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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

Comments

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.

[priestwarrior]

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.