I understand where you're coming from, but that's painting with a pretty broad brush. Advertising covers everything from the signage stating the name of the mom-and-pop shop on the corner (which is why cities often limit the size of logos/names on building) to billboards on the side of the freeway. It covers movie trailers I seek out ant watch to see what's coming soon to commercials interspaced within a video that interrupts the flow.
I hate some of those, but i actively like, or at least value the utility of some of the others. A specific type of advertising has grown outsized that last couple of decades, and it's causing real problems. But let's not paint with too broad a brush just because we're fed up. That's how stupid laws get passed.
> ...They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers...
> ...You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
This is fair. Both sides of the debate have made this ideological.
The pro advertising side make it sound like it is your capitalist duty to suffer ads.
No. Fuck that, I block annoyances in my life if I can. And I still buy crap don't worry.
Is a catalogue? Yes, I would say so, however it's a fundamentally less offensive, less coercive, format than billboards. I am not made to suffer the contents of a catalogue unless I opt into it. I would only open a catalogue if I've already decided that I want to see what it contains, probably because I want to purchase something that it may contain.
Shops are similar to this, I don't enter a shop unless I've decided to purchase something I believe they might have. One difference is the amount of signage outside the shop, which assaults me whether or not I've decided to enter the shop. (The cover of a catalogue arguably does the same, but is much smaller and that's an important difference.) Thankfully many municipalities have taken a stand against this and have begun regulating commercial signage, if only to preserve the local aesthetic / property values.
Consider the difference between Victoria and Vegas. Both have no shortage of commercial zoning. One is delightful, the other is an blight. A monument to just how bad things can be when we allow commercial interests to run rampant. Cynical, exploitative, and ugly.
So if i want to build a shop with a self contained (non structural or otherwise regulated) frontage of my own design, you think you should have a say over that?
And yet, the raison d'etre of movies and video games is not to be noticed. For advertising, it is. If the non-extreme forms of advertising are not being noticed, it means they are indeed dying out.
The purpose of advertising isn’t to be noticed, it’s to make people give you their money. It’s an open question whether being consciously noticed is a prerequisite for this or not; can ubiquitous but ignored Coca-Cola logos successfully change someone’s answer to “What would you like to drink?”
It is in a way, but that's because advertising has become underhanded and is inadvertently being done by the people at large. This is particularly prevalent in the media industry (TV and movies), where things like posters or TV commercials are not nearly as effective as the buzz a movie creates online.
When I checked my Facebook the other day, at least half of the posts made by my friends were in some way expressing how much they like a movie, TV show or game. I mean on the one side that's fine, it's sharing and talking about what they enjoy, but on the other it's a form of marketing / advertising, and I'd rather they talk about themselves or politics or something that matters more.
You're right. Advertising is just a symptom of the root problem, capitalism.
"Attention is currency in the marketplace of ideas" as they say. If everyone is supposed to vote with their dollar, you need to make them vote for you. The easiest way to do that is by fighting for your attention.
We're talking digital ads here, and the root cause of that is the cultural assumption that Internet content = free content. Now we know that someone is paying for the content one way or another. But we let the imbalance stick around too long, and programmatic advertising rushed in to fill the vaccuum.
And capitalism enables occasional charity, if you want. So I'd say it's a pretty good parallel for our nature. Certainly though it's not the "root of the problem" when it comes to self-serving behaviour.
Right, capitalism enables personal ownership which creates an opportunity for charity. Which parallels how humans and other animals behave in general. They seek out personal possessions but also sometimes understand the value of sharing them.
And means of production are just one type of possession. I am arguing that humans inherently seek personal possessions, of which one type is means of production.
Yes, I've considered that and I think it is much more likely that capitalism was shaped based on us, its creators, rather than us being shaped by capitalism.
Have you tried not seeking out movie trailers and seeing how your life changes as a result? Between my television avoidance, adblocking, and theater avoidance, I've not seen a movie trailer in many years. Instead of deliberately blasting your brain with fast paced A/V propaganda for a minute or two, try learning about movies through word of mouth with people who share your general interests.
Yes, but then I miss stuff I would have wanted to watch, or more accurately miss it longer than I would have wanted to. If a show or movie is genuinely engaging or thought provoking then I want to know, because material like that has value to me.
There are ways of becoming aware of what's available other than watching trailers. For instance, reviewing lists of recent releases then reading the wikipedia pages for them. The A/V format of trailers is fundamentally more coercive than text.
Television commercials are fundamentally more coercive than radio commercials, so should we all transition back to radio just to avoid those small additional coercive factors? No, of course not, there are benefits to television that are more important than those factors.
You should in fact practice television avoidance. It's an awful format in just about every sense.
You should not begin listening to more radio to compensate. Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate. Something movie trailers, television, and radio all have in common is the coercive use of music to manipulate how you feel, particularly when trying to persuade you to buy something or vote for somebody.
Try this simple exercise: instead of watching CNN on television, go to CNN.com and read the stories they have there in text. I assure you, anything important they have to say on television will be written down. And in text form, it will have less flashy graphics to daze you, the emotion in the television personality's voice will be neutralized, there will be far less repetition and typically more details organized in a more coherent manner. And perhaps best of all, the advertisements will be much easier to filter out.
Ok, maybe television wasn't the best example of my point. Let me give a different example. Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers? You mentioned adblockers but obviously that's not feasible for television, so for the purposes of the hypothetical, assume that adblocking on the web isn't feasible either. Would you stop using the web if that was the case?
> "Advertisements on the web are fundamentally more coercive than advertisements in the newspaper, so should we regress back to newspapers"
Emphatic yes, should adblocking on the web become infeasible. As I said, "Reading more newspapers and books would be more appropriate."
As it stands currently, it's possible to see fewer advertisements on the web of any sort than advertisements in newspapers. Web adblockers are currently very effective. Should that change, then I will change my reading habits and so should you.
(Of course websites that do not contain advertisements would still be perfectly fine.)
I don't get it. Basically you are saying that advertising has a greater negative utility than the positive utility of any technological advancement which could be used for advertising. How could this possibly be true? Would you prefer a world where reading and writing were never invented if that meant advertising could never be invented?
I don't quite agree, but they're very nearly bad if not worse because audio specifically is exceptionally power and very easy to manipulate people with. Arguably people in the radio industry might be more skilled at using audio for manipulation since they're forced to rely on it, but I think that's discounting the hypnotic effect of television, which controls your gaze as well.
Either way, avoiding television only to listen to the radio more is absurd. Like an alcoholic who's trying to quite booze so he starts chain smoking to cope.
I'm not against advertising, but I am against branding. The term was borrowed from the cattle industry, where a hot piece of metal scars the cattle with a logo of the owner. Branding in advertising is meant to scar your brain. I consider it a form of assault.
You mean those laws that allows companies to get a reputation with their clients without a scammer being able to legally exploit it and confuse everybody?
Branding is ok.
What I think is not OK but totally normal, is branding combined with advertisement. The name of the brand combined with all the perfect, beautiful and fun things of the world, so your name associates the brand with all the nice things. That is lying to me and I hate that it is the norm.
Oh, ok. You dislike brand advertising, that's reasonable.
I don't know if it's viable to separate good brand advertise (our soda tastes good, our bags last forever) from the bad kind (use our product and get all the pretty woman). Some regulation over emotional tone (and, of course, false info) may be much more successful than focusing on brands vs. unitary products.
I would not regulate it at all. I hope for more people to understand what is happening with their brains. Once you do understand it does not affect (as much). But with kids these days entrenched in their smartphone virtual reality consuming custom tailored ads .. the trend is unfortunately downwards.
I'm pretty sure if you actually look at cattle branding and advertising branding, the thing being branded is the product. Branding is as simple as the BIC logo on cheap pens, and hoping you'll remember the name when you need one or talk about one. I'm not sure how you're torturing the metaphor to get to the brand being applied to your brain.
The term was borrowed from the cattle industry, where it was used to know who owns a thing, thus you know the source and have a reasonable expectation of quality.
I understand where you're coming from, but that's painting with a pretty broad brush. Advertising covers everything from the signage stating the name of the mom-and-pop shop on the corner (which is why cities often limit the size of logos/names on building) to billboards on the side of the freeway. It covers movie trailers I seek out ant watch to see what's coming soon to commercials interspaced within a video that interrupts the flow.
I hate some of those, but i actively like, or at least value the utility of some of the others. A specific type of advertising has grown outsized that last couple of decades, and it's causing real problems. But let's not paint with too broad a brush just because we're fed up. That's how stupid laws get passed.