Selling dreams: How advertising misleads us [Paperback]

Product Details

• Paperback: 149 pages
• Publisher: Consumers' Association of Penang (1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9679950204
• ISBN-13: 978-9679950205
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,794,627 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful Commentary about Advertising Tricks, March 18, 1998

By 

Martin A. Schell (Klaten, Indonesia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Selling dreams: How advertising misleads us (Paperback)

This book was written in 1986 by Mohammed Idris, President of the Consumers' Association of Penang (CAP) in Malaysia. It is full of photos of ads taken from billboards, TV, magazines, posters, etc.

The title clearly describes the underlying principle of cigarette advertising, which typically suggests the dream of outdoor activity (e.g, the Marlboro Man) to men who spend most of their waking lives in offices and factories that are located in polluted cities.

The content focuses on several major products that are being promoted aggressively by multinational companies in the Third World. It is now well known in western countries that the tobacco industry targeted the youth of developing nations to counteract their declining markets in the industrialized world during the 1980s.

It is also widely known that European dairy companies have done much to undermine breastfeeding thru the promotion of baby formula, playing on the embarrassment and/or insecurity of Third World women who hope to become "modern". Ironically, "modern" women in the industrialized nations have been returning to breastfeeding while their sisters in the poorer nations have been led to shun it.

Public uproar and boycotts led to restrictions on the promotion of infant formula, as expressed in the International Code on Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in May 1981.

However, Malaysia's code applies only to infant formula, not to sweetened condensed milk (SCM), which CAP considers to be "The Other Baby Killer" (note: the title of a separate book they have published on this topic) in developing countries. It is not well known in the west that companies which sell SCM in the Third World promote its use as a breastmilk substitute by printing a feeding schedule (with dilution instructions) for children aged 1 week to 4 months on each can's label. CAP succeeded in lobbying the Malaysian government to force the removal of feeding schedules from the labels on SCM cans.

Readers who have lived in east Asia probably are aware of the ubiquitous presence of monosodium glutamate (MSG) in foods, sometimes innocuously indicated as "permitted food conditioner" in the list of ingredients. Idris details a long battle that CAP had with the Japanese giant Ajinomoto, after the latter brazenly included the use of young children and the WHO and FAO logos in its MSG advertisements. Ajinomoto's aggressive tactics blatantly ignored the code of Malaysia's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), an industry-friendly organization that simply requires the phrase "Not for Infants" on all labels and ads for MSG, based on a WHO/FAO report that explicitly states that MSG "should not be taken by children below the age of 12 weeks" because it may cause brain defects. Page 56 shows a photo of a typical ad, along with a letter of rebuke to Ajinomoto Malaysia from the FAO written on UN letterhead.

Although many of the ads portrayed in this book are now out of date, the book remains very informative and insightful for readers who are interested in consumer rights in Asia, examples of how big companies ignore relatively mild safety regulations in the Third World, and a glimpse at the impact of westernization on SE Asian culture. CAP is affiliated with the Third World Network, which publishes a number of books on these themes. Readers who are interested in "How Women and Children are Used in Adverts" in SE Asia will find chapter 5 devoted entirely to this topic.