Advertising
Advertising, the promotion of goods or services through the use of slogans, images, and other attention-getting devices, has existed for thousands of years, but by the late 1990s in the United States it had become ubiquitous, permeating almost every aspect of American life. Indeed, the most omnipresent trend was the placement of advertisements and logos on virtually any medium that could accommodate them. Advertising and brand logos appeared regularly on T-shirts, baseball caps, key chains, clothing, plastic cups and mugs, garbage cans, bicycle racks, parking meters, the bottom of golf cups, in public restrooms, on mousepads, in public school hallways, and, for schools fortunate enough to be located near major airports, on school rooftops. The quest for new advertising venues never stopped—advertising has been placed on cows grazing near a highway (in Canada), and on the edible skins of hot dogs.
Television screens became commonplace in many places where the audience was captive—doctor's offices, which were fed specialized health-related programs interspersed with commercials for health-related products, airports (fed by CNN's Airport Network), and supermarket checkout counters. Indeed, by 1998 place-based advertising, defined by advertising scholar Matthew P. McAllister in The Commercialization of American Culture as "the systematic creation of advertising-supported media in different social locations" had reached almost any space where people are "captive" and have little to distract them from the corporate plugs.
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