Marketing and advertising is bullshit and you should hate it.

On any given day, in the first five minutes I'm awake, I've been exposed to around twenty advertising or marketing offers trying to convince me to buy shit.


I'm a social media tragic, so it's probably my own fault. There's no escaping internet ads, so I try to make do by just ignoring them the best I can. I probably do better than most, but there's no escaping the sinister feeling that -- at all times -- someone, somewhere, wants you to buy something from them.


It may be that it's an advertisement for something I actually need.  But usually it isn't. And it's not just on the Internet. The branding, packaging, and logos of about 6 different products or services are within my field of direct vision right now, relaxing on a computer in a lounge room. These images, icons, symbols, flood through my life and guide my purchasing habits in subtle ways that my conscious mind can barely keep track of.


In short, there's a whole lot of consumer marketing and advertising executives influencing, directing and sometimes downright manipulating the way I spend any money that I may earn on any given day.


This phenomenon is a part of the daily routine of every single person in a consumerist society. In essence, it is bullshit. And if you're sharp enough to read the title of this post, you'll know that I think you should hate it. Here's why.

1. Ads are smarter than us now. I read the demographic that is least susceptible to 'conventional' marketing is Generation Y, my demographic. So those that present us with advertising and marketing daily, in turn, have to become more clever. The Gen-Y demographic has both the largest disposable income, and the best grasp of technology like internet smartphones, which do more stuff --- for free --- on a daily basis than any other product has before.
   
   The result is the ad has to be smarter than us. While it sounds like I mean the advertisement has developed sentient consciousness and artificial intelligence, what I mean is the images, media, sounds and text we take in when we briefly view an advertisement has to be specifically tailored to bypass our intellect and appeal to an artificial, created 'want'. From the article linked above:
   "Spin Communications chief executive Simon Lock said the report showed that marketers needed to find clever ways to establish a rapport with this more suspicious demographic."
   
   An example would have to be the evil genius of the 'Share a Coke' campaign.
   
   
    
   
   

   This is smart advertising at it's best. Besides the fact that we consumers have seen enough Coke ads to last until doomsday, some bright spark had the simple idea of cutting into the phenomenon of picture sharing on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and injecting a large portion of Coke advertising onto the wall of every moron who looks at a can and thinks: "Share a can with Barry! I KNOW A BARRY!"
   
   Then, the person takes a photo with their smartphone, uploads it, tags it, and waits for the Likes to roll in. Satisfied that they have been sufficiently clever, this person most likely wets their whistle with an ice cold Coca-Cola.
   
   What one little packaging idea --- putting a variety of common names on Coke labels --- actually did to the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of Aussie consumers, is staggering. When a consumer is switched from a simple person who enjoys the advertised drink to someone who not only drinks it but becomes their own autonomous advertising and marketing machine, you have to see why I cry 'bullshit.'
   
   It is manipulation on a terrifying scale --- if you think of humans as natural beings that once roamed the Earth on their own spiritual quest, that is. Now our spiritual quest is getting hijacked, chopped up and sold off to the highest corporate bidder. It's bullshit and you should hate it.
   
   
2. Marketing exploits human instinct and emotion. I want you to watch an ad that I saw only a few days ago. Just watch it, and keep reading afterwards.
   
   
   
   Seems to be a fairly innocuous advertisement for a relatively cheap kind of funeral insurance, right? Personally I hate insurance of all kinds, especially since they take people's money weekly or monthly, then when the shit hits the fan, they try to squirm their way out of paying for things they're trying to insure. But that's not what this article is about.
   
   Now, if you're like me, you're used to this kind of shit all the time. Like I said, this world requires advertising and marketing to function, so we're literally saturated in it. But this advertisement, while ostensibly selling a service, is actually creating an artificial consumer fear -- having no money to pay for the costs of the death of a loved one -- and then the company, represented by a smooth voice-over, arrives to proclaim itself as the saviour of coffee-cup-clutching widows everywhere.
   
   It plays on the emotion of love, our fear of loss, and our need for stability. And as soon as you feel those emotions, you are more likely to sign up to their policies, which will then detract a small portion of your income every day/week/month. All for that legendary product insurance companies have sold for years: "Peace of Mind."
   
   But they don't sell that. They pay for the odd funeral here and there. They pay, obviously, out of the $3.41 a week they're getting from people that haven't died. People who have watched manipulative ads like this. It's bullshit, and you should fucking hate it.
   
   
   
3. Buying shit we don't need is literally slowing the progress of humanity down. The debt level of all sovereign nations is staggering. The PERSONAL debt level of these nations is equally as staggering. But still, we borrow. We buy consumer items, quite expensive ones too, on a regular basis. We don't fix troubled electronics, we replace it. We devote half our income to either paying rent or an interest repayment on a home loan. It is (and I'm probably going to be written off as a crazy person in this paragraph) a form of MODERN SLAVERY. We are not held by cages and prisons, and we are not whipped by slave masters. What we have now is a form of economic slavery, fueled by the awesome propaganda machine that is the marketing and advertising sector.
   
   People hear the term slavery, and liken their own lives to slavery, and then dismiss it. How can I be a slave? I have air conditioning and an iPad. I drive a car that I purchased and hand-selected, to a job I chose to apply for. I watch whatever TV or YouTube video that I like. I am free.
   
   After an interesting presentation last week from my personal friend Benson, I began to reconsider my own perspectives on what we term 'value'. He showed me a powerpoint he was using to educate people in presentations he was making around the country, about how we in our current society view value, how we assign a certain economic value to objects based more on their context.
   
   The truth is, the way we assign value to a house, or car, or Xbox, or anything, is based on a broad set of economic factors that are inherently manipulable.
   
   In layman's terms, why is a bottle of milk $4.50 and a one-bedroom apartment in Western Sydney $450,000? Is the apartment worth 100,000 milk bottles? No. The basic mathematics behind it is simple. If you can convince someone to pay a price for a product or service, then that is what it is worth, according to our monetary structure. Supply and demand is a pretty easy concept... that is of course, until our good old friends Marketing and Advertising come in, tasked with the specific job of artificially changing the value of a product or service.
   
   And when we understand these obvious economic truths, and couple that with an objective look at the state of the world's finances right now, I don't feel I'm being too sensationalist when I say buying shit we don't need is literally slowing the progress of humanity down. And more specifically, paying WAY TOO MUCH is slowing us down. We would be 1000 years further into technology if the Church had not squashed the idea of scientific discovery and prowess during the middle ages. What we are being stifled with now is our own stupidity.
   
   It's an illusion. It's all bullshit. Are you getting that yet? All that is helping humanity right now, is technology. Our technology has gotten insanely innovative, and it's not even a stretch to say that the modern day person equipped with an internet-capable smartphone has a form of technological superpowers that people 50, 40, even as little as 30 years ago simply did not have. The ability to record a high-quality video, then upload it to a satellite so that a person 5000km away can watch it on a big screen TV mere minutes later is a fundamental change in human technological evolution. But because of the need to commercialise, to add a price tag, to create cycles of consumption, this technology is bastardised into becoming just another tool to keep a consumer consuming. It's slowing down the progress of all humanity, it's bullshit, and you should hate it!

I don't know what else to tell you in this post without repeating myself. If there is a need of a Too Long; Didn't Read, then here it is: Don't just take for granted the images, sounds and videos that sell you things on a daily basis as 'the way things are'. You're better than that. Humanity is better than that. The sooner we can go all Howard Beale and scream "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" out of our windows, the better. It's not cool to be lied to, it's not cool to act like being lied to because companies need to make a profit is no big deal, and it's not cool to act like spending and spending will be the only way to bring us out of debt. It won't.

There is so much awesome progress in humanity's future, I feel, if we can just get out of this mindset of consumer culture and take our technology, our society, and our species to the next level. Let's work on that, K?

Peace and Love

Willskis