'The advertising industry has long known that contented people don't spend so much,' writes Gemma Tipton
'A good puzzle," says Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, "would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub." Another good puzzle would be to try to go anywhere without passing an ad. You used to know where you were with advertising or, at least, you used to know where they would be.
The best and glossiest photoshoots in fashion magazines are often the ads; the wittiest, best-designed pages in the papers; those billboards that make you think. There's nothing wrong with a bit of advertising - in the right place. But it does encroach - I remember feeling dismayed the first time I found an ad on the handle of a petrol pump, the bar on a supermarket trolley, the inside of a toilet door. "Leave me alone," I thought.
Little by little all these have become "normal". Still, sometimes I wonder is there anywhere that I can go to escape from all these exhortations to "work, rest and play", "think electricity", "have the drive of my life", "reveal the goddess within", and (my least favourite at the moment) "live, work, succeed"?
There is a place. Since last year, the city of São Paolo in Brazil has banned all outdoor advertising. There are no neon signs, no billboards, no rotating messages at bus stops, no gable walls painted up to lure you into escapist fantasies as you sit grid-locked on the bus. The law, passed by an overwhelming 45-1, went into effect on January 1st, 2007, and no one thought it would last.
It was also highly unpopular in certain quarters. It would be "like New York without Times Square", according to Marcel Solimeo, the chief economist of the Commercial Association of São Paulo. That, at least, put me in favour of the ban, because I think Times Square is pretty hideous, and that we like it because we're told it's exciting and glamorous - to put it another way, it advertises itself really well.
Something else Solimeo said struck me too. "We live in a consumer society," he declared, "and the essence of capitalism is the availability of information about products." Now, there may be more to capitalism than that, but information is definitely seductive. As a child I thought ads were amazing things, telling me about the wonderful stuff I would need throughout my path in life. How else could you get shiny hair if no one told you about a certain shampoo? How would you otherwise discover the joy Barbie brings?
As a teenager, I was even more enthralled; I had entered a world where, though not tall and not thin, I could wear the very same lipstick as the model in the fashion spread. Important as that discovery was, there were others I was glad of too - a hangover cure that really did work, the place to go (pre-internet) for cheap travel, the dates of the Dunnes Stores sale.
I wonder what I would look like today if I had relied on the informational networks of friends and family instead of advertising. Would I have hair this particular shade of blonde? Would I still wish to be just that little taller, that little thinner? I would, of course, still want things. Imagination and desire are two of the motivations that drove us to invent the wheel, to develop the microchip. But it is highly likely that the things I wanted would be more attainable; because a truth that the advertising industry has known, ever since Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, used his uncle's theories to create and harness desire for marketing purposes, is that contented people don't spend so much.
So now that the ads have all gone, is São Paolo a more contented city? Stripped of its neon, is it a more beautiful place? The answer is (not unexpectedly) yes and no. A calmer, more "serene" (if that word could ever describe a city of 11 million people) city is emerging, but so too is an awful lot of ugliness. Drab grey housing towers and ill-conceived office blocks have been revealed from behind their coloured wrappings. The removal of huge banners from end walls shows the bad design that gave them space in the first place.
The point is that while advertising makes us want unattainable things, it can also help mask the things we really need. You can hide ugliness with promises of happiness through lipstick, aftershave, beer or washing powder, but imagine if that creativity could instead be expended on making better places for people to live in the first place? There will always be room for fantasy and a little luxury in our lives, and the environment would be a much poorer place with no advertising at all. But we also need to remember that desire itself does not make life better, and contentment lasts longer than that fugitive feeling of fleeting bliss.