Advertising - Prof Dean Lauer PDF

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Prof Dean Lauer...

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Advertising “The Justification of Advertising in a Market Economy”, Alan Goldman “The Bribed Soul: Ads, TV and American Culture: How advertising transforms both our experience and identity into a ‘sponsored life’”, Leslie Savan

Are wants dependent on advertising? Galbraith • Needs originate in the personality of the individual, wants through the process of production. The latter are “contrived” wants. • Wants depend upon the process by which they are satisfied. • The productive society leads to “private opulence and public squalor.” Hayek • Preferences created by the social environment are no less legitimate. • “It is because each individual producer thinks that the consumers can be persuaded to like his products that he endeavors to influence them. But though this effort is part of the influences which shape consumers’ taste, no producer can in any real sense ‘determine’ them.” • State planning is the “road to serfdom” “The Justification of Advertising in a Market Economy” • Neoclassical Economics, 101 • An efficient market will distribute resources, capital, and labour to satisfy consumer demand for products and services, i.e., delivery maximum utility. • Market efficiency premissed on • Fair competition • Free (uncoerced) movement of labour/capital • Access to information (consumers): products, prices and features • Access to information (producers): demands, willingness to pay wants • Undersupply for high demand items forces prices up, and vice versa, until the market reaches a state of natural price equilibrium. • High prices force more $ into the product/service channel until production increases, which makes prices fall. • Can advertising subvert the supply-demand balance in the economic system? Can advertising create a demand, i.e., set the price for its product/service? • Can advertising disrupt competition by creating brand loyalty, therefore, inflating prices? • Further can advertising create disinformation, which would diminish maximum utility? • Name brand loyalty over generic • OR • Does advertising create a venue for the distribution of information and disrupt brand loyalty? • Benefits of advertising • Consumer have relevant knowledge of existence, quality, price of products.

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• A valuable source of information, which is necessary in a free market. • Subsidizes media. • Most news sources could not survive without material support from advertising. Negatives of advertising • “Debasing of taste” • Advertisers want to appeal to the largest audience possible. This means that programming will often appeal to the lowest common denominator to attract a wide audience. • Sponsors exercise censorship over programming. Advertising should aim at honesty. • Consumers who are misled cannot make free choices, the basis of a free market. Advertising should appeal to rational persuasion. • Appeals to fears, anxieties or the unconscious violate the basic Kantian principle of respect for persons as equals because these appeals do not respect the freedom of the individual’s rational choice but seek to use the person purely as a means to another end (profit). Advertising as free speech • In this sense, it is a protected as a form of free expression. • Unlike individual free speech, it is limited. • No right to mislead or defraud. • Statements must be truthful and factual claims substantiated. Advertising ethics • The social effect on media is beneficial when sponsors resist censorship. • The public effects of persuasion are detrimental when advertisers create desires whose fulfillment would be more harmful than beneficial to consumers.

“The Bribed soul” • Pervasiveness of adverting • “Studies estimate that, counting all the logos, labels and announcements, some 16,000 ads flicker across an individual's consciousness daily.” • Industrial advertising • “Most admakers understand that in order to sell to you they have to know your desires and dreams better than you may know them yourself, and they've tried to reduce that understanding to a science.” • “[V]ital data that can be crunched, analyzed, and processed.” • Seduction • Modern experience is seduced by appeals to the improved way of life that adverting offers. • Sponsored life? • “The sponsored life is born when commercial culture sells our own experiences back to us. It grows as those experiences are then reconstituted inside us, mixing the most intimate processes of individual thought with commercial values, rhythms, and expectations.”

Our psychology and identity is fragmented and by reconstituted by advertising so that we think in the medium of advertising. • “Where’s the beef?”, “Whaazzup?”, "I've fallen and I can't get up”, MLK’s ‘I have a truck speech’, etc. • “Our notions of what's desirable behavior, our lust for novelty, even our vision of the perfect love affair or thrilling adventure adapt to the mass consensus coaxed out by marketing. Cultural forms that don't fit these patterns tend to fade away, and eventually everything in commercial culture comes to share the same insipid insistence on canned excitement and neat resolution.” • “You know you've entered the commercial zone when the excitement building in you is oddly incommensurate with the content dangled before you.” Be defensive • Watch TV as an outsider and beware of flattery • Ads lie (not directly but through emotional appeal or exaggeration) • Look for information, ignore the style • Assume no relationship between brand and image: consider brand parity. • Attitudes are sold and then products suit the attitude. • Think about the worldview that BMW and Mercedes sell. Do you want that world or do you want the car? • Advertising is political and designed to celebrate a certain class: income earners in the 25-49 age group. It disregards those without purchasing power. • Advertising flatters you and appeals to your individuality but actually tries to fit you into a preformed mold. •

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