I'm not asking about ads in general, but it might be part of the same behavior. I mean the trend of showing media/art like Finding Nemo and people immediately going 
with the message and buying endangered fish.
Is this commodity fetishization, and if so, what are things an artist or creator can do to curb that? Is this something that is considered the responsibility of the creator?
Can anybody suggest readings or authors that shed light on this problem or possible solutions?
commodity fetishism is a different thing to crass consumerism
See, I was wondering if someone who wanted to prove they were the biggest or best consumer of a product fit the definition.
Like a cash-strapped parent buying the most expensive trendy toy for their kid? Like the inherent value of the item or product itself doesn't factor in when it's artificially scarce or marked up.
No, none of this is commodity fetishism. It has nothing to do with a "fetish" recognizable to modern parlance, it refers to an outdated anthropological term wherein people were believed to revere objects they themselves created as being deities (this was a misunderstanding). The analogy here is that commodities are produced by people, but the amount of different labor inputs from different people (and some other factors) result in commodities being produced that seem to exist of themselves rather than as a result of human labor.
You can make a tenuous connection to what a contextless interpretation of "fetishism of commodities" seems to be because the alienated way that products seem to just exist of themselves might contribute to the mindset that you're discussing, but that's completely an accident.
The 
para on commodity fetishism really clarified this concept for me
spoiler
One day there was an anonymous present sitting on my doorstep—Volume One of Capital by Karl Marx, in a brown paper bag. A joke? Serious? And who had sent it? I never found out. Late that night, naked in bed, I leafed through it. The beginning was impenetrable, I couldn't understand it, but when I came to the part about the lives of the workers—the coal miners, the child laborers—I could feel myself suddenly breathing more slowly. How angry he was. Page after page. Then I turned back to an earlier section, and I came to a phrase that I'd heard before, a strange, upsetting, sort of ugly phrase: this was the section on "commodity fetishism," "the fetishism of commodities." I wanted to understand that weird-sounding phrase, but I could tell that, to understand it, your whole life would probably have to change.
His explanation was very elusive. He used the example that people say, "Twenty yards of linen are worth two pounds." People say that about every thing that it has a certain value. This is worth that. This coat, this sweater, this cup of coffee: each thing worth some quantity of money, or some number of other things—one coat, worth three sweaters, or so much money—as if that coat, suddenly appearing on the earth, contained somewhere inside itself an amount of value, like an inner soul, as if the coat were a fetish, a physical object that contains a living spirit. But what really determines the value of a coat? The coat's price comes from its history, the history of all the people involved in making it and selling it and all the particular relationships they had. And if we buy the coat, we, too, form relationships with all those people, and yet we hide those relationships from our own awareness by pretending we live in a world where coats have no history but just fall down from heaven with prices marked inside. "I like this coat," we say, "It's not expensive," as if that were a fact about the coat and not the end of a story about all the people who made it and sold it, "I like the pictures in this magazine."
A naked woman leans over a fence. A man buys a magazine and stares at her picture. The destinies of these two are linked. The man has paid the woman to take off her clothes, to lean over the fence. The photograph contains its history—the moment the woman unbuttoned her shirt, how she felt, what the photographer said. The price of the magazine is a code that describes the relationships between all these people—the woman, the man, the publisher, the photographer—who commanded, who obeyed. The cup of coffee contains the history of the peasants who picked the beans, how some of them fainted in the heat of the sun, some were beaten, some were kicked.
For two days I could see the fetishism of commodities everywhere around me. It was a strange feeling. Then on the third day I lost it, it was gone, I couldn't see it anymore.
I was not expecting this phenomenal explanation of Commodity Fetishism when I sat down and read this play for the first time, but it was a nice surprise!
This is a passage from The Fever by Wallace Shawn, if anyone is interested. It's a short monologue, you can get through it really quick.
Isn't there another part of commodity fetishism that pertains to how the relations of production from labor to commodities get inverted into relations in which commodities dominate the labor that produces them, so labor becomes subservient to commodities, as if they were little gods that ruled over workers?
I always found that consumerism was related to that aspect of commodity fetishism.
We could call it consumer fetishism, the inverse of commodity fetishism. The consumer ascribes to commodity powers that the consumer themselves own. Examples
Consumer fetishism is more commonly called treatlerism.
Oh okay. I was coming at this from a lens of magical thinking within capitalism. I think I see where I went wrong - I was thinking along the lines of a movie like Finding Nemo having the opposite of the intended effect because consumers don't understand that poaching fish and buying toys that become pollutants is actually harmful. But that seems more like apathy and consumerism, yes.
I don't think it happens intentionally when the market shifts with a trend like exotic fish after Finding Nemo came out. But there is this thing where people with excess people pour wealth into whatever is trendy or a cultural signifier.
The screaming hollow core of the neoliberal subject is just an empty void created by individualism and alienation and immiseration. All community and social fabric has dissolved into air, society is now a commodity that can only be experienced if you have the money to pay for it. "Want" is all there is, interrupted by brief moments of consumption followed by more hollow emptiness.
In this miasma, how could you ever expect an audience to engage with a subject without wanting it? We're hungry ghosts out here.
Source? If this is your original writing, it is exceptionally good. Poetic and evocative on top of being accurate and meaningful.
I think I took the specific term "screaming hollow core" from... something? A podcast maybe? (TrueAnon? Deprogram? Chapo?) And "dissolved into air" was a reference to "all that is solid melts into air" from the Manifesto. This was mostly just original writing, though!
I recognized the allusion to Marx's "melts into air" line, but I still could have sworn the rest of it was from a more recently famous work. So I searched for it but of course found nothing because you just wrote it! You have an impressive talent, comrade.
aw shucks 😳
Slap their hand with a ruler
It's not commodity fetishization (that is a specific Marxist concept about social relations to production), it is consumerism under capitalism, nost acutely seen in the imperial core where the acquisition of commodities has become a substitute for self-identity, hobbies, and friendly socialization. Your example is also about being inconsiderate or unthinking, which is also a socialized behavior.
It is fairly dense, but you may appreciate reading The Society of the Spectacle. If you aren't already up on your Marx you may need to read it twice with some reviews of Capital in between, particularly its jargon. But it is all about thr extension of commoditization to society, media, thought, and basic social fabric, and that is fundamentally what you're describing.
Re: people being inconsiderate well, I think that ultimately comes down to how we are raised and taught, and currently that is dictated by capitalism to be (often dysfunctional) nuclear families, fairly abusive school systems, and petty tyrannies at work, and all of those things contribute. That's challenging to untangle quickly, but even just overhauling those things with basic socialist approaches would surely help. For parents and their children, economic stability and free time, free and community-enriching "third places", housing stability and good schools (less need to move around unless you want to). For students, education with well-paid teachers and minimized influence from small business tyrants or desperate people in crisis. For workers, more democratic workplaces and a clearer sense that there is a tangible social benefit to what is produced.
This is an extremely optimistic view on my part, but I think it's important to remember that some of this is people very seriously being trained to be that way by advertisement and consumer culture and so on, which should make it unsurprising when someone who is raised in a world covered in ads responds to many other things as though they are ads.
But I feel like it also has to do with the hollow, hopeless nature of many people's lives. Do you really have a hope of being financially secure? No? Well, you can still take out a loan to buy a muscle car if you get to the dealership before your credit score gets any lower. Are you valued as a human, or just for the work you put out and the money you make? Better buy a bag you can barely afford, it's a good way to make a good impression on people.
Do you have any hope of making a better world? Can you actually sustain yourself with the pay from work that builds toward a better future for humanity, or just to make some shitty executives money? Well, may as well have some treats to fill the void.
I hate dwelling on anti-consumerism, it's usually a really snobbish, but to me the bulk of it is basically the same as religion, which is that people are suffering and need to sooth it, and this is just what happens. If you're going to be politically involved, it's good to disabuse yourself of these things, but we can't just tell everyone to do that and, on a systemic level outside of a communist party, the best way to alleviate poisoning from opiates is to make people's lives substantively better so they aren't being hurt as much and therefore don't cling so much to opiates.
Edit: Tangentially, you might be interested in "Society of the Spectacle," a book whose title is also misinterpreted based on modern connotations. The core idea is that we live in a society of representations, of ethos by style and association, and therefore try to self-actualize by basically getting accessories, like getting whatever brand of cig to be more manly. Importantly, the goal isn't simply to look more manly (or whatever the trait is), but that by engaging in these rituals the person actually is more manly in their own mind. You might say that they are creating an image not just to convince others, but to convince themselves.
There's a lot more to the book and it's really interesting, but that's the titular part as I understand it.
This is an extremely optimistic view on my part, but I think it's important to remember that some of this is people very seriously being trained to be that way by advertisement and consumer culture and so on, which should make it unsurprising when someone who is raised in a world covered in ads responds to many other things as though they are ads.
iirc mcdonalds tried not running ads somewhere and it tanked business. those people probably ate at competitors they saw an ad for but what if we had no ads, like best korea?
It would be hard to pull off. In the old AES countries they had no ads but people were still crazy to get their hands on Levi's jeans and Marlboro cigarettes.
Edit: Others are already talking about commodity fetishism.
I would suppose we do it in a very similar way to which we get past people seeing things directly and saying "I want that".
Either by putting as much as possible under the collectivized modek so that people get used to it, or by instilling a sort of ambivalence over owning things (e.g. having to lug everything you own across town without using a motor, or maybe just not having arbitrary amounts of storage as something you can just buy).
It's just like how you can't make a show about an anti hero without all the pasty, lame dad's buying all the Heisenberg grill aprons.
YOU. ARENT. SUPPOSED. TO. ROOT. FOR. WALT.
Under neoliberalism I do not think there is a solution to this.
So long as there is scarcity people will covet it. However it is the pain of alienation from capitlaism that makes the pain so accute. When you see accounts of people who live in ways with less alienation they don't have it that bad.
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