Advertisers know that they cannot sell meaning and happiness, but they can illicit those feelings by advertising visions of what a “good life” should be through the selling of products, known as **image-based advertising**. Sut Jhally’s article, Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture, explains how image-based advertising has been so integrated into our way of thought and consumption that it is difficult to pinpoint when our most cherished values became tied into consumer culture (p 201). Advertisements have taken up so much of our public space and discourse, and now even our private with the advancement of technology, that we are constantly being shown what the vision of happiness is, and what we must buy to achieve a satisfying standard of …show more content…
U.S. government plays only a small role in determining who owns the media, and only regulates it minimally, and the power of the U.S. media that uses the market research to produce products reaches us not just here in the United States, but also has a global impact. Because of the United States’ **cultural imperialism**, where American styles in fashion and food, as well as media far, dominate the global market, our versions of the “good life” are influenced on parts of the world, as discussed in Richard Campbell’s “Media Economics and the Global Marketplace”, (p 411). Our ‘cultural dumping’ of exporting U.S. media can influence other countries societal value systems, development of original local products, and abandon their own rituals to adopt American tastes. In reality, the power behind these large media researchers, marketers, producers, and distributors, who are often the owned by the same company, is astounding and influences not only our lives as an individual, but also has the potential to influence on a global level. They are able to gather information about individuals, sell it, and categorize as they see fit, leaving us with no sense of privacy, with the goal of selling us as many goods and services as possible until we reach the unattainable “good life”, which is a vision that they have carefully created. Until we, as consumers, are more aware of