Although commercialism—through packaging both products and politicians—has generated cultural feedback that is often critical of advertising’s pervasiveness, the growth of the industry has not diminished. Ads continue to fascinate. Many consumers buy magazines or watch the Super Bowl just for the advertisements. Adolescents decorate their rooms with their favorite ads and identify with the images certain products convey. In 2012, the third straight year of increases, advertising spending in the United States totaled $140 billion.³⁹

A number of factors have made possible advertising’s largely unchecked growth. Many Americans tolerate advertising as a “necessary evil” for maintaining the economy, but many dismiss advertising as not believable and trivial. As a result, unwilling to downplay its centrality to global culture, many citizens do not think advertising is significant enough to monitor or reform. Such attitudes have ensured advertising’s pervasiveness and suggest the need to escalate our critical vigilance.

As individuals and as a society, we have developed an uneasy relationship with advertising. Favorite ads and commercial jingles remain part of our cultural world for a lifetime, but we detest irritating and repetitive commercials. We realize that without ads many mass media would need to reinvent themselves. At the same time, we should remain critical of what advertising has come to represent: the overemphasis on commercial acquisitions and images of material success, and the disparity between those who can afford to live comfortably in a commercialized society and those who cannot.