Rating: 
Summary: Quite a platform
Review: A very galvanizing narrative. And important for the American conscience ... as Europe has been noticing this kind of encroaching manipulation for some time. I was amazed to read Kilbourne's own account of her work and her clever ability to use the tactics of the advertizing industry to get her own agenda across. And her struggles with her own personality disorders were also quite interesting to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes The Way We Think
Review: Advertising affects everyone whether they realize it or not. Each people are being exposed to thousands of ads. Writer Jean Kilbourne is a perfect example. Like Jean Kilbourne, and millions like her have become so used to ads they've learned to cope with different advertisement strategies. This leads to the obsession with material objects and the desire to have them. Businesses don't care about the consumer; they only care about consumption and how it can be increased. This book will change your whole perspective on advertising and how you choose to let it affect you.
Jean Kilbourne shares her experiences in growing up and going along with the trends, staying with the flock trying to make other people happy. Jean Kilbourne used bad habits, forced upon by her by ads, as liberators to dull her pain and sorrow. She then realizes what advertising has done to her, and what the affects are on America's Youth. Ads put enormous pressure on teens to look like models, party, smoke, and to be as artificial as possible. This book portrays the dangers to exposure of advertising in America's culture. This is centered solely on the need of material possessions and the manipulation for desire of unpractical belongings.
Jean Kilboune examines the fact that advertising exploits sex to sell products. She also discusses that "romance and rebellion are the two main themes in car ads." She then ventures into the controversy of "falling in love with food," Which talks about how food is consumed in comfort and once again exploited by sex. As well as discussing "People's dependency on substances, being viewed as the very thing that keeps them going, instead of the very thing that kills them." These are just a sample of references and comparisons made in the book. After reading Can't Buy My Love, my outlook has drastically changed about the effects on media in today's world. The plethora of advertising strategies will astonish you as well as prepare you for the pollutants of advertising in American culture. Never again will you look at the same way.
Rating:
Summary: Chilling & Insightful
Review: As Kilborne suggests, advertising is responsible for fanning the flames of nicotine addiction, alcoholism, violence, & female submissiveness through the powers of imagery and proliferation. Kilborne claims that these advertisers, in their efforts to generate revenue, (sometimes inadvertantly) design ads that subliminaly create a collective consciousness that affects our ideas about relationships, sex, and the male/female dynamic. In this new world, cars take the place of partners, food substitutes intimacy, and alcohol becomes a best friend. _Can't Buy My Love_ artfully combines the intellectual punch of a well-researched thesis with the heart and conversational tone of a personal narrative. This makes for easy, insightful reading. (Case and point: I read it in one day -- in one sitting.) At times this book is hard to read. I winced countless times, recalling many of these advertisements (Many are pictured in the book), wondering how much I had/have been affected by them. Even more chilling is the realization that, as time goes on, we are continually bombarded with more and more advertising -- saturating our subconsious, and perhaps peppering our behaviors. If you've ever needed a cigarette to relax, longed for the comfort of a cocktail, or craved ice cream but still felt you need to lose those "extra 15 pounds," you should read this book. Very highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Chilling & Insightful
Review: As Kilborne suggests, advertising is responsible for fanning the flames of nicotine addiction, alcoholism, violence, & female submissiveness through the powers of imagery and proliferation. Kilborne claims that these advertisers, in their efforts to generate revenue, (sometimes inadvertantly) design ads that subliminaly create a collective consciousness that affects our ideas about relationships, sex, and the male/female dynamic. In this new world, cars take the place of partners, food substitutes intimacy, and alcohol becomes a best friend. _Can't Buy My Love_ artfully combines the intellectual punch of a well-researched thesis with the heart and conversational tone of a personal narrative. This makes for easy, insightful reading. (Case and point: I read it in one day -- in one sitting.) At times this book is hard to read. I winced countless times, recalling many of these advertisements (Many are pictured in the book), wondering how much I had/have been affected by them. Even more chilling is the realization that, as time goes on, we are continually bombarded with more and more advertising -- saturating our subconsious, and perhaps peppering our behaviors. If you've ever needed a cigarette to relax, longed for the comfort of a cocktail, or craved ice cream but still felt you need to lose those "extra 15 pounds," you should read this book. Very highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Exposes the "sellers" of Liberation
Review: Fantastic analysis and documentation. Proves that just like the empty slogans of "freedom" and "justice", in so called "advanced societies", woman's liberation is reduced to a slogan to sell products and held subservient to the economic aims of the "sellers" of such liberation. Exposes the ulterior motives of the corporate elite and their advertising propaganda network and the false consciousness they produce to control women and people around the world- the connections and extensions can easily be worked out by all thinking readers. I'm very grateful to the author for this great service to society.
Rating:
Summary: The truth about ads
Review: I didn't think ads affected me in any way, until I've read this book. It talks about the strategies ads do to sell their products. This includes making women appear as sexual objects and how ads teach men to treat women as objects. And How this affects our society. Don't think it does? Oh it certainly does! This is the truth about ads. The harsh truth is ads don't care about you or your well being or how we treat women or men, they just want to catch our attention so that the product will sell. Its disgusting but its the truth, how we're so used to the messages that ads give us that we think that what their telling us is the truth. When in fact its all lies! The reviewer below is right, you'll never look at ads the same way after reading this. The writer doesn't try to be funny, but is angry and has a right to be. Its disgusting the way ads depict women as objects, I feel so sad for women everywhere that are exploited by the ads. This book will open your eyes and tell you the truth about ads.
Rating:
Summary: Save your soul: read this book!
Review: I encourage you to buy and read this book. It's a source of reason, enlightenment, passion, love. It's meaningful, revealing. I read it in a few days, subtracting time to my other activities. Each time it has been difficult to stop reading and close the book. If you are going to read only one book this year, choose this one. This book is focused on a few, fundamental, issues (excerpts are between "quotation marks").
1 - It explains that advertising works. Most people think they are not influenced by advertising. But advertising works best precisely because people don't think it works on them.
"If you are like most people, you think that advertising has no influence on you. This is what advertisers want you to believe. But, if that were true, why would companies spend over $200 billion a year on advertising? Why would they be willing to spend over $250,000 to produce an average television commercial and another $250,000 to air it? If they want to broadcast their commercial during the Super Bowl, they will gladly spend over a million dollars to produce it and over one and a half million to air it. After all, they might have the kind of success that Victoria's Secret did during the 1999 Super Bowl. When they paraded bra-and-panty-clad models across TV screens for a mere thirty seconds, one million people turned away from the game to log on to the Website promoted in the ad. No influence?" 2 - It makes you understand that the message mass media and advertising repeat us moment by moment ("The average American is exposed to at least three thousand ads every day") is that happiness comes from products. Alas, products are only things: no matter how much we love them, they won't love us back. By the way, didn't you ask why - in the car commercials - there are all those cars entering tunnels?
We are sold models impossible to follow - and just wrong. But effortlessly advertised: you are made up to think they're true. Thus, a sense of strain comes. I think that many problems our society faces (high divorce rate, violence, alcoholism, drugs) come from this split. I'm a pharmacist: it's amazing how many tranquilizers I sell every day. 3 - It lets you to realize that advertising often turns people into objects.
"It is becoming clearer that this objectification has consequences, one of which is the effect that it has on sexuality and desire. Sex in advertising and the media is often criticized from a puritanical perspective - there's too much of it, it's too blatant, it will encourage kids to be promiscuous, and so forth. But sex in advertising has far more to do with trivializing sex than promoting it, with narcissism than with promiscuity, with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that it is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical. (...) We never see eroticized images of older people, imperfect people, people with disabilities. The gods have sex, the rest of us watch - and judge our own imperfect sex lives against the fantasy of constant desire and sexual fulfilment portrayed in the media. (...) We can never measure up. Inevitably, this affects our self-images and radically distorts reality. "You have the right to remain sexy", says an ad featuring a beautiful young woman, her legs spread wide, but the subtext is "only if you look like this". And she is an object - available, exposed, essentially passive. She has the right to remain sexy, but not the right to be actively sexual." 4 - Did you know that we are a product? Mass media sell us to advertisers.
"Make no mistake: The primary purpose of the mass media is to sell audiences to advertisers. We are the product. Although people are much more sophisticated about advertising now than even a few years ago, most are still shocked to learn this." "Through focus groups and depth interviews, psychological researchers can zero in on very specific target audiences - and their leaders. "Buy this 24-year-old and get all his friends absolutely free", proclaims an ad for MTV directed to advertisers. MTV presents itself publicly as a place for rebels and nonconformists. Behind the scenes, however, it tells potential advertisers that its viewers are lemmings who will buy whatever they are told to buy." 5 - I think this book is also valuable because it re-states the ethical principle that there are no shortcuts to riches, no shortcuts to happiness. There are no free lunches.
"Today the promise is that we can change our lives instantly, effortlessly - by winning the lottery, selecting the right mutual fund, having a fashion makeover, losing weight, having tighter abs, buying the right car or soft drink. It is this belief that such transformation is possible that drives us to keep dieting, to buy more stuff, to read fashion magazines that give us the same information over and over again."
Rating:
Summary: BE CAREFUL - This is DEADLY PERSUASIONS with a new title!!
Review: I loved this book when it was originally published at Deadly Persuasion. Be careful when ordering...in TINY letters on the cover it says "Originally published as Deadly Persuasion."
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and Frightening
Review: Jean Kilbourne does an excellent job of taking you through the mindfield of advertising. I was shocked to learn that America is one of the few countries to allow advertising directed at kids and after reading this book, I know why it is outlawed in most places. Throughout this well developed and researched book, I found myself shocked and stunned -- and that's not easy to do to me. Everyone should take a look at this book. The insidious nature of advertising is made apparent and if you think you aren't impacted by advertising then you truly should read this book. Fascinating and frightening.
Rating:
Summary: You'll never look at advertising the same way again
Review: Jean Kilbourne has a truly rare gift for finding purpose in and explicating insight into the thousands of ads that bombard us on a daily basis. It is fascinating to watch her meticulous, brilliant, even-handed exploration into the world of advertising. Her cogent remarks on the psychology of advertising bring a rare glimpse into previously unchartered waters. Having been a long-time fan of her films, it was also a distinct pleasure to read about her own personal and professional development in the first chapter as it was affected by the products advertisers insist we need to be fulfilled. Those interested in psychology, sociology, communication/cultural studies, and feminism should ensure this book is read and kept forefront on the bookshelf. It would be ideal as a college text as well.
| 
