This morning I jumped on YouTube and typed in “commercial.” The video below popped up first.
It seems to me that this commercial serves as an example of a pattern I’ve noticed throughout advertising today. Advertisers often no long sell products and services, they now sell religion.
What does this commercial sell? It sells a goal, a telos, a purpose for the boy’s life. It sells an identity, a meaningful identity as a Porsche lover and owner. It does not simply sell an object, a car, but rather traffics in the categories of meaning, value, purpose, and identity. These values have traditionally been reserved for religion.
When I observe advertisers in North America it appears to me that the vast majority of them have given up on trying to simply sell goods and services. You rarely see commercials plainly enumerating the characteristics of a product. Rather they focus on selling meaning, value, purpose, and identity and attempt to attach their products to these values. In short, they traffic in religion.
These messages are in direct competition with the message of the Gospel that Jesus is Lord. We need to address these messages not merely as temptations to unwisely spend money or care more strongly for material things than we ought, but also and more importantly, as competing ideologies to the message of Gospel. The story of Jesus Christ makes absolute claims on where meaning, value, purpose, and identity come from in this world. We ought to be very wary of those who not only make claims to the contrary, but do so insidiously, “we’re not selling meaning, we’re just selling products,” and with near complete penetration into our everyday lives.
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