Soft Sell

Review by Mike Gange

Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising
by Jean Kilbourne
Free Press, $38.50, 366 pages

The average American sees three thousand ads each day. And while some would argue the ads have no significant influence in our society, studies show pre-school age children can identify animated advertising figures like Camel cigarettes Joe Kool, more readily than they can identify their ABC.s.

For Jean Kilbourne this is cause for alarm. Her book, Deadly Persuasion: Why Women and Girls Must Fight the Addictive Power of Advertising, takes aim at advertisers’ ability to manipulate anxieties and relationships, particularly those that involve women and children.

Kilbourne is no newcomer to this war of words. Internationally recognized for her research on alcohol and tobacco advertising, and the image of women in advertising, she has twice been named Lecturer of the Year by the National Association of Campus Activities. She is a documentary film maker (Killing Us Softly, 1979) and a scholar.

Kilbourne writes in a style of both a campus lecturer and a close friend, letting us in on some little known details in various advertising campaigns. She uses more than 100 black and white photos to convincingly illustrate her message that ads do indeed control our lives. She criticizes the insidious influence that ads have on society, especially those who are dis-empowered or unsuspecting, like women, minorities or children, saying ads encourage us to live recklessly and develop dangerous dependencies.

Young people, she says, are caught in the irresistible lure of advertising that promotes a relationship with a product, instead of with real people, a tendency which mirrors the behavior of the addict. The colors, images and messages of ads such as the Absolut Vodka campaign belie that any negative effects can come from drinking alcohol. Those ad campaigns affect us all but have serious implications for young people.

"Both the alcohol and tobacco industries are in the business of recruiting new users. Hook them early and they are yours for life," she writes. "These people spend a lot of money in the present too: according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, junior and senior high school students drink over a billions cans of beer a year, spending $500 million (U.S.)."

Research from the United States and Canada shows that "43 percent of all alcohol is consumed hazardously (defined, as binge drinking, where one consumes five or more drinks in a single sitting). However among young adults, nearly 80 percent is consumed hazardously," she writes.

Kilbourne is especially vehement in her attack on the tobacco companies, despite their health warnings printed on the sides of cigarette packages. She writes, "It is difficult for children to take health warnings seriously when they are surrounded by billboards of cartoon characters smoking, when the hottest (and coolest) celebrities light up in films and television programs and concerts, when the magazines in their homes are filled with colorful ads for cigarettes. A 1999 study found that more than two-thirds of the fifty G rated animated films released by major studies during the past 60 years portray alcohol and tobacco use without any clear message of negative heath effects."

Kilbourne admits is it difficult to precisely measure how advertising effects us, as conclusive research cannot be done because there are so few uncompromised comparison groups left in the world. But by interpreting research and statistics gleaned over the past two decades, Kilbourne pointedly shows how women are exploited from their teenage years, with the lure of romantic ideas or rebelliousness, to their adult years, by ads that promise comfort, power and gratification. All too often it is a deadly persuasion.

Overall the book is long on condemnation and short on solutions. Kilbourne goes on the attack for most of the book, although the final chapter does include a brief call for media literacy courses in schools, courses which encourage critical thinking about the power of the media. (While every province in Canada has media literacy courses as part of their school curriculum, the movement is in its infancy in the U.S.) But after reading about the need for education against the power of advertising, one might expect Kilbourne to give the media literacy movement more than lip service as a way of regaining the balance in favor or consumer and children.

 

Mike Gange teaches media studies and journalism at Fredericton High.