I enjoyed the film today partially for the "datedness" but mostly because I find the advertising world fascinating. I already understood that advertising is apart of our daily lives and that most of it just breezes by us unnoticed, but I like how they gave the analogy with the fish not thinking about the water around them. This struck me because I had not really thought about advertising as being such a crucial part of our life, good or bad. Fish need the water to sustain them and I just am not convinced that we need advertising to sustain the world. The only thing that advertising sustains is business industry. By having all these different kinds of advertisements geared to make people products so that their life will be more complete these companies are creating consumers out of everyone. Most of the time the advertisements are made to make us believe that buying a certain product will give us a certain feeling for example, a particular kind of deodorant will help attract people of the opposite sex and give you a feeling of acceptance. The ads are not so much about the product itself, but what it can get you in life. I think that if advertising was not as prevalent in our society, we would still have an idea in our mind that we need material, man- made things to make our lives better and easier. The fact that we can make such machines like cars and computers, we should have them in our lives and readily available to the masses. We came from making small tools out of rocks to generating energy through huge nuclear power plants, even without advertising we would still have the drive to own things that we can create with our own hands. Overall, I think that advertising is crucial for businesses to stay a float, but not crucial to everyday people going about their business.
