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Advertising is a cancer on society
I know it's a blog post, but you're not going to get this kind of thing in a news article. Hopefully SoylentNews' many advertisers won't be offended.
[...] Advertising as currently practiced shares these characteristics. It's a malignant mutation of an idea that efficient markets need a way to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them. Limited to honestly informing people about what's available on the market, it can serve a crucial function in enabling trade. In the real world however, it's moved way past that role.
Real world advertising is not about informing, it's about convincing. Over time, it became increasingly manipulative and dishonest. It also became more effective. In the process, it grew to consume a significant amount of resources of every company on the planet. It infected every communication medium in existence, both digital and analog. It shapes every product and service you touch, and it affects your interactions with everyone who isn't your close friend or family member. Through all that, it actively destroys trust in people and institutions alike, and corrupts the decision-making process in any market transaction. It became a legitimized form of industrial-scale psychological abuse, and there's no way you can resist its impact.
The growth of advertising is fueled by the enormous waste it creates. In any somewhat saturated market - which, today, is most of them - any effort you spent on advertising serves primarily to counteract the combined advertising efforts of your competitors. The same results could be achieved if every market player limited themselves to just informing customers about their goods and services. This, unfortunately, is impossible for humanity, and so we end up with a zero-sum game instead (or really negative-sum, if you count the externalities). If you have competitors, you can't not participate.
The blog/article goes on to describe Robocalls, telemarketing, Spam, Leaflets, snail mail spam, SEO, and much, much more, all for the same low price! (Now how much would you pay?)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @11:41AM (4 children)
I'm not trying to be funny here, but I've seen the term being used over the past couple of years but never quite got what people were talking about, it was part of the background noise, so,
I've just spent some time Googling the term..
Seriously?, just when I thought things couldn't get any worse...ok, I know that humanity, or, specifically, western culture, is currently experiencing rather bad outbreaks of all sorts of random fuckwittery indicative of a bit of a decline at present, but what sort of moron is 'influenced' by the 'things' that the search threw up as being examples of 'influencers'?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @02:56PM
I'd expect it's the type of moron who is most easily manipulated, and therefore the most valuable for the advertisers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:35PM (2 children)
My question: how would one become an "influencer"? How does that work? Is it the kind of thing that you just have it and know it or you don't? Do advertisers approach these people to hawk their product? And how do the advertisers identify these "influencers"? It all seems rather curious to me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @04:42PM (1 child)
My understanding is that is all based on "subscriptions" or "likes" or "retweets" or similar depending on the realm where the influencer is considered an influencer, and I think it works in both directions with influencers seeking sponsors and sponsors seeking influencers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 01 2019, @09:31PM
Then it sounds to me like a big circle jerk of "influencers" and sponsors. Mostly harmless (to me), really, as I doubt I will be influenced by what some yutz on twitface is hawking. About the only way I can see this influencing me is that the echo chamber may restrict what is being offered to the rest of us in the general public. But then I don't have much fashion sense so I just buy what is on sale at Kohl's. And I almost never buy the next big shiny on sale at Best Buy; in fact, it was only a few years ago that I bought my very first smart phone, and that was only because the last cell phone broke and Verizon had a special offer that day at their store. This registers as a great big Meh for me.