Disinformation in Advertising
One always takes advertising with a grain of salt. A person selling something is bound to present their offering in the best light.
Long ago Ralph Nader pointed to the phenomenon in cars when he wrote Unsafe At Any Speed. At the time GM was selling a car named the Corvair that would easily flip over under certain conditions. They publicized the car by showing ads of it driving under just those conditions. Unsafe at any Speed referred to the fact that some people had died falling against the sharp fins that were the style of the time but that wasn't really an advertising issue.
I think that Nader may have killed the Corvair.
The ads of the time didn't show impossible things. They didn't have the tech means. These days advertisers do have the means to show impossible things via AI slop. It's starting to show up a lot.
What triggered this topic is that today I'm seeing ads for things that let a person walk on water. What is shown is impossible. The things are too small to be buoyant enough to hold up a person. But you can see it with your own eyes - a closeup of feet walking on water wearing the things.
That's one sort of disinformation ad - and really that ad is designed to get people looking at a whole string of other ads looking for the walk on water things that aren't actually there.
There is another sort. Lately I've been seeing ads for a weed killer. A person strolls along spraying from a bottle and plants just go black and collapse. There's a scene where a guy walks into a field of crops to his waist and sprays and the plants just disappear leaving bare ground.
A few weeks ago I saw ads for kits that grew crystals. The ad showed pouring powder into a bowl and adding water and huge crystals would bloom as delighted kids watched. Crystals don't grow in the air like that.
I look at these ads with some amusement but really it's not funny. The ads are expensive and there must be enough people responding for them to be profitable. And I wonder - who would possibly respond? I also wonder about the psyche of someone who would run ads like that? My view is that you have to be some kind of sociopath to do that.
I've noticed a slow evolution in internet ads. The advertisers need to be ingenious as well as sociopathic. Even gullible people get bored and desensitized. Ads need to continually change or they become part of the background.
The ads do offer an interesting perspective on our society. On the sites I watch I've noticed that lots of products are aimed at families keeping kids engaged and amused. When I was a kid I didn't look to my parents for amusement - I was a latch key kid and spent a lot of time playing with my friends. These days I hear that if kids have the freedom that I did their parents are liable to charges of child abuse.
My point is that the ads we see are a kind of probe into what our society is like quite apart from the fact that the ads support capitalist culture.
What do you think?
I open the floor
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.