I found this a rather interesting article. It's an entirely British perspective, but none the less globally applicable for that.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6368477.stm

That article was quite funny, witty even, in a uniquely British way, as well as addressing an interesting phenomenon of our 'culture'.

Over here in the USA we do have companies who ritually change their name every few years as well. There is a bank in my area, same people, same building, same everything, but it’s name has been changed once every five years or so.

I find the changing of slogans to be more annoying. It's almost an insult of intelligence that you expect us to buy your product just because you changed your slogan.

I'll go you one further: It is an insult to the consumer's intelligence that they expect us to by their product just because they have a slogan.

Does anyone besides me believe that the world would be a much better place if advertising just plain didn't exist?

I disagree. While I believe that rampant over-advertising is an annoyance, I also feel that some degree of advertisement is necessary. How else are we to know that certain products or services exist? What if, for example, your favourite movie was re-released in the theatres, including all sorts of wonderful additional features, but you never found out because it wasn't advertised? A new CD from your favourite artist? It could even be something as mundane as which brand of shampoo you choose to buy. Standing in an aisle, faced with hundreds of varieties of items you've neither seen nor heard of would be bewildering and frustrating, and the chances you'd actually get what you really wanted (in my opinion) would be reduced exponentially. (As an ardent lover of bath products, I can assure you- they are not all created equal. )

In a world of widely available telecommunications and Internet access, advertising is bloody useless, except as a means of supporting media (Although most ad-supported media - IE, television - is crap). 99% of ads I see are utterly unappealing to me, and most are also so horridly produced and directed they make me want to strangle the people who funded such a crappy ad campaign. Besides, humanity didn't have the Internet or even phones for most of its history, and during that time, advertising wasn't anywhere near an organized, professional occupation - There is such a thing as word-of-mouth, you know, and nowadays it's more powerful than ever. I don't buy books because I see ads for them. I buy books because I go to the bookstore, read a couple of pages and like them, or because people have said good things about them. Same goes for nearly everything I buy except food, which I buy based on knowing what tastes good, what doesn't, and what I haven't had the opportunity to taste yet. Advertising is an useless profession living off society's misguided belief that it's good for something and people's utter inability to think for themselves.

Besides, advertising are anything but useful information. Having seen the ads of half a dozen different brands of shampoo teaches me nothing about their effectiveness.

I used to think much the same way, because I can't remember the last time an ad influenced me to buy anything, but I can't help but think that if companies found it wasn't pulling its weight they'd stop funding it.

Advertising does influence people, but that doesn't mean it's in any way useful or necessary; just profitable, because people are susceptible to it. I'd much rather companies spent the money on research and development, say, than in advertising, but the fact that most people actually believe the bull they're spoon-fed by the average TV ad spot makes that a losing proposition for most companies.

Then again, corporations routinely do massively stupid things.

Ah, you need to remember that the average joe out there is quite the stick in the mud. Lusternia does attract a different subset of individual’s; I'd call us the alphas and betas. Most of these ads you say you aren’t influenced by are directed toward the gammas and deltas in this brave new world of ours, if they don’t influence you it’s ok.

"Ending is better than mending!"

*cough*

The content of an ad does not matter to the producers of the ad. All they care about is if you remember the name of the product while looking for that type of item.

It's a simple concept called brand recognition.

Er... wrong. The entire profession of publicity revolves around creating ads which are appealing and make people want to buy the product.

You're both right. Adverts serve more than one purpose. Some just get the brand or product name out there, some are more directed at drawing in the punter, it depends how clever the company behind it's trying to be.

Oh, sure brand recognition comes into it, but the notion that ad content doesn't matter is wrong.

Advertising is about the most psychological profession you can find, outside of psychology. I've only done some fairly basic study on it from a communications point of view but...wow...it's just so manipulative. There are so many tricks and cues.

And clearly, you're just dying to be right.



Saying advertisement is useless due to the advent of E-commerce, internet and telecommunications is downright ridiculous though. It's as if you're confining advertisement to billboards and TV commercials. What about product placement in movies and even in various popular places around the web. If anything telecommunciations and internet has only broadened the advertisement landscape and given them more ways and even sneakier ways to get their products into our minds. And for the clever and intriguing companies the internet and this growing world of telecommunication we have has enabled such confusing and largescale advertisement campaigns including viral marketing.


And I'm sorry, without some sort of marketing irregardless of aforementioned tools to seek out products, you won't -know- what to look for without the effects of marketing in someway. And even in the case that you just want to find a different comparisons for shampoo, you go search the web for different shampoos to buy and you're going to inevitably run into ads and marketing for not only shampoo but various other products and consumer services. The fact that you think they're so unnecessary and seem so unaware of their effects just proves how well it is working to any company you buy products from. And don't think most employees in the marketing field don't know that word of mouth is still probably the single strongest tool in selling and advertising a product there is.

Don't put up a straw man. My point is not that advertisement is useless to the companies that employ it, but rather that it serves no purpose in society; it is, of course, the only business model for supporting certain kinds of media, but regardless.

Is it really so impossible to believe that one can live and find the products one needs without advertising? Do you seriously believe people are all retards who need to be told what to buy? I practically don't watch television, and I haven't clicked on an internet ad in ages. The only ads I'm subjected to are the annoying ones at the start of movies. Do you really think people are so amazingly stupid that, without advertising, they wouldn't know shampoo existed?Sure ads can be good for marketing a wholly new product, but if an entirely new product is good enough, the media will pick up on it anyway. Web search engines, say; they were never advertised on TV until they were used already by a majority of Web users. I don't think Google ever did a single ad spot. If people care about what they buy, they'll research their purchase; if they don't, they might buy the product with the better ad campaign, but that doesn't mean they're buying the better product. Advertising benefits advertisers and media, not consumers. (Except, of course, consumers of media who get free content on the basis of the implicit agreement that they lend their eyeballs to advertisers.)

Look around yourself more. It's pretty obvious some people still don't know shampoo exists.

And it's about the different types of shampoo. And in any case, shampoo was advertised by someone before. At which point someone bought shampoo, and irregardless of wether or not you were subjected to advertising of shampoo, another person would have had to inform you of Shampoo through word of mouth, making marketing and advertisements and their trickle down affect still a very real factor in your equation.

But that's just one simple example of it really. And sure, I currently can find everything I require without advertising. But despite myself or wether I realize it, I've enough understanding as for how this all works to know that a large part of that imbedded knowledge comes from past advertising or word of mouth from someone else in some way. Without the knowledge of the various products someone doesn't know which products to do research upon.

Basically all of your arguments can be thwarted through one of the basis of most advertising that Daganev mentioned above: Product recognition.


And practically not watching TV doesn't mean a whole lot, that's only one avenue to something that pervades our entire lives now. You haven't clicked on an internet ad in ages? Yes, but you still see them, you're aware unconsciously and consciously of their existance and even what a great deal of them are attempting to sell. From a psychological standpoint it can be assumed when you're shopping these advertisements clicked on or not will come to mind when confronted with a selection of different products, and it works. They wouldn't be doing it still after so many years if it didn't work. It's a tried, true, tested, proven formula that works.


Google didn't pay for costly ads on TV, correct, but they advertised and got their name out in various other ways. They're a new age company doing things in new ways. Just because you don't see an Advert in the middle of Heroes about going to Google doesn't mean they didn't market their search engine in other ways. But either way, you seem to be one of those anti-Mainstream freaks, trying to converse about any of this is fairly pointless I'm sure. But saying advertisements don't benefit consumers is a complete cop out, sure it can be said to be true in a lot of cases, but by in large that's a generalization as much as saying black people are lazy workers.

Again... it's not whether someone would know a specific brand of product exists or not, but rather whether they are aware a class of products exists. For 90% of what we buy regularly, supermarket shelves are the only ad space.
Again, it's not about whether it works or not. It's about whether it benefits consumers. Consumers != advertisers.

Because every mention of the word 'google' in media is an advertisement for it. And again, unless you're consuming media that is ad-supported, you don't benefit from advertisement. Not including viral marketing, ad spots are about 30 to 60 seconds on television, less than that on radio, and a single (Large) still frame in the case of billboards. How many startups selling a revolutionary new product that nobody knows about can afford TV advertisement? And how can you expose the virtues of a revolutionary new product in a single billboard, or a short text ad, or a banner? Sure there are ads that are useful, and sure there is a lot more media being distributed for free because of advertisement - But publicity and advertisement are essentially parasitical. They don't produce anything; they don't improve on existing products; their stated purpose is to make more products get sold, which is not necessarily good for consumers or good for the economy. Their usual methods are screwing with people's base impulses to make them buy stuff (I'll refrain from the relevant quote from Fight Club, here). I don't see how the existence of the advertisement industry and the modern advertisement profession benefit consumers at all; I'd much rather ad support in media was merely the simple statement 'Such-and-such company sponsors this programme' rather than 30-second ad spots. I'd much rather companies spent money they spend on advertisement actually making their products better. So yes, advertisement is a drain on society and vastly more pervasive than is should be. I'm not personally familiar with how they work, but what I hear seems to be that their methods are downright unethical, as well.

I agree partly with the gist of your argument but you aren't really giver advertising enough credit. How do you know shampoo exists at all if some sort of advertising hasn't shown you it? Even word of mouth is a form of advertising. We know about these products now as basics of life in our world but there was a point where someone went "my hair feels like :censor:, what do I do about that?" and then along came shampoo.

See. Veri, you're waaaay on one side of the spectrum. And the viewpoints I've expressed are waaaaaay on the other side.

But in actuality, the real situation of how advertisements affect the world, wether they're good or bad is somewhere in the middle. There's good and bad things to it all, but simply marking it off as parasitical and unneeded is just silly. Has the advertisements and marketing gone too far? In some cases, it certainly has. Does that make it as a whole a drain on our society or economy? Not at all.

Unethical is a matter of opinion, but yes some of the more effective ones sneakily trigger some of the human races natural instincts to push you into buying them or otherwise using pyshological control mechanisms to influence your opinions about a product. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. The biggest flaw in outright calling their use of psychological nuances and control unethical is the lack of malicious intent. Some Joe, went to college, and wants to make this ad campaign because it's his job and he wants to feed his wife and kids. He does it the best he can using the tools at his disposal. I highly doubt he's a sinister conniving mind controlling parasite out to get you for doing his job.



Anyone know that Kinko's commercial where the Administrator is telling the employees to do their usual worthless routines then states he's going to Kinko's so they can help him actually do the work? Verithrax is really reminding me of the "You just think everyones out to get you." line from it.