Can Advertising Influence the Way We Live Our Life?

Of course it can! Technology is ever changing and communicators have to keep up with this fact. As a creative on this side of the wall I have come into a paradigm shift where adverts have started to become more one-to-one advertising where the campaign/ad can target a like-minded audience rather than putting it out in society for all to see and target only a small amount of the required audience.

Yeah sure the mainstreams media works but there are forms of communication out there that can no only influence the way we live but also make us realise there is more to advertising that what many may know.

'The prevalence of advertising in modern, consumer driven, societies is strong and growing more all the time, with television, radio, the Internet, newspapers and magazines the most ubiquitous platforms. With advertising companies increasingly looking for new media and platforms on which to advertise: roller coasters such as the "Pepsi Max T Big One" and the "Playstation" at Blackpool's Pleasure Beach, and aspects of every commercialized sport currently played, from football jerseys right down to the helmets of motorcycle riders, this begs an important question: do advertisements merely influence consumers choice of the brand of product they will buy, or do they fundamentally influence the basic types of products consumers can choose, and even the consumer's lifestyle?'
....'The result of this is that many of the world's biggest brands are struggling, as they have resolutely failed to track and follow the lifestyle of their customers, and if they are making more and more noise, it is out of desperation. As they moved from merely validating products to encapsulating whole lifestyles, brands began to evolve a growing social dimension, and in the developed world, "They are seen by some to have expanded into the vacuum left by the decline of organised religion." (Economist, 2001) But this has made brands, and the multinationals that are increasingly identified with them, not more powerful, but more vulnerable, as consumers will tolerate a substandard product for far longer than they will tolerate a substandard lifestyle, or being associated with a brand that is viewed as substandard.'

Cited from http://www.englishessays.org.uk/english-essays/can-advertising-influence-our-life.php