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And this is different from all other marketing how? If tobacco style marketing is a problem that needs to be solved, then 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
by AngryData 4mo ago
And this is different from all other marketing how?
If tobacco style marketing is a problem that needs to be solved, then 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
- shrubby 4mo agoBill Hicks had a good advice to the marketing guys: "kill yourself" so I you're onto something here!
- cm2012 4mo agoI know its just a joke, but Bill Hicks also constantly marketed himself and branded himself as an anti-marketing comedian. In his mind it was okay to promote yourself as a comedian but not promote your own business.
- bandofthehawk 4mo agoI don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?
- cm2012 4mo agoComedy is about putting butts in seats. No comedian can be successful without promoting themselves to get attendees at their shows, and Bill Hicks was no exception. Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc. And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing. All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.
- margalabargala 4mo agoThat's performing, not marketing. The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.
- cm2012 4mo agoPerforming is just showing up at comedy shows and doing your bit. That alone would not have made him successful. He aggressively promoted and marketed himself! Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly) He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.
- red-iron-pine 4mo agohe's a comedian; his entire job is standing up in front of people and saying shit and having a message. thats... the point. it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.
- cm2012 4mo agoI promised you every single individual business could say the same thing. No product has any value if people don't know about it.
- newaccountman2 4mo ago> having a message I don't think most comedians really have any cogent "message", nor do I think that's part of the job
- picofarad 4mo agoYes, people who have worked with Paul Feig are not comedians, that's possibly where you're having contextual issues.
- Forgeties79 4mo agoThen I don’t think you really understand comedy to be honest. That’s a very reductive view of comedy, essentially “just a joke with no relevant context or layers allowed,” which rubs against the entire history of the art form. No working comic would agree with you. Put another way: Not everyone is looking to do revolutionary commentary, but good luck finding a comic with no commentary at all.
- gaiagraphia 4mo agoThere's a different between 'promotion' and 'bait and switch'. There's also the matter of the externalities of the products you're promoting. If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him. Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives. The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.
- cm2012 4mo agoI didn't recall Hicks saying that people who do bait-and-switch tactics (which i also agree are bad) should kill themselves. I recall him saying all marketers and advertisers should kill themselves.
- rayiner 4mo agoMost marketing these days is that kind of pernicious Mad Men style feelings-based marketing. If ads were informational, like “here is a new product you might like from the makers of this other product you already use,” that would be different.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- thesmtsolver2 4mo agoYou are doing a bait and switch now comparing all ads to bait and switch.
- thinkingtoilet 4mo agoHe didn't take out ads or anything. He lived his life the way he wanted to and spoke his mind. That's not 'marketing'.
- cm2012 4mo agoIf you think buying ads is the only form of marketing, sure but advertising is probably 10% of marketing. See my other comments to see why he was a natural marketer and used some key tactics that he specifically chose for promoting himself.
- Forgeties79 4mo agoI respect the hell out of Bill Hicks but the dude absolutely sat around thinking about marketing and getting his name out there. You have to if you want to be a working comic. Hell it’s not like he didn’t have an agent.
- JButtermilk 4mo agoI think marketing is fine until it turns into lies. Reaching people to sell them your product should not be an issue. That, with misrepresentation and misleading claims is an issue.
- francisofascii 4mo ago"Men of America smoke Chesterfields" Is that a lie?
- iririririr 4mo agono true Scotch would fall for that
- ilovetux 4mo agoI would agree with you if we were just talking about the abstract idea of marketing. But like everything else, the devil is in the details. The marketing industry in the US is built not only to get the word out about your product, but also to gatekeep who can compete in our free market. With marketing being so pervasive as to monetize the entire internet it effectively levies a tax on every business that wants to compete. If you dont have the marketing budget to outspend your competition then they have no competition.
- nradov 4mo agoReally? How much did Tesla spend on marketing?
- ilovetux 4mo agoFair enough, I suppose. While Tesla has (in some years) avoided traditional marketing, the ceo is known for spending ridiculous amounts of money on publicity stunts like having a submarine shipped to a cave and buying Twitter to boost public perception of his companies. I think this is the exception that proves the rule.
- somenameforme 4mo ago
- cluckindan 4mo agoIt’s more than marketing, they’re applying cigarette processing principles to food processing: choosing specific flavor chemicals and additives to produce maximum addiction within the varied neurophysiological profiles of different consumer cohorts They’re essentially engineering food to produce subtly mind-altering effects.
- AngryData 4mo agoI mean that would seem to apply to nearly all packaged foods that aren't plain bagged fruits and vegetables. If you sell food, you want it to taste good and want people to want to eat more of it. Whether its doritos, chili dogs, apple pie, bread, jam, or whatever else. Nobody makes a mix of peanut butter, finds it bland and unappealing, but then doesn't change either the ingredient proportions, ingredient sources, or add in other flavors or spices or sugars to make it more appealing.
- cluckindan 4mo agoFood being made appealing is one thing and adding behaviorally reinforcing drugs into foods is another. Especially when the latter are not just one product, but a spectrum of products, each one engineered to produce addiction in a different group of people (nationality, ethnicity, genetics)
- geye1234 4mo agoIt's astonishing to me that advertising and marketing is accepted as normal. The majority of B2C marketing is designed to manipulate people's emotions so that they act against their interests, in order to make you money. It's really disgusting.
- cm2012 4mo agoI don't know if you know this, but all Facebook ads as well as TikTok ads and so on are public on the internet. You can go to Facebook Ads Library. https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&ad_type=all&country=US&is_targeted_country=false&media_type=all&search_type=page&sort_data[direction]=desc&sort_data[mode]=total_impressions&view_all_page_id=820882001277849 https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/?active_status=active&a... And in doing so you can see that what you're saying is actually not true. Look up any random advertiser and you'll see that it's pretty uncommon for ads to be based around insecurity. Almost always it's on banal product features. The insecurity-focused ads do exist but they tend to be focused on a few broad lowest hanging fruit ad categories.
- jnovek 4mo agoThere are entire categories of ads that operate on insecurity, they just don’t come out and scream “this is because you’re insecure” as that would make for bad copy. E.g. you think adult diapers advertise on anything other than insecurity (even if that insecurity is well-founded)? Also, GP was talking about enterprise (B2C) and ads for B2C are pretty scarce in consumer-focused spaces. Insecurity, FOMO, etc is absolutely used to advertise to people in middle management on up.
- 3form 4mo agoWho said anything about insecurity? "I like this thing" (which I don't need) is also an emotion.
- bondarchuk 4mo agoThat's actually really interesting about all ads being public like that! Didn't know that. Is it because of some regulatory requirement or just because it's useful business wise? (anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)
- cm2012 4mo agoTobacco is an addictive product that on average hurts the people who use it as a negative utility. Almost every other product people buy has a positive utility. Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad.
- bandofthehawk 4mo ago> Tobacco, along with other drugs, is uniquely bad. How can it be "uniquely bad" if it's "along with other drugs"?
- harimau777 4mo agoNot every drug has the same effects and side effects. For example, marijuana is much less dangerous than heroin.
- bandofthehawk 4mo agoYes, that was kind of my point. Either tobacco is uniquely bad or it can be grouped "along with other drugs". It can't be both.
- throwaway173738 4mo agoI don’t think Marijuana is likely to land you in the ED in quite the same way but the habitual smokers I’ve met tended to way underestimate how impaired they are by it and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of them drive and operate equipment while suffering those effects. Even the framing of Marijuana as a non-addictive substance seems to be a marketing framing.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- toasty228 4mo agohttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational_scale_to_assess_the_harm_of_drugs_%28mean_physical_harm_and_mean_dependence%29.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational... Tobacco ranks pretty high in term of dependence and physical harm, especially considering that it's legal.
- BigTTYGothGF 4mo ago> 95% of marketing needs to be banned. I could get behind this.
- singularity2001 4mo agosome of the greatest ideas are proposed in a ridiculed manner first
- Theodores 4mo agoThe story is an embroidered myth based on a sprinkling of facts. This is my understanding and I eat no processed food!
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]