The Greatest Blog Post Ever Assigned

Before I began watching this film, I was already pretty sure I knew what to expect. I thought that I knew the extent to which brands and advertisers permeated and influenced my day to day life. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold still managed to surprise me. It’s not just the sheer amount of information that we are bombarded with every day, but the control that these companies exert over it. Simply by providing funding for one of these movies, ads, or television programs, a company can dip their opinions into almost the entire production process, up to and including final approval of the program or product, as we saw with the commercial pitch to POM Wonderful. This reminded me of a chart I saw once which showed the different monopolies currently present in the consumer industry and how even though customers think there are hundreds of brands and companies to choose from when buying something, almost everything we consume both product and program wise is controlled by a core few companies. Paired with this documentary, I think it’s easy to see why that lack of diversity in who controls the products we use is so concerning. It took Morgan Spurlock intentionally showing the audience a place where outdoor advertising is entirely prohibited for it to really sink in just how desensitized to advertising we’ve become that the complete lack of it being shoved in our faces feels so alien.

Ethically speaking, the prevalence of advertising and the constant inundation of media we receive is very concerning. While corporations are legally able to make the claims that they do, it seems to me that they permanently occupy a moral grayzone. Advertising, public relations and marketing are, at their core, the use of creative language to make something, whether that’s a product and program or a person, appear desirable. These sponsors are able to exert an alarming amount of influence over current trends, simply by intentionally placing a product in frame where someone will see it. These choices can have repercussions involving what people eat, watch, listen to and buy. A sports star or musician can put their name on something, and even if they don’t actually use the product they may have just influenced hundreds of their own fans to do so. Taking into account how few companies actually possess this degree of control makes this appear even more dubious to me. As these corporate giants acquire and assimilate other smaller companies, their influence spreads. If we take media production as an example, the most obvious corporation to examine is Disney. Not only do they control Marvel studios, but they also own Lucas Films, giving them the rights to Star Wars, as well as ESPN, National Geographic, 20th Century Fox, FX Networks, the History Channel, ABC News, Hulu, and Pixar. This one corporation controls a massive amount of the entertainment market, which allows them to inundate a massive audience with any product or message that they approve, including those that are provided by sponsors.

Ultimately I think that this kind of product placement may seem harmless, but the darker implications of how this influence can be used make it a very slippery slope in regards to the ethics of sponsorship.

Disney ownership graphic taken from https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/money-finance/companies-disney-owns-worldwide/