You should check out the 'Ultimate Bill Hicks' DVD available. Amazon have got it at reduced price at the moment and it is excellent. I laughed and laughed.
That's not an ad, that's genuine interaction. The poster is not an actor(or someone trying to act a role), not an algorythm, not a corporation, not a marketer or salesperson. We must learn to discern between stuff if we want to consider ourselves "real-worlders" or whatever. If you get the concepts mixed up in your mind then your discernment gets distorted and you start conflating what's authentic and what's artificial. That's why it shits in your head.
Seemingly-genuine comments like that could be a plausible future step for escalation of advertising.
I'd guess there are people who would "rent" access to their active social media accounts to a company operating a bot capable of writing subtle "recommendation"-style comments. Sort of a merger of blog-comment-spam-bots and paid "influencer" posts.
heh, funny. But that's the point, deceiving is REALLY easy. But without trust and good faith, things start to get weird exponentially, it adds up. And so, as I saw in another article, truth becomes the roadkill.
You want to stay alive longer so that you can have a positive influence in the lives of the people around you - your family, your friends. It's well documented that "happiness" comes from positive interactions with other people.
In fact you are posting here because you seek to influence, which is great! That's what we're here for.
Well, I do not work in marketing (and I don't think he does, either) and I see where he's coming from. Like it or not, we (humans) are a social species.
I prefer the Spider-Man toothpaste, but if I want to feel particularly impressive I've found you can't go past the Incredible Hulk toothpaste. It's hard to find though.
You are getting downvoted because people feel like it's not adding to the conversation, however, I disagree.
I also use toothpaste, and other products,that my wife chose and came to the realization that even though I might not be directly marketed to, I am still reached by a so-called influencer, who has way more power then some random instagram person or ad.
I wouldn't be surprised to find more Marketing dollars are spent on advertising to women (probably, no proof, just an assumption). Since if they can target the person who purchases for the family, the company adds multiple consumers, regardless if they realize it or not.
To me, that's an interesting introspective and your comment did contribute.
As Nassim Taleb says, "the map is not the territory", just because you can say a lot of things are "kind of like a market", it does not, in any way, means that everything is a market, for example, higiene exists before market, nature exists before market, just because you can draw parallels it doesn't mean you've figured everything out. In the age of machines people wanted to think as if everything was like a machine, then in the age of systems they think everything is "just a system", then "everything is market".. This is faulty cognition, IMHO, in other words: fallacy.
Taleb may have repeated it, but the expression "the map is not the territory"[1] first appeared decades earlier in a paper by Alfred Korzybski[2], developer of the self-improvement movement known as general semantics[3].
Just because we are biologically tuned to "market" ourselves, for leverage in survival/gene-spreading, I don't think it's correct to state that the "entire purpose" of life is to market oneself. Nor does it make sense to say all actions are rooted in this need. In-fact, it seems _most_ actions are in service of other basic or secondary needs. Where is the marketability in taking a piss? Or reading a novel? Or taking the dog for a walk?
Interesting, what do you think is the distinction? The greatest contributor to flourishing capitalism is strong consumerism. And the biggest driver of the consumerist mind is capitalist manipulation. They feed off of each other, and are so intertwined that it's hardly useful to refer to one without acknowledging that it comes with the other.
>Interesting, what do you think is the distinction? The greatest contributor to flourishing capitalism is strong consumerism. And the biggest driver of the consumerist mind is capitalist manipulation. They feed off of each other, and are so intertwined that it's hardly useful to refer to one without acknowledging that it comes with the other.
It would be disingenuous to pretend the two aren't highly interrelated, but we are still discussing two separate phenomena.
The distinction, I think, can be summarised by "build a better mousetrap". I'll try the new product and mention it to my friends. Soon everyone is buying the new mousetrap. That's competition at work.
You don't need a multi-million ad campaign carrying an implicit, or perhaps explicit, message of "if you don't buy <new mousetrap> your wife will leave you/women won't find you attractive/<insert any other insecurity>".
Consumerism is the encouragement of consumption by encouraging vanity and appealing to emotional insecurities. Fundamentally I object to the application of psychological science to the manipulation of society in order to extract profit by causing psychological distress.
While your distinction about building a better mousetrap is true - the corporation building a better mousetrap needs more money to put into R&D and it can get more only if it is either marketing itself to investors (consumers in this scenario?) or gaining a larger market share by promoting themselves.
>While your distinction about building a better mousetrap is true - the corporation building a better mousetrap needs more money to put into R&D and it can get more only if it is either marketing itself to investors (consumers in this scenario?) or gaining a larger market share by promoting themselves.
There is a distinction between promotion and advertising.
I completely agree with you. But it's much more profitable (and therefore fit to survive in a capitalist system) to manipulate consumers to buying your shit mousetrap, than it is to engineer a better mousetrap.
The businesses that lobby politicians to hold these positions are simply using the most powerful marketing tools at their disposal allowed under capitalism: money.
The purpose is not being marketed, is having sex. You market yourself so you can have better sex. At least that's what some people say, like when they claim Zuckerberg started The Facebook so people could get easily laid.
I've also had interesting conversations saying the purpose is not sex but power. We do stuff the way we do because that might get us more power.
Life has many disparate potential sources of meaning, and the urge to systematize everything along one dimension represents ideology at work and should be avoided.
Those who go around proclaiming everything to be only about sex or only about money or only about power wish to make it so.
Of course natural selection is true, and we ultimately strive to pass on our genes but the mechanisms we've developed that motivate/enable us to do so are absurdly complex and admit much more than mere power games and peacock strutting.
The sun doesn't give off free energy to market itself to anyone, and even the the most succesful whore will end up dead. The main difference will be having been a whore.
I brush my teeth several times a day mostly because I had a cavity once when I was a kid and didn't particularly like the sound the drill at the dentist's office made. That and I enjoy various types of jerky and hope to continue enjoying it for the foreseeable future.
Separating signal from noise is work. Dealing with new information is not costless, and there comes a point when closing yourself off is probably the best option.
I adblock. I pirate. I don't use Facebook or other social networking sites.
I don't want advertising in my life. It's propaganda. It shits in your head.
If there's anybody reading this who works in those industries: you thought Generation X was cynical?