8 ms·

IMO there is nothing wrong with advertising in the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its comp

IMO there is nothing wrong with advertising in the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its competitors. Here is the price. Here is the total cost of ownership as compared to the competitor. Here is how this product can satisfy your needs in this specific case": But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job". It is very hard to legislate this are because of freedom of speech concerns but the British have a very good set of regulations concerning to advertisement [1] and an independent regulator responsible for this area [2]. [1] http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2008/9780110811475/contents http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2008/9780110811475/conte... [2] https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Our-history.aspx https://www.asa.org.uk/About-ASA/Our-history.aspx

colechristensen 11y ago
To be fair, there _is_ a lot of advertising which is nothing like that.
x5n1 11y ago
It's not just high school emotional blackmail, though that's a part of it. Billions of dollars are spent to scientific research and game people's psychology. On top of that billions of dollars are spent to then spread messages on massive scales that affect virtually everyone's thought process. It's social engineering in its truest sense. The only way to see beyond it is to move to a place which is not affected by the same tools, say very very poor countries and see how different people's psychology is there. In Western civilization we are set up to be miserable from day one. Whether it's through the schooling process or workplace. It's a toxic environment and it is engineered to be that way. To sell more, to be more productive, and to drive everything in a very tight system. It is a system which just like any other system serve itself much more than it serves the objects, humans, it administers. It encourages unstable mindsets and addictions.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- visarga 11y ago
  A regular person sees about 5 hours of TV per day of which 30% is advertising. That is over an hour every day of messages telling you what you need to buy to be happy and where you need to travel, what kind of esthetic surgery to have, which car to drive, etc. The main problem here is that the messages are disingenuous. They present the product being used by beautiful, smiling, sexy people, thus associating it with well being. We are constantly being told: you must get product X or visit country Y and your ego will be rewarded, more attractive, more successful. It's all about self image, how you see yourself. Very very insidious, because the self image is one of the most delicate and vulnerable parts of our psyche. An opposite to watching ads would be to do mindfulness meditation and cleanse your mind of all this crap thoughts and fake values which are not in your best interest.
  - x5n1 11y ago
    It's not as simple as hey I watched this ad and it told me to do this and I did or did not do it. Ads are narratives that create meaning. They in many ways define a sort of metaphysics of our world, a way in which we find meaning in who we are and what we do. They define us as people, society and civilization much like religion defined people in the Middle and Dark ages. Ads are a one way conversation that the producers are having with the consumers. The other side of that is the actual production of the products, namely your jobs. Stuff you spend most of your life toiling away at. Ads are what it means to be human in the 20th and 21st century. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9vFWA1rnWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9vFWA1rnWc
    - imakesnowflakes 11y ago
      I think this quote from the movie Network, might be relevant here. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/quotes?item=qt0447849 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/quotes?item=qt0447849 The scene (in fact, the whole movie also) is worth watching too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKkRDMil0bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKkRDMil0bw
harshreality 11y ago
It is very simple to regulate without getting into freedom of speech issues. Just declare (yes, I'm aware it's a constitutional/SCOTUS issue, not a legislative one) that corporations are not people and do not deserve freedom of speech. If individuals want to write checks for advertising that abuses psychology, that's a more troublesome issue, but getting rid of just the corporate funded advertising would be a huge step forward.
- yummyfajitas 11y ago
  You are conflating disparate issues. Corporations are people - this means that a corporation (rather than some of it's individual members) can own property and owe you money. If you want to sue or enforce obligations, you do it against the corporation itself rather than tracking down specific members and enforcing against them. That's all it means. If you eliminate this and then Comcast injures you, who do you sue? Freedom of speech is held by the owners of a corporation and it's employees; the corporation is property used by the owners to engage in speech. Saying corporations don't have freedom of speech is like saying inanimate objects such as printing presses don't have freedom of the press. Note that printing presses do NOT have personhood, yet they still have freedom of the press.
  - yequalsx 11y ago
    Well, Comcast has hundreds of thousands of owners and they don't all get an equal or even proportional (in reality not in theory) say in how the corporation spends the money of the corporation to get its message across. Corporations have 'free speech' in the sense that a corporation can spend its money without legal limit on political campaigns. The number of people who have effective control over that money is quite small in relation to the number of owners. Saying a corporation has free speech is not all like saying a printing press has free speech. Corporations have their own bank accounts, their own money, are subject to laws and have legal privileges that printing presses do not.
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      I agree that there are issues with shareholder governance; mostly a bunch of well meaning laws from the corporate raider era that prevent shareholder activism. This is a rather separate issue. Suppose we eliminated corporate personhood. Now a collective of people are bound together in a web of contracts and call themselves "citizens united". They agree to act and use a subset of their property in accordance with a specific governance structure determined by a mutually agreed upon charter. How do you hinder this non-corporate group's rights to free speech?
GeneralTspoon 11y ago
> But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that Here's an example of one such piece: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XkaWyrm8EQg/maxresdefault.jpg http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XkaWyrm8EQg/maxresdefault.jpg It's from the Superbowl ad for the mobile game 'Game of War: Fire Age'. It has sweet f-all to do with the game. It's literally just boobs + live-action battle scenes (neither of which the game has). Just another sad attempt to appeal to such basic caveman instincts... 'Game? Boobs? Me...game...boobs...like' I'm tired of junk like that, so at the moment I'm attempting to build an advertising platform for a project of mine to test the theory that advertising doesn't have to be trash (as mentioned above). The platform doesn't allow any sort of custom images/text by the advertiser.[1] The idea is that users decide if they're interested or not based on objective information (the same information as presented by organic listings). For anyone curious, it looks like this in practice: http://i.imgur.com/iI4oon8.png http://i.imgur.com/iI4oon8.png All the data for the campaigns is totally open for anyone to view & analyze [2] (although there isn't much data yet, as I'm only piloting the system now) Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't have enough boobs... but an interesting experiment to try anyway I think. [1] http://getcurated.co/advertising http://getcurated.co/advertising [2] http://getcurated.co/advertising/campaigns http://getcurated.co/advertising/campaigns
- baddox 11y ago
  That Game of War ad is obviously unrelated to the game and appeals to "baser" instincts, but does it really deserve a label as harsh as "psychological blackmail"?
  - GeneralTspoon 11y ago
    You're right, perhaps that's not precisely the correct term here.... "Psychological trickery" or just straight up lies maybe. As it's essentially trying to paint a picture of the game in your mind that's just not true. I would hold them at exactly the same level of sleaziness though.
    - imakesnowflakes 11y ago
      The purpose of the image is to guide your gaze to the ad. And nothing does it better than a scantly clad beautiful women. It is like the oldest trick of the trade. Ever wonder why all those billboards feature beautiful women when the product has nothing to do with women? If you try, you can recognize how your gaze is captured by the image of the women (thanks to a strong evolutionary instinct built over million of years to quickly identify potential mates), and how your gaze naturally follows to the name of the brand/caption on the board...If it was only the brand name/caption, then you would never have even looked at it.
dredmorbius 11y ago
Very much this. If you're not familiar with Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, The Century of the Self, on Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud (whom Bernays effectively made), and Anna Freud, as well as the influence of advertising, "public relations" (a term coined by Bernays), and propaganda (the term he coined PR to avoid) on the public, corporations, and govenrment. Also Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which is an ad-man's perspective on what is fatally flawed with his own industry. See also his later book, The Capitalism Papers. And of course, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. There've been a number of recent HN posts on how bloated websites are becoming, and how content is being watered down on the Web. Pretty much all of this can be traced to the current funding mechanism: advertising. Which is increasingly becoming the problem, not the solution. E.g., TJ VanToll's "The Web's Cruft Problem". Thomas Wells hits on what I see as the two most likely alternative funding mechanisms: a content tax, and philanthropy or patronage. Combining these with some form of decentralised content syndication compensation system seems like a possible path forward. The total value of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, of which publishing is $152 billion. If 20% of that is online content, it amounts to roughly $100 per person per year. Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK's broadband tax proposal is an earlier and similar concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Mander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Mander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication" https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes... http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo... http://developer.telerik.com/featured/the-webs-cruft-problem/ http://developer.telerik.com/featured/the-webs-cruft-problem... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9897306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9897306
- ctchocula 11y ago
wdr1 11y ago
Disclaimer: I work in advertising. > But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job". I don't understand this. If anything advertising is more transparent today than ever before. Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked. With the advent of TV, products would be place throughout the show. Today we have much stricter laws about making it clear a publisher is promoting a product because they are paid. > ... the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its competitors. Here is the price. Here is the total cost of ownership as compared to the competitor. Here is how this product can satisfy your needs in this specific case" Only a very, very small percentage of things are purchased this way. Why does your friend pay extra for those Louis Vuitton sunglasses? Hint: It's not because of quality. All sunglasses are basically made by one company. Why does your friend drink Coke over Pepsi? Hint: It's not because of health reasons & pretty unlikely it's because of taste. Why does your friend buy Frosted Flakes instead of the store brand? And so on... A lot of it boils down to "brand equity" -- what you'll pay for a specific brand over something else. Why do people do that? It's because of the association, image, and feeling a brand generates. You don't sell diapers by saying "We sell good diapers." You sell diapers by showing a cute baby with soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.
- topoligel 11y ago
  > soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product. What if it turns out that people have a finite amount of 'emotional bond chemicals' available each day, and by isolating that feeling and associating it to a product instead of to the baby, well, let's suggest for some people the newly constructed relationship between people and objects is (mother's emotion -> object, object -> baby's emotions, baby's emotions -> object, object -> mother's emotions) , and it doesn't work as synergistically efficient as you might expect? What if you don't even know how to measure stuff like that? What if there is a measurable loss that isn't obvious? What if it's linked to the most random of things, so it isn't even predictably rational in how it affects the system it operates within? The problem with advertising and emotional manipulation is that the information only flows one way. And a constant stream of increasing revenue doesn't mean people are happy, it just means they are buying stuff.
jfoster 11y ago
Can you provide an example of an ad that is like psychological and emotional blackmail? The closest thing that comes to mind is perhaps ads for luxury fashion brands. Is that a good example of what you mean?
- mozumder 11y ago
  The thing about luxury fashion brands, is that they actually look better than basic brands. There is nothing you can buy at Wal Mart that comes close to looking like it was produced by Saint Laurent. These brands hire the top designers and talent to work with them. They are expected to produce top quality work. And, if a luxury fashion brand starts to go down in terms of style, then reviewers pan their collections, sales drop, and they stop being a luxury fashion brand.

colechristensen 11y ago

To be fair, there _is_ a lot of advertising which is nothing like that.

x5n1 11y ago

It's not just high school emotional blackmail, though that's a part of it. Billions of dollars are spent to scientific research and game people's psychology. On top of that billions of dollars are spent to then spread messages on massive scales that affect virtually everyone's thought process. It's social engineering in its truest sense. The only way to see beyond it is to move to a place which is not affected by the same tools, say very very poor countries and see how different people's psychology is there. In Western civilization we are set up to be miserable from day one. Whether it's through the schooling process or workplace. It's a toxic environment and it is engineered to be that way. To sell more, to be more productive, and to drive everything in a very tight system. It is a system which just like any other system serve itself much more than it serves the objects, humans, it administers. It encourages unstable mindsets and addictions.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
visarga 11y ago
A regular person sees about 5 hours of TV per day of which 30% is advertising. That is over an hour every day of messages telling you what you need to buy to be happy and where you need to travel, what kind of esthetic surgery to have, which car to drive, etc. The main problem here is that the messages are disingenuous. They present the product being used by beautiful, smiling, sexy people, thus associating it with well being. We are constantly being told: you must get product X or visit country Y and your ego will be rewarded, more attractive, more successful. It's all about self image, how you see yourself. Very very insidious, because the self image is one of the most delicate and vulnerable parts of our psyche. An opposite to watching ads would be to do mindfulness meditation and cleanse your mind of all this crap thoughts and fake values which are not in your best interest.
- x5n1 11y ago
  It's not as simple as hey I watched this ad and it told me to do this and I did or did not do it. Ads are narratives that create meaning. They in many ways define a sort of metaphysics of our world, a way in which we find meaning in who we are and what we do. They define us as people, society and civilization much like religion defined people in the Middle and Dark ages. Ads are a one way conversation that the producers are having with the consumers. The other side of that is the actual production of the products, namely your jobs. Stuff you spend most of your life toiling away at. Ads are what it means to be human in the 20th and 21st century. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9vFWA1rnWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9vFWA1rnWc
  - imakesnowflakes 11y ago
    I think this quote from the movie Network, might be relevant here. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/quotes?item=qt0447849 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074958/quotes?item=qt0447849 The scene (in fact, the whole movie also) is worth watching too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKkRDMil0bw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKkRDMil0bw

harshreality 11y ago

It is very simple to regulate without getting into freedom of speech issues. Just declare (yes, I'm aware it's a constitutional/SCOTUS issue, not a legislative one) that corporations are not people and do not deserve freedom of speech. If individuals want to write checks for advertising that abuses psychology, that's a more troublesome issue, but getting rid of just the corporate funded advertising would be a huge step forward.

yummyfajitas 11y ago
You are conflating disparate issues. Corporations are people - this means that a corporation (rather than some of it's individual members) can own property and owe you money. If you want to sue or enforce obligations, you do it against the corporation itself rather than tracking down specific members and enforcing against them. That's all it means. If you eliminate this and then Comcast injures you, who do you sue? Freedom of speech is held by the owners of a corporation and it's employees; the corporation is property used by the owners to engage in speech. Saying corporations don't have freedom of speech is like saying inanimate objects such as printing presses don't have freedom of the press. Note that printing presses do NOT have personhood, yet they still have freedom of the press.
- yequalsx 11y ago
  Well, Comcast has hundreds of thousands of owners and they don't all get an equal or even proportional (in reality not in theory) say in how the corporation spends the money of the corporation to get its message across. Corporations have 'free speech' in the sense that a corporation can spend its money without legal limit on political campaigns. The number of people who have effective control over that money is quite small in relation to the number of owners. Saying a corporation has free speech is not all like saying a printing press has free speech. Corporations have their own bank accounts, their own money, are subject to laws and have legal privileges that printing presses do not.
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    I agree that there are issues with shareholder governance; mostly a bunch of well meaning laws from the corporate raider era that prevent shareholder activism. This is a rather separate issue. Suppose we eliminated corporate personhood. Now a collective of people are bound together in a web of contracts and call themselves "citizens united". They agree to act and use a subset of their property in accordance with a specific governance structure determined by a mutually agreed upon charter. How do you hinder this non-corporate group's rights to free speech?

GeneralTspoon 11y ago

> But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that Here's an example of one such piece: http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XkaWyrm8EQg/maxresdefault.jpg http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XkaWyrm8EQg/maxresdefault.jpg It's from the Superbowl ad for the mobile game 'Game of War: Fire Age'. It has sweet f-all to do with the game. It's literally just boobs + live-action battle scenes (neither of which the game has). Just another sad attempt to appeal to such basic caveman instincts... 'Game? Boobs? Me...game...boobs...like' I'm tired of junk like that, so at the moment I'm attempting to build an advertising platform for a project of mine to test the theory that advertising doesn't have to be trash (as mentioned above). The platform doesn't allow any sort of custom images/text by the advertiser.[1] The idea is that users decide if they're interested or not based on objective information (the same information as presented by organic listings). For anyone curious, it looks like this in practice: http://i.imgur.com/iI4oon8.png http://i.imgur.com/iI4oon8.png All the data for the campaigns is totally open for anyone to view & analyze [2] (although there isn't much data yet, as I'm only piloting the system now) Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't have enough boobs... but an interesting experiment to try anyway I think. [1] http://getcurated.co/advertising http://getcurated.co/advertising [2] http://getcurated.co/advertising/campaigns http://getcurated.co/advertising/campaigns

baddox 11y ago
That Game of War ad is obviously unrelated to the game and appeals to "baser" instincts, but does it really deserve a label as harsh as "psychological blackmail"?
- GeneralTspoon 11y ago
  You're right, perhaps that's not precisely the correct term here.... "Psychological trickery" or just straight up lies maybe. As it's essentially trying to paint a picture of the game in your mind that's just not true. I would hold them at exactly the same level of sleaziness though.
  - imakesnowflakes 11y ago
    The purpose of the image is to guide your gaze to the ad. And nothing does it better than a scantly clad beautiful women. It is like the oldest trick of the trade. Ever wonder why all those billboards feature beautiful women when the product has nothing to do with women? If you try, you can recognize how your gaze is captured by the image of the women (thanks to a strong evolutionary instinct built over million of years to quickly identify potential mates), and how your gaze naturally follows to the name of the brand/caption on the board...If it was only the brand name/caption, then you would never have even looked at it.

dredmorbius 11y ago

Very much this. If you're not familiar with Adam Curtis's BBC documentary, The Century of the Self, on Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud (whom Bernays effectively made), and Anna Freud, as well as the influence of advertising, "public relations" (a term coined by Bernays), and propaganda (the term he coined PR to avoid) on the public, corporations, and govenrment. Also Jerry Mander's Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, which is an ad-man's perspective on what is fatally flawed with his own industry. See also his later book, The Capitalism Papers. And of course, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death and Technopoly. There've been a number of recent HN posts on how bloated websites are becoming, and how content is being watered down on the Web. Pretty much all of this can be traced to the current funding mechanism: advertising. Which is increasingly becoming the problem, not the solution. E.g., TJ VanToll's "The Web's Cruft Problem". Thomas Wells hits on what I see as the two most likely alternative funding mechanisms: a content tax, and philanthropy or patronage. Combining these with some form of decentralised content syndication compensation system seems like a possible path forward. The total value of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, of which publishing is $152 billion. If 20% of that is online content, it amounts to roughly $100 per person per year. Phil Hunt of Pirate Party UK's broadband tax proposal is an earlier and similar concept. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimination_of_Television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Mander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Mander https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Postman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopoly "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication" https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes... http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-for-the-uk/ http://cabalamat.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/a-broadband-tax-fo... http://developer.telerik.com/featured/the-webs-cruft-problem/ http://developer.telerik.com/featured/the-webs-cruft-problem... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9897306 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9897306

ctchocula 11y ago

wdr1 11y ago

Disclaimer: I work in advertising. > But what is being passed today as advertising is nothing like that, it is more like high school psychological and emotional blackmail. "Here is this product. If you don't have it you are not in the ingroup but in the outgroup. You are not beautiful enough without this product. People will look down on you without this product. This product will make you more attractive to the opposite sex and more likely to land a high paying high profile job". I don't understand this. If anything advertising is more transparent today than ever before. Consider in the 1800s it wasn't uncommon for a publisher to be paid for a product & make it seem like they were simply endorsing something they truly liked. With the advent of TV, products would be place throughout the show. Today we have much stricter laws about making it clear a publisher is promoting a product because they are paid. > ... the strict sense of the word. "Here is this product. That's how it works. That's how it's different from its competitors. Here is the price. Here is the total cost of ownership as compared to the competitor. Here is how this product can satisfy your needs in this specific case" Only a very, very small percentage of things are purchased this way. Why does your friend pay extra for those Louis Vuitton sunglasses? Hint: It's not because of quality. All sunglasses are basically made by one company. Why does your friend drink Coke over Pepsi? Hint: It's not because of health reasons & pretty unlikely it's because of taste. Why does your friend buy Frosted Flakes instead of the store brand? And so on... A lot of it boils down to "brand equity" -- what you'll pay for a specific brand over something else. Why do people do that? It's because of the association, image, and feeling a brand generates. You don't sell diapers by saying "We sell good diapers." You sell diapers by showing a cute baby with soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product.

topoligel 11y ago
> soft music & get mother's to form an emotional bond with the product. What if it turns out that people have a finite amount of 'emotional bond chemicals' available each day, and by isolating that feeling and associating it to a product instead of to the baby, well, let's suggest for some people the newly constructed relationship between people and objects is (mother's emotion -> object, object -> baby's emotions, baby's emotions -> object, object -> mother's emotions) , and it doesn't work as synergistically efficient as you might expect? What if you don't even know how to measure stuff like that? What if there is a measurable loss that isn't obvious? What if it's linked to the most random of things, so it isn't even predictably rational in how it affects the system it operates within? The problem with advertising and emotional manipulation is that the information only flows one way. And a constant stream of increasing revenue doesn't mean people are happy, it just means they are buying stuff.

jfoster 11y ago

Can you provide an example of an ad that is like psychological and emotional blackmail? The closest thing that comes to mind is perhaps ads for luxury fashion brands. Is that a good example of what you mean?

mozumder 11y ago
The thing about luxury fashion brands, is that they actually look better than basic brands. There is nothing you can buy at Wal Mart that comes close to looking like it was produced by Saint Laurent. These brands hire the top designers and talent to work with them. They are expected to produce top quality work. And, if a luxury fashion brand starts to go down in terms of style, then reviewers pan their collections, sales drop, and they stop being a luxury fashion brand.