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