MediaChannel: What's the best approach for thinking individuals to counter the advertising industry?
Huffington: Get a life for a start. It's like, life is not about shopping, and it is not about choosing among different things to shop. And also be very discerning. We all need to be more discerning. I have two young daughters who are eight and ten, and I try to point out what's in Coke and Diet Coke. And I'm not saying I don't drink them — I do. But let's not at least start them as young, and let's be aware of what we are consuming, whether it is food or entertainment or anything.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

What are advertisers themselves supposed to do when, if they lessen their intensity, they're bound to lose their place in the market?
Well, you know, we are not talking about all products; we are talking particularly about products that threaten our children's health and grown-ups' health. But lets focus on children for a minute. ... I would not allow cigarette advertising at the moment. We are subsidizing it in many ways with tax credits. That's one of them. Alcohol and anti-depressants — we see ads for Prozac. Why are we advertising prescription drugs? I would not allow prescription drugs [to] advertise. You have to have a prescription, right? And that's for a reason, because they have hugely dangerous side effects. And yet now we have six million children on Ritalin and Prozac and other anti-depressants. Prozac hasn't even been approved by the FDA for pediatric use.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

Aside from the laughs, what's the value of something like the Schmios?
I think it is very important, because advertising has become like music — we don't even notice it. And yet it has a very evasive effect, especially when it comes to children. And the award that I'm giving tonight is to Commercial Alert [which] has been alerting citizens, parents, anybody who cares, to the fact that our children, when they are the most captive audience in a school, are being exposed to advertising as part of Channel One, as part of ZapMe! — you know, programs that get into schools by giving computers or donating supposedly current affairs time. But the truth is that this is more advertising at a time which is supposed to be sacred, which is suppose to be about learning, about wisdom, and about preparing for life, not about being exposed to more things to buy.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

MediaChannel: What's the best approach for thinking individuals to counter the advertising industry?
Miller: First of all, people have to try to become critical viewers, and that is something that you can learn to do from reading certain books, taking certain kinds of courses. But [what] we are talking about goes way beyond a media literary effort like that, because you can read it all you want, but if it's piling up at the doors and windows, you can't get away from it. Simply reading it critically is not going to stop it. So the question is, what can advocacy groups, what can professional organizations do to try to draw the line. I think there are various steps that can and must be taken. For example, the ownership of the media by a few huge corporations and their successful appropriation of the digital broadcast spectrum, which happened in 1996 — this enables these interests to commercialize cyberspace all the more, to accelerate the commercialization of TV all the more. There's got to be some organized attempts to reverse that process. So we are talking about a kind of media activism, first of all. We [are] also talking about neighborhood activism: get the billboards out of the neighborhoods where there are [since] they are mostly poor neighborhoods.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

What are advertisers themselves supposed to do when, if they lessen their intensity, they're bound to lose their place in the market?
I don't expect advertisers to do anything. I mean, advertisers do what they do; they're not necessarily evil people. This is not an ad hominum argument. ... They're trying to increase market share, they're trying to raise their stock prices — that's the nature of the beast, right? The question is how far off they'd be allowed to go in doing that. How much of our space should they be allowed to take up in doing that? How much of the public interest should they negate in doing that? ... I don't think that there is any contribution that they can make except, if possible, not to interfere with democratic attempts to preserve something of a non-commercial culture.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

Aside from the laughs, what's the value of something like the Schmios?
We've gotten to the point now — long past the point — where people even think to raise a question about it. It's just a given that every aspect of life should be heavily commercialized; that advertising should be everywhere we look. One good way to try to reverse that process is to institutionalize an event where people of all different ideologies and walks of life get together and offer a formal protest and explain why these various kinds of commercialization are intolerable.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

MediaChannel: What's the best approach for thinking individuals to counter the advertising industry?
Ruskin: It's pretty easy. You just start talking about it, and conservatives and progressives are increasingly working together to counteract how advertising harms kids, particularly young kids. For example, tomorrow McDonald's and Teletubbies are going to do a joint launch of a promotion which is essentially promoting junk food, fast food, to kids two-years-old and younger, at a time when we have skyrocketing levels of childhood obesity and childhood diabetes. So people are waking up to how corporations harm kids through advertising and marketing. It's really quite easy: you just talk about it.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

Aside from the laughs, what's the value of something like the Schmios?
Well, we're going to have a lot of fun, and we're going to have a lot of fun laughing at the advertising industry which actually does a lot of harm to citizens cross the country. Increasingly, there are some pretty pernicious forms of advertising coming about: advertising that exploits and harms children, advertising that actually coerces people to watch the advertising or harms them in other ways. For example, advertising that promotes junk food at a time when we have increasing rates of child obesity or ... alcohol or tobacco advertising. Or advertising for violent entertainment at a time when we have a lot of school shootings.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

MediaChannel: What's the best approach for thinking individuals to counter the advertising industry?
Hazen: Don't watch television. ... It's not easy ... to come up with a plan, because you know commercialism is everywhere; it's on the sidewalks, it's in the schools, it's on school-buses. It is a real problem. The best thing to do is to help young people understand how most media are really vehicles for delivering consumers to advertisers. A lot of the young people have the illusion that much of media is there only for the news-delivering purpose. When you understand that it's about advertising, then you begin to understand the relationship to how the news is covered ... to who is sponsoring it.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

What are advertisers themselves supposed to do when, if they lessen their intensity, they're bound to lose their place in the market?
As long as you have the system the way it is, there's going to be this desire to broaden your market ... to make money. It's too bad that there isn't a role for government to reduce the extent of commercialism. When you see it in European countries and Scandinavian countries, there are clearly laws written to isolate them. There used to be these commercial-free zones. ... Schools were a really good example then. But now, with Channel One and ads and sports teams' uniforms, you can't really escape commercialism. I think that ... [if] American business could get some conscious[ness] about it, they would withdraw their commercialism from certain segments. And I think that the public would appreciate that and might support them in the areas they are in.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

Aside from the laughs, what's the value of something like the Schmios?
It raises consciousness, [It] gives [people] some weapons, some ability to deconstruct advertising. I think it is great NYU as a school does it, because then the students are really brought up to speed on how advertising manipulates people. But it's also good for fun. We don't get a chance to laugh a whole lot about what's going on in the media system.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.

MediaChannel: Aside from the laughs, what's the value of something like the Schmios?
Adelman: Nobody criticizes commercials. Commercials [are] like the air we breathe, the water we swim in. We take it for granted: rains fall down, the chair has four legs — it's like a force of nature. But you know ... we have created that decision ... to live in a world of commercials. We have decided, made a conscious decision as a society, as a culture, that we would like to live in a media world which is subsidized by advertising, by 'spots.' And now we see it's run out of control and ... we feel like the little Dutch boy with the finger in the dyke. But someone's got to do it.
Greene: The fact [is] that advertising is what structures our entire media system, that everything that we see exists to deliver an audience to the advertiser and as a result, the kind of content that you see, the kind of people you see, the kind of emotions they want to elicit, are all based around wanting to appeal to the advertiser.
Click here for video! | Back to first page.