Advertising and value formation: The power of multinational companies

Contemporary advertising images in the media play an important role in promoting and sustaining contemporary consumer culture and provide one of the pillars upholding and furthering contemporary capitalism. Though one of its key roles is to promote materialism, advertising imagery also plays a role in cultural and value change at both the surface, selling products, and structural levels, causing shifts in cultural values such as an increasing emphasis on self-gratification through consumption, acceptance of increasing use of sexuality to sell products, obsession with youth, appearance and body image, and overwhelming obsession with modernity and the latest technology. There needs to be greater acknowledgement of these processes or the probable future will be an intensification of the present unsustainable economic system. Preferable options for the future need to take cognizance of the powerful role advertising and the media play in society and assess the possible options for changing those roles.