The Future.... of Advertising
The future of advertising is absolutely insane. Now companies are simply advertising words, unrelated to products, which they intend to later use in advertisements. And they're advertising them in almost-invisible ways... see this article on the YouTube "wigout" video. Frightening.
posted by Jonathan Ball at 7:36 PM
2 Comments:
hey... i think a lot of people assume advertisers are out there to sneakily convert people. do you know how much we giggle at this 'subliminal' business? it's just not the dilly-o at all... no one wants to make 'buy this product!' ads... i don't. making fun little productions and being entertaining is such a step up from 'virgins and gold if you sail to america'. that's what it's hopefully driving for... just entertaining people so they can make their associations with the company/product.
8:05 PM
i think the "wigout" idea is brilliant. & i also agree that advertisements can be exceptionally creative and entertaining. what disturbs me is the trend towards complete conversion of all aspects of life into manipulative media encounters intended simply to further some consumer effect-without-cause --- the idea that every encounter must be an advertising encounter, even when no product is involved. there is something horribly offensive about the utter saturation of daily life with this kind of "invisible" advertising. seeing a creative advertisement on television or a billboard or some media form which announces itself, through its form, as an advertisement is a completely different thing from two teenagers paid to discuss Band X on the street as if they were having a spontaneous conversation. The latter event involves all manner of deceptions and assumes private corporate right over public social space, and represents an absolute saturation of social life with corporate concerns to the dissolution of individual freedom -- all actions being equivalent in their unconscious engagement with corporate compliance.
McLuhan rightly acknowledged that advertisements were "great art" and that "historians and archeologists will one day discover that the ads of our times are the richest and most faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its entire range of activities." However, he also warned that they were "a crude attempt to extend the principles of automation to every aspect of society" and produced, as a byproduct of their media forms, homogeneity. Baudrillard similarly notes the disturbing collapse of the boundaries between the "real" world and a symbolic realm where only the illusion of reality persists. These forms of invisible advertising are indicative of an existential crisis which humanity will recall as the absolute collapse of all modes of meaningful social engagement.
9:11 PM
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