Awhile back I purchased a collection of old tv commercials from the 50’s and 60’s. It is a great set of very vintage material that not only marks the times, but touches on just about every stereo type we live buy today. A good number of the commercials would be controversial by today’s standards based on race or gender bias. However, that wasn’t the thing that stuck out the most for me. What did was the idea of creating a need that really isn’t there until an advertiser puts the idea in the consumer’s head.

I found one of my favorites on YouTube tonight, check it out:

I mean, was this a real issue back then? It started to make me think about how much we have come to “need” things that really serve no real purpose other than to fulfill another need that is pointless as well. But what if the needs that we create are our evolution of needs. In the beginning you need food, water, shelter, but then we started to define our food, water and shelter and we added companionship. Food needed to be cooked as well as caught, water must be fresh, shelter needs to have a door, and now we have heard stories about babies who never have human touch eventually die from it.  (That one might be an urban legend, but still the idea is there) What if we have come so far in this society and listened to advertisements so intensely that we now physically need the products we buy?