Keywords

1 Advertising as a Desire Alarm

Advertising activity has many facets. We usually think of it as circumscribed to the economic sphere: an instrument to sell products, through the public promotion of its qualities and advantages. However, this is only one of its many faces, perhaps the most visible, but by no means the only one. Advertising has a communicative sphere, which makes possible the dialogue of brands with their audiences; a social sphere, because it influences the fashions and lifestyles of the population; and also a psychological sphere, because their campaigns seek a certain effect on our habits and our desires. Let us stop at this last point now.

The manipulation of our desires is developed by advertising in many different ways and in many different situations:

  • By promoting a new product, advertising tries to turn it into an irresistible desire for the public that, until then, lived happily without knowing it existed: it did not feel attracted to it nor did it experience any frustration due to the lack of that product; and, nevertheless, from an advertising campaign you can wish it to the point of thinking that you will not be happy without acquiring it. In this situation, advertising seeks to awaken a nonexistent desire, arouse the desire for something that has never been perceived as necessary (León 1996: 13–27).

  • By promoting a product that is already known but has never been acquired before, advertising tries to turn it into a desire based on social consensus: “now everyone uses it, and you must also use it.” In this case, trying to activate a latent desire, the desire for something that until then did not look attractive or necessary, and that in the campaign is presented as essential, irresistible, or at least fascinating (Hennion et al. 1989).

  • By promoting a product that the consumer already knows and uses, but is manufactured by the competitor, advertising tries to raise the desire to improve our user experience. The product is presented as cheaper, safer, more pleasant, or easier to use. In order to achieve this, it relies on the distinctive advantage of the novel product, and for this it tries to awaken the desire of a product that, supposedly, offers greater personal satisfaction (Fawcett 2013).

  • Finally, when promoting a product that the public already knows and uses by acquiring the advertised brand, advertising can still play with our desires in a double sense: motivating a more repeated or frequent consumption (increased desire) or remembering the product and brand so that the public does not prefer the competitor: loyal desire (Knox and Walker 2001).

In all cases, advertising manipulates our desires. It awakens them, activates them, guides them, empowers them, or makes us loyal to them over time, but it always seeks to persuade us by pressing the desire for something that was not part of our life: the product, or the brand, or the frequency of consumption.

But advertising, by selling products or services, also triggers other collateral desires. For example, the desire to enjoy wonderful places like the ones shown in the ad: an impressive house, a paradise beach, a beautiful trip, a splendid adventure, etc. Or also a body as perfect as the one shown by the model who is advertising a cream or a perfume (Sun 2015); or also a lifestyle as glamorous as the one enjoyed by the protagonists.

Many of these wishes have been deliberately activated by a very specific advertising strategy. In fact, empirical research has confirmed the efforts of companies to promote certain desires. For example:

  • A content analysis of Nike’s campaigns targeting women has revealed “the politics and production of desire within Nike advertising.” Specifically, their campaigns try to develop “a particular notion of who or what counts as a female athlete” (Helstein 2003).

  • An investigation with consumers between 17 and 35 years of age on advertising images of food products even established the relationship between the distance of the product to the mouth of the model and the desire to consume it: “the consumers’ desire to eat a food product and their actual consumption of a food product would be greater when the model in the picture was close to engaging in consumption and that desire and actual consumption would be reduced when the model was shown in the process of finishing consumption” (Palcu et al. 2019).

Sometimes, social media advertising amplifies its effect in combination with user comments. Thus, the images of beer advertising on Facebook, designed to encourage comments from Internet users, reached a two-way influence on a sample of 120 young people: on the one hand, ads increased the desire to write comments; and on the other, “pro-drinking comments may increase the desire to drink and ad engagement, both of which may be predictive of future drinking behavior” (Noel and Babor 2018).

Finally, it should be noted that the relationship between advertising and desire is very different depending on the circumstances of age, training, etc. A study with 296 children showed that knowing the persuasive intent of an advertisement could reduce its impact on children aged 10–12 years, but in children under that age knowing it increased even the desire to own the products (Rozendaal et al. 2009).

In sum, and as González Requena and Ortiz (1999: 7) point out, it is not enough to analyze the data provided by advertisements, because we would be ignoring an important analysis perspective: nowadays “advertising messages are studied as informative messages, and what everyone nevertheless intuits is ignored: that in them the information matters very little, that contemporary advertising does not appeal to our reason but to our desire”.

This appeal to desire has had an uneven route over time, because in each era advertising has configured a different model of consumer; above all, when it comes to buying decisions.

2 Desires and Consumer Models

When talking about consumer behavior (Szmigin and Piacentini 2018), we tend to think that the buyer makes his decisions after a more or less careful deliberation: studies the pros and cons, assesses the value for money in each of the products and, after a leisurely analysis, chooses what he considers most reasonable. Nothing is further from the reality. There is a fairly high percentage of purchases that we make routinely, relying on the good experience we have had and without inquiring if, meanwhile, new competitors have appeared or they now have better offers (Solomon et al. 2014). Other purchasing decisions are determined by the whim, the aesthetics of the packaging, the lack of stock of our brand, or various emotional factors (Shapiro 2015). Consequently, advertising does not have a unique consumer model, but has developed different models over time that are related to the implicit wishes in the purchase (Méndiz and Domínguez 1996). In a synthetic way we can expose them like this:

  1. 1.

    Rational model: It is the one that conceives the consumer as a reflective buyer who evaluates the value for money and makes his decisions based on the advantages that he can perceive. In this model, desire hardly counts in the purchase decision, since every decision is the result of a rational analysis, and the determining factors are always in the available information, not in the emotions or in the desires. That is why in this model advertising is always informative persuasive.

  2. 2.

    Behavioral model: It is the one that considers the consumer as a being governed absolutely by his routines and buying habits, and whose only aspiration is to avoid the tension that every purchase raises (Bassat 2001), including the fear of not being right or staying ridiculous for the choice. His purchase decision is the result of reflexes assumed as a pattern of behavior, more or less conditioned by repetitive and ubiquitous advertising. The repetition of the messages ends up conditioning the purchases of the public, similarly to how the sound of the bell conditioned salivation in Pavlov’s dog. In this model, desire does play a role in the purchase decision, but its role is very limited because, in reality, it is not a desire of the person but a conditioned desire. Manipulation consists in making the purchase decision ending up being an automatism rather than a free decision.

  3. 3.

    Social model: The image that this model projects of the consumer are that of a man who seeks in his purchases, the acceptance or recognition from others. Rather than deciding based on his tastes or aspirations, he decides “externally oriented” (Li and Cai 2011): what others will think. When buying, he thinks about how he will look before his friends, what his classmates will think of that choice or what image he will convey with him. If you buy a luxury car, you do not do it because you are eccentric or a lover of rare vehicles, but because you want to attract attention and let others recognize your status. Therefore, what advertising offers to this consumer model is social approval, the esteem of its own value. Here desire plays a more decisive role than in the previous models, but it is an extrinsic desire (to be recognized in the group) and very channeled toward ostentation, notoriety, or external acceptance.

  4. 4.

    Motivational model: In this model, the consumer is perceived as a man who decides, for hidden reasons, for unconscious motivations that try to be satisfied in the purchase. This model “takes for granted the existence of underlying or unconscious motives that influence consumer behavior” (McPhail-Fanger 2012) and that end up shaping our decisions without us being aware of it. Proponents of this model, clearly indebted to Freud’s thinking about instincts and hidden desires, have had an enormous influence on advertising in the second half of the twentieth century, and have based advertising creativity on a previous psychological investigation of the authentic motivations and deep desires of the consumer. Because of its relevance in the advertising drive of unconfessed and even uncontrolled desires, we will explain this a little more in detail.

2.1 Motivational Studies of Advertising Desire

The so-called motivational studies in advertising appeared in the early 1950s by the hand of Ernest Dichter, a psychologist who started from Freudian presuppositions and who tried to apply the research techniques of clinical psychology to marketing and advertising. Faced with surveys and quantitative studies, Dichter emphasized the importance of personal conversations and in-depth interviews, without prefabricated responses. In addition to revaluing the “face-to-face” interviews, he also invented the focus group and several qualitative research techniques. His books, especially The Strategy of Desire (1960) and The Handbook of Consumer Motivations (1964), became references for a new generation of publicists.

An emblematic case is how it worked and resolved the first order it received, which consisted of improving the decadent image of Ivory soap in the United States (McPhail-Fanger 2012). The first thing that Dichter did was to review all the advertising of the product since 1898, which extolled its fragrance and its ability to float on water (so as not to lose it in the bathtub, in the river, etc.). The psychologist interviewed dozens of users to unravel the motives and desires that occurred in their minds while soaping their bodies. Influenced by Freud’s thought, he interpreted their desires in a sexual key: he observed that the act of bathing was a ritual experience, which provided moments of complacency; and concluded that, unconsciously, there was in that act an important erotic ingredient. The advice he gave to the brand was: emphasize the fact of stroking the body itself and show expressions of extreme pleasure in the ads. The campaign, perhaps because of the novelty, had a remarkable success. And with this cover letter, Freud’s thinking took over the advertising strategy in the 1950s and 1960s of the last century (Samuel 2010).

Suddenly, the agencies were filled with psychologists who tried to discover hidden or unconfessed motivations: the motivations they called real, those that are hidden under our layer of social courtesy, and which, according to them, are unknown even to their own subject. In this way, almost overnight, the study of desires—especially sexual desires—became the basis of advertising creativity: women had to be used in underwear to advertise anything, whether it came to mind or not.

Motivational research was favored by the appearance of a work by Abraham Maslow that was to have wide notoriety: A Theory of Human Motivation (1943). This book reflected his famous hierarchy of human needs, which began with physiological ones (breathing, resting, feeding) and kept increasing in importance for the inner world of the person. In the higher levels, the agencies were going to find ways to appeal to the wishes that every person experiences: motivations of affiliation (friendship, tenderness, affection), recognition (self-esteem, reputation, independence) and, on the cusp, those of self-realization (creativity, moral sense, sense of existence). The application of his theories to the field of advertising was suggested by Maslow himself in his following work: Motivation and personality (1954).

An author who, indirectly, contributed to mythologising the line followed by Dichter was Vance Packard. His book The hidden persuaders (1957) wanted to be a critique of the sophisticated methods of advertising research, which he presented as techniques for manipulating our desires and our subconscious. Along with an unusual social alarm about the manipulation of our brains, the book was also—without intending—a fantastic promotion of the controversial methods of Ernest Dichter. To sound the alarm about his methods, he put the following phrase in the mouth of this psychologist: “The successful ad agency manipulates human motivations and desires and develops a need for goods with which the public has at one time been unfamiliar—perhaps even undesirous of purchasing” (1957: 48). And yet, this contributed to giving it more notoriety. Companies and governments around the world, without special ethical scruples, went to Dichter’s consultancy to satisfy instinctive desires with their products or to modify the perception of citizens on the issues they were going to legislate.

Shortly after, and based on the ideas of Dichter, the director of investigations of the Chicago Tribune, Pierre Martineau, devised a new way to appeal to the consumer that he presented in his book Motivation in Advertising (1957). From the data provided by motivational research, he developed the concept of brand image: the representation that the consumer builds in his mind on the attributes and benefits of the product and the brand; attributes and benefits that are not always identified with those in reality. The important thing is the image, the dream, or the desire that the consumer builds around them.

This way of manipulating desires has continued until recently. When they prepared to relaunch Nike, motivational researchers already knew that one did not buy their sneakers after a study compared between different models, or because they seemed to us to be the best in value for money (rational motivation). They knew that one bought Nike products because one liked its design (aesthetic motivation) or, more frequently, because it is a popular brand that everyone wears and one didn’t want to feel excluded from the group (social motivation). But they went a step further and tried to discover hidden needs to associate with the product. Thus, they discovered that young people felt desires for self-expression and for the liberation of conventions (what they called authenticity) and decided that Nike’s publicity should symbolize for them the expression of the authentic, that acts freely and ignores expectations from others: Don’t think about what others will think: Just do it. His message was: act on impulse, so you will be authentic and therefore free.

2.2 Apparent Advantages of the Motivational Model

This line of motivational research has prevailed in advertising because what it postulates presented two great advantages over those of the rational model.

The first is the prevalence of the image. The rational model considers that the important thing in advertising is the text: it is assigned both the persuasive capacity and the merit of achieving a change of attitude in the consumer. The strong weight of the advertising strategy (raising the desire and motivating the purchase) is completely entrusted to the textual elements: the headline, which attracts the viewer’s attention; the body of text, which provides the reasons for the purchase; and the slogan, which causes adherence to the brand through a catchy phrase. In this model, the image fulfills only two minimum functions: it is in the advertisement as a decorative element and as a resource that attracts attention. In Victoroff’s expression (1978: 69), the image is just a “look-catcher.”

However, reality shows that the image has a broader capacity of meaning than the text. It is able to connote various meanings and convey many references that seduce more directly than arguments. In addition, it is more suggestive and empathetic for the viewer (Peninou 1976: 45), because the image establishes a stronger emotional bond than any advertising argument.

The second advantage is the immediacy of communication. In the rational model, advertising must be especially informative, and that means presenting the necessary data, referring to the distinctive advantages and exposing the purchase arguments. This requires some time for the viewer, because the advertising must present all that gradually, sequentially. As Elias St. Elmo Lewis pointed out—quoted by Edward Strong (1925)—the announcement must first call attention, then arouse interest, then awake Desire, and finally move to the Purchase Action. It is the A.I.D.A. (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action), very popular in the first half of the twentieth century. In this line of sequential persuasion, other models also appeared, such as that of Daniel Starch (1923), which pointed to the four objectives of an advertisement: to be seen, read, believed and remembered; or Russell H. Colley (1961), who identified four cognitive responses of the viewer: Knowledge (of the product and the brand), Understanding (of the competitive advantage), Conviction (security of having the right choice), and Action (the purchase).

However, most of the public does not have time for this progressive persuasion of the rational model. With few exceptions, the reader does not have time to read the texts of an advertisement; just glance one or two seconds at the print ad, enough time to see the image and read the headline. Nothing else. That’s why he usually quits reading the ads before reaching the end. Especially in products that involve images (cosmetics, jewelry, and expensive watches) advertising offers only photography or an image, and that is enough to achieve seduction. Currently, this phenomenon also expands to products—such as the car, the laptop, or the smart phone—which, due to its technical nature, would seem to require a comprehensive text to inform about its technical characteristics or its advantages over the competition. The reality is that we increasingly buy more for the image and less for the text of the ads. As the driving forces of the motivational model point out: “in relation to the text, the image has an undoubted advantage: it conveys its message instantly” (Victoroff 1978: 70).

For this double advantage, motivational advertising ended up being imposed as a guiding strategy for creativity. As a result, advertising in recent decades has investigated and pulsed our desires to try to sell their products, and has sought behavioral or emotional responses that have exalted those hidden desires—or, rather, have disorganized them—for the benefit of their own interest. That is why the activity of advertising persuasion has frequently raised suspicions of manipulation, and the most critical have published strongly denouncing works that have caused social alarm, such as those of Vance Packard (1957), Richard Pollay (1986), or Naomi Klein (2001).

3 Education of Desire: Initiatives in Various Fields

Undoubtedly, motivational advertising has contributed to the manipulation of our desires in consumer decisions. However, this was not the last word. After years of navigating in foreign environments to the innermost being of the person, a new consumer model has been developed lately: that of a being guided by personal principles and values. With this introduction, we begin the second part of this work: the presentation of proposals and initiatives that have been developed to educate the desires in advertising. These proposals have come from three different areas: advertising activity, deontological regulations, and teaching and research activity.

3.1 Professional Practice: Advertising with Values

As we pointed out a moment ago, in recent years, a new consumer model has emerged. In it, advertising is no longer trying to drive conditioned desires (behavioral model) or only external recognition desires (social model). Nor does it try to scrutinize hidden and unconfessed desires (motivational model). What it now intends is to put the values as a guide to our wishes and our purchasing decisions.

This proposal of values in advertising campaigns has a rationale. Advertisers have discovered that technology has matched the products to such an extent that it has become difficult to differentiate itself from the competition for strictly functional aspects. On the other hand, the public is no longer able to retain all the information transmitted in each ad (opportunities, discounts, benefits, etc.). Consequently, brands increasingly resort to communicating their personality (brand image) and their values (philosophy as a company) to establish their own identity; such that, more than products, advertising sells us values and lifestyles.

What does Coca-Cola sell? Happiness. In all sports and in all campaigns. And it has even created a Happiness Institute to support the dissemination of that corporate value with academic and scientific studies. What does Volvo offer? Security. It is not necessary to explain to us the controls that it has nor the demand of quality that it imposes on its suppliers: it is enough to remind us that this is its differential value and its commitment to consumers. What does Adidas tell us? Nothing to do with your shoes or your sportswear. What it proposes is a maxim for our life: “Impossible is nothing.” And finally, what does Apple propose? An attitude, a new way of creating, of conceiving relationships and of approaching problems: “Think different.” A whole philosophy of work and life projected on the products of that brand.

At present, all brands talk about values. Even in the advertising of technical products, companies give up flooding us with technical data and, instead, offer us a value that connects with our aspirations. They don’t sell us a smart phone because of the inches of their screen, processor speed or storage capacity. They sell us values that inspire our life: “Life is Good” (LG), “Designed for” (Samsung), or “For the brave” (Huawei). And they don’t sell us a car because of its power, speed, or low consumption; they sell us a car because with it we acquire elegance, prestige, or social distinction; because it represents freedom or the eagerness for adventure, because it suggests the attractiveness of the exotic or, simply, because it sells us the pleasure of travelling. This was BMW’s appeal in Spain for 15 years: “Do you like driving?” And in 2016, after the economic crisis and the interest in ecology, it proposed to us: “When you drive, drive.” That is, use the car responsibly.

Advertising, therefore, has become a kind of values trading: a more symbolic than real advertising, and more attentive—in the offer of products—to its meaning for the person than to the technical details it provides. However, the proposal of values in advertising has always had two faces: values and counter-values. And that is what, from its origins, has been observed in the empirical studies.

3.1.1 The “Distorted Mirror” Theory

Studies on advertising values began in the sixties of the last century with some critical articles regarding cultural imperialism in the United States. However, everyone recognizes Richard W. Pollay as the true initiator of that field. In his early work, Pollay (1983) drew attention to the emerging phenomenon of the use of values, and also designed a methodology to quantify the presence of values in advertising in various countries.

Shortly after, a large longitudinal study over several decades was conducted: it analyzed the values present in more than two thousand print ads—from the early twentieth century until 1980—and in more than 200 television spots of the 1960s and 1970s (Pollay 1984). It was able to demonstrate the persistent prevalence of some values with respect to others in North American advertising. This led to the formulation of the famous theory of the “distorted mirror” (1986). Synthesizing the conclusions of this research, it was concluded that advertisements do not faithfully reflect the values of the culture in which they are inserted, but that they tend—steadily over time—toward a clear deviation. Advertising is, as many suggest, a mirror of society’s desires and values, but a distorted mirror.

Years later, this hypothesis was corroborated in a new article (Pollay and Gallagher 1990) in which it was claimed that advertising “shows high consistency over time and across media. There is, however, a low correlation between this value profile and that of either the population at large or of heavy media users. This seriously challenges the conventional notion that advertising merely mirrors social values” (1990: 359).

Finally, it was confirmed: “the mirror is distorted (…) because advertising reflects only certain attitudes, behaviours and values. It models and reinforces only certain life-styles and philosophies, those that serve seller’s interests” (1990: 360).

In Spain, this line of work was developed by several researchers. A study on the image of women in television advertising (Méndiz 1988) concluded that commercials associate happiness with five values of an egocentric nature: success, evasion, technology, beauty, and comfort. Such as they were conceptualized, those values were rather counter-values. In the triple classification of values, the egocentric (pleasure, comfort, ostentation) showed a clear prevalence on the whole (58.2%), well above collective values (future, novelty, fashion: 34.2%) and, above all, of the transitional ones (love, tenderness, friendship: 6.8%).

In the Eastern hemisphere, several authors also applied Pollay’s ideas to advertising in their country. Srikandath (1992) analyzed the values that could be verified in the spots of his country, and concluded that “television advertising in India promotes more frequently—if not predominantly—the values of technology and modernization, as well as those of consumerism” (1992: 22). For his part, Wang (1995) developed a broad content analysis in which he concluded that the pursuit of pleasure and the ambition of modernity were the recurring counter-values in the advertising of the main Chinese newspapers; and Cheng (1997), on the other hand, stated that the values of modernity, technology, and youth predominated in the advertising of their country in the 1990s, while quality was being replaced by other counter-values.

More recently (Méndiz 2005), it was concluded that the most forgotten values in advertising are those that imply attention to others (solidarity, friendship, altruism, attention to the needy), those associated with tradition or the past (religiosity, patriotism, maturity, veneration of the elderly) and those that point to responsibility and commitment (work, competitiveness, culture of effort).

This and other research (Núñez et al. 2008) have corroborated the metaphor of the “distorted mirror” advocated by Pollay. Advertising companies are not interested in reflecting the values of society, but those that benefit them the most; that is, those that encourage consumerism. That is why some have stated that the advertisements, both print and television, correspond to those of a materialist lifestyle (Richins and Dawson 1992; Kasser et al. 2004; Roberts and Clement 2007) that is making a dent, especially, in children (Schor 2005; Buijzen and Valkenburg 2003).

3.1.2 Recovery of Values After the Economic Crisis

This whole situation changed with the international economic crisis of 2008. The sudden lack of resources and the alarming increase in unemployment made society cease to be centered on materialistic values (pleasure, comfort, distinction, social success) and began to rediscover the most human and transitional values: family, love, friendship, or solidarity moved to the forefront. Advertising changed radically: it now became an emotional connection with the public. And in the new paradigm, the values transmitted in the ads ceased to be focused on the product, rather it focused more on the direction of the person: “The bet now is to tell stories that affect the citizen, emphasizing the importance of the commitment-values binomial. In this way, the citizen becomes the main protagonist of the message” (Castelló et al. 2013: 658).

Thus, a new trend begins in the proposal of values. In support of a society that suffers intensely from the consequences of the recession, “communication is based more on emotions and feelings, seeks the emotional link between the brand and the consumer through content aimed at emotions: joy, happiness, desires, dreams… The real stories of people gain ground in front of the anodyne messages of products” (Fernández et al. 2011: 135).

From then on, some companies began to be aware of the responsibility they had for the advertising they broadcasted. Do my ads educate? Do they bring hope or disenchantment? Do they contribute to solidarity or individualism? As a result of this reflection, companies assumed the commitment to transmit positive values in their campaigns, implementing or adapting an inspiring message in all their messages. The reaction of the public has always been of clear support for those brands.

Perhaps the clearest example of this new trend is the line undertaken by Coca-Cola from 2008. The multinational soft drink is strong in its call to happiness, and in a short time tells us several stories of high emotional content. In Spain and in 2009, it relates the meeting between the oldest man (102 years) and the youngest baby (newborn) to tell us that life deserves to be lived, even in times of crisis, and ends with a radically optimistic message: “You are here to be happy.” In 2010, it launched the international campaign “Reasons to believe in a better world,” where—with the music of Oasis—we hear arguments to believe in humanity and happiness: “For every corrupt person, there are 8000 who donate blood. For every wall that rises, 200,000 door mats are placed that say: ‘Welcome’…”. And continues in the same manner in successive years: the video “Let’s go crazy” (2012), the street marketing action “The cashier of happiness” (2013), the spot “Love of brothers” (2015), etc.

In Spain we can cite three paradigmatic cases of national companies that have assumed this post-materialistic trend, more human and positive, centered on altruistic values:

  1. 1.

    Campofrío.—In 2011, this company initiated a series of campaigns to encourage Spaniards to maintain a positive mood in the face of the crisis. Its slogan was: “Let nothing and no one take away our way of enjoying life”. In Christmas of that year, it launched the “Comedians” spot, which brought together most of the Spanish comedians to teach us to laugh at ourselves and to see life with joy. In 2012, the campaign “The curriculum of all” came, in which a well-known clown—timid and down at heel—managed to value all our past and all the richness of our tradition, our gastronomy, our languages, and our milestones in the sport. In 2013, this encouraging spirit continued with the “Become a foreigner” spot, in which a naive but sensible Chus Lampreave made us discover that everyone’s effort to love what came from outside and become a foreigner had made us forget the wonder of our character: open, friendly, given to hugs and signs of affection (Cfr. Mut and Breva 2012).

  2. 2.

    Danone—Also in response to the collective discouragement of the crisis, in March 2013 the Danone company surprised the advertising profession with its “Feeding smiles” campaign. With it, it not only faced the adverse economic situation with a new spirit, but also placed it in the field of values. This was pointed out by the creators of the announcement: “We agree with those who think that, below the financial crisis, there is another much more important one: a crisis of established values” (Bosch and Gutiérrez 2014: 95). That is why the company tried to establish a new communication with its audiences talking about four values closely linked to its brand: Optimism, Children, Family, and Smile. Feeding smiles was a very famous spot in which a five-year-old boy approaches the prominent belly of his pregnant mother, and begins a dialogue with his little brother. He put forward everything bad that awaits him: parents worried about the crisis and a rarefied environment; but, at the same time, he offers to share his belongings: the shirts, the dinosaur, … and Danone. The following year, it launched a new campaign, “Do we start with a smile?” in which different families faced a new day with hope.

  3. 3.

    IKEA Ibérica—In January 2014, the furniture company Iberian IKEA initiated a campaign with a clear message defending the home: “Nothing like home to furnish our heads”. In this message, it leant toward four values that have been, in the forefront, its identity sign: the Family, as a nucleus that benefits from its entrepreneurial activity (IKEA manufactures furniture, but not office furniture, furniture for family); the home, as intimate space where the family grows, lives, and shares experiences; on a “Day to day” basis, which values tiny details of life; and Exemplarity: the home and the furniture should facilitate order, family coexistence, and ambience where parents educate and exercise their positive influence on the children. In Christmas of this year, it launched two campaigns in the same line. One, to show us “The other Christmas,” that which is not lived in gluttony and excess, but in the love of the home; and the second, in which a few children were writing “The other letter”: besides The Three Wise Men letter, they were writing another one to parents about the gifts they wanted for Christmas, and the parents who looked on were speechless: “if you could spend more time with us,” “if we could eat together more often,” “if you could read me a story at night before bed time,” etc. The parents finally understood: “At times you wish to give them the best, and the best … is you yourself!” (Cfr. Méndiz and Callejón 2015).

As the studies of these campaigns have reflected (Martínez-Rodrigo and Raya-González 2015; Bosch and Gutiérrez 2014), the positive influence of this advertising has been enormous in the Spanish population: with them, the mood of a country dejected by the crisis has been lifted and the wishes of the consumer have been oriented toward values relevant to our lives: solidarity, generosity, education, or the family.

3.2 Deontological Regulations in Spain: Codes of Autocontrol

In 1995, the Asociación Autocontrol de la Publicidad was established in Spain, an independent advertising self-regulatory body that ensures the development of trustworthy and honest advertising, which safeguards the principles of truthfulness, authenticity, fair competition, and respect for the person. This deontological body welcomes advertisers, agencies, and the media within it; and although it lacks the fourth element of the advertising system (consumers), it has worked quite effectively. At present, its more than 500 direct members represent 70% of the advertising investment in our country.

As the main activity, Autocontrol de la Publicidad has promulgated 22 codes of advertising conduct that have contributed to educating the public’s wishes, especially for younger consumers. Among those codes, there are two that are especially relevant: that of Publicidad Infantil de Juguetes (hereinafter called PIJ), written in 2003 and revised in 2015; and Publicidad de Alimentos y Bebidas dirigida a menores, prevención de la Obesidad y Salud (hereinafter called PAOS), promulgated in 2005 and updated in 2013.

The first code (PIJ) initially states that minors “constitute an audience with limited capacity to evaluate the information they receive,” and therefore urges “parents, educators, media, and consumer associations” to educate Children in the critical understanding of advertising messages (PIJ, Introd). For its part, the code tries to avoid manipulation of desires in three areas:

  1. (a)

    The excessive idealization of the toy. The code adopts measures so that ads do not generate unfounded desires: either in size, performance, or other characteristics (PIJ, # 3), or because they associate the product with “the acquisition of strength, status, popularity, growth, ability, or intelligence” (PIJ, # 4). It also prohibits false expectations about the mobility of toys (PIJ, # 7) or to imply, in computer-generated images, that the animated toy “has the same characteristics as the toy that is presented” (PIJ, # 6).

  2. (b)

    Sales pressure. Advertising should not encourage children to ask their parents for the advertised toy, nor should it suggest that the father who buys it for his children is more intelligent or generous (PIJ, # 16). Nor should he urge children to get the toy here and now (PIJ, art. 17) nor “should it give the impression that acquiring that product will give him greater acceptance among his friends” (# 18).

  3. (c)

    Promotional support: The advertising of toys will not exploit the desire of the product using characters close to them, such as “presenters of children’s programs, characters—real or fictional—of films or fiction series, specially known athletes,” etc. (PIJ, # 20). Nor will it use false promotions (affirmations of the type “contains a gift,” when it is something that is always included with the toy) or false incorporations to children’s Clubs of the brand (PIJ, # 23 and 26).

The second code (PAOS) has a special section on education and nutritional information, and it establishes some elements to prevent the falsification of children’s wishes:

  1. (a)

    Advertising will not promote “unhealthy eating habits, such as eating or drinking immoderately, excessively or compulsively” (PAOS, # 1), will not underestimate “the importance of healthy living habits” (PAOS, # 2) and will not present the product announced, “as a substitute for any of the three main meals: breakfast, lunch and dinner” (PAOS, # 3).

  2. (b)

    The presentation of the products will not generate false wishes about them or their characteristics (PAOS, # 4) nor suggest that they will be stronger, smarter, or more popular with them (PAOS, # 5). Nor will it use presenters or famous people from children’s television programs (PAOS, # 14).

Although the PAOS code had the approval of the health sector, some specialists (Royo-Bordonada et al. 2019) have suggested some points of improvement, such as: the high frequency of advertisements for products high in sugars and saturated fats; the extension of the regulations to other marketing techniques, such as the placement of products in films and television series; the healthy supply in food and beverage vending machines; or the implementation of an “interpretative frontal food labeling, based on color codes, traffic light type” (p. 587) that helps differentiate healthier foods from those that are not.

In any case, 5 years after its implementation, a scientific assessment of the PAOS Code indicated that “it has been relatively effective for the control of food advertising aimed at children,” since most of the announcements have fulfilled the regulations and have contributed to the education of consumption and desire in food matters (Martín-Llaguno et al. 2011).

The same could be said of the PIJ Code. The scientific literature has validated the effectiveness of the regulations as well as their formative nature in child consumption behaviors (Martínez-Pastor et al. 2017).

3.3 School and University: Teaching and Research

Educommunication (Aparisi 2011) or media literacy (Hobbs and Jensen 2009; Gutiérrez and Tyner 2012) refers to the education of minors in media consumption, including the critical reception of their contents. Although the subject is relevant and with a certain tradition (the UN declared it a specific area of knowledge in 1976), its implementation in secondary education has not yet been taken to the curricula. In Spain, a child receives classes for 12 years in Language, Geography, History, Mathematics, etc., but only 1 year—and if the school has planned it—in Media or Audiovisual Culture (Civil and Recoder 2017). The result is that, with few exceptions, the child is very poorly prepared to manage the influence he receives daily from the media.

Given this institutional lack, some professors sensitized with media literacy have incorporated in their programs, various training modules in that field. Specifically, several have developed proposals to use advertising as a teaching tool (Méndiz and Cristófol 2004), as they have realized that advertising offers students more remarkable attractions than a regulated class (Ferrés 1994). As an “educational model,” advertising surpasses the classroom at these points:

  1. 1.

    Objectives: The educators present their speeches so that the recipients learn, while the advertisers make theirs to seduce and entertain.

  2. 2.

    Contents: Didactic programs contain a large volume of information, while advertising messages convey simple information, easy to learn, and remember.

  3. 3.

    Staging: The class is sometimes monotonous and excessively structured, while the ads always meet their first norm: to distract, not to bore, and always surprise.

  4. 4.

    Duration: The classes usually last between 45 min and 1 h, but the spots only last 20, 30, or 60 s, so they capture the attention more easily and manage to stay in memory despite their being fleeting.

  5. 5.

    Message orientation: The teacher primarily focuses on the presentation of the subject and the coherence of the lessons; advertising, on the other hand, focuses on the aspirations of the recipient and adapts his message to the age, culture, and personality of the public.

For all this, some suggest the need to integrate advertising in the classroom (Martínez-Sánchez 1994) and others suggest using it in specific subjects: in Language (González-Gil 1995), Mathematics (Muñoz 1995), or Expression (Palmer 1998). More interesting for our study are the proposals to use advertising messages in the subject of Ethics (Pérez and San Juan 1995; Maquinay 1995). This last author explains how in the classroom she has been able to unmask some desires falsely created by advertising, such as eternal youth, being valued only by appearance, and the need to stand out through consumption.

However, specific subjects in media literacy still do not appear in the school curriculum. What has grown, to a large extent, is scientific research.

In the United States, academic proposals on media literacy in advertising have focused on three areas: counteract the growing development of child sexualization in advertisements (Barker and Duschinsky 2012), develop a critical attitude toward food advertising, especially food garbage (Hindin et al. 2004; Nelson and Kehr 2016) and help identify and reject sexist advertising or that which discriminates against minorities (Cortese 2015).

In Spain, the proposals in this field have been promoted mainly by the Comunicar group (University of Huelva), which has been researching on educommunication for 32 years. Led by Professor Ignacio Aguaded, he publishes the first media literacy magazine in the world: Comunicar (ISSN 1134-3478, Q1 in WoS). Among the works published there are several related to Advertising and education in values (Pérez and San Juan 1995; Maquinay 1995; Biasutto 1996; Biedma 1997; Moro 2007).

Within this line, in the last 3 years the first works on education of desire have appeared in advertising: Pérez and Delgado (2017) point out in their article “The education of desire” that media competitence is the best means “to dismantle the sense of invulnerability caused by the advertising messages with their appeal to the emotional” and indicate as a programmatic objective “to educate so that the communicative competence includes media literacy as a fundamental pillar.” In this line, Rodríguez (2017) exposes a didactic experience about the production of radio advertising texts and points out the need to “reflect on the role of advertising as a transmitter of values that constitute identities.”

It is clear that, although training in media literacy is still provisional—not integrated into the curriculum of the students—or concentrated in a few teachers and schools, the research has been prolific and well articulated. It is laying the foundations for the formation of a new generation of teachers who, in the future, will implement this education of desire in the regulated training of minors.

4 Conclusion

We have seen that advertising has always tried to awaken the wishes of the consumer to promote product sales. This has been done in various ways, according to different consumer models: the rational consumer, who evaluates the value for money and seeks strictly informative advertising; the behaviorist, who buys due to reflex conditioning caused by repetitive advertising; the social one, who decides his purchases based on the image he wishes to transmit to others; and the motivationalist, who makes his decisions based on unconscious desires or hidden motivations.

Recently, a new consumer model has emerged that decides on purchases guided by its principles and to which advertising offers values rather than products. This advertising, which was initially directed toward egocentric values (pleasure, comfort, social success, and ostentation) and that constituted a “distorted mirror” of society, has been directed, after the economic crisis, toward the person rather than the product and is now committed to offering altruistic values: solidarity, friendship, cooperation, and optimism.

In this framework, three great advertising proposals for desire education have emerged. The first comes from the professional field and consists of the commitment to the values in their advertisements. The second comes from the deontological field and has been specified in the codes of Autocontrol de la Publicidad that have guided the consumerist desires of the younger audience. And the third comes from the academic field, which has developed media literacy initiatives to use ads in the classroom as a pedagogical tool and to foster the students’ critical sense of advertising and their appeal to our desires.