On Advertising

My pet sheep died last week. The funeral was today.
As I stood there, giving my sad, reminiscing speech, I realized something: Ewes Only Live Once. So treasure your sheep while they live, dear reader. You never know when they will bleat their last.



Advertising is more than scary. It's terrifying. Whenever I want to feel paranoid, powerless, and disgusted, I let my thoughts wander to the advertising industry. Ads are specifically designed to make people unhappy, because happy people don't buy things.

This is a interesting comparison. Source

There's a term advertisers throw around: "clutter". This buzzword refers to the ever expanding and ever more meaningless aggregate of advertising. Advertising is always there, lingering on our peripheral vision. It saturates our cultural consciousness. It takes endless forms: annoying popups, enormous billboards, catchy jingles. The end goal of any advertisement is to "cut through the clutter", to make a commercial that sticks with the consumer. Brand retention is key.

Here's the thing: In its desperate attempts to cut through the clutter, advertising inevitably becomes a part of it. There's a bitter, crushing irony there. Imagine if your friend told you that he didn't care about designer clothes. Fashion shows are a stupid waste of money and time, he says. There are much better ways we can spend our resources. Every time he sees someone on the street with a brand-name article of clothing on, he complains to no end. He has declared a War on Fashion.
Yet despite this, he is always wearing designer clothing, shops at the most expensive department stores, and spends every cent he has keeping up on the latest trends.

Is... is this trendy? It's the first result in Google Images for the term.

You should tell your friend to consider going into marketing, because his thought process is similar to how the advertising industry works. It's almost like a satire of itself. This is an industry so far removed from reality that it says when you open a can of Coca-Cola, you are opening happiness itself. Now that's weird. Weirder still is the fact that advertising is so branded into our cultural consciousness that this message seems perfectly normal to us.

Seriously, what does this even mean?

The weirdness doesn't end there. When you aren't paying to use an online service, it seems like you're not consuming any product. In fact, you are the product. Your very presence is how corporations such as Google or Facebook make money. They are selling you, giving other companies a chance to bombard you with commercials, hoping to extract maximum profit. It's important to recognize that our time and our attentions are worth just as much -- probably more -- than the dollars in our pockets. The next time you see a 'vert for an idiotic online flash game, Facebook has successfully sold you, the consumer.

We as consumers are a product. Something something bitter, crushing irony again.

Isn't it unsettling to realize that, in all likelihood, search engines and social media companies know more about us than our friends? Our family? Ourselves?

-Me