The Future of Advertising

Community, A TV series and Yahoo web series created by Dan Harmon, is comedy that takes a lot of satirical jabs of current society and its trends.

One of the main characters, Britta Perry, is strong-headed character who focuses her passions on sheltered animals, the homeless and starting protests to support the minorities in society. Throughout the seasons of Community, this character always expresses her hate for the government and their suppressions of human rights. Thus, in an episode in season 3, when she meets a man named “Subway” who was basically a corpo-humanoid that is meant to live as an embodiment of the franchise, she is immediately against the idea of submitting a human being for pure advertising. However, the two then begin an unlikely romance with each other which eventually leads to Subway losing his job. I understand this story plot sounds ridiculous, much like the rest of the TV series, however just as the storylines are nonsensical, they also have deeper messages that challenge and criticise the society of our culture. I am yet to hear of a person using their identity as a platform of advertising, but as mentioned in this week’s reading about a school allowing advertising to support their finances, who is to say that we, as a society, are not far off from creating our very own corpo-humanoids.

People are growing much more aware of advertisers and their intentions. I rarely hear of millennials feeling persuaded to purchase what they see on billboards and posters out in the streets, we almost always anticipate the ‘skip’ buttons on Youtube ads, and we are so dedicated to saving money, we are willing to put up with ads on Spotify instead of paying for Spotify premium. Living in the era of technology and ever-present media, we are learning to identify sponsorships and ads and ignore their messages. Advertisers are finding it harder and harder to pull an audience into buying their products, thus they are always trying to come up with new inventive methods to spark our attentions. Hence, the character “Subway” is presented as a hyperbolic warning of the potential path advertising may come to.