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Marcelo Salles - salles@fazendomedia.com

In “The Industry of Dreams”, published in the second edition of FM, I tried to analyse how the media, and the publicity in particular, stimulate certain wishes and hopes of the human being in order to make them consume each time more. Considerig both the extent of the theme and the debate towards it, I shall be back to this subject. 

It is not about condemning the advertiser’s routine, but of trying to understand how it works, despite its objectives are somehow distorted of what we are taught in the University. 

Edição # 9 - december, 2003.

There are certain patterns of beauty and of behaviour reinforced daily by several vehicles of communication. It is interesting to observe how this process chooses exactly the minority and transforms it in models. In other words, something that must be imitated, followed. Some people give their lifetime trying to get to the top. 

Obviously, it would be easier to consider that process a coincidence or, as their creators like to say, “that’s what sells”. But, while they try to hide behind subjective sentences (or saying), they hardly notice they are just giving up. When they say “that is what sells”, they are just confirming the theory they intended to omit: it is the dream that sells. The dream of being like the model (minority in the society) of the magazine’s covers. They sell the idea that you have allways to be thin to be happy, no matter how thin you already are. They sell the idea that eternal youth may be achieved by several plastic surgeries. They sell youth. They sell, mixed with so many ideas, products and more products they promise will make you be like the model. 

There’s no respect for the different. Once, in a programme self-denominated fantastic, a report on new “bikini models” interviewed some people at the beach. Sequencially, they asked the guys, the stylist and some thin women about the bodies, considering the arrival of the summer. When they broadcasted women out of the patterns, guess, their faces were not shown. For God, that’s how they film bandits! 

The message of this media is always very subtle. If we do not pay much attention, we may buy their excludent and harmful point of view. That model introduced to usa does not represent absolutelly the brazilian the way he/she is. Goebbels, wheter he was alive, would be surprised to see how his methods have been improoved. At the news-stand, about 90% of the magazines have beauty as their subject. On television, four or five hours of daily broadcasting, including the primetime, are bound to reinforce that model. Simply because it sells a lot. They impose rules, costumes, perceptions. The result is surprisingly surreal. In a country that gets poorer each day (we developed only 0,1% in 2003, according to Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), the cosmetic industry sells each time more. 

Apparently that project of a country has been imposed on us. This government is not worried about producing and developing, but about selling dreams. You don’t have to be very smart to notice the advertiser Duda Mendonça was the great responsible for Lulás victory (Lula was sold to the people as a product that, by the way, he is not) and today he is more importante than any minister. 

It was not by chance that Cesar Maia (the mayor or Rio de Janeiro city) proposed an increasing of nothing less 1.000% to the publicity of Rio de Janeiro city hall. After all, how to fight all the misery produced by the very government’s disregard, in a quick way? Lying, of course. 

There was no space to talk about the relations between the industry of dreams and the industry of death, as we see in the so beautiful cigarretes advertisements, just to give an example. But soon I’ll write about this item.