Thursday 9 May 2002

Pic of the day: TV - the power tool of evil! Screenshot from The Sims, since I don't have a TV at home. Nyah nyah! Ahem. Anyway ...

Advertising

I don't mind commercial advertising, in principle. There are many products I would not even have heard of, if not for advertising. I think it is a good thing that companies can inform about the strengths of their products. Competition benefits the consumer.

What I abhor is emotional advertising. That's just EVIL. One thing is that it's beside the point. When I want to buy a computer, I want to know its capacity and what brands of main components they use, and of course the price. I sooo don't need to know that they can afford pretty women and handsome men to pose among their computers. That just means they have more money than they need and ought to cut their prices instead. Like, duh! What else could it mean? That I'm gonna become handsome too if surrounded by their machines? Come on, if I were that retarded, would I afford to buy my own computer?

***

Sadly, yes. Statistics show that emotional advertising works. Sometimes it is hard to remember that a large percentage of the population even in rich countries are really, really stupid. Which brings me to the next point. The people who make the ads are not that stupid. Far from it. They coldly select the emotional strings to pluck, like a scientist running a rat through a maze. Has it ever occurred to anyone that this is EVIL? That it ought to be illegal to swindle money from the less gifted by manipulating their feelings? Why in the name of decency doesn't anyone throw these fraudsters in jail where they belong?

To add injury to insult (for a change), even we who react negatively to this advertising must still pay for it. In many cases, there are no easily available alternatives that stay out of the circus. Not only do they part us with good money for no good reason, but we are effectively drafted to pay for a certified act of evil.

The quickest way to reduce your exposure to emotional manipulation is to get rid of the TV. Compare advertising in newspaper with advertising on TV and you will see that TV ads are almost entirely emotional. This is all well and good if the point is to make you give to charities, I guess. But in commercial advertising, it adds nothing but greed to your life. Do you have the power to resist?