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[priestwarrior]

So Independence Day I went to a minor-league baseball game. It was fun (our mascot is a Sasquatch), but I couldn’t help noticing that every time the teams switched out, some hapless fan was dragged out onto the field to compete in a poorly conceived minigame with the sole purpose of promoting some corporate sponsor. Now, I’m sure everyone who’s

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this is sarah from work.

[anonymous]

How approriate that we were just talking about David Foster Wallace's commercial satire the other day - Subsidized Time and The Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment and all of that.

You say that you think you screen out a lot of advertising, but we are really far more suceptible to it than we think. Seriously, why else would corporations spend so much money on it? It infiltrates our thoughts and especially our language; the classic examples of corporate language manipulation are that many of us no longer copy but "xerox," no longer reach for a tissue but a "kleenex." TV and radio advertisements for smoking, which included everything from claims that smoking certain brands can be beneficial to one's health to comparisons between smoking and being a better feminist, were banned in the 1970s because they were linked to rising numbers of smokers, despite the health risks being common knowledge. Joe the Camel had to be chucked because, in the 1990s, little kids recognized him more often than they recognized Mickey Mouse.

Also, check this out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyQjr1YL0zg
This trick may have been staged, as it often the case with these things, but it's still a little freaky.

Re: this is sarah from work.

[priestwarrior]

You know, I think this is part of a cultural view of people as programmable: we blame all our problems - obesity, smoking, alcoholism, etcetera - on external factors, such as advertising. We are in control of our behavior, and whether or not that clip (it was interesting) was staged, there's a long way from individually targeting two people and putting them under a half-hour time constraint to actually controlling the behavior of lots of people. More later. I'm going to bed.

Re: this is sarah from work.

[priestwarrior]

Another thing: I sincerely doubt corporations are good enough to push all the right buttons in a mass of consumers to make them buy the right thing. The human mind is an immensely complex object, and I don't believe in an Adrian Veidt watching 108 simultaneous TV channels and deducing all the right marketing trends and buzzwords - I don't think sociology is an exact enough science to do anything like that.

What advertising might do to be profitable is slightly nudge the thinking patterns of millions of people rather than brainwashing individuals...

or that could be complete bull. I don't have any deep understanding of economics, and I do have a deep mistrust of some of the basic concepts that underlie modern society, including the ability of the social sciences to make accurate predictions.

Re: this is sarah from work.

[anonymous]

Levi, if you won't trust any study based on economic or sociological concepts - a stance which sort of throws a wrench into any serious discussion of social phenomena - will you at least trust in the motivating power of the dollar?

There are many reasons why corporations succeed, not all of which have to do with the effectiveness of advertising. They provide us with the products we use daily in order to happily function in society. They sell these products under an established brand, so we are more likely to receive a decent product from them than from, say, a guy selling a similar product off of a blanket on the street. However, due to advertising exposure, we often purchase products that we have absolutely no need for. That "slight nudging" you are talking about is something that affects enough people to give rise to totally pointless industries, especially for kids' products.

It's a well documented fact that small children respond to brands and advertising with far more zeal than adults. This fact leads companies to pour a whole lot of money into studying child psychology and child-geared advertising, since they can get a huge return on their investment. Walk down any toy store aisle and you'll see tons of shit that no kid on earth needs, but it all gets sold, because kids are really suceptible to "created wants;" if someone convinces them that every stupid Pixar tie-in product is cool, they will nag their parents until they get what they have been convinced that they want.

Here is a link to lots of experts talking about this effect. Click on "Marketing to Kids." http://www.thecorporation.com/index.cfm?page_id=314

So maybe you don't want to listen to any of these new-fangled "economic studies" or whatnot (some of which are partially putting me through college, by the way), and maybe you think that the average person can steel himself against the onslaught of advertising we are exposed to all of the time, but you have to agree that little kids are pretty vulnerable to external stimuli. We've all seen kids freak out when their parents won't buy them the new Power Rangers action figure (or whatever it is the dang whippersnappers are into nowadays). They're not rational actors (my apologies for using jargon of the hated economists) and they often can't understand when something is a totally irrational purchase. Yet, through their parents, they wield a disproportionate amount of purchasing power. So, companies, seeing the dollar sign potential, manipulate them through big, bad advertising. It's scary, and not a little fucked up.

I could write more, but I have to leave the office and nudge shy participles into the coherant clauses where they belong. Id est, I have to do my Latin homework. See you tomorrow.

Re: this is sarah from work.

[priestwarrior]

Not going to let me get away with anything, eh? Well, good.

Now that transcript is scary. Alright, touché. Advertising is obviously a force to be reckoned with, if you can imprint brand loyalty into young children or whatever, and yeah, probably a lot of people buy things based on irrational associations derived from ads (x drink will make you happier, x shoes will make you more powerful) - but the surfeit-of-information barrier remains. You can't imprint children with cradle-to-grave brand loyalty if competing brands are attempting to do it simultaneously, or rather, only one of them will win, which means that the other marketing campaigns have been ineffective. It's a bit of a rat race for the corporations - they have to spend a lot of money, and they end up where they were before relative to other corporations.

And even so, it's ludicrous to think that an individual who slobbers all over the Cheerios board book at age 6 months, and is repeatedly exposed to Cheerios ads on television growing up, can never break free of this mental stranglehold and decide, "You know what? I don't even like Cheerios. I'm going to fix myself some bacon." Individuals remain individuals no matter how hard you try to program them into the dutiful consumers they should be.

Re: this is sarah from work.

[anonymous]

Sure thing. I think we agree here, since I don't really buy into the whole "cradle-to-grave branding" thing either. People aren't automatons, but when a person whose mind is not quite fully developed, whether it be a toddler or one of those jerks I always overhear talking about iPhones and Hummers in the U of A gym, comes under the influence of one of these multi-million dollar ad campaigns formulated by trained experts, they don't really stand much of a chance. Which is scary, because the companies are pushing these people over the border into automaton-land just to make a buck. Not much of a moral decision.