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Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

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Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#431

Post by deepakkarki »

gnoppa wrote: post #424
deepakkarki wrote: post #346

Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 From the video description - "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's idea…

Is watching this documentary still useful after having read Bernays' Propaganda?

I haven't read Propaganda so can't answer your question, but I do think you should watch the first part and see if it adds anything new. The documentary is not much about his work as it is about him and the impact of his work - it's a level meta. So might be worth it.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#432

Post by slavaukraini »

deepakkarki wrote: post #346

Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 From the video description - "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's idea…

Wow it's crazy to think the world wasn't always like this... and I guess it's even crazier that you can't really imagine a world without adverts using things like celebrity endorsements. It's insane how much effect seemingly minor things can have on society.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#433

Post by amelius »

davnicwil wrote: post #252
amelius wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if someone needs a painter, they could just use an unbiased search engine, right? There is no need to bother anyone with ads.

You're right, but that's a very customer centric viewpoint - from the point of view of the advertiser this is not so great. This specific painter pays the ad platform to be the one that comes to you, when you're busy with all the other things on your todo list, so that you choose them and not one of the other 10 painters in your area. It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative. You actually want this service and…

> It still doesn't make them bad, or manipulative.

I don't see why not. Ads have negative externalities, for example: now everybody sees the ad (not only people in need of a painter), and also now the painter with the largest advertising budget will get more customers (not the best one), and finally the advertising costs will eventually be paid by the client (the client pays for being manipulated).

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#434

Post by titzer »

beecat wrote: post #428
enlyth wrote: post #15

To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's attention and use it to generate profit. We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.

I can't second this strongly enough. Why are we utilizing such vast amounts of our limited resources to persuade people to make certain decisions? In my humble opinion it's usually because the decisions the people who employ advertising tactics want the people they are advertising to, to make, are suboptimal, if not downright bad, and people wouldn't make those decisions, but as a by-product of having been advertised…

Absolutely agree with the above and upvoted.

We all have to stop focusing on the short term quarterly profits and growth and zoom out and see the big picture. Not only is software eating the world, but it's appropriating it for a low kind of social programming--turning us all into zombies. Software wants to mediate all of our experiences as humans, and advertising is right there with it, trying to interpose to do, as you wrote, "psychic violence" in little drips throughout our daily lives.

It's amazing that we let our minds be run by the shit in computers. (including all of this! haha!)

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#435

Post by zapita »

titzer wrote: post #420
kortilla wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core parasite is government, which siphons value from private citizens under the threat of violence.

I know people love to parrot this libertarian talking without really thinking it through. Generally young, logic-minded people that end up following some kind of Randianism and cannot fathom the possibility that people are, by and large, basically bastards to each other. The truth is the government is a social contract designed to actually protect people from violence. Yeah, it taxes people. But it also protects them…

I agree that libertarianism is ignorant at best.

But your example of the French Revolution detracts from your argument, because that occurred in the context of a strong monarchist government, not a libertarian dystopia.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#436

Post by grenoire »

baddox wrote: post #203
jandrese wrote: post #4

Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can buy that will increase your happiness. You're basically being negged by advertisers.

> So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy That claim doesn't follow. Some people actually are unhappy, or would actually be happier if they discovered and purchased certain products. I'm not claiming that advertising is or isn't a net positive, but this part of your argument doesn't hold up. It's kind of like saying "dating, or asking someone on a date, is fundamentally trying to convince someone…

If someone is perfectly happy, then they cannot be happier with someone else. At the hyperbole, your argument doesn't hold either.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#437

Post by titzer »

zapita wrote: post #435
titzer wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people love to parrot this libertarian talking without really thinking it through. Generally young, logic-minded people that end up following some kind of Randianism and cannot fathom the possibility that people are, by and large, basically bastards to each other. The truth is the government is a social contract designed to actually protect people from violence. Yeah, it taxes people. But it also protects them…

I agree that libertarianism is ignorant at best. But your example of the French Revolution detracts from your argument, because that occurred in the context of a strong monarchist government, not a libertarian dystopia.

Yes. The point was more that inequality will result in revolution, no matter how it arose.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#438

Post by mushbino »

3xblah wrote: post #422
deepakkarki wrote: post #346

Folks in this thread may find this interesting, a 4 part documentary on Edward Bernays and the history of advertising and PR as we know it today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 From the video description - "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's idea…

"PR" was invented by the military. I learned this from someone in PR who was trained in the service during WWII and then went on to work in the "public relations profession" as a civilian. I suspect the military trained Bernays. He may have invented the "profession", but he did not invent PR.

Bernays started Public Relations as an occupation + name in the private sector. In the military it was known as propaganda.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#439

Post by foldingmoney »

piva00 wrote: post #426
foldingmoney wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one's being forced to buy soda, eat highly processed food, have a credit card, or use a car dealership. Yet people voluntarily choose to spend their money on these things, so they obviously do find some value in them. When you characterise them as 'not valuable to people', you're making a prescriptive moral judgement (and not one I necessarily disagree with), as opposed to a descriptive observation of where free a…

You lost me on "free agents", under the kind of system of advertising and PR we are under there is a very narrow window of "free agency".

If the advertising industry is such a powerful force of mind control that we literally have no free will anymore, then why did they let _you_ figure it out?

You're giving them way too much credit. Do you notice how the world is full of failed advertising campaigns? How the world is full of failed companies and failed products that the evil geniuses in advertising weren't able to make people buy?

There's a world of difference between 'we can use some principles from psychology to try to exploit people's fears and make them more interested in our product' and 'our unlimited powers of persuasion make free will an illusion'. And despite the hype, most big-data, machine learning, 'downloading your thoughts from Facebook before you've even had them'-style targeted advertising amounts to showing you ads for the thing that you just bought.

Re: Advertising as a source of dissatisfaction: cross-national evidence

#440

Post by jasode »

jodrellblank wrote: post #361
jimktrains2 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The light side is of so little value that I think we should just throw it out with the bathwater and kill this modern experiment in advertising. I don't think that's true at all. Where else would you learn about new services or products? Here are some examples from a 2010 model railroader. https://photos.app.goo.gl/RvRzECgs7MaTo7tP8 Some, especially the Kato model Amtrak one, have some aspects of an aspirational ad…

Why would I want to learn about new services or products? Or more directly to the point, why would I want to let /you/ decide which services and products I learn about, when, where, and how often? When that is a) more in your interest than mine, and b) inevitably going to turn into a "cover every surface and channel into advertising as you try to shout loudest for my attention in competition with every other vendor o…

>Why would I want to learn about new services or products?

I think you missed the context of gp's comment. His example of ads was from a hobby enthusiast's magazine such as Model Railroader.[1]

Many readers buy hobby magazines in part for the ads. Yes, there are feature stories but the ads themselves are also informative of new products the readers want to learn about.

So to directly answer your question of "why would I want to learn about new services or products?" -- it's because that desire for ads was implicit in your decision to buy a hobby-oriented magazine. (The "I" and "you" is not you specifically but a rhetorical placeholder for the generalized magazine buyer.)

Another example of some people expressing a desire for ads is buying the Sunday edition of their local newspaper. (Many readers won't buy the Monday-to-Saturday editions but they'll go out of their way to buy the Sunday copy that's has the ad inserts.) They didn't buy it for the news articles written by journalists; they bought it for the stores' ads to see what's on sale and for the coupons.

An opposite example of buying a magazine because it does not have ads would be something like Consumer Reports.

[1] https://mrr.trains.com/magazine

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