I'm not against advertising, calm down ha. I'm just saying there's a lot of mediocrity out there. Which there is. I understand the difference between an ad that is not targeting me specifically, and a plain old crap ad. I also happen to think there is a hell of a lot of mediocrity as far as TV shows and 98% of big-budget movies released last year. If you happen to like crap like Two and a Half Men, good for you. Maybe working at an advertising agency on Michigan avenue you get a view of all the best practices and are in a culture where everything discussed day-in day-out is the best practices of advertising. I work for a company that is larger than Apple and probably spends more on advertising than Apple (hopefully not giving away too much). I've seen some of the processes here and it ain't good. This is my first corporate job so maybe my expectations were too high, but it definitely encourages one to go into business for oneself. It seems like a lot of areas are just neglected due to bureaucracy + apathy + a focus on short term profits.
There are only about 40 companies on earth that are bigger than Apple, and the only one the could possibly advertise more than those 40 or so is Walmart. By "not good process" do you mean "Completely unabashed evil"?
Technically only two companies are larger than Apple in dollar terms, and I don't see a lot of PetroChina ads. But luckily for his interwebz-secrecy, 53 companies spent more than Apple on advertising last year.
Speaking of Apple, I recently discovered that my aunt had bought me like $20 worth of Apple stock when I was a kid. Current value? $4,300. BAM!
I was going off the Forbes 500 list ranking, where it ranked Apple #37 in size. Whatever. Does it really matter? My point is that a lot of these monolith companies have trouble running Office 2010, let alone executing CIA-like advertising campaigns or advancing scientific fields of study.
Wait does KIMaster have two accounts now? There is mediocrity in everything. TV shows, restaurants, blowjobs, personalities...forum posts. Did you go to some liberal arts school where they gave you warm and fuzzy feelings about the world outside, you got there and it sucked? Not trying to be a dick, but I feel like that might have been the case.
I'm gonna be one of the few to say I viscerally despise advertising. Not for any reason that makes sense, is intellectually valid or psychologically healthy... but when I watch a Kay commercial and think to myself, "Somewhere out there some poor sap is eating this shit up, buying shiny rocks so little African kids can get their arms cut off," I'm fucking infuriated. Not even about the abuse necessarily, but that people (probably including me) fall for this shit.
Well, maybe I save a little extra hate for the diamond industry. But the point is, you don't want to watch TV with me, because I mock every ad with vitriol.
Well my reaction was two fold. First, working in advertising, just that sentiment. I mean, not to harp on everything said already, but its not a shell game on the Atlantic City boardwalk. Nobody is being tricked into anything. Second, growing up with a father in the diamond industry, not as a jeweler/wholesaler/cutter/etc but as a completely neutral tech consultant of sorts, the overblown media sensationalism around the perceived blood diamond problem and the idea that every diamond is bathed in the blood of orphaned African Aids babies sends me into an anger normally reserved for advertising by most in this thread.
They don't have trouble running Office 2010; what they have, is infrastructure and legacy systems that have been running successfully for almost 30 years - systems which in many cases were bleeding edge at the time of implementation. You don't just 'switch' overnight. Everything, and I mean EVERYTHING downstream has to be fully ported, upgraded, and accounted for unless you want to go back tracking your ledger with pen and paper while the neckbeards in IT get everything sorted out. (I for one, would like to hail our new neckbeard overlords; for you keep my SAS running - I'll even do a PROC SQL rain dance if it'll keep you from throttling my mainframe access) Multiply that by just over a quarter million employees... It's a friggen' miracle that some advertisements have even a semblance of sophistication when you consider how many other things are being juggled at the same time just to make sure product stays on the shelf so you have decent quality shit at a reasonable price.
I actually agree with you here. In a perfect world, personal responsibility would be paramount. (You can sense the 'but coming, though). Buuuuut the problem occurs when a failure in personal responsibility doesn't just have personal repercussions, it affects everyone else. If enough people believe that owning a house will get them the smiling wife and well behaved kids and life they've always wanted (because they don't have the raw intelligence / training in critical literacy to realize they're being fed a line of bullshit), and promptly go out and buy a bunch of mortgages they can't afford, they aren't the only ones carrying the can for their decisions. I picked the housing market because it is an issue which visibly effects everyone, but you could make the same argument for fast food, cigarettes, alcohol, televangelists, politicians etc. I agree that you can't draw a line for the advertisers though; at least, I can't think of an enforceable one. The only solution I can think of is attempting to teach children critical literacy, but I suspect that if you do that, the whole system breaks down. It's much harder to sit in a cubicle for 8 hours a day if you can think critically about why you're there. I'm going to fuck up this explanation because it's been a while since I've read it, but there's a fair bit of research to suggest that people feel happiest when they are exposed to a limited circle of people of roughly their own economic status. If you are constantly exposed to people who have more than you, you tend to be more dissatisfied with your own life. If you want to be more content, you narrow the circle. Advertising represents the ultimate expansion of the circle. Fundamentally, what interests me about advertising isn't so much that someone will be compelled to go out and buy something, but that 100,000 pissed off unemployed kids in Britain will see ads for houses they'll never own and cars they'll never drive, and start rioting. Sure, their actions are on them, but at the same time it's a little disingenuous to just say 'well, they shouldn't do that' and go about your advertising day. I absolutely believe people should have the right to smoke. I just personally wouldn't work for a cigarette company.
Ok, question for the marketing people that I haven't been able to figure out. Is Dr Pepper's "It's not for women" campaign serious, or is it some sort of three levels deep, steeped in irony, reverse psychology psy-ops type shit?
Men don't drink diet drinks overall because they think it makes them a pussy. Their sisters, mothers, daughters, wives, drink diet. Same reason men don't drink Smirnoff Ice, Ciders, or Wine Coolers. Hence Coke Zero, which is Diet Coke for men, Pepsi Max which is Diet Pepsi for men Dr. Pepper's whatever is just diet for men. They're not taking the whole Dr. Pepper brand and saying fuck off women, this is specifically a diet brand repositioned for men.
I hate some advertising. Some child hair salon left a piece of paper on my car. It rained, and fucked up my windshield. Well you know what you get you child-hair-saloning-motherfuckers? Social karma. Negative yelp, google places, and facebook posts for you.
That being said, its just some very poorly executed creative. The idea and target market is fine, their commercials however end up unintentionally alienating a segment of their market.
...and therein lies the heart of my argument. The minute you step away from 100% personal responsibility, you have no clear lines to draw. So we can observe that yes, some advertising can encourage bad decisions that may negatively impact both the people making those decisions and the broader market. What do you want to do about it? The lines are too vague to even point to, let alone build rules around. We're not talking about tobacco ads targeted at children, here. I just can't agree there. The answer IS "well, they shouldn't do that." The answer is fuck them. The answer is a bunch of self-entitled pricks, who do widespread property damage because they believe they deserve things they can't afford, should be put down, hard, because, again, FUCK THEM. What do you do, stop advertising nice things that only some people can afford, because some people can't afford them? Advertising does not have a laser-focused distribution medium (well, arguably ad tracking online, but let's keep our scope limited here) - the ads are going to be watched by people who want or can afford the item, and by people who don't want or can't afford it. There are arguments to be made about the wealth gap creating a lot of this hostility, but that has very little to do with advertising.
It's a little hard to tell people to "get fucked" when your youth unemployment rate is more than 20%. For the UK that's literally 1 million plus people, all they really want is jobs. There's quite a difference between systemic unemployment and self-entitlement. I think his point was that advertising just exacerbates an already shitty situation. People generally don't like getting their nose rubbed into poop, especially when it's not theirs.