From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 21:00:29 BST
> [Arlo]
> Just ask any advertising executive on Wall Street... Or Wikipediea. Or
> Walter Scott, who in 1904's The Psychology of Advertising wrote
> "advertising has as its one function the influencing of human minds...As it
> is the human mind that advertising is dealing with, its only scientific
> basis is psychology". Or consult the referred Journal of Consumer
> Psychology, and any number of students in Consumer Psychology graduate
> programs, which covers things from very basic "color theory" to the power
> of associative placement.
>
> Advertising is value manipulation. Plain and simple.
Advertising proclaims freedom, the highest value of all. Plain and simple.
> [Platt]
> [Here you quote me to prove, what?]
> To quote Arlo: "Eliminate advertising and you'd get a clearer picture of
> which products would succeed or fail in the marketplace by virtue of their
> 'Quality'" How a MOQer can propose to curb free speech by eliminating
> advertising is beyond my comprehension.
>
> [Arlo]
> Free speech doesn't cover yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Or slander.
> But you know full well my statement was hypothetical, and not a call to use
> the Big Government of Bush to "eliminate advertising". Ironically, my
> hypothetical world with no advertising would see a much freer market, where
> products would not succeed or fail based on celebrity endorsements or slick
> campaigns, but on their own Quality.
If you can cite where an advertisement caused a riot in which people were
injured or killed, you may have a point. Otherwise, you have no point.
No amount of advertising can make a product succeed that doesn't meet the
values of consumers. Remember the Edsel?
As for you hypothetical, you take away with one hand (not a call eliminate
advertising) then bring it back with other (would be a freer market.)
That's called trying to have your cake and eating it too.
> One thing I am for, is truth in adverstising. I think McDonald's should
> have to display pictures of their actual products in their ads and behind
> their counters. Being as their sales would plummet (demonstrating the power
> of advertising), if they wanted to stay in business they'd have to make
> their actual products look like what the advertise. Your consumers would
> win. But this will never happen, since it interferes with profit in a world
> where "good profit" still has the emphasis on "profit". When that gets
> shifted to "good", I think the culture will endure a number of changes. I
> only hope I am alive to see it.
>
> In the meantime, I'd love a series of courses in "critical consumption",
> beginning with small kids, where ads are dissected and the students are
> shown the techniques and reasons how and why ads are designed to manipulate
> them. It could use "Quality" as a way of separating the actual product from
> the deceptive rhetoric of adversting around it.
Yes, you would love to see courses attacking capitalism and the free
enterprise system, not to mention free speech. For a better educational
lesson, let's send the kids to Cuba for a semester to give them an idea of
a country that's full of Quality because it prohibits advertising. :-)
Platt
P.S. Speaking of Marxists, a book on Mao just published called "Mao-The
Untold Story" begins with this sentence: "Mao Tse-tung, who for decades
held absolute power over the lives of one quarter of the world's
population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime,
more than any other twentieth-century leader." Wasn't Mao a hero to many
60's hippies? As I recall, Mao's "Little Red Book" was an icon of that
age.
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