Merchants of cool

I personally tend to subscribe to the "of course they manipulate us. So what?" kind of view about advertising. I mean, in some instances, corporations are definitely in the wrong. I heard from a friend that Coca Cola buys the cheap water for their soda from poor villages in Africa even if they're in a drought and people are literally dying of thirst. That undoubtedly fits under the category of evil. 

Still, I don't really see pinning down and even manipulating customers for profit as "evil". At most, it's a little rude. The main reason I think like this is because the way I see it, from the customer's end it's pretty much the same. Since advertising companies are intentionally pursuing the result it counts as manipulation, but if they just sat there and did nothing youth culture would still happen. It might happen differently, and a little slower, but teenagers would still get obsessed with whatever crazy thing they came up with. I really don't see a problem with what they're doing until it causes a genuine tragedy, like a teenage girl committing suicide because she doesn't live up to supermodel standards. 

Which I'm not saying doesn't happen. Things like self-confidence issues and the related definitely are a terrible side effect of modern marketing culture. But we have to remember that while we're criticizing society for victimizing teenage shoppers, those shoppers are part of society too.  Those teenagers are the ones that decided what's cool, and the process of it getting commercialized and processed and made and packed and shipped doesn't really change that.

Basically, the way I see it, advertising is a phenomenon that takes advantage of an already existing culture. There are nasty reprecussions, and I'm not saying it's the best thing in the world or completely without flaw, but I am saying that the system isn't completely at fault. It may accelerate both the negative and the positive, but if there was more positive to begin with then we wouldn't have these problems with it.