Amen.

Americans do accept advertising in areas where it does not tend to appear elsewhere. It is not uncommon here for a sports presenter to be required to break away from the main business in hand to draw your attention to the succulence of a sausage or the ruggedness of a truck.

Prescription drugs though are surely different. After all, the whole point of them is that it is not considered safe to let us simply buy them over the counter. They are so strong or so habit forming that it is up to the doctor to decide that we really need them. Advertising subtly changes that relationship by sending us in to see the doctor filled with nameless dreads about the symptoms of diseases we might have, and a detailed knowledge of the drugs that might help us…

Those adverts with their sure sense of how to play on our doubts and insecurities are a symptom of the restless energy of American capitalism and of the belief that it can apply to issues of health and happiness just as readily as it can apply to polish or pet food.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, TheNew York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules…

Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

Consumption was not only the linchpin of the campaign; it was also recast in political terms. A campaign booklet put out by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency told readers that under “private capitalism, the Consumer, the Citizen is boss,” and “he doesn’t have to wait for election day to vote or for the Court to convene before handing down his verdict. The consumer ‘votes’ each time he buys one article and rejects another.”

According to this elite view, the people are too unstable and ignorant for self-rule. “Commoners,” who are viewed as factors of production at work and as consumers at home, must adhere to their proper roles in order to maintain social stability. Posner, for example, disparaged a proposal for a national day of deliberation as “a small but not trivial reduction in the amount of productive work.” Thus he appears to be an ideological descendant of the business leader who warned that relaxing the imperative for “more work and better work” breeds “radicalism.”

As far back as 1835, Boston workingmen striking for shorter hours declared that they needed time away from work to be good citizens: “We have rights, and we have duties to perform as American citizens and members of society.” As those workers well understood, any meaningful democracy requires citizens who are empowered to create and re-create their government, rather than a mass of marginalized voters who merely choose from what is offered by an “invisible” government. Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.

Talking about patterns in pop culture is at least as useful a vehicle for social criticism than pure politics. It is politics. It’s also democratic. Pop culture is popular not because it’s dumb, but because it’s usually about the crucial questions of life and society, told with interesting characters and a constantly updating, suspenseful storyline. And just like with Emily Gould’s piece, pop culture pieces tend to get the big readership.

Alisa Miller, head of Public Radio International says there are very few news networks in relevant places around the world because it is cheaper to cover celebrity gossip despite increased demand for more international news.

Much has been made of the consequences of democratizing design. Already, the designer’s responsibility has shifted from creating objects and experiences to creating the conditions for innovation – putting into the hands of the masses the tools to make their own designs. However, the threat to the livelihood of designers may well go beyond packs of online amateurs.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that $1,000 worth of computation in the 2020s will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain. The result? By 2020, greatly extended human longevity (and a cure for the common cold, thank God); by 2030, nanobots that can repair our bodies on the fly; by 2040, machine back-ups of human memories. In the same timeframe, we’ll spend less time in front of computers and more time inside of them, working and playing in virtual worlds.

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By presenting both uber-consumers and the professionals who deal with trying to sell us the stuff to fill our endless appetites, or the holes in our souls, Walker indirectly addresses what he coins the “pretty good” problem: What distinguishes a product when assembly lines or underpaid third-world workers can make even the cheapest products “pretty good?” Since quality really isn’t much of a criterion any more, there must be other signifiers, and that’s where our subconscious steps in.

Most of us have been inundated with advertising for our whole lives, so on some level we know that we’re being sold … which is why some hipster crowds gathered around PBR precisely because they weren’t being given the hard sell. So if somebody cracks open a can now, knowing that the trend is played out, what does that act of consumer disobedience say about them? Now that PBR is so “yesterday,” shouldn’t that make it cool again? Plus, the conception of consumption as a statement is in itself reflexive. In other words, if a hipster cracks open a can in the forest and there’s no one around to hear it, are they still being cool? It gets pretty meta.

The point of Mr. Kaushik’s candor is that he wants marketers to start thinking more about the “why.” To get at that, he espoused the use of more online surveys of site visitors to find “segments of discontent.”

He advised marketers to create conversations with consumers using a simple, short and free online survey created by Iperceptions.com, an online research firm. The survey asks: Who is coming to your website? Why are they there? How are you doing? What do you need to fix?

source: Ad Age

Also mentioned on AdFreak.