We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Samizdata quote of the day The simple fact is that advertising doesn’t compel anyone to buy a product. At best, it can create some warm and fuzzy associations. A person can act on those random impulses — or he can choose to think about his purchases. It’s wholly up to him.
Diana Hsieh, stating what ought to be bleedin’ obvious as we Brits say. But good on her for saying it anyway.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
I’ve watched lots and lots of commercials in my day, and I’ve bought maybe one percent (probably less) of the total things I’ve seen advertised. That’s a pretty bad record if they’re controlling my mind.
Of course, you know, it’s the poor people who are being victimized by the Evil Capitalists, because poor people are naturally desperate and irrational owing to their relative lack of money, which is why we need a benevolent State to watch over the businessmen and keep them from taking advantage of the poor. Much as you would watch over an older child who wants the candy that a younger and more impressionable child has. You know what I mean?
Yes.
There have many examples of ad campaigns that been good in the sense that people liked the ads and remembered them (“you are never alone with a Stand” for Stand cigarettes springs to mind) but where the good or service advertized has still bombed.
Ads may lead someone to look at a product (so ads are worth doing and worth doing well), but if the product is not liked (for itself – not for the ads) people will not continue to buy it.
Two campaigns are worth watching at the moment.
First, “Virgin Media” has been running (for months) the biggest ad campain (plus special deal prices and so on) that I have ever seen.
Second, the publishers of Philip Pullman’s childrens books have been running a very big promotion.
Rigged “votes” for the best childrens book ever (when there was an open vote, some years ago, the Pullman books lost – in spite of efforts at vote rigging, so they just prevented the public voting at all in the recent “vote”), and the books put on special stands in places like “W. H. Smith” (book retailer).
It really is as blatent as that, one goes in and the Pullman books are not filed under P in the fantasy section – they are put on a special stand by the door (to try and boost the sales figures).
No doubt it is all tied in with the film launch in December – but it has been going on for months, and the “great and the good” (i.e. the Guardian readers and the B.B.C. people) have been boosting the Pullman books whenever they get the chance.
I think that both products (Virgin Media and the Pullman books) are crap, but it will be interesting to see if the ad campaigns and the promotions have a big impact.
After all – I have just given them a bit of free publicity (although with a health warning), so the message is getting to people.
And yet the effect on children can be pronounced(Link).
I think we should be careful about differing between advertising as such and sales promotions, such as displays of a certain book – or even book signings for that matter. The cover of a book tends to advertise its content, true, but putting books where people see them easily (or for that matter sweets in the reach of kids in supermarkets) is all part of the “point of sale” mix.
The same applies to sponsorship, which is usually fatuous as the cultural event or sports fixture is going to go ahead anyway whether anyone has put their name around the place or not.
Most advertising only works if people are looking for that type of product to buy. A lot of TV ads for instance are easily recalled by people but with the wrong product names, and even the most effective ads rarely “sell” a lot of items. They might well create good impressions and, sometimes, given a choice between two similar products consumers may go for the one they think they somehow “know” from the ads they’ve seen. But as there are many other factors, not least price, it’s a hard call to make.
Some wealthy businessman (sorry, his name escapes me) said, well over a hundred years ago, that half of his advertising worked and half of it didn’t work. The problem he said was he didn’t know which half.
There are products which took their foot off the advertising gas, as it were, and lost market share and found it hard to claw back but usually only because a rival was on the scene.
Some products get it so wrong. The Strand ads tunred people off because it “sold” loneliness, but maybe it just wasn’t the right colour box or shops didn’t put it where it could be seen among the other fags. Equally all the market research in America didn’t stop the incredibly strange Ford Edsel bombing, despite it having what everyone said they most wanted in a car.
Mind you, the old Coca Cola ads featuring the song “I’d like to teach the world to sing” drove the BBC nuts as people would ring up asking for it as the Coca Cola song, so as advertising went it was pretty good to get the name on the Beeb with its pretend-we-don’t-have-any-advertising policy. Incidentally, the good old Beeb had no problems with horses at showjumping events being called “Everest Double Glazing” or whatever.
A lot of companies do extensive market research into the recall of ads but as a lot of people tend to give the answers that they think are wanted it all is great fun but rather useless. But ads have become a sort of art in themselves, so it all adds to the gaiety of nations.
I find a lot of TV ads insulting, but I tend to fast forward through them anyway, with the PVR. I didn’t notice the Pullman campaign – I’m never in WHSmith – but I thought the Dark Materials series was absolutely fantastic.
Perhaps if the “great and the good” had not kept telling the universe that we had to like the Pullman books I would have given them more of a chance.
On their philosophy, I can understand the position that existance ends with nothingness (i.e. the end of the self), but why this should be source of joy escapes me (using language like we become the stuff of the stars does not do anything for me).
A position that held “when you are dead you are dead – it is terrible, obscene, but it is the truth” I would respect (even whilst I hoped it was not true). I do not respect the idea that it is somehow a good thing.
As for the “Republic of Heaven” idea that was old even before the French Revolution.
Perhaps I can not separate my dislike for the man (he even supports “progressive” education, which as anyone who has seen my mistakes in spelling and grammar can tell, I am a victim of) with my judgement of the work.
James Marwood,
Do you think the effect of parental discipline and discretion can be pronounced, also?
It is the parents’ responsbility to exercise control over the result of their lifestyle choice, their offspring.
As for advertising itself, it isn’t an exact science. There might be varying formulae for success, but inevitably it is always a gamble on the marketplace.
Even if advertising functions as a form of “product propaganda” the answer certainly isn’t that it be somehow regulated by true propagandists – The State. I may have reservations about the amount of advertising one sees in a day (at least here in the US which it is estimated the individual sees about 1,000 + different types of advertisements in a day) but the answer is not Force.
Following up on the poor theme, I have little doubt where all this “research” (paid for with State dollars no doubt) is headed – the better off will find ways to skirt advertising – DVR’s, DVD’s, ad free internet sites, and ad free subscription entertainment, while the poor pay their toll by being advertised at. Mark my words this will soon be a Statist issue with the poor yet again the victim.
I’ve watched lots and lots of commercials in my day, and I’ve bought maybe one percent (probably less) of the total things I’ve seen advertised. That’s a pretty bad record if they’re controlling my mind.
Me, too. And they’ve all been kinds of products that I would have wanted anyway. This notion of advertising as mind control is bafflingly divorced from reality. I’d have a dozen cars and three different phone plans if it really worked that way.
Paul,
But… If it is true that when you’re gone, you’re gone then that possibility generates a certain grandeur. Every moment that ticks by is unique, every experience ineffably valuable because you can never recross the stream of Heraclitus. This is it and there is no rehearsal.
If you are good or evil, stupid or brilliant it perhaps doesn’t matter whether or not it is recorded and you are judged upon it. It just matters in and of itself. Well that’s just my 2p.
I haven’t read Pullman. He sounds like C S Lewis for atheists (and I can’t stick Lewis) but that “star-stuff” thing also winds me up a little because it could just as easily be “slug-stuff” All carbon atoms are equal*
So… what matters is the arrangement of those atoms and what (by whatever mechanism**) they think, feel and do. It’s a beautiful mystery. As Einstein once said “You can analyze a Beethoven Symphony in terms of air pressure waves but…”
I don’t know if death is “terrible and obscene” but I do know (though too infrequently act upon it) that life should be lived full-throttle.
Like you I was state-educated but the grass is not always greener on the other side. Rather the colour of the grass matters not a tinker’s cuss. You are deeply erudite on a staggeringly wide number of matters. I would not dare cross swords with you on political economy if I had a 2m Zweihander and you had a modest penknife. I click over to SD a lot to learn things I didn’t know and in this region you’re a market leader.
We all, ultimately, achieve our own education despite the best efforts of teachers (with a vanishingly small number of exceptions).
*Let’s just for the sake of the point ignore isotopic variation.
**”Mechanism” in a very loose sense. I tend towards the (very) non-Laplacian Copenhagen Interpretation and Wheeler’s “It from the Bit”. Never mentioned the latter here but that’s discussion for ya!
Oops! I too am guilty of “pushing” Pullman to various members of the SD commentariat behind the bike sheds before assembly of a morning too Paul. I just find his prose style better than Rowlings is all.
I was in advertising and marketing for a brief while, and like Watcher in the Dark said… We didn’t know nuffink. We would pat ourselfs on the back like crazy when a Cinzano ad wins the equivilant of an Oscar at the Advertising awards and at the same time watch the products market share drop like a stone.
The below gentleman is someone I also prosletise for and this time I’ve got a link (bloody hope so anyway!)
He has something much better than I to say about marketing in there somewhere.
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1366476727111157120&q=genre%3Acomedy&total=6576211&start=0&num=100&so=0&type=search&plindex=59
There used to be a kid’s toy called “Silly Putty”. I don’t know if it is still sold, as I don’t have anyone to buy it for these days.
Anyway, it was a gooey, rubbery substance, apparently discovered by accident, if I recall correctly, which could stretch and snap back, bounce like a super ball if rolled into a ball, be molded into all sorts of shapes, and pick up cartoons from the Sunday paper, colors and all.
It was the “schmoo” of toys. (There’s a little antiquated cartoon reference for all you minutiae fans, speaking of the Sunday papers.)
This is the image of people that many of those opposed to consumer choice, and therefore advertizing, hold—something infinitely pliable, malleable, stretchable, and bounceable.
All those mindless consumers out there, who will just soak up anything that’s pressed up against their heads, like silly putty on the newspaper cartoons.
There are two fundamentally opposed views of human nature battling for control of the modern world.
One states that humans are silly putty—infinitely pliable, totally shaped by outside forces.
The other view is that people are self contained entities who, while they certainly interact with the world around them, have certain elements which are intrinsic to their very nature as human beings.
The former believes that, if we can only construct the right mold, we can produce the proper people, like cookies cut into shapes, or jello poured into molds with little pieces of cut up fruit and inflicted on despairing relatives at big family dinners.
The latter believes that, while context is important, a human being is a living creature which will seek its own shape and purpose, employing those talents it enjoys and overcoming those flaws within it as best it can.
I live in a land which, for all its many errors and failings, was the first in the history of mankind to embrace the latter principle, enshrining this belief in its foundational legal framework.
I am, therefore, one of the most fortunate of men. I was given, with my first squalling cry, a pearl of great price—my own life as mine to live.
For such is the meaning of those strange, stilted, explosive words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”.
But, as in all that is human, each must choose. Will you be a product? Or a living entity?
And that is the question which greets us each day, each moment, in all times and all places. There is no escape, no evasion possible. Reality relentlessly demands an answer.
One can, indeed, choose to be a drone, either by conscious preference, or by default.
I made my choice long ago. I am a free man. In partnersip with a free woman, I have raised free men and another free woman.
The pearl is theirs also, as a birthright, as the air they breathe, the sun that beams down, the gravity that holds them in place.
They are free in their very souls, in the deepest part that makes them who they are, in that which is “just Norfolk”.
Such is the nature of the conflict which rages all around the globe—who will define what human beings are, and can be?
Who are you?
Yup. What he said.
I’m back.
And this time it’s West Country.
And in case you were wondering, Tesco does cheap Tetleys bitter at the same price as Leeds.
BT?They couldn’t get in my flat, but they still turned on my landline, and I now have full broadband 4 days ahead of schedule.
Diana Hsieh, stating what ought to be bleedin’ obvious as we Brits say. But good on her for saying it anyway.
Well we Aussies are a bit thick between the ears.
You see, we have the current leader of the Labor Party Kevin Rudd, who is strong favorite to be the next PM, promise to “help out mums” by introducing legislation to ban the use of cartoon characters like Shrek and The Simpsons in the use of advertising products.
You see those kids keep asking and asking, and its hard for mums to say no… or so the story goes.
I can’t speak for mums (never having been one), but when one of my daughters saw a comment saying the same thing, she observed “it’s well nigh bloody inpossible for dad to say yes!”.
Her cleverer, younger sister proved this wrong by trying the formula “would you object if I…”, and heard me actually say “Yes”. But I did have to go into darkened room and lie down for a while to recover.
veryretired – excellent comment (as is typically the case with you). Your point of view reminds me very much of what Thomas Sowell had to say in his book,
the vision of the anointed …
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript229.html
Good stuff if you’ve not read it already. By the way, have you samizdaters considered giving veryretired the Midwesterner treatment? I’m sure I’m far from the only commenter to whom that notion has occurred.
Watcher, the quote is from John Wanamaker and in full is: “Half of all the money I spend on advertising is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
I love watching good adverts, sadly the regulations are getting worse and worse. I am not as gullible as the advertisers like me to be, but if I see someone pouring a glass of wine (in a film on TV for example) I am very tempted to get up and get myself a nice glass of red wine. Same with champagne.
That’s because wine is nice. If you saw someone pouring a glass of cyanide you wouldn’t rush out to Poisons ‘R’ Us to buy a couple of bottles. Of course advertising results in people consuming more of products that they like consuming anyway (why would anyone bother otherwise?), but it can’t force people to do things that they don’t want to do. There’s nothing more sinister about advertising than a bloke in a pub recommending something to you.
Thankyou Richard for the real quote about wasted advertising money.
Has to be said that some of the wasted money though creates cracking ads and memorable moments between programmes.
Apparently neither of my adverts worked.
Oh well.
Another day, another dollar.
I remember going to a friends house who had a new telly (we only had one with the BBC. No Dont touch that dial! about it. There wasn’t one) when ITV started in 1956 or 8, just to watch the adverts, which were much more entertaining than the programmes-
But we still didn’t buy any of it.
I do’t object to advertisements for competing products, but why are the the media filled with government advertisements for “services” that we all know to be available, and which are available only from the government monopoly? Even worse are the threatening “we know where you live” ads to remind us to pay our taxes etc.
I assume the agencies responsible for these ads, or the media carrying most of them, are owed favours by the Labour party?
Veryretired – quite so, you put it much better than I can.
RAB – yes I am being silly, having my dislike of man determine how I regard his work.
“Oi you – I do not like you, and I do not like the colour of your tie either”.
Nick M.
Errr no I do not regard the process of physical and mental decline that is life as grand (I did not regard life as grand even when I was young).
I do not regard death as such as “revolting, obscene” – it is the idea that “this is it” (although this may be a true idea).
For most people most of the time, life is a boring, pointless, waste of time. So I suppose I should be glad if Mr Pullman’s view that there is a full stop to it is correct – but I am not (call me inconsistant).
MarkE. Because government is trying to sell a competing product. The alternative to their product is liberty and personal responsibility. But there are not too many adverts for that I’ve seen.
Midwesterner
Not sure I agree with you; government may be competing with liberty and personal responsibility, but they are not trying to sell me their services, because I have to buy them anyway.
I have chosen to pay for my children to be educated instead of entrusting them to state sponsored child abuse centres, but I have still had to “buy” state education. Their advertisements may say the state schools are wonderfull (25% of pupils have received A grade A levels today), but they could say they were hopeless (80% of those A grades may not be worth what the pupil thinks it is*) but I still have to pay for the schools through my taxes.
*Not too worried about A level grades today; my daughter got the grades she needs for the course she wants at her first choice university. But I would have prefered that the A grades she got were evidence of excellence rather than the standard ration.
MarkE, that only means that you are one of the people who will never buy a Ford. But the purpose of the advertising is to shift the assumptions and expectations of the voting demographic. The more people who use a service and take it for granted, the more secure the government is in providing that service.
The purpose of those ads is not really to sell product. It is to shift societal assumptions. It is to sell meta-context. It is to stop people from saying to themselves and each other “Why are they doing program ‘A’?” and get them to just assume that the existence of program ‘A’ is natural. You will usually find the co-conspirators in those ads share the meta-context of big brother government.
MW, perhaps we* should consider running a series of ads to counter government propaganda; for every ad saying “you are entitled to x” we place an ad saying “x is paid for by taxpayers, not the government, and every time you accept it you demean yourself”**
*By “we” I mean you and I organize it, but unless you are richer than I we also need a wealthy sponsor to pay for production and placement.
**Part of the production might involve a decent ad agency (I don’t think that is an oxymoron) to write something better.
MarkE,
I like that idea a lot and have wondered about it from time to time. No I’m not rich, but I can write copy. But in a budget tight tactical triage, I look at a couple of other potentially better returns. (I don’t think those government ads work very well on a dollar return measurement. But they don’t worry about things like that, do they?)
There are two things I would really like to see. One is libertarian comedy. We are beginning to at least see some libertarian jokes. And there is Penn and Teller, of course.
But really, (wouldn’t we all) I’d like to see a libertarian news network.
I look at #?Doughty Street and wonder how much it would cost to make an online half hour newscast. If donated cell phone video was chosen as acceptable, with good fact checkers to confirm* and double confirm (and triple confirm!), it might be a lot cheaper than even a modest advertising campaign. And maybe even generate ad revenue of its own.
I think what we laugh about and how news is presented influence our meta-context a lot more than any ads, even though that is their primary purpose.