> I quit advertising after only a couple of years because it blackened my soul. If I was helping to harvest people's personal lives for private profit I can only imagine it would have been worse.
I can definitely feel this - I worked in mobile gaming for a little while. The camaraderie was amazing, I keep in touch with a number of coworkers from that job - the company was terrible (like gaming companies tend to be) but the fact that I was devoting part of my life to building a system I knew was deeply immoral and taking advantage of people's addiction is what pushed me away from it in the end.
I really try to avoid judging people over their career or life choices since nobody is as simple as a statistic, but advertising and mobile gaming is where I break this rule - I definitely don't judge marketers as categorically evil, but the vocation is poisonous. In the article the author calls out that...
> One answer is that I'm earning to give: I give half of what I earn to the most effective charities I can find, and the more I earn the more I can give.
As a response to people asking why they're in marketing and I think this is a really bad sign. If you need to justify your work by calling out the charity you're doing with the earnings then I think you, internally, have identified that what you're doing is causing harm to society.
I understand and sympathize with the fact that brands with poor visibility can struggle to break into established markets but these positives seem quite limited when stacked up against over-consumption, addiction exploitation, decreased general attentiveness, a weakening of what objective truths are and leaving a gigantic security hole in our society for disinformation to easily penetrate deep into folks' hearts and minds.
Advertising, at it's most basic, is trying to change the minds of consumers - you're attempting to take someone who is thinking wrong and make them think right - where right is the mindset that leads them to purchase your product. I think that advertising is really an emotional manipulation at its core.
There is probably a distinction between purely informational marketing that's done to increase general awareness of your brand and marketing that's targeting increasing the chances that an uninterested party will impulse buy your product (the later is what can lead to the over consumption of high sugar products and spur on obesity). I, honestly, couldn't draw a line between the two so if we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater so be it.
I've tried to write this up with a calm head and in an even manner, but my apologies in advance if it's too strong - it's a subject I personally have extremely strong feelings on.