Advertising Or The Agent in the Agency
             I had an excellent Catholic education in high school, which is remarkable since I attended a public school and I'm Jewish When I was in high school, at Roxbury Memorial High School for Boys (in Boston), I didn't have the slightest idea about what I wanted to do with myself. I knew that I liked to write and I liked to draw. What to do? I took many different tests-one of which was called the Kuder Preference Test, if I remember correctly-and they all came out with the same answer: go into advertising. Maybe it was because the tests recognized the creative aspects of my personality and thought that channeling this creativity into advertising made more sense than, say, becoming an accountant. Or maybe they discerned that I had a lot of potential as a flimflam artist?
             I've always had negative feelings about advertising. I admire the creativity of many of the people in the business, but I am very uneasy (to put it mildly) about the power advertising has to shape individual behavior and the way it has created a consumer culture in which, as the saying goes, "in life, its the boys with the most toys who win." In one of my books, Pop Culture, I wrote about what I called "The Affordinary Man" (and Woman), who measure life in terms of the goodies they can afford and measure other people the same way. For this so-called "Affordinary Man" (and Woman) the numbers on the stock market pages are of all-consuming interest (meant literally and figuratively) and determine how he feels about himself and his place in the universe.
             And it is advertising, of course, that helps shape the consciousness of these "Affordinaries," as marketers would put it. Marketers in the United States are always dividing the American public into different groups, based on things like age, sex, race, religion, zip code, socio-economic status, and consumption patterns. These groupings are supposed to help ...