"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."
Fun fact: Bernays grandson is the co founder of Netflix. And you may think what brainwashing are all of these memes by Netflix? (Stephen Bernays Randolph his father)
>>> He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
I sometimes wonder if the people who are the true targets of advertising, made to want things they don't need, are the people who buy advertising.
"PR" was invented by the military. I learned this from someone in PR who was trained in the service during WWII and then went on to work in the "public relations profession" as a civilian. I suspect the military trained Bernays. He may have invented the "profession", but he did not invent PR.
Wow it's crazy to think the world wasn't always like this... and I guess it's even crazier that you can't really imagine a world without adverts using things like celebrity endorsements.
It's insane how much effect seemingly minor things can have on society.
To me, it is worrying how much human effort we're investing into advertising as a whole. The top minds of our generations, backed by billions of dollars in funding, are working on increasingly manipulative ways to capture people's attention and use it to generate profit.
We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.
It seems like a larger and larger percentage of our economy is being taken up by parasitic sectors that have a net negative value for society. Advertising, soda, highly processed food, credit cards, car dealerships, (most) sales people, etc. We'd probably be better of as a society paying these people to do nothing than to do what they do now; we'd be even better off if we paid them to do something actually productive.
There's a lot of talk about what impact mass automation will have on our society, and what kind of work people will have once they're replaced by machines. This is always framed in such a way as if it's a problem we're about to face, but it looks like it's actually a trend that's been going on for decades (at least). And the answer is that, unless there is an effort to direct these people towards productive ends, many will continue to flow to these parasitic sectors.
I can't second this strongly enough. Why are we utilizing such vast amounts of our limited resources to persuade people to make certain decisions? In my humble opinion it's usually because the decisions the people who employ advertising tactics want the people they are advertising to, to make, are suboptimal, if not downright bad, and people wouldn't make those decisions, but as a by-product of having been advertised to.
Quite frankly, advertising is psychic violence, and you can't escape it. Exploiting people's psychology to consolidate their resources for yourself is tantamount to theft. When men do it to women to push them to sell sex, we call it "pimping", and judge it as a completely reprehensible, unredeemable act. Of course your general well-being is diminished by a barrage of messaging encouraging you in every conceivable way, that the only road to satiety is to act against your own self-interest. How could that not totally fuck with you?
Spending your time coming up with more devious mechanisms, and ways to decrease the escapablity of said mechanisms is a fucking unseemly way to behave, as an individual. As a species, it's absolutely tragic that all those brilliant people doing it, can't break from the comfort of those fat paychecks and find something better to do with their time on Earth... Myself included.
I don't care how much education they have, the minds who are focused on developing ways to capture people's increasingly fractured attention are disqualified from being considered the top minds of our generation.
And then the math geniuses that could be the next Einstein are slaving away in cubicles writing algorithms for the stock market. So much potential lost in the pursuit of increasing someone else's wallet.
Here's the reason they keep doing-- It works.
Stop rewarding it and they'll stop.
I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
A good way to immunize yourself against something is to have weaponized it yourself in the past. Then you can recognize it when it appears, and you know its strengths and weaknesses.
The human vulnerabilities that advertising leverages are coded deep in the genome; building antibodies instead of avoiding the virus entirely could be wise indeed.
Lol, we're already incredibly far down that path. Have you been using the same smartphone since 2008? I ask seriously: how many have you owned since then?
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't."
I'd say that's not true any more. We do have a war to fight, the war against destruction of our planet by humanity. (Hoping our politicians would fix it has turned out to be ineffective so far.)
If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.
I think they are missing the biggest issue with advertising, which is it incentivizes businesses to create things for the sole purpose of drawing their attention to the advertising. Truth is less important than shock value. Utility less important than appearance of utility. Extremist rhetoric gathers more eyeballs than moderate views. Advertising's biggest negative effects are in how it manipulates people into manipulating people's attention.
Isn't this what you would expect? Advertising fundamentally is trying to convince you that you need something. If you're perfectly happy with your current situation then what else would you need? So the advertising has to convince you that you're not happy but that there is a product that you can buy that will increase your happiness.
One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock".
The other is "Look at this woman, isn't she fascinating? People like her will desire you more if you buy the thing she's lying on top of. Actual woman not included."
Unfortunately, people have discovered type 2 is effective for a lot of things. Not only that, there are no scruples at all with appealing to people in this kind of way. It's not lying in the normal sense, but it is manipulation, or an attempt at it. Current dogma seems to be that rational people can just take the type 1 info out of your type 2 advert and think with the appropriate organ.
I would go further and state that our entire economy and society are based on the manufacturing of demand. There are so few things we actually need. Food, water, clothing, shelter. Everything else is a luxury you've been convinced to buy (or it was given to you by someone who was convinced).
I'm not talking about ethics here, just straight facts.
The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television, where you're forced to sit through something before you can get to the content you're trying to watch.
I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it!
It's also pretty bad for F2P mobile games, although the solution there is easy (play different games).
I actually don't mind advertisements in big cities or on billboards, sort of adds to the flashiness factor in some cases. Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.
I visited a family member last night who pays for a commercial streaming service. They described an interesting TV program and tried to pull it up, but it had vanished. After using search function, it said "this content has expired".
This morning I woke up and the first thing my mother (who is literally dying of cancer and wanted to listen to a song on the way to hospital where she will receive medical attention for her terminal illness) said to me was that two years of her songs (she is part of an organized choir) have vanished because of iTunes, so she can't access her music in the car.
I for one am never buying another Apple product, use Linux nearly everywhere (despite the hassle) and try to help and educate others where possible. As a society, we have to stop trading long term freedom, stability and efficiency for short term convenience and planned obsolescence / landfill. Contribute to Wikimedia projects, use open source for media creation, and contribute to open culture.
> The biggest offender in my opinion is not the web, where you can install ad blockers and avoid certain websites, but television
Yes, I agree with this. I gave up on television about 20 years ago, and it was the ads that pushed me that way. Every so often I'll see a TV program, and it's still intolerable -- things are so much worse than they were 20 years ago.
Cable TV used to be ad free when it first came out. The whole reason people were willing to pay for it was to not see ads like they got on the free broadcasts. Then once telecoms got their market share the ads trickled in, as was originally planned I'm sure.
>Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.
I live in a metro area. Physical adverts are the worst type in my opinion. There are methods of eliminating every other type of ad: I use adblockers on my phone and computers, my network is pi-holed, I use plex/netflix instead of traditional TV, I pay for spotify instead of listening to the radio etc. But physical adverts? There's no way of blocking them, unless you consider "never going outside" an option. In a way, not having a method of opting out of billboards feels like they are being pushed on you without your consent, which is horrifying to me.
>I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it!
This is still better than what Netflix does, where they cram egregious product placement down your throat so you can't even just look away until it's over.
Doubling of advertising expidenture (Which is a massive, sea change) would apparently make people 3% less happy. So basically it has a negligible impact on happiness even if this analysis is true.
I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but so many other things affect advertising spend as a whole that wouldn't show there. More globalization coming to a country (as markets open up and global firms find advertising worth their while), changes in industry make-up, political election cycles becoming more heated, internet connectivity (which would be huge in the time period they studied, and would greatly impact ad spend numbers with it), etc.
It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising. The closest you can do is convert their existing opinions into actions. There is a ton of good academic literature on this - here's a good primer: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
I view advertising as a form of pollution. In many cases, it erodes the human experience. It is abusive to families with children creating strife where there was none. I spend a lot of time managing expectations and sharing philosophical ideas, like "less is more". I don't mind teaching my children, but I don't like feeling people are trying to take advantage of us all the time. I explain it to them as if it is a game we're all playing, "if you keep your money you don't have to work forever." Another fun game I'd like to suggest is looking at an index fund calculator and see how much money you'd have if somebody had invested 1K (or $50 a month) in your name on your birthday. I use this as a means of giving them a plan; nobody had ever done it with me growing up, hopefully my kids are clued in on how to earn financial freedom. Now, I just hope my advice withstands the test of time.
One of the nicest things about been a techie is I rarely see/hear adverts.
I don’t listen to the radio (programming podcasts and music), watch broadcast tv (streaming and..other sources), ublock origin deals with the web.
So I see maybe a one or two per day (billboards near work).
I’m reminded how nice that is every time I touch a windows work PC that isn’t mine (I run fedora on a box I built myself), at least everyone is running ublock origin now after I suggested it.
I get that advertising is a necessary evil but I've become numb to accepting any form of advertisements due to it being abused.
Ad block + refuse to watch pretty much anything on TV. Life is too short to lose +-10% of my leisure time being brainwashed over a product I don't care about
There is a very underrated old movie called Roger Dodger, where the main character is an advertising executive. He said something to the effect that his job was to convince people that their lives were shit. Only after you convince them that their lives are shit you can then convince them that the new product is the very thing they need to fix their lives.
Advertisers are also the "moral police" and strong arm media companies into compounding the short and long term toxic effects of their original message.
That's only true in very extreme cases of "original message", and advertisers only act if there's demonstrable proof that a large percentage of the audience of the toxic message will bail out on their particular product.
The financial industry was huge (it reached 8% of US GDP, and 40% of corporate profits [1]), sucked up many bright students, and made many of its practitioners rich, while arguably not creating much value.
It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.)
When I lived in London, I often wondered what it would be like if the adverts that covered the underground and streets were replaced by pictures drawn by children.
This article misses by far the number one benefit of advertising: it makes products and services cheaper.
That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well.
There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service, so you get to pay some of your attention instead.
Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising ratio as a slider.
That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.
Root of the problem is measuing everything in GDP.Natural resources such as rivers and oceans, topsoil and forests, the ozone layer and the atmosphere, are seen as essentially valueless—unless, of course, they are exploited and converted into revenue.
Gdp measures mainly market transactions. it ignores social costs, environmental impacts and income inequality. Seen through such a lens, the most economically productive people are cancer patients in the midst of getting a divorce. healthy people in happy marriages, in contrast, are economically invisible, and all the more so if they cook at home, walk to work, grow food in a home garden, and don’t smoke
I assume brand advertising to be specific is the real culprit here. As a huge fan of Mad Men some of Don Draper's (main character) quotes are illuminatung here.
"Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay."
Imagine having a person constantly walking too-close next to you, picking just the wrong time to JUMP IN FRONT OF YOU before every little thing you try to do, and shouting in your face and refusing to go away until they can finish what they were going to say. This is what modern advertising does, for everything! It isn’t exactly surprising that this could be a net negative for pretty much everyone.
[+] [-] deepakkarki|6 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
From the video description -
"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires.
Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book, from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar.
His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling consumer goods. It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could be made happy and thus docile.
It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."
[+] [-] HNLurker2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] analog31|6 years ago|reply
I sometimes wonder if the people who are the true targets of advertising, made to want things they don't need, are the people who buy advertising.
[+] [-] 3xblah|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnoppa|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slavaukraini|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otabdeveloper1|6 years ago|reply
Advertising today is mechanical applications of the central limit theorem / law of large numbers to sociological problems.
[+] [-] enlyth|6 years ago|reply
We're constantly getting better at it; who knows what path this will lead us down. I suspect it might not be the one we had wished for.
[+] [-] Chathamization|6 years ago|reply
There's a lot of talk about what impact mass automation will have on our society, and what kind of work people will have once they're replaced by machines. This is always framed in such a way as if it's a problem we're about to face, but it looks like it's actually a trend that's been going on for decades (at least). And the answer is that, unless there is an effort to direct these people towards productive ends, many will continue to flow to these parasitic sectors.
[+] [-] beecat|6 years ago|reply
Quite frankly, advertising is psychic violence, and you can't escape it. Exploiting people's psychology to consolidate their resources for yourself is tantamount to theft. When men do it to women to push them to sell sex, we call it "pimping", and judge it as a completely reprehensible, unredeemable act. Of course your general well-being is diminished by a barrage of messaging encouraging you in every conceivable way, that the only road to satiety is to act against your own self-interest. How could that not totally fuck with you?
Spending your time coming up with more devious mechanisms, and ways to decrease the escapablity of said mechanisms is a fucking unseemly way to behave, as an individual. As a species, it's absolutely tragic that all those brilliant people doing it, can't break from the comfort of those fat paychecks and find something better to do with their time on Earth... Myself included.
[+] [-] borkt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ngold|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maerF0x0|6 years ago|reply
I actually think a large number of societal issues today are stemming from people's inability to think rationally for themselves. Things like fake news, being vulnerable to advertising, taking bad deals like minimum wage etc. If someone were able to think rationally and into the future to figure out, "4 years from now if I choose this [politician, car, job]" I'll be as bad or worse off, then those things would die out for want of funding...
[+] [-] gesman|6 years ago|reply
Only government [regulations] can change that - but above resources are certainly partially directed to make sure this won't happen.
[+] [-] trevyn|6 years ago|reply
The human vulnerabilities that advertising leverages are coded deep in the genome; building antibodies instead of avoiding the virus entirely could be wise indeed.
[+] [-] InternetUser|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarqwertz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] locknumber110|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] perfunctory|6 years ago|reply
"Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't."
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fight_Club_(film)
[+] [-] kaybe|6 years ago|reply
If we could have a war against drugs or terror we can also have a war against climate change, soil degradation, desertification, insect decline and biodiversity loss.
[+] [-] seasoup|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|6 years ago|reply
You're basically being negged by advertisers.
[+] [-] lordnacho|6 years ago|reply
One is "Hey, did you know this thing exists? Check it out! Here are all the tests it passed, realistic cost of ownership, and locations where it is in stock".
The other is "Look at this woman, isn't she fascinating? People like her will desire you more if you buy the thing she's lying on top of. Actual woman not included."
Unfortunately, people have discovered type 2 is effective for a lot of things. Not only that, there are no scruples at all with appealing to people in this kind of way. It's not lying in the normal sense, but it is manipulation, or an attempt at it. Current dogma seems to be that rational people can just take the type 1 info out of your type 2 advert and think with the appropriate organ.
[+] [-] jressey|6 years ago|reply
I'm not talking about ethics here, just straight facts.
[+] [-] lwb|6 years ago|reply
I find it especially offensive on paid services like Hulu. I'm paying for the thing, just let me watch it!
It's also pretty bad for F2P mobile games, although the solution there is easy (play different games).
I actually don't mind advertisements in big cities or on billboards, sort of adds to the flashiness factor in some cases. Though if I lived in a more concentrated metro area I might feel differently.
[+] [-] contingencies|6 years ago|reply
I visited a family member last night who pays for a commercial streaming service. They described an interesting TV program and tried to pull it up, but it had vanished. After using search function, it said "this content has expired".
This morning I woke up and the first thing my mother (who is literally dying of cancer and wanted to listen to a song on the way to hospital where she will receive medical attention for her terminal illness) said to me was that two years of her songs (she is part of an organized choir) have vanished because of iTunes, so she can't access her music in the car.
I for one am never buying another Apple product, use Linux nearly everywhere (despite the hassle) and try to help and educate others where possible. As a society, we have to stop trading long term freedom, stability and efficiency for short term convenience and planned obsolescence / landfill. Contribute to Wikimedia projects, use open source for media creation, and contribute to open culture.
[+] [-] JohnFen|6 years ago|reply
Yes, I agree with this. I gave up on television about 20 years ago, and it was the ads that pushed me that way. Every so often I'll see a TV program, and it's still intolerable -- things are so much worse than they were 20 years ago.
[+] [-] asdff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mayniac|6 years ago|reply
I live in a metro area. Physical adverts are the worst type in my opinion. There are methods of eliminating every other type of ad: I use adblockers on my phone and computers, my network is pi-holed, I use plex/netflix instead of traditional TV, I pay for spotify instead of listening to the radio etc. But physical adverts? There's no way of blocking them, unless you consider "never going outside" an option. In a way, not having a method of opting out of billboards feels like they are being pushed on you without your consent, which is horrifying to me.
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|6 years ago|reply
This is still better than what Netflix does, where they cram egregious product placement down your throat so you can't even just look away until it's over.
[+] [-] mrep|6 years ago|reply
What??? You can pay for ad-free hulu! Why are you complaining?
[+] [-] cm2012|6 years ago|reply
I highly doubt it is true though. It's a purely correlational study, that says from 1980-2011, advertising increased and people in general got 3% less happy. They say they accounted for GDP when doing their regression, but so many other things affect advertising spend as a whole that wouldn't show there. More globalization coming to a country (as markets open up and global firms find advertising worth their while), changes in industry make-up, political election cycles becoming more heated, internet connectivity (which would be huge in the time period they studied, and would greatly impact ad spend numbers with it), etc.
It is really, really hard to actually change people's opinions with advertising. The closest you can do is convert their existing opinions into actions. There is a ton of good academic literature on this - here's a good primer: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
[+] [-] deogeo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sesteel|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noir_lord|6 years ago|reply
I don’t listen to the radio (programming podcasts and music), watch broadcast tv (streaming and..other sources), ublock origin deals with the web.
So I see maybe a one or two per day (billboards near work).
I’m reminded how nice that is every time I touch a windows work PC that isn’t mine (I run fedora on a box I built myself), at least everyone is running ublock origin now after I suggested it.
[+] [-] hindsightbias|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullandvoid|6 years ago|reply
Ad block + refuse to watch pretty much anything on TV. Life is too short to lose +-10% of my leisure time being brainwashed over a product I don't care about
[+] [-] deogeo|6 years ago|reply
Whatever convinced you it was necessary? A few cities/states banned billboards, and as far as I'm aware, the sky didn't fall.
[+] [-] hristov|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xfitm3|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bediger4000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FabHK|6 years ago|reply
It really seems to me that the same holds, more and more, for advertisement (Google, Facebook). (Well, banks created the ATM, as Volcker famously remarked, and Google a better search engine, so there's that.)
[1] https://www.fa-mag.com/news/how-finance-took-over-the-econom...
[+] [-] oregontechninja|6 years ago|reply
Are there any nations or states which outlaw or heavily regulate advertising? I've heard some governments outlaw advertising to children.
[+] [-] codeulike|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clevep|6 years ago|reply
That notion obviously applies to the plethora of "free" (free in quotes because I am not trying to dodge the fact that you are always paying something) websites which everyone frequents, but goes beyond that as well.
There's a comment on here complaining about how Hulu shows ads despite the fact that they are paying for the service. Well, you can pay more and not see those ads, but you have made a conscious decision to pay less for the service, so you get to pay some of your attention instead.
Back to the article -- it claims that "a hypothetical doubling of advertising expenditure would result in a 3% drop in life satisfaction." What I would like to see is some analysis of how much life satisfaction is earned back if all relevant products become proportionately cheaper. Then we would be in position to figure out what the sweet spot for society is using a price:advertising ratio as a slider.
That would be very interesting and result in a more productive conversation.
[+] [-] wow425|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 40acres|6 years ago|reply
"Advertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It's freedom from fear. It's a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay."
[+] [-] makecheck|6 years ago|reply