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Different is good. Seven months ago, I wrote this in a post where it served mostly as an analogy:
| quote: | | The evolution of marketing paradigms mirrors the degradation of political campaigns conspicuously. Once upon a time marketing was the art of the clear, concise elucidation of the factual characteristics of the product or service being advertised. Watching a commercial, you might be educated about the painstaking care with which each unit is crafted, or about the particular innovations which make one company better than its competitors. But today, you would struggle to find a single advertisement that contains this type of information - and if you did, you probably wouldn't notice or care about it. As time has progressed, however, intelligent and enterprising advertisers (who, incidentally, were actual leaders) have learned to employ clever psychological tricks to earn more money by selling more of their product - often at a lower cost of production as well. Rather than attempting to persuade the logical part of your mind that their product or service is superior by the bland enumeration of the relevant facts, they attack the creative and emotional parts of us by attempting to trap us inside a intoxicating psychological fantasy where wearing that new shirt will make us better, more attractive people. Who cares about craftsmanship when a shirt has the power to transform who you are as a person? No one does. They exploit our emotions - all of our dreams and desires, and our fears and insecurities too - to persuade us to give them our money. And it works. It works so well that everyone does it - and in fact everyone has to do it. Using an obsolete, rational, fact-based marketing paradigm would be a fast way to end up bankrupt. |
It seems to ring true more loudly with each passing day. One of the newer mechanisms advertisers have found to affect our emotional response to their products is so-called "product placement," a strategy whereby products are used by or otherwise associated with popular characters in movies, television, and other media with the hopes that we will subconsciously think better of the product as a result of this association. On a more basic level, it also serves as a simple reminder of the existence of a product - the more time their product occupies your thoughts, the better, as far as advertisers are concerned.
At some point in history I might have told you that the prosperity of our advertising industries was a good sign of the prosperity of our markets in general. However I've grown increasingly disenchanted with that notion. The false assumption was that the average person was capable of making sound decisions regarding their purchases - an egregious error to be sure, but not altogether an uncommon one.
Rather than being an indicator of market health, this rampant advertising is an opportunistic plague upon our economy. For this marketing paradigm is one of misdirection, deception, trickery, and demagoguery. It is designed not to deliver useful products and services to the consumer, but rather to manipulate the consumer into purchasing products or services he or she does not need and would not have particularly wanted were it not for this manipulation - sometimes even going in to debt purchasing unnecessary and mostly-useless "luxuries." This indicates to me an overabundance of such frivolous products and services - the fruit of resources which would have been better spent battling society's problems or building infrastructure for greater future productivity in both science and the arts.
I will say this: I do not find these advertisements entertaining, or funny, or enjoyable in any way. They are obnoxious and presumptuous - an insult and an affront. They indicate a general lack of respect for the observer's ability to make sound judgments about products and services - an insult I for one do not take in good humor.
Advertising has become an endless fountain of waste and venomous lies, a toxic fluid which fills every crevice and overflows beyond all reasonable boundaries. In this world you cannot escape the advertising poison, for it has already soaked into most everything. Wherever you find money you will find this scourge hard at work, sucking desperately at every passer-by to drain every possible cent from their pockets. Draining the soul out of everything it touches, this vile corruptor makes a mockery of art and would-be "entertainment," with its surreptitious agenda.
There is only one cure for this ill; it must be starved of the one thing it needs: money. View every advertisement with the same contempt that its designers have shown you. I doubt there are enough wise people to destroy this scourge: as long as the fools continue to pay it will grow ever stronger, more pervasive, and more contemptible.
Now, I suppose you can guess how I might have answered that question. 
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