They began by talking about the way advertising no longer sells the products themselves, but the images and characteristics associated with them. This has caused us consumers to attach meaning to the products based on the way they are depicted in the ads. I remember when I was out buying a watch as a little kid, I wasn’t shopping around for the one that would tell the time the best or that was easiest to read. 
I wanted a Rolex or Omega;
not because it was expensive, but because it was “The James Bond Watch.” The same holds true with BMW a few years ago, and of course, the Aston Martin. People don’t buy these things because of their functional ability. They buy them because they want to be like Secret Agent 007.
This occurs all the time. Products gain meaning by either being attached to a celebrity or depicted in a certain light during their advertisement. As Sturken and Cartwright say, “such advertising images are central to the construction of cultural ideas about lifestyle, self-image, self-improvement, and glamour.” The way products are displayed in ads makes consumers feel like they can buy the product and acquire those characteristics themselves, whether this be the beautiful and carefree attitude of Herbal Essence, or the bad-ass attitude of James Bond. We are supposed to buy these products with the idea that doing so gives us these characteristics. The book describes this by saying that people have come to, “…derive their sense of their place in the world and their self-image…through their purchase and use of commodities which seemed to give meaning to their lives in the absence of the meaning derived from closer-knit community.” More interestingly, we buy products as a way to fit in to certain groups. For instance, I generally shop at Abercrombie and Fitch or J-Crew, while my best friend frequented Hot-Topic and other stores like that. We were best friends around the neighborhood, and hung out with each other all the time, but we belonged to two totally different groups. I was seen as the preppy, by the rules kind of guy, while he was a punk-rock rebel. Because of the clothes we bought, music we listened to, and media we consumed, people made various assumptions about our identities as people. If you saw us both at random, you would never believe that we were best friends because of this. Yet I have more in common with him than anybody else I know. We just happen to buy different things, so we have different identities and belong to different groups.
It’s interesting the way advertisers have played into our identity crisis. They constantly make us feel like we need the latest, greatest newest thing to hit the market to be cool and belong. If we wanted to hang out with the punk rock kids, you needed the latest CD. If you wanted to be with the video-gamers, the latest software, and the jock the latest jersey. Advertisers have made it so that we feel like we need to buy their products to gain membership in various groups we want to belong to because their products will help us develop our identity to fit those standards.
So are ads making us shallow, teaching us to value unimportant things? Probably. Are they the only thing responsible? Probably not. But it certainly does say something about who we are as a society in the way that we are marketed to. Rarely do you see a “buy this product because its good for the world,” advertisement or even a “buy this product because it is the best, cheapest, or safest available.” Instead, it is “buy this product because it will make you X,Y, or Z.”
Ads like this promising to make us things we aren’t are prominent everywhere. Product placement has brought it to a point that sometimes we don’t even notice, like with the Rolex and Aston Martin in James Bond, or Coke drinks on American Idol. We assign labels to products without even realizing it. For instance, Slice orange soda appeared in the TV series “One Tree Hill” frequently, so without even realizing it, consumers have come to liken Slice to One Tree Hill, assigning the same characteristics to the soft drink as they do to the show.
The final point worth mentioning is counter-bricolage; or why I will never be able to buy a normal-quality pair of pants again. Counter-bricolage is essentially the producers and advertisers appropriating the latest subversive teen fad into their own mainstream style. For a while, the thing to do was buy vintage or beat up your clothing. My favorite stores figured that they could sell more clothes if they started making them that way, so now they sell ripped jeans, pants with paint on them, 
and hats that look like they’ve been through a war. I actually had a hat that I wore for nine consecutive years, and people would constantly ask me if I bought it that way. It was ripped, dirty, and quite nicely broken in; yet the clothing was now coming this way because of advertisers trying to appropriate the latest fad. They are manufacturing vintage clothing…which seems like it shouldn’t work. “Hey, I have a great idea. Let’s make clothes that look like they’re really old and have already been worn by at least eight different people.” Even more outrageous, is that these “distressed” clothes are usually the ones that are most expensive. Why can they get away with this? Because they aren’t selling the products themselves. They are selling the image. If a consumer was out buying jeans for the sake of being covered up and protected from the elements, they certainly wouldn’t want a pair with rips and tears, and paint and holes all over them. But since they aren’t shopping for function, but image, they crave the distressed pair because of the identity that goes along with it. This pair makes them cool, and fit in with the latest crowd. The fact that these jeans can be more expensive than a legitimate well-crafted pair say volumes about our motivation as consumers and what we assign value to. Clearly, the image the clothes portray is more important to us than their actual physical quality.
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