For those like junebeetle who are fed up with increasingly propaganda-style advertising and marketing, I highly suggest looking at the cluetrain manifesto site. It describes how increasingly networked consumers are able to subvert these techniques by communicating with each other instead of relying on a business’ marketing. They go on to claim that businesses will have to transform their approaches to take this into account, which I can only hope is true.
Also, on a more practical level, I highly recommend Junkbusters for lots of information on how to cut down on the number of advertisements you get. Among other things, they offer a web proxy server (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is) that will get rid of nearly all of the advertisements you see on the web. Not only will you not see them, but they won’t even get sent to your computer in the first place, so you’ll save download time and pages will load more quickly. I’ve been happily and successfully using it for at least a year now.
matt_mcl: I tend to agree with your point, that businesses try to create the needs and the wants, and then try to fill them. Kinda like Religion has been doing for the last few thousand years.
Lib, Smartass, now what’s happened here? According to page 42 of the libertarian handbook, we’re all supposed to think the same thing.
This is assuming that people don’t know what they need without advertisers to tell them. As matt_mcl pointed out, one of the purposes of advertising is to create demand where none exists. E.g. I didn’t know I needed that little plastic thing with blinking red lights until I saw it on TV.
I’m surprised nobody has pointed out what I think to be the greatest flaw in my abolitionist scheme. The entire advertising industry would go bust overnight, destroying perhaps millions of jobs!!
I’m perfectly willing to ignore advertising as suggested by Libertarian, but that doesn’t stop me from worrying about what it does to our society. (Oops, I forgot — libertarians don’t believe in society! ) I believe that other countries have taken steps to counter the adverse effects of advertising. In one country that I know of (Sweden?) commercials aren’t allowed during children’s programming because advertising which targets young children is considered immoral.
Also, thanks for all the great reading recommendations. I will check them out.
We don’t believe that society has rights. We believe that people (such as yerself) do.
Society is merely a set. What you said is like saying “My math teacher doesn’t believe in real numbers,” when in fact your math teacher has said that the square root of -1 has no real number solution.
junebeetle, the premises of your OP seem to be that advertising in some way prevents critical evaluation of products, and is also the key factor in rampant American consumerism.
As far as the first assumption goes, I think the best comment has come from Libertarian:
Besides being a whimsical suggestion that you don’t have to give attention to advertisement, a deeper meaning is that, besides ignoring commercials, we may at any time disengage our thinking from the path suggested by the ad and instead apply our own evaluative process to the product being hawked.
As far as consumerism is concerned, advertising seems to take more of an “enabling” role than a causative one. The fictional works cited by CalMeacham and Myron Van Horowitzski are excellent commentaries on this. In fact, science fiction has addressed this issue in many different ways. You might also want to look at The Man Who Ate the World, also by Fred Pohl, Philboid Studge by Saki for an earlier (1920’s I think) look at advertising, and Ubik by Philip K. Dick for a really strange look at consumerism and the meaning of life.
At the risk of turning this into another libertarian debate, I might mention that numbers in a set can hardly be compared with human beings in a society. Human beings are social animals. We interact with other humans in complex and important ways. The other humans around us determine how we view the world, what kind of people we become, and how successful we can be, among other things. That’s why we have culture.
xenophon41 said,
But do we? I never gave advertising a second thought before I learned the tactics behind it and gained the ability to analyze its underlying structure. Do you really expect children to figure out what’s going on when Tony the Tiger extols the virtues of Frosted Flakes on Saturday morning TV?
Uh, don't those kids have parents who control what they buy? Granted television commercials swayed me as a child, and they still do, but they never *made* me want something.
Sorry, junebeetle, but now I gotta agree (more or less) with MGibson. As our direct puchasing power increases, so should our critical thinking skills. I admit, there are people in this country who exhibit remarkably little ability for rational thought, but it’s a bit of a stretch to lay the blame for that on advertisers. Every salesman since the first troglodyte who offered a squirrel skin in trade for a piece of flint has used hyperbole, deceit and flash to try and make the sale. Sometimes squirrel skin becomes the fashion because of this, sometimes it doesn’t.
My point is that even rudimentary skepticism is a far better defense against hucksterism than any censorship could ever be. In fact censorship at it’s core is itself an attempt at thought control; to justify it’s use to prevent manipulation of society is sort of like saving a freezing man by setting him on fire.
Frightening, 100% true anecdote: One night I had a dream. This dream, however, was preceded by a commercial for the Bank of Montreal. brrr I considered writing them and telling them that if they were taking out advertising space in my subconscious, I would expect them to pay for it.
But what about society? Doesn’t society have needs and volition? If you cut it, doesn’t it bleed? Doesn’t society have a right to be left alone? Shouldn’t society be allowed to pursue its own happiness in its own way? Shouldn’t we all assist in taking care of the children it produces when it has sex? And shouldn’t we all be there to care for its heirs when it dies?
The rustle of her nightgown was barely audible as it slid to the floor. The tall blonde cupped her full, round breasts and seductively whispered “Do you want this body,” as she leaned over and…
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Granted television commercials swayed me as a child, and they still do, but they never made me want something.
xenophon41 wrote:
My point is that even rudimentary skepticism is a far better defense against hucksterism than any censorship could ever be.
I think you guys underestimate advertising by a long shot. I honestly believe that a lifetime of watching this stuff has embedded these desires so deeply in our nature that we don’t even realize they’re there. TV commercials in particular are very sharp and very knowledgable about how to push our buttons on a fundamental level. I feel like I can see through most of it, and you probably do too, but it seems a little unrealistic to think that none of it is getting through. If nothing else, it sure as hell gets tiring fighting it all the time. How often do you get to go even a few hours without someone trying to sell you some damn thing.
I’m, not suggesting we outlaw advertising, but I took junbeetle’s OP to be more of a ‘wouldn’t it be swell if…’, and to that I’d say, ‘yeah it would’.
You have a point. The human race is not a giant ant colony in which the welfare of each ant depends solely upon the existence and prosperity of the colony. But it is useful sometimes to view humans collectively as a society, and to address large groups of people rather than individuals. I don’t advocate this approach as tantamount to individual rights but sometimes the good of the many outweighs the good of the few.
Fireworks are illegal in my home town because a few people do not handle them safely and cause injury to themselves. As an individual, I know how to handle fireworks, but I still cannot enjoy my own firework show on the Fourth of July. I might be tempted to side with the Libertarian cause because I value my personal freedom and I am annoyed to have my fireworks taken away.
There’s one complication. Since humans live in a society, and since the actions of humans have direct consequences upon other humans, we cannot consider each human in a vacuum. If people misuse fireworks in my home town, they not only can injure themselves, but they can set fire to the outlying grasslands and drive hundreds of people out of their homes. As a lawmaker, I choose to ban fireworks in the town, because I feel that the benefit to the town as an entity is greater than the comparatively minor privilege for individuals to posses fireworks. In this case, the society — namely the town — has rights which take precedence over the rights of the individual townspeople.
I’m not saying that fireworks should be illegal — this is merely a case in point. You can argue that the rights of a society lose precedence over the rights of individuals as larger and larger groups of people are considered (from town to city to state to nation) — in which case I might agree with you. But if you consider society as merely a set of discrete individuals with no consequential interactions, then you are missing the complete picture.
How does this apply to advertising? Er … I’ll get back to you on that one. The OP was more cultural criticism than serious policy suggestion.
xenophon41 said,
I agree. Censorship = very bad thing. But should product advertising be protected under the same umbrella as free speech?
It costs money. And some of the speech has regulations on it (tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical products come to mind).
Then there are placement regulations (cigarettes on broadcast, limited number of billboards by local option).
Car dealers have to include a disclosure of financing terms.
As far as print ads are concerned I think most of us learn early to “Beware of the asterisk.” For TV ads this can extend to a distaste of 5-point typle flashed on the screen for a few seconds.
Carry on.
I think you’ve just pointed out what’s wrong with laws against things as opposed to laws against behavior. Suppose the same reasoning used in the fireworks ban were applied to all other things. There could exist nothing electrical, nothing sharp, and nothing combustible. You couldn’t have boiling water or toilet bowl cleaner in the house.
In fact, you couldn’t really have a house. Too many people are injured or die in them.
) I believe that other countries have taken steps to counter the adverse effects of advertising. In one country that I know of (Sweden?) commercials aren’t allowed during children’s programming because advertising which targets young children is considered immoral.