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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

#421

Post by ionised »

crummy wrote: post #367
rkagerer wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never clicked a Google link and bought something. I've never watched a Youtube ad and bought something. I don't think they're making much money off me. They still keep advertising at me.

Have you ever bought a soft drink or purchased food from a fast food restaurant? Why did you choose it?

I always order Tango at places like that because I like the taste. I can't remember the last time I saw a Tango advert, but Coke which I avoid like the plague because it tastes like ass, has ads absolutely everywhere.

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

#422

Post by 3xblah »

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.

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

#423

Post by harshreality »

air7 wrote: post #300
crispinb wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I view advertising as a form of pollution Quite. If (which is now for obvious reasons somewhat unlikely) our global civilisation manque struggles on for another century, it will look back on the overconsumption propaganda industry very much like we now see slavery. Ogilvy, Saatchi et al are the Goebbels' of our age.

> Ogilvy, Saatchi et al are the Goebbels' of our age. Sorry, but that is waaay over the top. It makes you sound a bit nutty. A "Truther" of sorts, that dangerously believes too profoundly in his own ideology.

Have you considered that maybe GP has a better intuition about the systems effects of advertising, that you haven't fully considered?

- Advertising is a major driver of material consumption, much of which is unnecessary.

- Material consumption drives economic growth. There's also intellectual property, and there's the service industry, but even those contribute indirectly to material consumption.

- Economic growth and socioeconomic growth are unquestioned foundations of virtually every "civilized" society, but they make no sense. Growth works great... until at some point it doesn't.

Obligatory Albert Bartlett video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4

Obligatory Eric Weinstein video segment, focusing more on what he calls "EGO"s... embedded [unacknowledged] growth obligations. (Ignore the other three people in the video... even Jordan Peterson is completely out of his league in this "discussion".)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PagNM_oxssE#t=27m47s

The only criticism I'd make against GP's claim is that the advertising industry is just one spoke in the global wheel of impossible growth and consumption. GP's claim is not nutty, it's too narrow and limited. Ogilvy and Saatchi are only footsoldiers.

The only way this game of musical chairs ends without tears is if we luck into some awesome technology that leads to post-scarcity economics. That doesn't seem very likely from my perspective, except if we create AGI and AGI figures it out, but then AGI is an existential risk while economic collapse is just at worst a 100-200 year setback.

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

#424

Post by gnoppa »

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?

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

#425

Post by DoreenMichele »

InternetUser wrote: post #406
DoreenMichele wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a copywriter in the sense of "person who writes adverts," but I am someone who writes copy for website content. One of the problems is that it isn't even good communication to say (for example) "This device has a 7 inch screen." That's mostly useless information for most people. It's much more genuinely helpful to tell people something like "You can easily read our large screen even in bright sunlight." Most…

Do you not naturally do the same thing in your own life? If you're hanging out with some friends and want to recommend a certain drink or food, do you say something like "Oh my god, you've gotta try this, it taste so good," or do you pick up the packaging and read off some of the ingredients list and nutritional facts? Would you first say some cookies should be tried because they're "delicious," or that they are wort…

For a long list of reasons that aren't especially pertinent to this discussion, no, I basically don't ever tell anyone in my personal life "Oh my God, you've gotta try this, it's so good."

I'm happy to talk to people in an informational way about a lot of things, but I basically think it is unconscionably rude to try to essentially dictate food choices or similar to anyone for any reason at any time or otherwise put them on the spot where they might need to turn me down and then have to wrestle with whether or not to divulge medical information or other personal info that I might not yet be privy to.

I do this in part because there is a long history of me just making small talk and, to my horror, people jumping on it like it was excellent advice and it going weird, weird places.

I've wrestled a lot with the question of "where does good communication end and manipulation begin?" precisely because I place a high value on self determination and respecting boundaries, yet have all too often had people react to my words as if I were trying to make them do X. It's often not only weird, but also some manner of train wreck.

I knew a woman going through a divorce who was feeling old and ugly etc. I casually joked that the cure for that was a younger lover. My real point was "Oh, don't let your ex make you feel that way. His opinions no longer count." But the next thing I knew, she had a younger boyfriend.

We weren't even friends. We were casual acquaintances and she treated me terribly every step of the way, which just added to the WTF?? factor.

I bring those same rubrics to my paid writing, so I try to be very informational and explain what x product is good for and who might want it and why. But I'm very clear that if I do that well, there are people who will find my words compelling and promptly jump on it.

I sincerely believe you simply cannot neatly and cleanly distinguish powerful and effective communication from intentional manipulation. If I make the case strongly and effectively enough that this is good for x, there will be people who will jump on that without further thought.

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

#426

Post by piva00 »

foldingmoney wrote: post #413
csomar wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and all of these industries you name exist and pay well because people value them and choose to spend their money on them. I think his point is, these industries are not valuable to people; they are just aggressive at extract wealth from other people. In net, they have a negative value (from his perspective) and thus society will be better without them.

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".

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

#427

Post by blueboo »

kaybe wrote: post #127
perfunctory wrote: post #33

What can I say "Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won…

I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.) If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.

Our politicians are an expression of our political will.

People don't care (enough to vote)

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

#428

Post by beecat »

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 to.

Quite frankly, advertising is psychic violence, and you can't escape it. Exploiting people's psychology to consolidate their resources for yourself is tantamount to theft. When men do it to women to push them to sell sex, we call it "pimping", and judge it as a completely reprehensible, unredeemable act. Of course your general well-being is diminished by a barrage of messaging encouraging you in every conceivable way, that the only road to satiety is to act against your own self-interest. How could that not totally fuck with you?

Spending your time coming up with more devious mechanisms, and ways to decrease the escapablity of said mechanisms is a fucking unseemly way to behave, as an individual. As a species, it's absolutely tragic that all those brilliant people doing it, can't break from the comfort of those fat paychecks and find something better to do with their time on Earth... Myself included.

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

#429

Post by chrisseaton »

ionised wrote: post #415
chrisseaton wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a hugely snobby attitude. The value of soda for example is that some people like the taste and sensation. It brings them a little bit of joy. Not everything has to be coldly utilitarian.

Or people enjoy soda because the of insane amount of sugar put in it by people intending to make the product as addictive as possible. Remove the sugar from soda and you have awful-tasting water. Sugary drinks are no better than cigarettes, and the people pushing them know exactly what they are doing and what they are exploiting.

You can make anything sound absurd by reducing it to its ingredients like that.

And anyway, value is determined by the buyer. You can't say as an individual that something has no value to society.

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

#430

Post by andrepd »

Chathamization wrote: post #334
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.

It seems like a larger and larger percentage of our economy is being taken up by parasitic sectors that have a net negative value for society. Advertising, soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive…

In a system where we (richly) reward people who buy and sell securities back and forth, or who manipulate people into wanting to buy mountains of crap (with lovely side effects such as the above post mentions), or produce clothing and food, transport them half the world, then set it on fire, when the system rewards these behaviours then of course this is exactly what will happen.
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