So this quote by Banksy has been making the rounds, touching on the general public's relationship to advertisements, intellectual property and such: I have to say I've come around to Banksy's way of thinking and Bill Hicks' as well: The straw that really broke the camel's back for me was watching the recent Lorax/ Mazda commercial: If it's somehow acceptable to piss on a man's grave so completely as that ad does, fuck you for saying anything I do with respect to your "work" is unacceptable. Focus: Marketing, advertising, virtuous sucide, go
Is some advertising obnoxious? Sure. Is some marketing excessive and predatory? Sure. But the people who blindly rail against an entire industry because they don't like the GoDaddy commercials are just as ignorant as those who might actually be effectively targeted by those commercials. You have a new product you're bringing to market. Might as well just put it on the shelves and hope for the best cause Bill Hicks told us all to fuck ourselves if we market it.
Disliking ridiculous/shitty advertising and then going on to say you hate marketing in general is a great way to show how little you know about the subject. It's like saying all art sucks because you don't like postmodern art when it's just one small component of the whole thing. Focus: I hate fucking awful advertising that makes for great stereotyping.
But let's be honest here. How much of advertising is "hey, here's a new product you might want, this is what it is," and how much is a concerted effort to manipulate the psychological associations the viewer makes with the product? Just taking the ad I posted, even if you leave aside all the Lorax bullshit, the main thing they're pimping is their "skyactiv" technology. Well what the hell is "skyactiv" technology? At it's core it's engine tweaks that allow a higher compression ratio and ultimately a roughly 15% gain in fuel efficiency. A nice little piece of engineering, but in what way does that have anything to do with the sky, or with "active" spelled without an e? Absolute fuck all, it's just a ploy, a way to make the internal combustion engine seem cleaner, smoother and more "high technology" and "environmentally friendly." Because the truth, that this is the next iteration of a well established technology, that burns fossil fuels and produces various pollutants, but at a rate 15% less than the previous iteration, doesn't create the psychological dissonance with reality that maximizes their profit.
Blah. I already posted about this twice. Here is the deal, there is competition between products. There isn't a psychological assault on your psyche to get to your wallets. Nothing is secret anymore besides the KFC and the Coca-Cola recipe. So if you have a widget and they have a widget, that really have no advantage over the other, you need to distinguish itself so people can make a decision towards you. Its simple as that. Advertising takes information from surveys, focus groups, and other tests to create messages. Advertising does mostly of regurgitating, not brainwashing, just in a creative way so you don't get bored in those 30 seconds you watch it. That and if we removed advertising, we'd be paying directly out of pocket for all of our entertainment. So HBO is commercial free, you pay $10 dollars a month. Think about if you had to pay $10 a month for every single channel you watched. Or if your Netflix or Hulu doubled. TV shows are expensive, advertising pays for them. Do you want to pay for Spotify and Pandora also? What about the radio?
Has anyone else actively boycotted a product due to advertising? I still haven't seen the movie Titanic due to fact that when it was coming out, I saw the trailer for it 3 times in the same commercial break. On the same channel. I'm sure it's a fine movie, but hey, Fuck You.
The disconnect is that you assume the average consumer will respond to a reasonable, logical argument about why they should use X product. The advertising industry learned a long time ago that this is typically not the case. Most people (i.e. consumers) are mindless and childlike and need to be led to a desired conclusion by trickery and flashing, shiny objects. From politics, to religion (and that's all I'll say about those tow topics), to the kind of food they eat and clothes they wear, people will take the intellectually lazy way out. Rather than objectively considering the pros and cons of a particular product, they will react emotionally to promises and false assumptions. If they are told something will make them feel good, they'll fore go any kind of analysis of the subject. Since I can't get into politics and religion, let's go with a mundane everyday product we see advertised every day - deodorant/antiperspirant for men. I won't even pick on AXE - that's too easy. Let's just say there are two brands, X and Y. Let's assume that X costs 10% less than Y. They have similar active ingredients, so they should work similarly. But while X just claims to function as designed, Y implies, if not outright states, that you will be more masculine if you use it, through pictures of chainsaws on the container and the new and improved Leather Musk scent. Will using Y really make anyone more masculine? Of course not. And chances are, any women that gets a whiff of Leather Musk will walk the other way. But the psychological manipulation will work on many people, resulting in greater sales based on nothing more than an appeal to an insecurity about the consumer's masculinity. To sum it up: Advertising sucks because we suck.
On the whole I don't mind advertising. There is some I take the Aetius stance on it, some that doesn't effect me because I don't care about the product or add, then there is the really creative stuff that I like or have to give credit to for being creative or innovative. Something like test marketing movies that seems like bullshit* (as outlined by Hicks in his bit on Basic Instinct) or marketing to toddlers. I work, very low level right now, for a market research company, there is a component in some of our projects ascribing intangible feelings and benefits to a product in the consumer mind yada yada. Some are about figuring out new avenues and innovations to make in products, gaining customer feed back that can be used to improve or otherwise make more useful a product to a consumer. * I generally dislike the way entertainment is test marketed because they use very simplistic and outmoded ideas for their testing. Though, for every Sharon Stone lesbian scene edited out of Basic Instinct you'll have a case where a director legitimately needed to reign it in. I can't think of any classic examples off the top of my head, Spielberg has admitted test marketing pointed out flaws in one of his movies, ideas to lofty and out there that it was legitimately perplexing and against the flow of the movie and edited it all out (forget what the fuck it was).
Shitty advertisements are a symptom of a shitty culture, not shitty business practices, companies are still going to use whatever method they can as long as it works. Period. I realize I'm splitting hairs here, but Netflix is ad free.
There's always going to be some level of salesmanship/marketing, but I think there's a line there. I'm not going to pretend I'm too smart for advertising to work and I've never bought something because I saw it on TV, but I will say that all the purchases I've made that I've been most satisfied with are things that I didn't buy as a result of such advertising. There's a difference between recognizing a legitimate customer want or need and positioning your product to fill that need, and doing anything you can to generate the perception of a want or a need that your product doesn't have the ability to fill anyway. To use an analogy SUAPYG is going to hate, it's one thing to go to a bar, have a few drinks and a few laughs and meet a woman. It's quite another to do research to see how many drinks she needs to have until she's most open to influence, how many times you need to mention her father in order to generate a craving for male attention, and where best to corner her in the bar so she can't escape your message. It's the difference between an effort to facilitate mutually beneficial transactions, and a calculated campaign to generate transactions, regardless of how they actually affect the other party.
Regardless of the ads themselves, the methods of marketing can be ingenious at times. Retailers have become very good at targeting their advertising according to your purchase history - so good in fact, that Target was able to figure out a girl was pregnant before her own father did (Colbert - Surrender to a Buyer Power). As for the ads themselves, there certainly are some diamonds on the rough. The Cadbury ad from a few years ago, with the gorilla playing drums to a Phil Collins song? I can't help but smile when I see it: is it a good ad, am I being manipulated, or both?
"WE REPORT THE NEWS WHEN IT HAPPENS" ..welll, no shit. That's your job, morons! Gee, you take a quick six decade nap and all of a sudden the news world becomes such a go-getter. I can't wait to see the next Air Canada advertisement: "WE LAND OUR PLANES AT THE AIRPORT!"
I'd actually like that for three reasons: You'd only pay for channels you actually watch You'd be encouraged to waste less time in front of the TV when nothing's on, since you can't channel surf Channels that nobody cares about would disappear forever Netflix and Hulu are already paid services, even if they went up I'd still rather pay for them than cable. And Netflix doesn't advertise. I don't know what planet you live on, but Spotify and Pandora became paid services a while back, and payment causes all those annoying ads to go away, meaning the price for the service as is must be at least covering what the ads make them, otherwise they'd continue advertising regardless. Advertising is obnoxious, stupid, and annoying. It focuses on cheap tricks and manipulation rather than actual information and reasonable portrayal of product. A lot of the time all they do is further stereotypes about the product they're representing and their competition, without actually putting forward any real information at all, which just serves to further alienate their consumers from those who are not yet consumers. Classic examples: Are they amusing? Yeah. Are they in any way accurate? Hell no. As someone who uses both a mac and a PC I can honestly say that 90% of what these commercials promote is complete bullshit. They just create imaginary differences, parade them as fact, and rely on peoples' emotional response to result in business. How is THAT in any way reasonable?
Yes they do have pay services, they also have dual revenue streams, but the majority (at least 80%) of their revenue comes from paid advertising not paid subscriptions (people paying to avoid commercials). Neither Spotify nor Pandora can or will support themselves subscription only. How much would you pay to avoid ads if the prices kept going up for no ads? 15? 20? 30? The fact is all of you "Oh my god, this is brainwashing us, this is lying to us, its misleading us, blah blah blah" people don't get is that advertising pays for a ton of shit, so you don't have to. If someone was to actually come up with a profitble business model for TV/Music, the costs to the watcher would be insanely high. The only reason Netflix is cheap is because all the money on those shows/movies has already been made at the box office/TV advertising. There is no fucking way a good, watchable, enjoyable TV show could be made simply off Netflix. That is to say, Netflix doesn't have the money to create its own channel with original programming, with its own money at its current pricing model. Just as a run through, take Tina Fey's income from 30 Rock. Advertising pays her salary. What you're saying is that you want to pay that directly yourself or your portion of it? Now toss in Tracy Morgan and Alec Baldwin's salaries. Now all the other actors, camera men, producers, kraft services, directors, key grips, associates producers, make-up people, etc. NOW multiple that by scale of production for every show you watch. Go on...I'll wait. OR you could just watch commercials for shit you probably buy anyway... Oh and Bill Hicks used marketing so people could get to his shows and know when/where to buy tickets + set ticket prices. Just throught I'd toss that in. God this shit is ridiculous. On top of all of this bitching, it just assumes people are fucking idiots can't see a commercial and say "No, I'm good." Which people do every goddamn day.
I'm not sure why the first excludes the second in any way. Advertising creates desire for products where there isn't any. Now, obviously that lack of desire does not come simply from ignorance, or the ads would not be the way they are. It seems very much to be a psychological assault going on, and I like that phrase, I'll use it from now on. What's worse though is the psychological assault doesn't just "manipulate" you into buying a product, it molds you into being a person that desires that product. Are you that dense as to think we actually don't get that? Of course we do. And I have to wonder why you think that rules out the fact that the method of those santa-claus-esque advertisers is to brainwash, mislead, and lie to us? Advertising is the worst thing in the world-- and yes, "the problem isn't the system, the problem is us." Of course... But fuck advertising still. We are still paying-- buy all this shit that we scream at you about and then you don't have to buy tv. I'd rather buy tv, and never know about this retard shit.
I like that commercials give me an opportunity to take a piss and grab another beer without missing the thing I really wanted to watch. So long as they don't screw with that process, they can continue to try and convince me to buy their shit all they want. They're going to have to do a lot better, too--like maybe three of those products for $19.99. Plus additional shipping and handling fees, naturally.
You're great at exaggerating, I have a copywriter position you might be interested in. Send me your resume?
Let me summarize your post. The public can't afford the cost of the current media orgy without the massive influx of funds from advertising. Ok? My point was that advertising execs are unscrupulously amoral in the way they carry out their operations. How is this related in any way? Edit: Also they totally eat babies on orphan-fueled fires.
Oh, but they're not. What are the evil agendas of the guys that promote TVs or oreos? What about car companies? Or videogames? Or books? There isn't a hidden agenda by advertising execs. I've met some of them, I work with them. I've studied the positives and negatives of advertising. The issue is that advertising is a reflection, not the creation of society/culture. So the conclusion of this thread is that we're all bad people and certain people suggest we buy things.
What execs aren't unscrupulously amoral in the way they carry out their operations? That's just how society seems to operate these days; I'm not condoning it, just acknowledging the reality of it. Yes, some advertising is maliciously designed to misinform and push an inadequate product at an inappropriate price. But think about some of the things in your life - there is a good chance that you are only aware of them due to how it was advertised.