Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel

"When was the last time you felt this comfortable in a relationship?"
-- An ad for sneakers

"You can love it without getting your heart broken."
-- An ad for a car

"Until I find a real man, I'll settle for a real smoke."
-- A woman in a cigarette ad

Many advertisements these days make us feel as if we have an intimate, even passionate relationship with a product. But as Jean Kilbourne points out in this fascinating and shocking exposé, the dreamlike promise of advertising always leaves us hungry for more. We can never be satisfied, because the products we love cannot love us back.

Drawing upon her knowledge of psychology, media, and women's issues, Kilbourne offers nothing less than a new understanding of a ubiquitous phenomenon in our culture. The average American is exposed to over 3,000 advertisements a day and watches three years' worth of television ads over the course of a lifetime. Kilbourne paints a gripping portrait of how this barrage of advertising drastically affects young people, especially girls, by offering false promises of rebellion, connection, and control. She also offers a surprising analysis of the way advertising creates and then feeds an addictive mentality that often continues throughout adulthood.

This book is focused on a few, fundamental, issues (excerpts are between "quotation marks").
1 - It explains that advertising works. Most people think they are not influenced by advertising. But advertising works best precisely because people don't think it works on them.
"If you are like most people, you think that advertising has no influence on you. This is what advertisers want you to believe. But, if that were true, why would companies spend over $200 billion a year on advertising? Why would they be willing to spend over $250,000 to produce an average television commercial and another $250,000 to air it? If they want to broadcast their commercial during the Super Bowl, they will gladly spend over a million dollars to produce it and over one and a half million to air it. After all, they might have the kind of success that Victoria's Secret did during the 1999 Super Bowl. When they paraded bra-and-panty-clad models across TV screens for a mere thirty seconds, one million people turned away from the game to log on to the Website promoted in the ad. No influence?"

2 - It makes you understand that the message mass media and advertising repeat us moment by moment ("The average American is exposed to at least three thousand ads every day") is that happiness comes from products. Alas, products are only things: no matter how much we love them, they won't love us back. By the way, didn't you ask why - in the car commercials - there are all those cars entering tunnels?
We are sold models impossible to follow - and just wrong. But effortlessly advertised: you are made up to think they're true. Thus, a sense of strain comes. I think that many problems our society faces (high divorce rate, violence, alcoholism, drugs) come from this split. I'm a pharmacist: it's amazing how many tranquilizers I sell every day.

3 - It lets you to realize that advertising often turns people into objects.
"It is becoming clearer that this objectification has consequences, one of which is the effect that it has on sexuality and desire. Sex in advertising and the media is often criticized from a puritanical perspective - there's too much of it, it's too blatant, it will encourage kids to be promiscuous, and so forth. But sex in advertising has far more to do with trivializing sex than promoting it, with narcissism than with promiscuity, with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that it is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical. (...) We never see eroticized images of older people, imperfect people, people with disabilities. The gods have sex, the rest of us watch - and judge our own imperfect sex lives against the fantasy of constant desire and sexual fulfilment portrayed in the media. (...) We can never measure up. Inevitably, this affects our self-images and radically distorts reality. "You have the right to remain sexy", says an ad featuring a beautiful young woman, her legs spread wide, but the subtext is "only if you look like this". And she is an object - available, exposed, essentially passive. She has the right to remain sexy, but not the right to be actively sexual."

4 - Did you know that we are a product? Mass media sell us to advertisers.
"Make no mistake: The primary purpose of the mass media is to sell audiences to advertisers. We are the product. Although people are much more sophisticated about advertising now than even a few years ago, most are still shocked to learn this."

"Through focus groups and depth interviews, psychological researchers can zero in on very specific target audiences - and their leaders. "Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends absolutely free", proclaims an ad for MTV directed to advertisers. MTV presents itself publicly as a place for rebels and nonconformists. Behind the scenes, however, it tells potential advertisers that its viewers are lemmings who will buy whatever they are told to buy."

5 - I think this book is also valuable because it re-states the ethical principle that there are no shortcuts to riches, no shortcuts to happiness. There are no free lunches.
"Today the promise is that we can change our lives instantly, effortlessly - by winning the lottery, selecting the right mutual fund, having a fashion makeover, losing weight, having tighter abs, buying the right car or soft drink. It is this belief that such transformation is possible that drives us to keep dieting, to buy more stuff, to read fashion magazines that give us the same information over and over again."


BE CAREFUL - This is DEADLY PERSUASIONS with a new title!!   December 3, 2002
16 out of 18 found this review helpful

I loved this book when it was originally published at Deadly Persuasion. Be careful when ordering...in TINY letters on the cover it says "Originally published as Deadly Persuasion."


Must read   January 19, 2004
J. T. Florence (San Ramon, CA United States)
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

This book should be required reading for every female high school freshman. Every woman who has dieted, picked herself apart for her appearance or stared longingly at a magazine layout needs to read this book. It is such a fantastic book. You know you are living under myths and lies to a certain extent but just how many is amazing. I love all the excerpts about how magazines try to pull in major advertising dollars. I have recommened to all of my friends who have young female children. I wonder how much smarter I could have been if this had entered my life as a younger woman.


You'll never look at advertising the same way again   March 29, 2002
Debra Mollen (Lewisville, Texas)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful

Jean Kilbourne has a truly rare gift for finding purpose in and explicating insight into the thousands of ads that bombard us on a daily basis. It is fascinating to watch her meticulous, brilliant, even-handed exploration into the world of advertising. Her cogent remarks on the psychology of advertising bring a rare glimpse into previously unchartered waters. Having been a long-time fan of her films, it was also a distinct pleasure to read about her own personal and professional development in the first chapter as it was affected by the products advertisers insist we need to be fulfilled. Those interested in psychology, sociology, communication/cultural studies, and feminism should ensure this book is read and kept forefront on the bookshelf. It would be ideal as a college text as well.


Fascinating and Frightening   January 11, 2002
Mary Snyder (Remlap, AL)
5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Jean Kilbourne does an excellent job of taking you through the mindfield of advertising. I was shocked to learn that America is one of the few countries to allow advertising directed at kids and after reading this book, I know why it is outlawed in most places. Throughout this well developed and researched book, I found myself shocked and stunned -- and that's not easy to do to me.

Everyone should take a look at this book. The insidious nature of advertising is made apparent and if you think you aren't impacted by advertising then you truly should read this book. Fascinating and frightening.