Bookshelf:

Advertising

Rest in peace Darryl Kile, pitcher for the Houston Astros, Colorado Rockies and St. Louis Cardinals.

It sounds like Kile had hardened arteries. It's scary to turn on the ballgame on a Saturday afternoon and hear that someone like Kile - a fine pitcher with a solid reputation and probably many good years ahead of him both in and out of the game - had just up and died. It could happen to anyone, I guess. And that's the scary thing.

I've been reading True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, which consists of the visionary 1981 novella by Vernor Vinge (which foresaw cyberspace in all its glory - albeit with a different name - several years before William Gibson's Neuromancer did) and a collection of essays by folks like Marvin Minsky, Richard M. Stallman, John M. Ford, and others. The essays touch on many of the developments of the Internet, particularly in the 1990s, with a specific emphasis on cryptography (which is, in a roundabout way, what "True Names" is about).

I'll write a full review later, but one thing that the book made me wonder about is advertising. Specifically, how advertising is used in the United States.

It seems to me that advertising here is used for two purposes:

1. As announcements, to inform or remind people that a given product or service exists.
2. As propaganda, to brainwash people into using a given product or service, or to persuade them to believe or behave in a certain way.

Most advertising seems intent on brainwashing the viewer. One dictionary definition of brainwashing is:

brain-wash-ing n.

1. Intensive, forcible indoctrination, usually political or religious, aimed at destroying a person's basic convictions and attitudes and replacing them with an alternative set of fixed beliefs.
   
2. The application of a concentrated means of persuasion, such as an advertising campaign or repeated suggestion, in order to develop a specific belief or motivation.

Consider automobile advertising. There are a few ads which tout the safety of a given vehicle, and even fewer which tout the reliability or inexpensiveness of a given vehicle, but there are a lot of ads which attempt to sell cars by making them seem cool. They look snazzy, they go fast, they take you to exotic locales (the ridiculous Land Rover ads around today are a prime example of this), they set you apart from the crowd. And I guess that's what some people are looking for in cars. But, really, it's probably not what people are looking for in a Toyota or a Saab. Maybe a VW Bug, in a strange way. But a Honda? No, if you want a cool car, what you probably really want is the Ford Mustang. But how often do they advertise those on TV?

My own criteria for a car are that it should get me where I want to go reliably and cheaply. It should also be reasonably safe, but unless I'm prepared to buy a large car there's a limit to how safe they can be. I suspect that many other people want the same thing (Consumer Reports certainly thinks so, since they focus a lot of their car reporting on those subjects), but car companies rarely advertise for those qualities.

Also consider credit card applications. Like many people, I receive one of these every three or four days. They don't really bother me, since it's always possible that they might offer me something I actually want (like a card with a higher cash-back rate than my present card), but that doesn't seem very likely. The credit card companies have never bothered to ask me what I might want in a card. I'm obviously just part of a large group of people (determined by a Panoptic Sort, as Alan Wexelblat describes in his essay in True Names) who have been determined to be people who might want additional credit cards, and are considered safe risks. It's especially strange since my attitude towards credit cards is that they should be giving me something (like the Discover card does), rather than the other way around, since otherwise I'd just use cash or check. So it's not like I'm a gold mine for credit card companies. But they seem to think I am, yet they never offer me something tasty enough to make me get another card.

I've also proven very resistant to commercial advertising. Even if I didn't time-shift and commercial-skip almost all of the TV I watch, I've never really paid much attention to commercials in the past, except the occasional sale announcement (since I could conceivably go to a sale and get items I need for less than I would otherwise pay). My attitude towards ads in newspapers, magazines, or on the Internet are similar: What can these products do for me? Why should I go out of my way to patronize a store or buy a product rather than buy ones I'm already using, go to stores I already know I like, or just not bother in the first place?

That seems like the real weak link in advertising: Ads generally don't explain why I should care. They often assume that I already care, and try to convince me to care about them rather than their competitor through their sheer advertising presence (a sort of "Big Lie" approach: if they say something often enough, they figure I'll believe it, though in reality I generally end up ignoring them). Or they imply that I'm dumb, or uncool, if I don't care (this seems to be the whole idea behind celebrity endorsements). It's kind of insulting, actually.

I do peruse some ads to get an idea of what's out there, but I go check things out for myself, or read evaluations (partial or impartial) elsewhere to get an estimation of whether I should bother. (Consumer Reports is a huge boon here. If you don't subscribe to it, you should.) And I try to patronize stores which I think will best benefit me in the long run. I buy high-price books from, for instance, Amazon, and cheaper ones from good local used and new independent book stores. That way I save more money on the expensive items, but spend a little more on cheaper items to help support stores which generally have a more eclectic stock than big book chains. I rarely do more than browse at Borders or Barnes &am; Noble. And these days nearly all of the CDs I buy are either on sale, or used, since I think CD prices are insanely high.

Advertising just doesn't reach me. It doesn't really try to reach me, because it doesn't understand my needs and wants. And I bet there are millions of other people who feel similarly. I wonder if advertisers ever try to figure out how to reach us effectively, or if they don't bother worrying?

I'd be interested in hearing whether my foreign readers (I know I have at least two in Canada, two in Sweden, and one in Australia) have similar perceptions of advertising in their countries.

Debbi's back in town. I picked her, Lisa and Michel up at the airport around 11:30 last night, and spent the night at Debbi's. We toodled around town today and generally took it easy. It was a nice sunny day, if a little cool and windy. Got to see some cute young ducklings in the pond in her complex!