Advertising

Guide to Earth, Part XIX.

Advertising is the symbol, the tenet, the essence of our advanced consumer society. The advertising industry is a driving force in the economy. According to Statista, the world spent four times the GDP of Hungary, USD 733 billion, on advertisingin 2023, and this figure does not include covert ads. Happily, this great form of investment is on the rise! What other field can you find, apart from financial services, where you can get rich without any production? Advertising spreads the word about new products, helps consumers make decisions, and empowers underdeveloped people of the Third World to catch up with the advanced West.

Source: news24.com

Obviously, the more money a company spends on advertising, the more it cares about the consumer. Advertising can also be seen as tender loving care, in which benevolent parents, i.e. multinational corporations, enlighten the minds of ignorant children as to what is good for them. Good for the children, of course. The only problem may be that when we finally understand that washing powder X is the best, another advert comes along and explains that in fact detergent Y is the best! What to do in this case? The best thing is to stock up on both. This way you can’t go wrong.

Some dilettantes suggest that the money spent on advertising should be spent on improving the product. Please! If we take this logic further, we arrive to the conclusion that the more something is advertised, the lower its quality. It’s like saying that the most aggressive person in a group is the dumbest, when we know that this is not always the case. Genghis Khan, for example, was a great strategist and successfully prevented overpopulation.

Source: https://correctmongolia.com/genghis-khan-statue/

Advertising brings color to our grey lives. Let’s face it: advertising is art. Tasteful ads decorate our public spaces. Just think about the suggestions of cleanliness female sanitary pads bring, or the poetic depth of the pained faces of migraine sufferers. Drug ads are particularly beneficial. Let’s take as much medicine as possible to avoid getting sick! Cigarette advertisements also used to adorn towns and cities, it’s a real pity that these images of so many happy young people have disappeared from the streets. True, people in pulmonary hospitals are not enjoying life precisely as depicted, but what do you want, Churchill smoked cigars all his life and lived to be ninety. Unfortunately, after decades of struggle, the health lobby unjustly banned tobacco advertising. That’s highly unfortunate, but take comfort: advertising for strong drinks has increased significantly at the same time. We know that liquor is medicine while also being antiseptic.

Advertising harmful substances naturally doesn’t increase their consumption. The image of a blown-up chocolate bar would never tempt hungry people to buy the thing made of sugar and additives instead of a healthy meal. The sole aim is to convert consumers who are already consuming only unhealthy fake chocolate to the advertised unhealthy fake chocolate brand. Advertisers advertise their products solely to build brand loyalty. Loyalty being a vanishing virtue, it’s so nice that brand loyalty is bringing this value back to our lives! The question arises that if consumers already have brand loyalty, what’s the point of trying to lure them to another company, but this problem has already been addressed in the section on washing powder.

As to aesthetics, the accusation that there is too much advertising in public places is far from true. We are nowhere near the level seen in the film Brazil, where advertisements lining both sides of the highway are a welcome protection from the sight of a devastated landscape.

Source: https://epochemagazine.org

Moreover, there are now social ads. In fact, some articles make a note about not containing commercials for ethical reasons. This might make you waver for a moment: is it possible that advertising is not perfectly ethical everywhere? Is it possible that your devoted parents don’t always have your best interests at heart? Let’s get this unworthy idea out of your head! Surely it’s simply a matter of other articles being even better suited to carrying instructional advertising.

Political commercials have a special place among advertisements. It has long been demonstrated that the more money a candidate spends on advertising, the more votes they receive. One can easily see that a politician with more wealth is more skillful, more successful, therefore better able to run the country. This is especially true for parties that have been in government for a long time, having access to the country’s public funds and being able to run gigantic advertising campaigns. In Hungary, one party is so modest and fair that it even advertises its opponents’ candidates instead of its own.

Source: Amerikai Népszava

This particularly tasteful stunt has, of course, quickly become popular with other parties, although unfortunately they only have access to their own money, which is several orders of magnitude smaller than the treasury.

According to some accusations, ads contain masses of subliminal messages, suggestions perceived only by the unconscious mind. This is not true, of course. In our democratic society, who would have an interest in manipulating the public? And even if it was true, the subliminals would be placed there out of politeness. After all, people might get disturbed if they were to consciously discover the erect genitals in soft drink advertisements for children. When advertising professionals act in an amateurish manner, outmoded moralists always become outraged.

Source: https://www.nyugat.hu/cikk/szexista_oriasplakatok_szombathelyen_kreativ_vagy

Subliminals are believed to have been banned anyway, and since they are highly effective, while being undetectable, the ban, which does not exist, would obviously be respected. In any case, there is no reason to worry about suggestions that target the unconscious mind, since it is well known that people don’t live their lives on the basis of emotional impressions, they make decisions only on the basis of conscious, rational facts. The more than one billion smokers could easily give up cigarettes any time they wanted. The overweight population could also lose weight at any moment, they just deliberately choose a more corpulent body shape because this is what they prefer. Racism and religious hatred, is similarly based on obvious facts, never on images, feelings or moods that have been ingrained in people.

Others complain about giant ads displayed on scaffolded houses, which, unlike the subliminals, are illegal in Hungary, yet the country is full of them. Those imbued with an exaggerated sense of criticism portray this as a mockery of democracy, the rule of law and, not least, aesthetics. But in fact they are a sign of a high degree of freedom in society. After all, it would be dictatorial to impose such heavy penalties on unlawful ads that they would not be worth erecting. Newspapers used to make their living from illegal full-page cigarette ads and now this is taken away from them. Surely you don’t want to pose limits on news and free speech!

Source: http://www.hazaitajak.hu/nyugati_ter_01_012-i43309.html

Young people no longer even remember the bygone era when there were no ads during films on TV. Fortunately, progress, the spirit of America, has reached backward Europe. These ads serve to protect people’s health. Now you don’t have to hold your bladder when watching an exciting film. You can use the ad breaks to relieve yourself since you’ll be easily able to hear the advertisement in the toilet, being twice as loud as the program itself. The volume increase can also serve to wake you up if you’ve dozed off during a boring film. And during horror movies the insertion of commercials can be a life-saver, calming your blood pressure.

Critiques have also come up with hilariously absurd theories about advertising on TV. One such hypothesis is that commercial TV and radio programs are really just a medium for advertising. Since these channels live off advertising revenue, so the conspiracy theory goes, it drives their entire operation, subordinating everything to advertising. Even a small child can see through the ridiculousness of such a statement. This would be like saying that the most important thing for a shopkeeper is to make a profit, not to serve his customers. Or saying that victory is more important for a warring party than honoring the rules of engagement.

People are convinced that they aren’t influenced by advertising. Everyone believes they always follow their own choices in their shopping and lifestyle. It may be possible, they think, that commercials affect other people, but it certainly doesn’t affect them. The three quarters of a trillion dollars spent on advertising each year (so far) is obviously just a hobby with no hard business calculations behind it, it’s just a fashionable thing to do for companies. Unfortunately there are also paranoid minds who claim that advertising is deliberately dumb in order to fool us, and more easily absorb its hidden messages on a different level of consciousness. Let’s not listen to such whining, because we might become aware of the fact that we have voluntarily put our necks into the hook, and this realization is bad for our self-image. Not to mention the fact that if we didn’t obey the suggestions in ads and stopped overconsumption, the economy would grind to a halt, we wouldn’t have jobs and couldn’t work to buy all the unnecessary things advertised. We might end up spending time with our children, enjoying the beauty of nature and the blue sky! Thank goodness there are now also aerial commercials.

Forrás: https://www.enigmaglobal.com/marketing-techniques/advertising-here/