Who’s The Product?

Sri City: In an age defined by volatile trends and consumption culture, we are ceaselessly bombarded with advertisements about “hot, new” products that everyone supposedly needs to purchase. And as these manufactured desires trump actual needs by creating a perceived lack in our lives which these products can fill, how do we draw a line between our own wants and needs - more importantly, our own perceptions and identities?

Image Source: https://youtu.be/PnX3S5vfNWQ?si=9XjN5NkLdPyDdG6u

All my excitement fizzled out as our car entered the windy roads of Mahabaleshwar - this was not the quaint, serene, and lush hill station that I remembered. This rather resembled a dystopia filled with huge billboard advertisements flashily showing conglomerate products that everyone apparently needs to buy. Aside from the obvious visual pollution taking place, this raised broader questions in my mind: Does everything absolutely have to be commercialised? Every single waking day of our lives, we are constantly bombarded. Advertising messages fill up physical, digital, conscious, and unconscious domains – continually whispering, suggesting, and shouting. Advertising and consumerism aren’t just economic activities; they tell us what to want, what to fear, and even who to be. In contemporary society deeply entrenched in an overconsumption culture, advertisements have evolved from providing information for rational choices to consciously and intelligently manipulating the habits and opinions of the masses, all to build a consumeristic culture wherein one’s wants overshadow their needs; wherein one is entirely consumed by this insatiable hunger for more.

As social media and technology companies collect and monetise personal data and online activity for targeted advertising under surveillance capitalism, the transition from mass production to automated systems only fuels pervasive commodification. This contemporary context is aptly explained by Herbert A. Simon as the “attention economy”. While Simon had originally coined the term to describe situations where information is abundant and human attention is a scarce and valuable commodity, the concept is highly relevant today as attention is a symbolic currency that’s monetised through advertising. Given the current context, social media platforms capture fluid, spent attention and turn it into a quantifiable, preservable asset called “calcified attention” - views, likes, and comments on content. This can immediately be translated into financial capital via advertising. Psychological triggers like the aforementioned calcified social attention, influencer recommendations, or even plain old FOMO translate into impulse buying sprees. This shift of attention from merely being a resource for marketers to being a universal symbolic currency underlying and permeating the market economy is defined as the second wave of the attention economy. The use of advanced technology and algorithms ensures that this currency is extracted efficiently, feeding a perpetually-growing system of commodification like a global digital factory where the raw material is human focus itself. Moving from direct competition for consumer money to an underlying competition for calcified attention results in advertising being prevalent literally everywhere: from billboard hoardings to commercialised streaming platforms, from social media to literal subway tunnels. Corporate advertising influences every aspect of our modern lives, from how we feel about ourselves and our bodies through to our perceptions of others and the world. Take this FaceTune Ad for example: plastered all over the NYC subway, it advertises the app’s AI-powered editing using the cryptic phrase, “Look like you had 8 hours of sleep”. Not only does it induce facial dysmorphia and push forward Eurocentric, idealised forms of beauty, but it also subliminally implies that being overworked is normal. The system becomes so pervasive that people are no longer just consumers, but also the product itself. Individuals become commodities, and self-identities are sold for profit.

While this might seem far-fetched, literary theorist and semiotician Roland Barthes suggests otherwise. He argues that each advertisement is a complex arrangement of signs, with different layers of meaning within an image: the denotation, the connotation, and the anchorage. The denotation is the literal, objective meaning, while the connotation is the subjective cultural and associative meanings that evoke emotion. The anchorage is essentially how text anchors the meaning of an image, directing our interpretation of the visual. What advertising does is carefully manipulate these layers, and in doing so, as Barthes says, “involve the consumer in a kind of direct experience of the substance, make him the accomplice of a liberation rather than the mere beneficiary of a result; matter here is endowed with value-bearing states”. Beyond individual ads, Barthes’ discourse extends to our choices in products, brands, and lifestyles, which are not solely practical decisions, but rather acts of communication. The devices we use, the media we consume, the clothes we wear, the beverages we drink - all of these inevitably become symbols, speaking volumes about our identity, values, ambitions, and social standing. To believe advertising only sells us products is a naive belief to have. It ultimately sells us the idea of ourselves: tapping into our innate desire to belong, to stand out, to be perceived in a certain way. We buy not just a perfume, but the luxury and sophistication it represents. We purchase not just a phone, but the status it implies. In this intricate symbolic dance, consumption becomes a language we speak, often unknowingly, to the world around us. It shapes our expectations of how meaning should be produced in life.

Being so influential on the human mind, the public visual realm is one regrettably dominated by commercial interests. With advertisements and corporate imagery dominating the landscape, local identity and collective well-being are undermined as this prioritises private profit over public good. Many urban spaces have been overwhelmingly reduced to transactional zones where individuals are primarily addressed as consumers, depicting the attention economy’s primary goal of monetising every individual interaction and the constant saturation that feeds the relentless “fight for visibility” described in the attention economy. In response to this domination, activists and artists use methods such as subvertising to reclaim the public visual realm for political and cultural expression. They demonstrate public art and visual storytelling as a vital instrument for social change and democratic expression, shifting the focus from passively accepting the constant commercial extraction of attention to actively supporting organised, community-driven interventions that reclaim the same attention for the common good. Street artist and political activist Banksy directly fights these consumeristic notions, their art directly satirising this system through reclaiming space and challenging corporate hegemony. It provides an accessible and humorous visual dialogue against commercialisation, forcing viewers to use their attention to confront the system rather than passively absorb its commercial messages. Additionally, I had come across a movement called “Brandalism” which fights this commodification of attention by directly hacking commercial infrastructure to replace messages of consumption with messages of critique and hope, in a phenomenon called “culture jamming”. Brandalism seeks to stop corporations from “destroying our ability to think”, using semiotic war to challenge corporate aesthetics.

This is where Barthes’ analysis comes in again: ideological undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of advertising and consumer culture reinforce societal norms, perpetuate class divides, and often present consumption as the primary path to happiness. They don’t just sell a lifestyle, they sell an ideology of how life should be lived - sustaining a cycle of superficial satisfaction and continuous desire. This constant desire, fuelled by manufactured images of perfection and fulfilment, keeps the engine of consumerism churning, often at the expense of genuine wellbeing and critical thought. The message is loud and clear: if you buy this, you will be happy, loved, and successful. If you don’t, you will be both left out and left behind. The subtle language of advertising shapes our desires, defines our identities, and ultimately dictates our societal values without us consciously realising that it does.

Everything being said, I want to establish that I am in no way urging you to engage in extreme acts of subvertising the advertisements that you come across, nor am I claiming that absolutely all advertisements are inherently laden with ulterior motives. In a world swamped with commercial messages, let this serve as a call to intellectual arms. Becoming active decoders rather than passive recipients of cultural narratives is a vital act of self-preservation. By recognising the myths woven into everyday objects, experiences, and milieu, by drawing lines between denotation and connotation, we begin to reclaim agency over our desires and values. Questioning the normalcy and naturality of what’s presented to us, engaging in mindfulness and critical thinking when consuming is essential to experience the joy of not buying anything while being sold everything. For all you know, what you see is not the product: you are.