In our culture, is advertising primarily a unifying or fragmentizing force?

In our culture, is advertising primarily a unifying or fragmentizing force?


can you help me answer this and can you give me an example. Please and thank you.

In our culture, is advertising primarily a unifying or fragmentizing force?
advertising is a destructive force... did you know that they predict that in 20 or so years, they will have "billboard sattelites" circling the earth, so there will be advertisements in the sky! now thats ridiculous.
Reply:neither
Reply:There are two sides of a coin. So here, it depends on which stand you wish to take. Advertising can unify a socio-economic group as carefully made advertising can reach out to such people. Everyone in society wants to belong to a certain socio-economic group, that said, each of them would be pretty happy to be classified under such terms. It's sort of like the Yuppie craze in the 80s. To be a yuppie, you should be driving a beemer and have a condo up some premier district. However, advertising also splits groups of people into the have and have nots. If an Advert for the new Apple iPod is put on TV, it's probably reaching out to a group that basically can afford to own it, and not those who can't even afford to put two square meals on the table. There are many evils in advertising which I won't go into, coz I happen to be involved in this industry.
Reply:If it is done right. Unifying. That is the idea. A good ad campaign is one that attracts the most potential buyers to a product or service. The way you do that is to demonstrate that your product or service is the one that most people want. A common ground...a unifying experience. McDonald's does it every day when they advertise that their products are the best in the industry and the place to go for anyone to have a hamburger.