Yves here. Richard Murphy gives such a strong form version of his thesis, that advertising is intended to make consumers feel inadequate, that I suspect many will object. However, before the era of Eddie Bernays (Freud’s nephew), ads focused on product attributes and advantages, like “This wringer washer will clean 10 pounds of laundry in the time it took you to one by hand, and better too!”
One proof of Murphy’s observation is women are unhappier after reading fashion magazines. Another is that actors who do commercials absolutely must be smiling (as in even if the commercial lets them show more range, the auditions and/or screen tests will place great weight on their ability to project happy and bouncy).
I have trouble accepting Murphy’s claim that advertising is about leading the viewer to compare himself with other people and come up short. What about (actually not effective) products like “Title Lock” that sell themselves as a solution to a real problem, title theft? Bug and pest killers? Kitchen and clothes cleaners? Or all those old people ads that hype seemingly cheap because they deliver less Medicare Advantage plans, or the raft of drug ads? Am I going to feel diminished because I am not a candidate for Ozempic or an anti-smoking or an anti-neuropathy medication? Seriously? (This is separate and apart from the big problem that these ads are believed to be effective, witness that drug companies spend more on advertising than R&D, and thus presumably create demand for treatments/products that may not be warranted, or may be pricier than other options. But I don’t see “making consumers unhappy” as the mechanism).
The question is how to regard ads that promise a happy future state, like the prototypical car ad, showing the vehicle driving across a dramatic, vacation vista.
Happiness is at best transitory. Personally, I think the pursuit of happiness is a misguided aim, since it has a tendency to make one aware of not-happy states. The exception might be if you define happiness as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi does, as a state of “flow” or engagement, as opposed to the sort of giddiness that Americans seem to regard as happiness.
What is more of an edge case, or perhaps edge category, are advertisements that cater to a desire for self betterment, such as exercise, diet, “wellness,” memory improvement, and even now AI language tutors. Is being reminded of an interest in improving your foreign language skills designed to make you unhappy? They work only if you already had that intention. Admittedly, diet and exercise ads can prey on unrealistic body ideals, but most of the ads feature trim, often middle aged people, with bodies way below model/athletic standards. With doctors hectoring most patients to eat better and exercise more, is the background noise of these promotions necessarily a bad thing?
Nevertheless, there are significant swathes of products, particularly in the beauty/lifestyle arena, that do bear out Murphy’s claims.
By Richard Murphy, Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of the Corporate Accountability Network. Originally published at Funding the Future
Advertising makes you unhappy with what you have, and even who you are. That’s how it works. So, do we need to better regulate it?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Advertising makes you unhappy.
Let’s be clear what I mean. The advertising industry is the only one in the world that sets out to deliberately make you unhappy to achieve its goals.
How does it do that? Well, very simply and very straightforwardly, what the advertising industry tries to do is persuade you that you are inadequate.
What it says is that whatever you have right now that is being used by you to fulfill your needs, or maybe your wants, is not good enough. You need something else, which is whatever it is, of course, that the advertising industry is trying to promote. And so, they try to make you feel as though you’re unattractive, you’re a failure, you’re unsexy, whatever it might be.
It is giving you a message that without this product that they’re trying to sell to you, your life is incomplete and the comparison between you and someone else is one where that other person is going to come off better and, therefore, you’re worse.
And the consequence is very simple and very straightforward. You are induced to buy something which you would otherwise not wish to spend money on, so that you might restore your own sense of adequacy through consuming.
And we know that this happens. We know that people go out to literally binge shop to give themselves a dopamine hit to try to make themselves feel better, as if something is inadequate or wrong with their lives. But the hit is incredibly short-term. And for some people, this is incredibly dangerous.
Let’s be clear. There are people in this world who can hardly manage to meet their own needs.
There are some people in the world who have so much wealth that they can consume to excess.
Advertising is deeply indiscriminate. A lot of it is aimed at all those audiences, because it is impossible for the advertiser to know precisely who is going to see what they produce.
For the person who has almost no spare ability to consume, those adverts are particularly pernicious, because it reminds them of just how unfair the world is to them, either because they are paid well below what they’re worth in the job that they’re doing, or because they are on a benefit which does not cover their costs of living, or whatever else it might be.
But for them, that advert reinforces their sense of being on the outside of society.
For the person with excess wealth, what is being induced is the idea that they can have it all, that they are so superior, that theirs is the world to command. There was, a while ago, a cosmetics advert – I cannot remember who by because I’m not that good at remembering adverts – but it said “because you’re worth it” at the end of the advert, and that was the message it was trying to impart. You were superior because you used this product.
And the net consequence is that, of course, there is an increase in the sense of inequality in our society. And that is incredibly dangerous, because division is something that is exploited to create harm.
And there’s another industry that is exploiting this situation, and that is the credit industry. The finance industry offers people the credit to buy things that they cannot afford. That is one reason why advertising is promoted in its own right. It’s not just the product that is being sold by the advertiser. It’s also the credit facility to buy the product that is being promoted. And in most cases, of course, the person who is selling the goods will get a kickback or a benefit from the credit facility that they can also sell. In fact, most car companies make more money out of the credit facility that they sell to buy a car than they ever do from making the car itself.
So what we’re also seeing is a dangerous rise in indebtedness as a consequence of this advertising.
And, we’re over-consuming our world. The threat to our long-term well-being from advertising is quite extraordinary. Those companies that are literally making products we don’t need because they simply want to make more profit, to reallocate the world’s resources in their favour, and to sell more finance, are doing so at cost to the planet and the people to come on this world. That is, perhaps, the most pernicious feature of advertising.
Now I get all the paradoxes of saying this, by the way. I understand that you’re watching this on a channel that is paid for by advertising. I know that there is a conflict in this. I know I am living in an imperfect world. I know that this is a difficult thing for me to reconcile myself to. But despite that, I’m going to use this platform to say that we should take action to address the harms that advertising creates.
One of the great benefits of taxation is that it is a tool for the delivery of social policy. And if advertising is a tool that is designed to make us feel inadequate, make us feel harmed, make us feel as though we are suffering, and to make us feel that we must over consume beyond our means and therefore force us into debt, we should be taking action to prevent advertising achieving those goals.
And there are things that can be done to achieve that. For example, companies that are advertising products that are considered to be harmful – and that is the vast majority of advertising, excluding only those things that are effectively small ads for jobs and so on – they could be denied tax relief on their advertising expenditure. So the amount of the money they spend to artificially induce people to buy products that they don’t really need could become a bigger cost in their accounts by them not getting tax relief on that spend, therefore inflating the cost by, in the UK at present, maybe a quarter.
And we could do that again by denying them the opportunity to reclaim the VAT that they are charged by those companies that carry the adverts so that the cost goes up once more.
Now that is entirely possible. That would effectively increase the cost of advertising by almost 50 per cent in total.
Now you could say that the consequence of that is that media would suffer as a result, and I agree it would, but the money that is lost by those companies having to pay more for their advertising would of course represent an increase in tax revenue for the government because they would not be giving the tax reliefs in question. And that money could be used to subsidise local media and the types of media that provide information for people rather than being the platform for excess consumption. So, we don’t need to lose out in the way of not having newspapers, not having local radio, not having other such things which are currently dependent upon advertising. We could have them in another way.
And, we could also ban certain adverts. For example, ultra-processed foods clearly cause harm. They should be banned.
Or, gambling should be banned because it is addictive.
Likewise, for alcohol.
And there’s a massive question about whether advertising targeted at children should ever be allowed.
So it’s not just taxation, it’s regulation as well.
My point is that advertising is so pernicious that the government should act.
And one final thought. When you are persuaded by an advert to buy something, just make a note of what it is that you want to buy. I often do this myself. I’m talking here about something that I do. I will watch a video or I’ll see an advert on television and think, that looks good. But what I do is tell myself to wait for a few days and see if I still feel the same way. It’s a deliberate choice on my part to check. Am I being persuaded by the advert, or do I really want this thing?
If I decide after a few days, I do really want this thing. I usually do a bit more research at that point, just to check myself out. But what I try to eliminate is the influence of the advert in itself, because then I’m making a conscious choice, not one that the advertiser is trying to make do without any conscious effort on my part.
You can take action to take back control of what you consume from those who would like to demand that you consume what they want you to buy. And that is deeply liberating.
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All ads mislead…so, all ads confuse you a bit…happy or unhappy? ok, for a few…everyone is different and it can depend upon how one is feeling at that particular moment of viewing the ad. In the end we are all much more content, and calm, by not watching any ads….avoid them and keep your mental balance…
To touch upon Yves’s comment that happiness is transitory and which links to yours, the best comment I ever heard came from the (then) “God” of Health Economics in 1996 who gave one lecture a year to us people on the MSc course in York, UK.
He said “forget happiness, utility etc. People should aim for FLOURISHING”. He really wanted the whole paradigm to be based on that as a principle. He didn’t succeed, which is a shame. I got to review two of his books for a top clinical journal and he personally contacted me (although he couldn’t possibly have known who TF I was at that stage of my career) to thank me for my insigntful reviews. *
I was sad when he died of (IIRC) heart failure. Incidentally he was the last “God of Health Economics” who got to be acknowledged as such despite not having a higher degree. Yes he was a professor, but no Master’s or PhD. He just thought about stuff and managed to avoid all the senior academic shenanigans.
*Later if you fast forward a few years he definitely DID learn who I was. He was senior editor of the top journal “Journal of Health Economics”. He had to referee a fight between me and one referee on one side and a rather senior established referee on the other. He went with my side and thus my career got its kickstart. To this day I think he “didn’t get the maths but he really liked the concepts we wanted to re-orient well-being to”. Very interesting man. /old man blather
Yves: I totally agree that Richard is giving a strong form of the thesis that is not necessarily true. Apologies for the tangent into history but it was the early 1980s that statistical design theory (in the recently deregulated US airlines) that suddenly allowed companies to effectively do price discrimination (as taught in Econ 101). The point was not to “make you feel bad per se” by not buying it, the point was to SEGMENT the market so well that profits could be hiked up massively (as indeed price discrimination predicts via hoovering up loads of the consumer surplus).
By the 1990s it was realised that the “conjoint” methods of obtaining outcomes were rubbish and thus discrete choice modelling (which much more closely matched the kind of “buy this or that” outcomes IRL) emerged and then things went into overdrive. You had an outcome that matched real market ones, a theory of how people could be consistent/inconsistent plus experimental design procedures that enabled you to investigate a huge number of “what ifs?” without having the expense of actually doing the what if in real life.
It was likely inevitable that we reached a point where companies extracted virtually all of the consumer surplus. But THAT was their original aim, not FOMO etc as we now call it. The FOMO effect came much later and is an added benefit in the tech age. We increasingly compare ourselves to narrow market segments (that those tech companies discovered and exploited) and indeed feel FOMO but let’s not claim that that unhappiness factor came first. It was at best an “added benefit” that came along the way when companies learnt how to segment markets incredibly accurately. After all, if we still had a single price under a regulated regime, unhappiness would be much more diffuse and average out.
PS the “because I’m worth it” thing is a great example of TOO effective marketing. For those of us who worked with academic marketing adjacent people for years you learn how funny it was when certain “branding slogans” became so powerful people forgot what brand they were attached to!
there is also strong survivoship bias in advertising….
some people are just unreachable via adverts because they are aware of the tropes, others (like my mother) are receptive to almost anything, lol.
You may ask yourself, we buys into this aspirational malarkey…..attend an American Super Bowl party and see some people fawn over f……amily blogging 30 second adverts like it is Shakespeare, there you have the target audience
Thank you. Believe me “accessibility” was a CRUCIAL issue in some studies I did, not least the pro bono study I did via my company for the 2017 UK General Election. I did well – I put my money where my mouth was and bet May was gonna lose her overall majority. Now, I’m NOT going to claim big things here…..I wasn’t doing that study as a General Election one. It was one to understand BREXIT and by chance we got a surprise General Election in the middle. There was enough overlap in issues for me to risk a punt…..which paid off.
Unfortunately I let my heart lead my head on the 2nd punt (predicting a larger Labour vote) which meant my “win” was almost perfectly cancelled by my second vote loss. Lesson learnt.
But I’ve always been VERY very aware of the issue of accessibility of people for our surveys so I’m with you. Be so careful with your target market, whatever the context.
To your point about the too effective marketing, there is currently an ad running that I find pretty funny about wanting Batman but getting (Jason) Bateman instead. I’ve seen it a few times now and it made me laugh, but I couldn’t tell you what’s it’s for…
I typically recognise the female-oriented marketing lines so know what make-up line it is but most men do not. But I still laugh at several sitcoms around the turn of the century who had male protagonists try to cash in on that particular “shop for nice stuff for women” we all know about and do stuff like “buy a nice bra”.
The joke was invariably “what is your partner’s bra size?” And jokes using different size fruit resulted. FFS. If I were straight I’d make damn sure I knew my female partner’s size so this whole palava didn’t arise.
Incidentally, and I’ve NEVER had a good answer to this……do men proposing to a female AUTOMATICALLY know their ring size? Sounds like a superpower to me.
I don’t have a good answer for you. Maybe I surreptitiously took an older ring to get the correct size when getting the engagement ring for my better half, but I don’t remember doing so. What I do remember is a lobster hustling friend of mine who drove around in a white van hawking seafood telling me to check with him first before I bought any ring, which I did, not really knowing what he was talking about. The next day he comes into work and empties out an old purple Crown Royal bag into his hand, filling his palm with diamonds! I have no idea where those came from or why he had them, but I picked one, and ordered up some other shiny stones to go with it that I thought would look nice, which he then took to a jeweler friend and had set into a ring. He could have been selling me a bunch of paste for all I knew, but my better half was thrilled with the ring, and the other stones I chose turned out to be her birthstone, which I hadn’t realized, and I still haven’t mentioned to this day that I picked them randomly. Could be I just got lucky with the size like I did with the birthstone ;) A few years later my better half had the ring appraised and it was actually worth substantially more than what my buddy had charged me. Sometimes having a hustler friend works out well. Anyway, I’d say it’s more dumb luck than a superpower.
Best story on the internet today. I went “awww” to myself and really wished I had my Mr Right to do something like that.
Still doesn’t answer how OTHER blokes get it right. Hehe.
Does anyone know if ring “correction” is a (big) thing? Because like being a funeral director it sure sounds like a guaranteed income.
https://www.jewelryshoppingguide.com/how-to-resize-a-ring-guide/
Rings made of silver, gold or platinum, can always be resized without any issues.
Thanks, though the warning at the end is the real money-shot.
As a child during the sexual revolution strictly on the outside looking in, the advertising of the 70’s in particular was so sexually oriented with no pretense of it being anything other.
This is not strictly speaking the same but a similar phenomenon I subsequently learnt was real. In the Early 1980s we watched He-Man and Thundercats. Even my pre-pubescent self sensed “hmmmm”. Turns out that yes, a lot of animators to kick back against Reagan did indeed insert homoeroticism. There are YouTube channels that list these and there is no way to deny them!
It “didn’t make me gay” but in retrospect I find them hilarious. Selling BDSM stuff to 8 year old kids. WTF?! LOL
Let’s just be on the same page here – both of those cartoons were jam packed full of homoeroticism, and some of it wasn’t even subtle. Yet The Critical Drinker and others want a “proper” remake. Errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr, did you not watch what I watched or are you trying to quietly tell us your sexuality? I just LOL because the lists of BLATANTLY gay stuff on YouTube is really up to 6 sigma levels. Doesn’t MATTER what I think……the facts speak for themselves.
In fashion advertising the models smile or scowl depending on the brand. There’s a very funny scene in the comedy film Triangle of Sadness with a crowd of shirtless models being coached at a photo shoot. He shouts Balenciaga and they all adopt a luxury brand grumpy face then he shouts H&M and they all switch to looking like teens being gifted a pony. They switch back and forth very fast. Memorable cinema and hilarious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJeYXR2hFyM
Whether or not advertising makes us feel like losers or not, the fact is we are overwhelmingly influenced by it personally and culturally. I think of propaganda as simply advertising writ large. People will say “Oh I don’t pay attention to advertising” but that’s like a fish saying it doesn’t pay attention to water. We’re swimming in the stuff and don’t know it because our culture is utterly dependent on it like the bible is to bible-thumpers… in a sense, our projected social personas are a form of advertising, necessary to swim successfully with our fellow fishes.
Agreed. In the “olden days” most people could blatantly see their willingness to pay (demand) was nowhere near a supply that suited them so I doubt they were so bothered. It gets iffy when, via a process of “supplying something closer to your WTP – (and the classic example I’d argue is Ryanair) you no longer pay attention to the wider market (or perhaps in this analogy, ocean).
When there is a “version” of the product that matches VERY closely to the things you “like” then you should be paying attention……yet that is exactly when people start to pay least attention because it is like “swimming in water as a fish”. As already said by Yves, do I NEED to get this? Have I spent 48 hours to think about it?
Some of those adds can really be evil in what they are trying to trigger with people I find-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lo4XC8hzr4 (30 secs)
But sometimes the branding that Terry mentioned can backfire spectacularly. Remember two years ago when Bud Light decided in their wisdom to make transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney the representative of that beer’s drinkers? A campaign showing a dozen or so different drinkers including Mulvaney might have worked but instead Mulvaney was it. The rest was history. People can feel very attached to a brand and do not take kindly by being betrayed by it.
A year or 2 ago didn’t GIllette get a major backlash for its very “inclusive but selective ad”? I now laugh when I watch YT on the tablet (so can’t block ads) and see their ads are back to “The best a man can get” as if that clusterfamilyblog never happened.
Yet Someone like me could and would have told them, “excuse me, you are going for a demonstrably narrower segment, which will definitely antagonise a non-significant part of your core audience, just to to virtue signal?”
Total nonsense. Gillette are there to help with shaving. Full stop. You might like to know what people like me have to say about “what packaging and pricing” in certain markets (like yeah, a bunch of my fellow gays will stupidly overpay to help with price discrimination but you gotta find and target them first and in current city setups that’s not easy)” but your main message is simple and needs no nuance. Shaving. You got it right years ago FFS. Except for blades. The 5 blade thing was a “joke that would never happen”. Until it did. I’ve even watched vids. 3 blades is MAX you need, if you have odd skin/hair like mine. But to be honest, for most guys 2 is tops. Best solution? Learn how to use a safety razor. Vimes’s rule of boots.
behind every other advert executive is an auteur who implicitly sees themselves as 50% Orson Welles and 50% LeCourbusier (as in they see themselves bending the world to fit their vision)
Yep. Whilst for me it is:
(1) Lemme do a study to understand preferences among a large number of people and thereby show the market segments;
(2) Lemme show you how to appeal to each of those;
(3) Pay me cos I know you’re paying my a tiny % of your additional profits
;)
Purely anecdotal of course, but I will always remember my daughter telling me how much happier she was after leaving the UK to go to the DRC (you read it right). She attributed it to the lack of advertising in Congo.
Happily she is still alive and has left DRC for South America. I believe there is relatively little advertising where she is, but I ought to ask her one day.
Advertising, propaganda, public relations, three versions of the same thing. crap built on lies
Hmm. Whilst I agree with your assertion that their “common interpretation” are synonyms, part of me is sad. Part of my long academic career drew upon “academic marketers”. These were people who, often having connections to mathematical psychologists (many of whom were “people looking what to do with their skills when “The Bomb” worked and they got ignominiously chucked out).
These people knew statistical design theory, an often VERY complex area of mathematics. Others drew on mathematical psychology (who actually did properly designed experiments to show how and when people did or didn’t change their minds). Finally, my then mentor did loads to change the scene to quit using stupid rating scales and make the dependent variable something that matched real economics – “buy/do not buy”.
Nothing ANYTHING of these three branches was based on were lies. Unfortunately, there have been no end of grifters who have used whatever bit(s) of these they liked to tell lies and sell us stuff. *sigh*. My public lecture on happiness scale nonsense provides all the academic references you could possibly want….and that was back in 2010ish……before we had excuses like COVID etc! MY book was 2015. Same stuff, more detail. Depressing. I “get” when Yves gets exasperated about unsubstantiated rubbish that she discredited in her book years ago. Unfortunately bad money drives out good.
I would argue it is the capitalist consumer society and associated inequality that is the problem, not advertising per se. Is a plumber, electrician or similar tradesperson advertising their services trying to make you unhappy that you have a leaking toilet, faulty wiring etc? How would I know where to find such a person quickly and easily without advertising?
How about adverts for a new product that means you can wash your clothes at a lower temperature or get a more energy-efficient system? If you have built the proverbial better mousetrap, how are you going to tell the world?
And he is totally wrong about advertising being indiscriminate. All media outlets will tell you about target markets. Ad breaks in soccer matches in Britain are all for gambling sites, soap opera ad breaks aim at a totally different audience. As for print ads, all publications will present a readership profile breakdown. You would not run the same ad in the Sun, Daily Mail and The Guardian, for instance.
He may have a point when it comes to brand advertising that is aspirational but again that is down to capitalism. When you go food shopping it is ridiculous to see loads of different brands of pertty much identical products when it comes to coffee, oil, tinned tomatoes etc., etc. That is capitalism to excess.
However brands were originally intended to provide quality assurance and consistency in a time when most products were sold loose and at risk of vendors adulterating such products. Prepackaged products eliminated this risk and brought with it so-called brand building. Nowadays there are far more health and safety regulations providing better consumer protection so the connection has become divorced.
Murphy is shooting the messenger quite simply.
yes. On an infinite timeline, in a world without advertising (everything else being equal), every market would be dominated by a few names.
Advertising allows the new person to at least have a tiny chance of breaking through
like all tools, adverts can be used for constructive or destructive ends
I grew up in NYC suburbia as the son of a “MadMan”. Pop dutifully commuted into work and cranked out blurbs mostly for print ads – a ‘copy writer’. Mostly dull stuff for industry publications with an occasional foray into consumer ads and maybe even radio/ tv spots. Maybe, some ‘Big Apple OG’s’ might remember the jingle from the 60’s, “The road to riches starts at the Dime” (Savings Bank of Brooklyn). No, the jingle wasn’t his (they hired a pro) but he had a big hand in the writing of the voiceover scripts. Hell, the bank’s name was probably hoisted from the (still going?) nonprofit The March of Dimes which raises money to help fight/ eradicate birth defects. I remember reading Marshall McCluhan’s (sp?) book The Medium is the Massage in the early 70’s and came away thinking, “yeah? Tell me something I don’t know “. Of course I had grown up reading Advertising Age, which came in the mail every week and watching tv commercials (‘adverts’ for you Brits :^) with a critical eye and ear for quality and impact. Popular ad campaigns moved products but just as importantly brought prestige and more billings and new business for the hotshot agency that created the campaign. I highly recommend, and will likely ‘binge watch’ for a second time, the entirety of the Netflix-produced series “Mad Men”. The series opens with Nixon’s loss to JFK in 1960 (I was five) and Tricky Dick had hired protagonist Don Draper’s ad agency for his campaign. The show’s producers pay meticulous attention to details like fashion and social trends ( and esp. for me, the popular songs of that given year.) The drinking and debauchery was a bit over the top perhaps, but then again, most of the characters and the plot lines focused on the sales and marketing side, as opposed to the creative side minions who had to please bosses and clients. The tobacco and alcohol consumption back then WAS pretty ferocious tho, there were ashtrays everywhere, no seat belts or DUI laws with any teeth, and a dollar would get you more than 2 gallons of gasoline. In sum, unlike our esteemed hostess, I largely agree with Richard Murphy’s contentions in this post – we are SO brainwashed by now that “Reality,” without a majority consensus, is ‘sailing off into the sunset’ without us. Interesting times ahead, indeed! (Yes, I’m still long pitchforks. ;^/ )
Out of curiosity, have you ever read “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor” by Jerry Della Femina? It’s a pretty funny look at this industry from back then. He said that they employed some pretty talented people that could convince you to fly with Nazi Airways.
Thank you Rev, I confess I haven’t. Della Famina was certainly large on the radar back in the day. This calls to mind a quite notorious art exhibition in NYC titled “SENSATION” circa ‘99 – 2000 bankrolled by British ad mogul ***** (sorry, senior moment or brain fog ;^)
Apologies – half of my comment got eaten by Wi-Fi gremlins at my end. Grrrrr……
At least in the interim I remembered that ad mogul’s name – Saatchi! He was a serious art collector who no doubt gave a major value boost to the artists and their art pieces in the show that he already owned. Chris Ofili – whose portrait of the Virgin Mary perched atop four balls of elephant dung made Mayor R. Giuliani blow a gasket and try (unsuccessfully) to censor and shut down the whole show. Also in the limelight was rising star Damien Hirst, notorious for slicing complete animals (a cow, a shark for starters) and encapsulating the pieces in a thick, crystal clear resin to be then hung from the ceiling with enough space between the slices to appreciate the internals. You get the idea.
“I highly recommend, and will likely ‘binge watch’ for a second time, the entirety of the Netflix-produced series “Mad Men”.
I recommend it as well, however, it was first ran on the AMC cable network. Netflix re-aired it later after it’s long run.
I actually watched the entire series, all seasons, twice, mostly because the first time I started watching, it was already around season 3 or 4.
Years after it ended, I came across this on the “internets”:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52845104-mad-men-and-the-specter-of-american-fascism/
Maybe it can be considered a bit too much overwrought academia for some, but it would make a good drinking game for Mad Men (a drinking show for fans in its day) to take a swig with every fascists or authoritarian reference in the show.
Thanks for this link! I’ll look forward to reading that book – sounds pretty timely to me. And thanks for the correction as to its origin
What else is the point of advertising, if not to create desire where none existed before?
To inform people of your offerings. I find it very helpful to get e-mails about condos for sale when I am in the market, for instance. My interest was pre-existing. Same for hotels in a place I am planning to visit.
Yep. Upon re-reading I can come across as some proto-socialist weirdo but I honestly would want proper advertising to continue. If for no other reason than to have some sort of authority (partly state owned) whose remit was to to run trials on new products.
Ones that didn’t just be proven to “mess up your short term health but which seem to do well long-term” would be ones I would definitely want advertised. They could even have a degree of targeting (though don’t hold me to that, I’m still in 2 minds)……but the point is word-of-mouth only gets you so far. Advertising must remain. The question is “in what form and for what purpose?”
Google reviews, until inevitably crapified, are useful as ‘word of mouth’ at scale. If that’s advertising I’m all for it. Not sure about the value of the rest of it.
Perhaps read the stuff about review bombing…….I’ve looked at distributions and they Make No Sense.
Reviews are “whether you would buy this product x again against product y in a repeat purchase” administered to someone who we KNOW for a FACT bought it. Otherwise its trash. We threw all such other reviews out knowing they were false.
If you want to go through and prove these people we rejected were real people be my guest…..but our funders had a word for them….TROLL and you sound rather than certain people who got into *ahem* trouble on here. Produce a dataset proving me wrong. I challenge you. Yves would no doubt be interested too.
I’m with Chomsky here, the bulk of advertising is not to inform. Otherwise car ads would tout MPG, or durability rather than the happy family outing in the SUV. Marketing is smoke and mirrors, bullshit and manipulation, the lipstick on the pig. The amount of deception may vary, but there’s really no hard and fast line.
One other point: One of the biblical ten commandments is “don’t covet.” I’d suggest Madison Avenue is the covetousness industry. I’ll believe the evangelicals are sincerely in the Judeo-Christian tradition when I see pickets outside the ad agencies.
I read an old book about the advertising industry a very, very long time ago. The author (David Ogilvy, I think?) made a distinction between “hard sell” advertising, which focuses on features of the product, and “soft sell” advertising which tries to associate the product with some psychological need in the prospective customer. It seems to me that reactions to Murphy’s post depend very much upon which of those two kinds of advertising one has in mind.
One thing I’m missing – and maybe it was stated too subtlety for me to catch on a quick read – in the last 20 years or so, especially the last ten, many ads about how great it is to be an ass and treat people badly.
Curelrent trend in US auto ads to show people destroying landscape (profession driver, closed course, do not try this at home) make me furious although I think these ad are meant to make intended buyers feel like the king of the world who car throw mud/sand/snow in anyone’s face.
And what of perfume ads? Confusing nightmares for my entire life.
Yep. It’s like the “house flipping shows” in UK. My Dad got caught up in this. He was commissioned by someone I won’t/can’t name to have his Shojis in there to make the new improved house look better.
Final edit? Miniminal screentime, despite huge work nd love of them…..and despite the fact some of his other clients are Ambassadors to the Court of St James in Westminster. So he knows he’s doing things right. Just not making it past editors of certain tv “shows”. Lesson learnt.
Dad just told me Eclipse Blinds here in mid UK gone bust.
If you value your internet history do not search their parent/sister company/companies and Israel. Similarly with Hillarys Blinds.
News you can use.
Overall I do not disagree. Your point about advertising being indiscriminate is part of what I wanted to emphasise above. In the modern age it most definitely is NOT indiscriminate – quite the opposite. The advertising is very selective (and amusingly in my case often very very wrong but I’ve spent 20 years messing with Youtube and its forbears!).
My criticism is that this “quality assurance” has led us into a state of idiocracy. We trust brands when they’ve done terrible things in terms of ingredients etc. Yeah you probably won’t come down with e coli within 24 hours…..but is Alzheimers 20 years later more acceptable?
Supermarkets round here are desperately trying to cover up the extent of their empty shelves. If, and ONLY if, we were in a world were every food stuff have to show safety over 20 years, leading to such gaps then I say BRING IT ON!. I do not need to see 20 variants of white bread, knowing that the preservatives in every single one is probably dodgy.
True, there are still some ads focused on utility, cost, and information. And there are even simplistic direct response ads like “If you’ve suffered an injury from X, call 1-800-555-5555”.
But with some of the more seemingly straightforward cleaning, clothes, and pest control (some of what Yves mentioned), it’s not only what they are saying or showing but the presentation.
The pest control guy is going to be at a nice home.
The people in the clothes ads are going to have great skin.
Etc…
Maybe that’s the subtext he’s getting at with some of those things. .
I used to spend 3x what I paid in rent on yellow pages advertising, as it was the only game in town 35 years ago, how else was I going to get people through the door?
I can still see the yellow page advert salesman telling me how if I had the lettering in red for just $400 more per month, it would stand out better-as he was telling a competitor the very same spiel.
Yellow page advertising worked, but i’m not sure current advertising has anywhere near the same mojo.
p.s.
I’d like to use Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi when playing proper name Scrabble.
Interestingly, Dad has found that targetted “old school” leaflets to people in London work best for him. Although he uses YouTube SEO yadda yadda yadda, they are NOT paying off.
(Though we can’t discount the possibility that a certain very very senior person in the UK establishment is telling people about him LOL)
AAA Aardvark Coin and Currency?
Ha ha!
It paid to be a crafty bastard against your competition, but more in terms of size of ad matters-for keep in mind we were in a unique business in that buying was much more important than selling, and just how were we gonna get those little old ladies exhibiting profound purse droop from the weight of all of deceased/divorced hubby’s manna, into the store?
You had all year to plan your yellow page ad after the book came out, if some other coin dealer one-upped you somehow-a war of words was to be waged in the next year’s edition, and maybe you’d whip out a big 10 inch layout.
p.s.
The 70 year old I was relying upon to have the goods was born circa 1915-20, so they had ample opportunity to have squirreled away coins & currency over that stretch of time, whereas a 70 year old today was 9 when silver coinage went away, and the few coin dealers I know with retail stores relate that they’ve got nothing… a few SBA $’s, a couple of 1957 series Silver Certificate notes, bupkis.
Gresham’s Law, of sorts
How I began collecting coins, a true story.
The summer of 70 mom and dad decide to move us back to Maine. We bought, operated and lived in a three story victorian inn with a tavern and small restaurant in the western part of the state. Each morning, before school I would tally the receipts, re-bank the tills, make the ledger entries and, on my walk to the elementary school stop by the bank and deposit the previous day’s takings. I got paid one dollar a week and I was allowed to fish the till for silver coins. To a third grader these were very favorable terms.
Mine was similar, the Wukchumni family road trip to Canada in 1972 would have the authorities in a tizzy today, as child endangerment charges would be filed against my parents for cramming 5 kids and 3 adults into a 1966 Ford station wagon that broke down so often, we were fixing things on the way back that had been fixed on the way in.
My dad was in the stock biz and all about arbitrage, and Canada had silver coins until 1968, and at the time were worth about 20% more than the face value, so he’d send me into a bank with $10 to buy a couple rolls of Dimes and i’d pick out the 3 or 4 out of 100, and then he’d replace those with regular ones and send my sister into the bank to get $10 for the rolls.
We did this in many a town in BC and Ab, I think it was his way of getting rid of us for a spell, and then when I got home to Cali, started collecting older coins and the rest they say, is history, even though I stopped collecting coins by the time I was 15 to become a coin dealer’s apprentice.
I do miss the yellow pages. A few people above mentioned that they didn’t mind ads informing them of things they actually needed. I know I’m a contrarian, but if someone advertises at me, I’m less inclined to buy their product since I don’t appreciate the interruption to my attention. But I did like the yellow pages and their much more passive advertising. If I wanted something, I could check there and see everyone in my area who sold what I needed and make my choice.
I’ve tried to do something similar on the interwebs and instead of a nice easy to read list of businesses, I get a scattershot listing of 3rd party pages like yelp, etc., and then find half of those listing are from companies no longer in business if they ever were in the first place, and nobody ever bothered to take down the out of date info. It’s often difficult to find a business’ own homepage, if they even have one.
Also, just try propping up a toddler at the dinner table with the internet.
Perhaps it’s neurotic but I hate advertising and all other forms of propaganda that seek our attention for questionable motives. Obviously in the USA this results in a great deal of media self management.
This debate has been going on for a long time and especially here in America where advertising is ubiquitous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vance_Packard
“In The Hidden Persuaders, first published in 1957, Packard explored advertisers’ use of consumer motivational research and other psychological techniques, including depth psychology and subliminal tactics, to manipulate expectations and induce desire for products […]
According to Packard, these needs are so strong that people are compelled to buy products merely to satisfy those needs. The book also explores the manipulative techniques of promoting politicians to the electorate. Additionally, the book questions the morality of using these techniques.”
So I guess one could argue whether desire is a form of unhappiness and Murphy’s choice of words. But given that so much of advertising is manipulation–a sales pitch–the wording may be moot. Of course Madison Avenue replies that they are only providing “information” in an entertaining way and would never ever have questionable motives. But the truth is likely closer to that Mamet play: “always be closing.”
Practically everything that comes out of Trump’s mouth lately is a sales pitch and making many people very unhappy indeed. He is not the authenticity that we’ve been so desperately needing.
Thank you. The key thing I took from that was authenticity. Ironically (as I’ve said before) my Dad’s Shojis are technically not authentic since they use a woven polyester blend….but the point is they are authentic to immigrant Japanese who want the appearance of the old coupled with the benefits of the new (and *ahem* to fool elderly parents when they visit).
We crave authenticity. It does NOT have to be 100% as made several centuries ago but it must be made with attention to detail reflecting that. So all the Japanese immigrants to UK who buy his Shojis and who have toddlers and/or cats love his product……they’re definitely not in line with the ones from 500 years ago but authenticity is shown via my Dad’s attention to detail to “fool their parents” yet “not be ripped apart by your cat/kid”.
I think that “modernisation” of authenticity – showing attention to detail even if details change – is what matters. It’s kinda (to keep the Japanese theme) how so many buildings there LOOK old but are quite modern with very very clever anti-earthquake things built in. Dad never lies about his stuff….which kinda helps LOL. Authenticity is increasingly recognised intrinsically by the populus…….it’ll be the downfall of various right-wingers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adequacy.org
Mark Fisher said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But it’s also easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of advertising. But maybe there could be forms of capitalism that would be livable if advertising was either eliminated or severely restricted. If you had things like Emily’s List and Consumer Reports and Linked In and Craig’s List as a more general model for finding information, would eliminating auto-play or pop-up ads on websites plus TV commercials and other broadcast type ads really leave you worse off? I mean, unless you were really into hyperconsumption for philosophical or religious reasons.
Yeah thanks. I attempted to make this point above….perhaps not very well. If there were supranational agencies with some sort of non-political scientists who would check every bloody “new” thing then I can’t but help think that the average supermarket would look less like a Coles/Woolworths (Aus) or Sainsburys/ASDA (UK) and more like a LIDL. ONE bloody type of thing that actually worked. DOn’t want that? Go to ALDI/independent.
I, being a carer, am UTTERLY sick of the “choice” available. Plus given my prior career I know this isn’t helpful. Give me TWO versions that both pass a test but differ in just one dimension that might matter to people.
Capitalism I can live with……..the CURRENT version of advertising is my problem….and just to be consistent, I’ve said above I think we need advertising, just not this version.
The “choice” available now is often a choice of different packaging and brand names but the same product, for all practical purposes. And real choice, like getting locally sourced or other niche products at the supermarket, seems to be going away, slowly but surely. Niche product example: I haven’t seen the Beyond Meat type products on the shelf for almost a year; overpriced meat substitute but not bad if you could get it on sale. Used to be in every big chain supermarket here, no more though. Local product example: wonderful Golden Girl granola used to be in half a dozen stores nearby, now down to one and that’s looking iffy. Meanwhile acres of $10+ beef packaged in styrofoam and plastic and a long aisle of sugar-drenched corn based cereal in every store. I’m sure in products other than food it’s the same (toothpaste, deodorant, etc.). Are cars that different among the five or so basic form factors, other than the brand? It’s hard to tell, but they all seem to have the same “features” you didn’t ask for and the same color choices. Electric cars I guess are a category apart, for those with the money to put into them. Cars have always had a status symbol aspect and that seems to keep getting worse. And advertising is crucial to status symbol creation and propagation.
Maybe check out Beyond Meat YouTube videos? On one hand they acknowledge the issues you point out. But a (IMNSHO) issue is whether these artificial chems put in these are good for us and won’t make us all demented in 20 years. A bunch of these drugs have been (if not proven) thought to be highly suspect in long term health.
No. Checking. At. All
Which reinforces my point: advertising should be under control of some sort of independent scientific board. I trust “beyond meat” no more than my average cheapo provider of chicken.
Plus one “very close to home issue”: lots of people remark that these foods must be consumed within 48 hours. What? Slices of cooked beef last for WEEKS. More work needed.
A slight twist in my case, the wife and I have cut the cord on regular TV and do it all via internet and IPTV. We do have Google TV but everything is watched via recording so we can fast-forward through commercials. I’m getting ready to cut that one out too as everything we watch is available via a subscription we have.
We do get a very quick commercial on some, but I’m working to get rid of these as well. Figure I’m already paying for the service, don’t need to see ads!
But I also subscribe to a few online blogs which provide reviews of just about everything and I find that here I am often more drawn to buy something than I ever was via commercials! Just saw an article about someone’s most recommended gardening tool for weeds and… I… must… have… it!!
I strive to check the sites for ties to the vendors for the products they emphasize, but the blogs are very knowledgeable as to what they’re rating and the emphasis is always on making my life, hobby, meal prep, exercise so much easier.
Thank goodness Yves doesn’t rate the top business/home financial software! Then again, I’m almost retired and she did have some good things to say about her choice for moving to Thailand;)
Thanks. Whilst your response doesn’t provide THE answer, it provides AN answer to my experience of YouTube.
1. I press skip in millisenconds on a YT ad.
2. 50% of the time I use Linux plus a browser that has both adblock and sponsporblock
The result is that the algorithm has clearly decided “Terry is worth NOTHING” so it minimises ads when I’m lazy and watch YT on the app on the tablet. Seriously, I get virtually no ads and those that appear are skippable after 5 secs so no biggie.
I’m watching EVERYTHING via my official account (so it knows it is “me”) but this works in my favour. Even when I’m lazy and watching using tablet or phone in bed the ads are very very rare. Then again, 20 years ago when you could check what google’s “picture of you was”, they thought I was a middle aged woman……which might explain the ads for female (ahem) urine leakage pads……………….have you seriously not amended things since then? (Former friend from uni suggests big fat “no”). So I LOL…..BTW I quit telling him stuff around then about regarding human choice modelling…….funny that?
I definitely do not dispute that (most) advertising is intended to cause feelings of inadequacy, but one thing I object to is we forgot to mention that a notable source of these inadequate feelings for me (and presumably other readers here) is via social media and direct peer pressure from friends and family. Specifically, I am very upset how often I have experienced and succumbed to peer pressure to have more friends. I have never used Facebook before, but I presume a big part is collecting “friends”, taking photos of whatever awesome social activity one is doing, and gossiping about (and feeling envious of) how to participate in more social events. Facebook’s brilliant strategy is encouraging everybody to gossip more and sell advertising adjacent to such gossip, both of which can and does encourage feelings of social inadequacy. Furthermore, seeing photos and videos of friends—which is not strictly advertising—undoubtedly leads to buying more stuff.
As I became increasingly disabled, it was a stunning revelation that I did not miss social activity. Why did it take me so long to realize that I simply don’t enjoy hanging around friends and family? What exactly was the point of all the worthless gossipy talk over meals, drinks, and other parties? I certainly didn’t advance my dead end career. I didn’t learn valuable or practical things. But I went to social gatherings anyway because friends and family told me that there was something wrong with me on account of my paucity of friends. Nowadays, I have a legitimate reason to avoid social interaction, and it’s not because I have some sort of social anxiety. Since there is simply no way I can go anywhere in the world and not trigger neuropathic pain, my friends disappeared, and my family stopped nagging me about all the solitude I experience. And I deliberately use the word solitude for its positive connotations instead of loneliness and its negative connotations. Not having a social life should be depressing, but I am evidently indifferent to this. I briefly read about how NC user “Late Introvert” derived his username. This sounds similar to me.
Nevertheless, congratulations to the NC community because I have never left a comment anywhere else in the entirety of the internet. I also never bother to read comments anywhere. But I like y’all because you have opinions and writings that would suggest wisdom and practical knowledge. These are the kind of friends I ought to cultivate. Are there ways to contact other individual readers without tying up the resources of our hostess with the mostess and the moderators?
Thanks for your thoughtful comment and kind words. Interestingly, the usual clinical distinction is that introverts find social activity to consume energy, while extroverts both find it gives them energy and they feel unhappy or unfulfilled without it. You make an interesting point, that with increasing costs of socializing, such as higher confirmism pressures, even those who might otherwise find it “energizing” now find it to be depleting.
Also that comment you highlighted was imprecise. As you point out, it probably can’t create feelings of inadequacy, but it can prey on existing, socially inculcated, ones.
Thanks Yves:
This intrigues me…..I’m introvert and see some of this……I genuinely need a “good COVID day” to properly think about this.
Thanks for enouraging someone new. I (when I had money) gave money to NC fundraisers……it may have been the 1st and 3rd/4th ones in ancient history to which I contributed! But I’m so glad others take up the mantle and others feel empowered to speak up.
By far the best commentator on advertising and marketing, taking the post war US context as his baseline, (though everyone should read Bernays “Propaganda”) is Vance Packard, whose ‘Hidden Persauders’ and ‘Waste Makers’ provide the nuance and detail that Murphy’ simplistic blog piece misses.
Packard’s critique of consumerism is withering, and prophetic on the impacts of corporate consumerism and obsolesecence.
To my view, the point of this article is not happiness or unhappiness by advertising. Its more about the shift from producing what we need to consuming for rentiers to make an extra margin.
To get people to overconsume it is necessary to instill a need for this product. And this applies to all products, not just beauty stuff. There will always be someone who really needs it. The art is, to make the rest also feel a need. And a feeling of need implies commonly that the fullfillment of this need will make you happy.
But that’s just the mechanism employed to drive consumerism. Actually they don’t care about our happiness at all. They care about their equity.