"Advertisement in Feed and our society"

Fausto Benitez

Feed by M.T. Anderson is a story one hundred years into the future from now. It’s a new society where 73% of people have a chip implanted into their brains. This chip is called feed. Feed is an advance form of the internet. They show advertisements. People who have a Feed have easier access to anything.

In the United States, we are a consumerism society because people want more and more stuff based on what they see. Advertisements are seen everywhere from movie theaters to bathrooms all the way to sporting events. A person sees advertisement everywhere and it has become part of our society. Advertising causes many people to be consumers in this society. Advertisement is commonly used to make people believe their product is the best of all and it’s tries to convince people.  

There are many types of advertisements such as television commercials, posters, online pop up ads, etc.

In Feed, Advertisement is shown throughout the whole novel. They have become a consumerism society because they constantly want to be up to date. Titus explains, “It was like I kept buying these things to be cool, but cool was always flying just ahead of me” (Anderson 279). Similar to our society, we buy things because they are cool and everyone wears them. We mainly get our dressing ideas from celebrities. Many men try to copy other artists style by wearing similar things like them. For example, men are constantly victims of this situation because they wear Timberlands or Jordans like DJ Khaled or other artists. They copy what they say like ," they don't want us to succeed". They spend hundreds of dollars on these products. We are influenced by artists or famous people based on our looks and style.

In the article, “online videos of advertisement industry”, by Abhishek it gives us information about how online advertisement has increase and what makes advertisements to be successful. It talks about a “new era of advertising” meaning that they are many new ways advertisement such as YouTube advertising, google and Facebook ads, etc. There are many new ways of advertisement. Everyone can relate to this because we all see YouTube videos and we have all gone through seeing a thirty second ad. This is a form of advertising commonly seen now a day.

The author says, “But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are. It can tell you how to get them, and help you making buying decisions that are hard. Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and OnFeed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile” (48). In other words, the Feed knows what you like and what are you interests. Based on this information, the Feed knows what to advertise and it knows what you will buy. No matter what we search up, the internet is making a profile for our interests similar to what feed does to Titus and the other characters.

We can compare their society to our society because we are living in similar situations. What we search up on the internet stays there. If a person has something in interest and constantly search it up or views videos, pop up ads will most likely appear on the side of a website you are in.

For example, in our society soccer players constantly look at reviews of soccer cleats, videos of soccer players, or even their favorite thing. Next thing you see is a pop up ad about a soccer cleats and jerseys on the side of the website.  

According to Abhishek, “the basic barometers (like shares, views, comments, likes, and watch time) contribute a lot for deciphering audience responses, which turns helps the strategists to interpret the quality content (what the audience likes)” (1). We know that the basic barometer is like the the Feed.

Similar to the novel, consumerism is a social issue. Advertisement is placed in each character’s head which is put there by the government. Many people are constantly getting advertising by cooperation’s and want them to buy their products. People in this society are attracted by advertising because it is chipped inside of them.

Similar to our society, we are attracted to what we see on commercials. For example: Peyton Manning is a famous NFL football player who has a sponsorship deal with Papa John’s. He advertises pizza and makes people believe that the right moment to buy pizza is on Sunday night football games. This isn’t good for society because there are many child suffering from obesity. The irony here is that Peyton Manning is perfectly fit and is advertising pizza to consumers. We are attracted to pizza and sports. We decide to buy pizza and watch Sunday night football based on this advertisements.

In the novel, one of the advertisement that caught my attention was on page 157 and it says, “’eye of the needle’ is just another name for a gate in Jerusalem- and with the Swarp XE-11s mega-lepton lift and electro kinetic gyrostasis, you can flip ninety degrees to the ground and back again in one-point-two seconds- so getting through the gate won’t be a problem anymore” (157).

In other words, if people purchase the Swarp XE-11s they have a spot in heaven. This is an example of false advertising. Similar to our world there are many fake advertising. A common advertisement is people buying a product in order to lost weight. Many of weight loss advertisements are either fake, they don’t work, or they just want your money.

Advertisement in both feed society and our society relate in many ways. We want to be up-to-date on everything we see. Advertisements help us make decisions on what we should get as well as our profile we create based on our search history. Advertisements are not always positive, they can be the opposite and lie to us. In our society, we use advertisements to be up-to-date, to help us what we like, and to attract us to buy their product.

Fausto Benitez, Prompt 4

Works Cited 

Anderson, M.T. Feed. Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2002. Print.