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from the ad-viewing-quota-enforcement dept.
The University of Warwick's Andrew Oswald and his team compared survey data on the life satisfaction of more than 900,000 citizens of 27 European countries from 1980 to 2011 with data on annual advertising spending in those nations over the same period. The researchers found an inverse connection between the two. The higher a country's ad spend was in one year, the less satisfied its citizens were a year or two later. Their conclusion: Advertising makes us unhappy.
Oswald: We did find a significant negative relationship. When you look at changes in national happiness each year and changes in ad spending that year or a few years earlier—and you hold other factors like GDP and unemployment constant—there is a link. This suggests that when advertisers pour money into a country, the result is diminished well-being for the people living there.
HBR: What prompted you to investigate this?
[ . . . ] I can't help noticing the increasing amount of ads we're bombarded with. For me, it was natural to wonder whether it might create dissatisfaction in our culture [ . . . ] In a sense they're trying to generate dissatisfaction—stirring up your desires so that you spend more
[ . . . . ] exposing people to a lot of advertising raises their aspirations—and makes them feel that their own lives, achievements, belongings, and experiences are inadequate.
[ . . . . ] we controlled for lots of other influences on happiness. Second, we looked at increases or drops in advertising in a given year and showed that they successfully predicted a rise or fall in national happiness in ensuing years.
So always take two ad blockers before bedtime.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 16 2020, @04:45PM (4 children)
If you're unhappy, you'll buy shit.
Feel like you're ugly? Buy cream. Doesn't work. Feel shit. Rinse repeat.
Feel like you're fat? Buy equipment. Doesn't work. Feel shit. Rinse repeat.
It's not actually THEIR fault that you are a sucker for this. Figure out how to become happy with what you are/have. Then you won't go chasing after dreams (vanities).
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 16 2020, @09:37PM (3 children)
I don't think that really addresses my point that the feeling of being to lied and needing your mental defenses up is physically stressful
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 17 2020, @12:01AM (2 children)
"Lie" is too simple a term for what they do. They manipulate and condition, and obfuscate, bullshit, and confuse, and omit and bury alternatives, and exaggerate and magnify their own stuff, and depress (you have problems, and we can help!), psyche, and anything and everything else that might increase sales. Much of that, strictly speaking, is not outright telling of lies, though it certainly is dishonest. Takes substantially more mental effort to cut through such a complicated web than to deal with a few simple lies.
Those who are doing a huge public disservice with their manipulation do not care. For instance, arms merchants. I heard the CEO of an A/C manufacturer say that Global Warming was good for his business.
Soft drinks were originally intended for medicinal purposes and were not thought to become a staple of our diets. How that shift happened is, I would suppose, a case study in effective marketing. Wine and beer are restricted, because alcohol, while sodas get a huge pass despite being empty calories, the worst way to consume sugar. I quit sodas 30 years ago, save for settling an upset stomach. I once thought orange juice was healthy. It's not. Oranges are healthy. Orange juice is oranges with the health all removed. Juice is also out.
Another area we've sunk into is lawn care. It's just nuts. Mowing with an old fashioned reel mower is a lot of work. Those things are heavy, slow, and less effective. If your lawn isn't already pretty neat and monocultured, the reel mower needs lots of passes to cut it. Farmers such as my grandparents sure didn't bother. What for? With the advent of the power mower, lawn care was a ready made market. Advertisers hardly needed to work for it to convince everyone to mow. Status, you know. And, perhaps fear of snakes in the grass. Now, we even have it enshrined in law, in very pejorative terms, that mowing is required! Not mowing is showing that you don't care about the neighborhood, you have no pride in your property, you're creating places for vermin to hide, it's a fire hazard, and it reduces visibility.
Then there's personal care. Especially, the daily shower. Sweat and body odor is so low class, and stinky, disgusting and unhygienic and all. Before indoor plumbing, people pretty much had to suck it up. It was way too much work to pump, by hand, enough water to fill a tub and lug the whole thing into the house and heat it on a wood burning cook stove to do that every day. You took a bath once a week. Daily showering sure sells a lot more soap, shampoo, deodorant, perfume, cologne, lotion, skin conditioners, and so on. One of the sickest things about it all, is that if we ate better, and showered less, we wouldn't have such awful B. O.
I have always found it perverted that the drug store so prominently displays cigarettes, sugary or alcoholic beverages, junk food, and candy. Lots and lots of candy. Get your fix, and the medicines to deal with the fallout, in one convenient stop!
That's just a small sample of the tons of conditioning to which we've been subjected. One eye opener that really hit home with me was a little piece on The Onion that mocked people who buy frozen mac and cheese. Their skit had a suicide hot line and counselor in the grocery aisle to console people who were too lame to cook the macaroni themselves, despite it being so easy. Yet I'm still thoroughly conditioned to grab commercial off the shelf product for my every need. I am merely a bit more aware of it now, and have rebelled against a little of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @03:49AM (1 child)
> Yet I'm still thoroughly conditioned to grab commercial off the shelf product for my every need.
Keep fighting son, you may make it yet!!
I was brought up mostly without TV (born 1955) and missed nearly all the adverts. When I started seeing ads, I was already old enough to do some of my own thinking, and see through them. It was weird in grade school being an outlier (even being bullied because I was somehow different), but I'm sure glad now that my parents made that choice.
Next time you need a snack, make sure you have salad fixings in the fridge.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 18 2020, @12:54AM
Oh, I'll keep fighting. The bullying to conform doesn't stop with graduation. It just becomes more refined and subtle. Cities don't literally throw punches and mostly don't stuff students into lockers (though they sometimes do stuff citizens into jails for the crime of not paying a fine for an overdue library book or letting the lawn get too tall). They just levy large fines and enjoy the revenue.
The main problem I have now is the uncooperative family who all always want to do things the easy way, and never mind the cost.