July 29, 2008

Immune To Advertising?

Fish can’t see the ocean because they're swimming in it. Apparently there is a whole new breed of marketing pundit who can’t see advertising for the same reason.

Advertising has become so pervasive that otherwise intelligent people think it’s not there. Seth Godin talks about "the death of traditional advertising"; ADWEEK talks about "today's post-advertising world."

I wonder what world these people are living in? There are, however, still some people who can think and see straight.

The New York Times had a review this weekend of a book called Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker

Commenting on the moronic claims of the popular press and pundits that advertising is dead -- and consumers’ delusional beliefs that advertising has little or no influence on them -- the reviewer, Farhad Manjoo, had this to say:
... Advertisers play along, assuring us that we’re tough to persuade; the trade press laments the birth of a ‘new consumer,’ shoppers hopped up on YouTube and TiVo who are said to have developed a strange ‘immunity’ to advertising...

Walker…argues that our susceptibility to marketing arises from our ignorance of its pervasiveness.
Walker, of course, is right. The People Who Always Get It Wrong are, once again, wrong.

1 comment:

Horapollo Aesymnetes said...

I pay basically no attention to advertising. Whenever it comes up on Youtube, I mute it. On TV - mute it (not that I watch much TV). In newspapers? Throw it away.
Every once in a while I'll search /on my own/ for low prices on something I've already decided to buy. But, frankly, I don't buy things I don't intend to use, so that's not very often.

I understand that advertisement is a method of communicating product information and creating positive impressions, but it just doesn't 'work' for me: I am far too self-directed in my shopping. It's the same way I always ignored 'teachers' and their garbage textbooks and read whatever I wanted. Advertisement is probably, like most things, aimed at stupid, emotional proles who don't even know what they want to begin with.