Advertising

William Gagan Mr. Hoskins English 51 26 September 2006 Sickness of the Mind Today’s advertising tactics are subliminally polluting our minds. They are crude misleading and devious ways to get into a consumers mindset. They seduce the ordinary consumer into believing that they need a certain product. And when consumers give in they are essentially losing themselves, giving up their own individuality and becoming clones, inspiring mass conformity that’s actually being masked as diversity. Ours mind have certainly become an implicit dumping ground of pollutants, distorted images, manipulative ads and so forth. Well-known authors such as Douglass Rushkoff, Peter Belmonte, Damien Cave and William Lutz have written articles that address these concerns towards advertising. As well as Adbusters, a non-profit magazine which is truly concerned about the “erosion of our physical and cultural environments by commercial forces”. Rushkoff is a columnists and writer who analyzes about the way one shares and influences others values. In his essay “A Brand by Any Other Name,” he writes about how brands depend on image, how they project and promote their merchandise and how while consumers think that they are admissible to advertising, they are essentially being lost in striving to “brand” themselves. Rushkoff mentions a phenomenon which he sees as, “a psychophysical response to the overwhelming sensory data in a self-contained consumer environment.” I have come to agree with him. A man named Victor Gruen is responsible; in the early 1950s he designed the first fully-enclosed mall in Southdale in Minnesota. His innovation created the “Gruen Transfer”. The shopping mall is a place where ones consumer’s mind-set slowly dwindles away and one is more likely to make impulse purchases. Its here where the unconscious atmosphere, the bright lights with colorful radiance, the mirrored and illuminated surfaces, the music that makes you feel content, the specific arrangement of interior store fronts and of course the cozy temperature all counteracts each other to produce the effect of the consumers strolling slower and their eyes caught up in s glaze. Another advertising maneuver is called “wink” advertising. Basically, “wink” advertising is a technique that prides is finesse to rouse a young person’s or consumers loyalty by pretending to neutralize itself. Such as, if you’re cool, then you get it. An ads ability to bewilder its audience is the new credential for the brands perceptibility. Rushkoff’s main note is that consumers today anatomize every purchase they make while being eagerly aware of how much detail has gone into fascinating them. The more that one tries to connect with brands, the more they begin to brand themselves. Peter Belmonte is a marketing executive, who wrote “Brand Cool” an essay that was featured in the September October 2003 issue of Adbusters magazine. What is cool' Belmonte views the concept of cool as being, “a timeless emotional need”. He believes “cool is a comprehensive set of life-guiding concepts, shorthand for social survival: acceptance, popularity, fun and success.” However, that’s not a definition, cool had no definition. Brandmasters began to study teens in the 1990s; the problem was the new generation, Generation X. It became the advertiser’s greatest challenge; it was a self-defense system against the merchants, set up by consumers. Soon the advertisers figured out the way, anti-sell became the new sell. One of the key ideas in Belmonte’s essay if the idea of reflexivity. Through reflexivity, the medias powers show us how we should or could be living. The susceptibility of information media to shape society. That may leave one to ask, where is cool going next' What’s the next, new, hip thing to be consider “cool”' The only answer to those questions is the one that moves at the speed of reinvention. Belmonte longs for the good old days, a place before teen started to become victims of ones own self-consciousness. A writer and Phillips Foundation Fellow, Damien Cave’s essay, “On Sale at Old Navy: Cool Clothes for Identical Zombies!”, expresses the exploitative ways that corporations inspire mass conformity while claiming to convey high culture to the population. The sad part is that few consumers can admit just how conventional their consuming habits have become. They believe that by consuming their needs are truly being satisfied. But in the end, we are actually being conned into thinking that are needs are being satisfied. These ingenious marketers are slowly turning us into automatons who assimilate being cool with getting the same inexpensive stuff that everyone else already has. We are stuck in a homogenized state. The store Old Navy, is designed to somewhat “numb the brain and remove all semblance from the purchasing process.” And Cave points out that Old Navy plays by in some since “sneaky rules”. The bags that the employee’s offer consumers at Old Navy are theses giant, over-sized mesh bags that are qualified to hold more than a hand full of pair of pants, the conclusion being that they are meant to promote over consumption. The whole advertising industry is created to trap the ordinary consumer in a web of materialism. Many surveys suggest that people who put exceeding worth on material goods are less happy in life than those who don’t. One misconception of materialism is that more goods and valuables in ones life will ultimately improve ones life, that unfourtunatly is false. Cave begins to conclude with the notion that since people are spending great amounts of time thinking, buying and even talking about buying certain products, they tend to not have time for the more important things such as conversations about real problems, real politics, and even real culture, all interaction with human population is slowing becoming a thing of the past. An English teacher at Rutgers University as well as a published author, William Lutz explains in his essay, “With These Words I Can Sell You Anything” the ways that advertisers use “weasel words” to deceive their consumers. Lutz’s list of “weasel words” begins us with the word help. The words help means to aid, assist, make easier. It does not mean end, overcome, stop, eliminate, or cure. The little trick that seduces one into believing is that the claim comes after the weasel word, and the claim is usually so extraordinary that one ends up forgetting about the weasel word all together and focuses on the remarkable claim. One of the most infuential words is vitually, it is usually used in claims that seem to make exact, defiant promises when in all reallity there is no promise. New and improved are the most commonly used words. New happens to be the first most commonly use word and improved is the second however, recently one may have seen them being used together, “new and improved” These two “weasel words” are so hard for advertisers to pass up because its so valuable and powerful. Advertisers are skilled proffessionals that aim to get people to but their product, they protray their product in the best most promising light, using any tool, ploy or scam that they are legally allowed. Ruthless advertisers, produce promising and brilliant results.