Brainwashing 101: Start 'em young!

quote:CBC: Any food packaged by McDonald's tastes better to most preschoolers, says a study that powerfully demonstrates how advertising can trick the taste buds of young children.

Manipulating the minds of children is profitable!

quote:"You see a McDonald's label and kids start salivating," said Diane Levin, a childhood development specialist ...

Study author Dr. Tom Robinson said the kids' perception of taste was "physically altered by the branding." The Stanford University researcher said it was remarkable how children so young were already so influenced by advertising.

That's capitalism for ya. Polluting the minds of children for wealth and profit. But at least they're not selling cigarettes to children.

quote: But at least they're not selling cigarettes to children.

Well, both can be fatally harmful.

I'm going to move this to Youth Issues for discussion.

Yea, good point. I forgot about that film, Super Size Me. I guess it takes strong advertising, early in life when our brains are underdeveloped and we're more vulnerable, to get us to engage in such life-threatening activities as smoking and eating at fast food restaurants.

I haven't been to any of the big fast-food places myself in a very long time. My body tends to go into some kind of digestive shock as it tries to expel the alien intruder. It's not a pretty sight.

That's one of the benefits of not owning a car, I think. Less toxins in the environment and less toxins in me. Ha ha. Then again, I could be making a virtue out of necessity. A car is way too expensive a luxury for me to maintain right now.

More information can be found here, though it seems like the Internet is flooded with all the information anyone could possibly want on both advertising to children, and McDonalds in particular.

Ugh. At our elementary school last year, McD's offered their "cheap lunch" to the kids. You could get a double beef burger, or a double cheese burger. WTF???? Kids in the under 11 age group don't need double anything, (like anybody needs double grease?) yet that was the only selection offered. That and fries, and a pop.

My kids took a lunch that day, along with my note to the new principal explaining to him exactly how disgusting that was.

[ 07 August 2007: Message edited by: Polly Brandybuck ]

I remember in middle school it was such a big deal to have our homeroom teachers take the whole class to McDonalds for lunch, or breakfast. It was a special lunch we'd all wait weeks for! I think maybe Mickey-Dees was paying off homeroom teachers in my home town to brand us early. [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]

APA: Protecting children from advertising

quote:The advertising industry spends $12 billion per year on ads targeted to children, bombarding young audiences with persuasive messages through media such as television and the Internet. The average child is exposed to more than 40,000 TV commercials a year, according to studies. And ads are reaching children through new media technologies and even in schools--with corporate-sponsored educational materials and product placements in students' textbooks.

Here are some key points:

quote:"Is it fair to allow advertising to an audience that is too young to recognize commercial messages are biased and have a persuasive intent?"

Advertising effects

Certainly the messages' power of persuasion is compelling, the task force found. Studies cited in the report have shown that after just one exposure to a commercial, children can recall the ad's content and have a desire for the product.

Some messages may influence children's behavior too, says Brian Wilcox, PhD, chair of the task force, which formed in 2000 to conduct an extensive literature review of advertising's effects on children. For example, research has shown that child-directed ads for healthy foods can lose their effectiveness when children view ads for snack foods in the same sitting.

Indeed, some researchers speculate that advertising geared to children--which largely consists of ads for sugary cereals, candy and fast-food restaurants--may be contributing to the increase in childhood obesity by promoting unhealthy foods. Plus, studies suggest that eating habits formed during childhood can persist throughout life, according to the report.

Also of concern is the "privatization" in children's media consumption, with a growing number of young children using the Internet and watching televisions in their bedrooms, where no one is present to explain what they are viewing or reading, according to the report.

That lack of adult interpretation is a concern because young children tend to accept ads as fair, accurate, balanced and truthful, Kunkel says. "They don't see the exaggeration or the bias that underlies the claims," he says. "To young children, advertising is just as credible as Dan Rather reading the evening news is to an adult."

For children to critically process ads, they must be able to discriminate between commercial and noncommercial content and identify advertising's persuasive intent, the report notes.

Particularly alarming to the task force is that commercials also often use psychological research to make their messages more powerful. For example, they draw from developmental psychology principles to build campaigns that persuade children they need a product and to nag their parents to buy it. In addition, advertisers often use characters and celebrities--such as from shows like "SpongeBob SquarePants" or "Blues Clues"--or premium gimmicks to reel in children.

What to do? Here's an example from Auz ...

Protecting Children from junk food advertising in Australia [8]

It's not clear to me whether the Bill was passed or not.

[ 07 August 2007: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

Sometimes I think that if I had a young kid I'd bring it to McDonald's and, while it was washing its hands, surreptitiously spike the food with Bitrex, so as to create an aversion for the stuff. But I'm not sure that would really be a good thing to do either.

Heh he. My own views may have been formed at an early age. My boyhood ski trips included a stop over at McDonald's in Nanaimo on the way to Green Mountain, Forbidden Plateau or even Whistler. In those days, that was the nearest McDonald's. However, the Nanaimo McDonald's had been charged with serving horse meat, on more than one ocassion I think, and that, shall we say, coloured my views of that esteemed restarant. Snerk.

I think it is the same with religion. You get religion drilled into you when you are young and then all the evidence to the contrary in the world doesn't make a difference.

Kids are taken to McD's and similar outlets by their PARENTS.

If you do not want your kids eating there then do not take them there.

Not hard. Take some responsibility for your own actions.

quote:I think it is the same with religion. You get religion drilled into you when you are young and then all the evidence to the contrary in the world doesn't make a difference.

This is the most insulting and offense remark I have ever read on this forum. This remark is a clearly statement of dislike for adherents of any religious belief, whether one is Christian or Muslim.

I am truly offended by such an invidiousness statement

quote: I am truly offended by such an invidiousness statement
The Conrad Black School of Arrogance?

Anyway, the harm of a McDonalds is not just the quality of the food or the low wages or the contribution to the car culture. It also represents a disconnect between people, children in particular, and where food comes from and under what conditions.

The fast food and processed food industries (and fast food is processed food) drive the worst aspects of modern, intensive agriculture from factory farms, to the liberal use of antibiotics and pharmaceuticals, to the death of the small, family owned farm.

As well, it is what drives the demand for consistency of produce over quality, taste, and nutrition. And there is the presence of chemicals from flavouring to preservatives that have any number of unknown impacts on human development.

The difference between smoking and eating at a McDonalds is that almost everyone knows that smoking is harmful and you make a choice. I don't think most people give much of a thought as to the ingredients in McDonalds food or how it is processed or how it comes to them. How much sugar, for example, is in that special sauce?

People make no connection between the rise in fast and processed foods over the past generation and childhood disorders such as ADS, aggression, learning disabilities, and so on. The treatments to these issues are often found in the same labs that produced the food colourings, flavours, and preservatives.

quote:Brian White: I think it is the same with religion. You get religion drilled into you when you are young and then all the evidence to the contrary in the world doesn't make a difference.

You might want to elaborate a bit more on this. The way I see it, children are vulnerable to the McDonald's advertising because their mental and physical development is incomplete. They are more accepting of anything that adults say to them. As I quoted above ...

quote:For children to critically process ads, they must be able to discriminate between commercial and noncommercial content and identify advertising's persuasive intent, the report notes.

But the critical mental skills are exactly what is lacking with children. So they are sitting ducks. And whether it is McDonald's sugar and fat rich "foods" or religious propaganda really makes no difference. They're still sitting ducks.

Thing is, not all religious education for kids is the same. Religious education that revolves around developing ethical, social and moral skills could be very useful and helpful for kids. My own church teaches a sexuality course for kids called "Our Whole Lives" which is age-appropriate, is also offered to adults, and provides the youngsters with information to help them make intelligent decisions about their lives. But, of course, there are lots of horror stories about the spirit literally beaten out of children in the name of religion, or an antagonistic attitude towards higher learning inculcated, or a Xenophobic attitude imposed, etc.

However, non-religious education can be just as harmful to kids as the most harmful religious education if the aim and result is to teach unthinking obedience, thoughtlessness, etc. Children are "ideal" recruits for military brainwashing, for example, because of their mental underdevelopment. Military 'education" around the world, e.g., the U.S. military is a great example, makes use of deep psychological understanding to "break down" adults, much less children, and turn them into efficient killers who will do what is expected of them.

In an ideal world, children would not have views foisted onto them as "fact" when they don't have the mental equipment (yet) to evaluate the merit of something as important as religious views, for example. It seems like child abuse to me. But that ideal world is a long way off. Parents, or the guardians of children, and not society as a whole, for the time being, decide what sort of "education" kids get and children's rights are still an unrealized dream.

It is highly instructive to note that even in Canada, for example, adults are protected by law from assault on their person ... but children do not have the same kind of protection. Too many adults believe that hitting children is a good thing and they are (partially) protected by the law if they do so. Swedish law provides a glimpse of a more humane treatment of children and their rights. It might be useful to have a look at the status of religious education for children in Sweden and see how that might be different from Canada as well.

Targeting tots could build brand recognition later in life, study says

And, therefore, "This can be done through advertising in children's programs or through product placement."

That's capitalism for ya. Brainwashing the kids, brainwashing the parents, brainwashing, brainwashing.

Oh nbeltov, glad you found this, am going to make it sticky with the one I started about more general sitings of it

Yes, I looked for that thread, couldn't find it, and, happily, found my old one instead.

it is like a little present when that happens eh?

The positive feeling is counterbalanced by the knowledge that many, even most, of the thousands of babble entries I've made are gone forever. But, yea, it IS like a little present.

ha! You can't be serious  

Ya, I know the feeling nbeltov, exactly, and sometimes yearn for the archives, but I have a very good memory, most usually, so not too much has been lost down the memory hole.

We need to liquidate the corporate right to free speech.

Eventually with Cable and DVDs advertising may be reduced on television. HBO shows run for 51 rather than 42 minutes. Netflix, TiVo and DVR are laying siege on marketing.

Actually, I think I'd go with just liquidating the marketing sector.

Without the trillion dollar, or more, marketing and advertising sectors in North America, capitalism as we know it would collapse. The whole thing hinges, at least in part,  on the creation of demand as firms "compete" in the areas of market share - by advertising and marketing - and lowest payout to workers - by prolonged class warfare over the last few decades. There is no real competition in the area of price for many products whose sale is dominated by the monopoly-like or oligopolistic firms.

There are, of course, political consequences in turning the population into Matrix-like victims and consumers. And that is what "the left" and those who advocate an alternative are up against.

Excellent put, but I just think we need to be better marketers ourselves, in order to provide an alternative living style that people can SEE, in their mind's eye.

If what they can see, is doom and gloom, they will not even go there. So too, if it is to utopian.

The reality, when edited to basics is; we all live, eat, shit, and die, and we want to make that as humane and comfortable as possible for everyone, at any given point in time.

We see it can be everyone, others  believe that it can only be a few.

They have sold their vision better.

I don't think the left makes full or proper use of all the efforts made by marketers and advertisers. Of course, what is useful and important for the left is going to be different from what is useful and important to those marketers and advertisers. In some sense, the propagandists for advertising and marketing know the working class better than many on the left who put that class at the centre of social life in a new society. I think the baby gets thrown out with the bath water here, as it were, the idea being, I suppose, that nothing useful can come from the study of such harmful activity.

In any case, brainwashing children has got nothing to do with what the left stands for; we stand for the protection of childhood, and the classroom,  from commercial propaganda. Capitalism, OTOH,  wishes to invade the classroom and turn it into a means of ever more profits ... the well being of children be damned. So we have a kind of ethical or spiritual denunciation against such practices.

However, I don't agree with your thumbnail summary. It is not simply a question of who sells better. Our spiritual and economic values, at least for socialists like myself, include a future with a vastly reduced marketing and advertising torrent of propaganda. Those efforts need to be turned towards more socially useful activity. Less brainwashing and more education is what we're about. So it is not simply who sells better, although there's an element of truth there. Capitalist advertising and marketing, on the whole, teachers social passivity and inertness. It takes the political energies of people and turns it into demoralization, nihilism, isolated individualism, and a generalized anger that can be easily directed at targets like women, visible minorities, immigrants, etc. Capitalism is the great Moloch, the great Satan, the great deceiver.

The ideal "consumer", from the capitalist point of view, is a drone who makes themselves available to the advertising torrent hurled at them - on television and in the media generally - and dutifully plays their role in keeping the "economy" going. Such drones never stop to consider what sort of economy they are helping to perpetuate. And so on.

We stand for citizens, not consumers.  We don't want to preach messages that lead to demoralized passivity. It is our aim to energize people, to MOVE them. When people move their consciousness changes. And so on.

So, it is not just a selling job, even of a vision. My two bits.

Pure semantics Nbeltov and nothing more.

You do not move other people, or engerize them,  without creating a vision for them to see the possibilities within.

hence mouseland.

A scoialist commercial if you will.

Your best teachers were those who could bring a subject alive by selling you the vision of it.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I agree with the necessity of having a vision by political leaders - or those who aspire to political leadership - but it is very difficult to bring people around to agreeing with "a vision" as opposed to getting people active on a particular issue that is near and dear to them. It really sounds like the making of obstacles rather than mobilizing people.

How did you (or I) come to have the vision you have now? Wasn't it a combination of involvement in particular issues, over time, some independent work on your part, and so on, that led you to where you are today? Did you form your views, all at once, by being convinced by a particular vision? Don't forget, we are talkng about masses of people who have been, as it were, innoculated against socialist ideas, demoralized and demobilized by the advertising and marketing blitzkreig, and so on.

J-E-L-L-O

What's that about?

I do not think we are talking about anything different. At all.

Though perhaps I have held my vision for much longer, as pretty much for sure the first time I saw gender inequality, I knew what I did not want my world to look like, and that was very young, and nothing much has changed since. As a woman who realizes women's rights need advancement, still. That is my primary, just as it always has been.

I do not think political need to have a vision  really, if the people who are the party have the vision good enough. Let thm drive the vision outward

I never for one moment forget this, I watch too many of my sisters in life walk around, not realizing their co-option. I just see that lamenting about what has happened to them, is not good enough.

We need to create visualizations  so they can see the path out of their plight and get themselves on it. It is not selling them anything.

it is showing what indoctrination is.

That is what Michaels Moores movies are. Exposing indoctrinations. Not selling a way of life.

Jello is Jello is Jello... it doesn't matter which flavour, it wouldn't taste the same by any other name. J-E-L-L-O, Jello!

um I believe the word you're looking for is advertising not brainwashing

I tend to agree the we live in an age where the dominant religion is consumerism but many here don't even realize how insulting it is to say that people who buy junk food for themselves or their children are brainwashed into it, while us smart people who don't eat mcdonalds have have resisted this evil propaganda.

There are many reasons that people eat junk food and these should be examined but brainwashing is not one of them.  Parents or teachers who convince their children that science can't be trusted are brainwashing.

Advertising to children who are ill-equiped to distinguish true from false claims, whose intellectual, social and emotional development is far from complete IS brainwashing.It's precisely the right term to describe the harmful effect, and intent, of advertisers. How else would you describe cigarette advertising and Joe Kool and candy-flavoured cigarettes aimed at kids? Give your head a frakking shake.

I will give you that there are many factors why, e.g., people eat junk food - I know, for example, that pop and sugar water drinks are cheaper than either milk or juice in poor Northern Manitoba FN communities - but that just shows that advertising and marketing have a context.

N Beltov

I'm not sure where you live but I've seen very few if any small children smoking or standing in line to buy themselves fastfood

EDUPAX, an educational NGO that started by taking on war toys and is now targeting media messaging in general, including the hypersexualization of kids into stereotyped roles, is organizing a conference on November 5 and 6 in Gatineau about media overdosing and child health. If you are in or near the NCR and understand French, this is a great opportunity for teachers and parents to make some links and contacts against this brainwashing flood.

« Les émissions, les films et les jeux vidéo violents m'ont toujours préoccupé pour leurs répercussions sur le comportement des jeunes. Ce colloque voit le jour parce que, maintenant, des gens ont accumulé des connaissances sur l'impact qu'a la consommation médiatique sur l'obésité des jeunes, ainsi que sur d'autres aspects de leur vie », annonce Jacques Brodeur, responsable du comité organisateur du colloque Edupax et conseiller en prévention de la violence et en éducation pour cet organisme à but non lucratif en prévention.

Il fait remarquer que les publicités s'adressant aux enfants ne cessent de croître, sans que ceux-ci ne soient vraiment sensibilisés à leurs méfaits. Il estime que la surconsommation médiatique a de fâcheux effets sur eux. « Elle affecte leur santé, leur propre estime, leur qualité de vie. Elle les expose à la sexualisation précoce, aux médicaments, aux produits amaigrissants, à la violence, à la criminalité, ainsi qu'au décrochage scolaire, etc. »

That's rather inane. Do you have kids? If you did, then you would know about the effect of TV advertising on your own kids. Any parent knows all about this.

I will see your anecdotal evidence and raise you a carton of Sportmen's. That's the brand I smoked, at age 11, when I started smoking ... along with many of my friends and classmates. Have a nice day.

Sometimes people don't have time to cook nutritious meals from scratch when both parents are working to make ends meet. Sometimes they don't even have time to make the kids lunch or are just too exhausted and shove a few bucks at the kids and tell them to eat at the cafeteria, and-or wherever. TV and fast food started out in the 1950's as frozen TV dinners and then escalated from there. Broadcast TV  and radio and food became an overnight sensation as far as propagandizing the public was concerned. Joe Goebbels himself never realized the propaganda potential for TV combined with radio and newsprint that today's capitalists have taken advantage of. Marketing propaganda used to be an art form. Now they have it down to a science.

Fidel, when I saw your post I thought of this article on Bernays, the man who began perfecting the pitch. 

http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/1999Q2/bernays.html

Well that says it all right there. I'd never heard of Bernays before or that he influenced Goebbels. Fascinating. And US neocolonialists had an army of darkness working for them in the Pentagon, CIA, and sometimes CIA heads with connections to Wall Street etc. Howard Hunt was one of their tools in those days and responsible for planning the overthrow of governments in small Central American countries for the Fruit Company's and for the benefit of other fruit and trading companies benefit paying Latino workers next to nothing.

OMG, Sportmen's cigarettes, had forgotten all about them.

What a targeted hook name eh?

Ah... the elite they love their propaganda to keep the masses in check, here and elsewhere it seems,  cannot imagine anyone here denying  media and it's attendant structures, manipulation of the message and optics, but yet I just saw it. @#36

Nothin new under the sun, eh?

And I thought Howard Hunt was evol incarnate. This Bernays guy was real piece of work.

Another "path out of the plight"? 

McDonald’s Closes in Iceland After Krona Collapse

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=amu4.WTVaqjI

I also occasionally stop for dinner at A&W for a greasy burger and fries or get KFC(very unhealthy) for the family but it is because of feeling like I don't have the time to go to the grocery store and by fresh food and prepare a nice meal that I do this.  Not having a car to drive to a store and load up with groceries, or a deep freeze to store enough food for a couple weeks is also a reason.  

I'm not going to change anyone's mind here, but my parents for example never kept soda pop in our fridge at home. never. Nor did they order out or pick up fastfood more than a few times a year neither did they buy us chocolate bars everyday as a treat for themselves or their children. 

My point is now that we've grown up none of us keep pop in our house or regularly order fast food very often despite seeing thousands of hours of commercials as kids for these products.  Nor do any of us smoke.  I feel that the parent's example has far more of an influence than advertising.

It is the same as religion or terrorism.  Terrorist familys in northern Ireland used to bring up the kids and have them marching as good catholics or prods as soon as the kids could walk.  And the kids would know all the songs and sing every word too.   So if the religous fanatic, or sectarian fanatic  or advertizer can get in there first before the kids circuts are hard wired for rational thought, they have won. I do not think kids should get any religous instruction before they are at least 7.  If the kids mind is gotten to before 7, the poor kid is mentally fucked on that issue. Cannot think rationally.

Try your religous indoctrination on older people, please.

Sorry if I offended anyone.  And if God exists, I am pretty sure it has self doubt, and the same worries about its Maker as we have.   If there is just one God, you gotta really worry about the lonleyness issues too. Lonleyness screws creatures up.

Did anyone ever smoke on startreck? Brian

"McMoms" Do McDonald's Bidding to Brainwash Other Moms

Fast food giants prey on parents' gullibility to sell unhealthy food to children [49] '06

Who would deny their kid ice cream, toys, and cartoons? Kids have been the targets of multi-billion dollar corporate brainwashing propaganda for decades. It's a large reason why kids in North America are so unhealthy today. They've been producing fat kids for a long time like people are so many profitable widgets. And we can throw those people on the capitalist scrap heaps of time once junk food capitalists and big pharma are finished with them.

You know how things change in 20-25 years.

way back then my daugter was not alowed to watch tv, nor eat crappy foods, no sugars, yadda yadda....and I was literally accused of child abuse by some. They could not fathom how i could be so "mean" to her.

today, parents are told they are abusing their kids if they let them...

my daughter tells her friends the way she was raised, and they envy her, because they  are all having heart disease and other health problems by 30... 2 of her friends have actually had heart attacks because of poor diet throughout life.

Imagine heart bypasses at 30

and funny, I have now lived long enough to be "smart mom", instead of the "why can't you be a normal mom" and "you are so mean to me, mom".

remind

so is it that you and you're daughter are smarter than the rest of those easily brainwashed folks or just less gullible(as per Fidel recent post)

I hate mcDonald food but what are they supposed to do - not try to market their product ? honestly - they should just tell people don't eat here?

So is it the fast food industry's unwritten right of capitalism that they use their multibillion dollar advertising to win hearts and stomachs of the millions they exploit in this way? Surely ordinary people like us, and the pipsqueek warnings from Health Canada are just as effective at informing people of the long term health risks of eating poorly as big business is successful at brainwashing people from an early age? The truth is that there is an unwritten rule of capitalism. And it says that taxpayers' money should neither compete with private enterprise nor be used to curb private enterprise's ability to profiteer.

less gullible,  had an education in health care, understood body functions, and went to a Linus Pauling seminar at UVIC.

Plus I had grandparents who lived kosher, and lived to be into their late 80's and 90's, with no health problems, at all...as excellent role models, nutritionally.

... if I had been a practising Jew, or Quaker, there would have been no issues about child endangerment. ;)

Back in the recent past, someone somewhere allowed mcdonalds to sell flavoured enhanced shite to their customers. That would be our good ole friends in health canada. No doubt they had their hands tied and were threatened by our MPs acting on behalf of high paying lobbiests. No doubt that tests showed that trans fats were bad for people long time ago. No doubt that these results were suppressed.  Now, what we need is a fastfood health warning, like on cigerette cartons. Also, fast food joints need to pay a health tax, 10% on every shiteberger will never pay for the health damage done to kids.  But a ban on shiteberger adverts on tv would be a start to protect the next generation. (they will not have the advertizing buget due to the 10% shiteburger tax). Cigarette advert bans are proof that this can be done.

Ya I don't like the comparison of less gullible versus gullible. I am my brother's keeper and don't believe that anyone should be taken advantage of in an I'm alright Jack capitalist setup. I don't consider myself smarter than anyone but perhaps more informed than average on certain issues. At the heart of this kind of attitude is an economic conundrum referred to as public choice theory. And it says that democracy produces gross inefficiencies in government policies due to special interest groups lobbying governments to implement inefficient policies that benefit only the few lobbyists lobbying for those policies. The rational ignorance of voters is blamed for our collective inability to elect governments who can make efficient policy all of the time. Therefore, the theory goes, we need free markets to make important decisions for us about the best and most efficient allocation of resources. They neglect to mention infamous free market failures as negative examples.

saganisking writes: I hate mcDonald food but what are they supposed to do - not try to market their product ? honestly - they should just tell people don't eat here?

A good illustration of the inanity of reducing solutions to what the abuser can/will do, on the strict basis of his self-interest. Not unlike wringing our hands in the hope that wife batterers will "get help" (even more than that they are getting from our collective denial of their crimes).

so if mcdonalds serving food is like a man beating his wife - shouldn't fast food be illegal then

good luck with that agenda

If you've read Dostoyevsky you should know that human beings are not rational - people already know fast food and smoking are bad but they consume them anyway

people do things against their best interest all the time -even you

Potato/ potato

Someone mentioned Edward Bernays upthread.  I think he was Freud's nephew.  Anway, interest in how the human mind works was a common fascination, although the kid was more interested in manipulating minds than was the founder of psychoanalysis. 

Bernays made his bones as a US government propagandist in the 14-18 War, then went on to invent modern PR and advertising, including a major media event in the late-1920s that got millions of American woment to start smoking - to demonstrate their freedom.

This PR whiz kid also literally wrote the book on propaganda.

By the way, my kids haven't ever so much as entered a McDonald's.

Since this has, to some degree, turned into a kind of grab-bag of contributions relating to (capitalist) advertising and marketing, I thought I might make a contribution on a completely different point as it relates to advertising and marketing.

Here is the link ... Michael Löwy - Advertising Is a "Serious Health Threat"-to the Environment

The group of Political Economists over at Monthly Review, going back to Baran and Sweezy, have underlined the critical nature of advertising and marketing to keeping the whole capitalist apple-cart going. Firms compete, in this monopolistic or oligopolistic dominated environment, only in areas of market share and in how much they can reduce the wages/benefits of the workers. (This latter point has only been reinforced by the decades of neo-liberal attacks on working people going back to the late 1970's and continuing to the present.) They don't really compete in terms of price anymore.

Now, in the article, the author firstly notes the following ...

And where do these false needs come from?

We are not here even mentioning "pre-market" studies and such, or products sold by the military industrial complex to government, and so on.

Here's the key point: "Advertising plays an essential role in the production of consumerist demand by inventing false "needs" and by stimulating the formation of compulsive consumption habits, totally violating the conditions for maintenance of planetary ecological equilibrium."

But all this compulsivity is essential to keep the system going. It's ubiquitous and critical.

The author claims that the way to distinguish an authentic need from an artificial one is whether the need persists without advertising?

Very well expressed and, perhaps, a key of sorts to getting rid of this monstrous system...

More specifically, why is advertising such a huge threat to the environment? It's a terrible waste of planetary resources that can, and should, be preserved or used for better purposes. In the USA alone, we're talking about a trillion dollar industry. That's a lot of waste.

Plenty of effort will have to be made to overcome this massive colonization of minds (brainwashing). But it will have to be done to overcome the harmful compulsive consumption that drives this endlessly rapacious system of unlimited growth to the abyss of global heating. "Advertising harassment and unlimited growth are two inseparable dimensions of the system, two teats from which capital accumulation feeds."

A good read.

Naomi Klein on the Obama brand

"How corporate branding took over the White House"

http://www.alternet.org/story/145218/naomi_klein%3A_how_corporate_brandi...

Thanks for that link Tigana, well worth reading.

Someone should advertise this to the parents that think it's a great family outing to take their children to Rotten Ronnie's.  He's really living up to that name but add pickled rottenness.  Fries with that?

http://www.rabble.ca/babble/labour-and-consumption/yum-ammonia-burger

"With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s [63], Burger King and other fast-food giants use it..."

I wrote on babble a few weeks back that Obama was nothing more than a brand or a slogan.  Mind you,  I was reading Klein's No Logo at the time, so branding was on my mind.  Anyway, I like this passage from the linked article:

The amount of technique and science at the service of fooling the people is remarkable. What is also remarkable, but only in the imagination right now, are those same techniques at the service of social justice and a better society. You may say I'm a dreamer, etc., ...

I've long thought that post-war western societies deploy the most sophisticated propaganda systems ever developed to maintain a veiled but coercive capitalist social order. Carrot-covered billboards right in your face, the stick concealed in the shadows or deployed against brown people on other continents. They've learned from the great leaps forward of Mr.Goebbels and the Stalin's propagandists, both of whom were expert at motivating the masses into all sorts of counter-intuitive behaviors through elaborately staged rituals and props. I think of Debord's Society of the Spectacle here as well.

We have been up to our necks in advertising for so long we hardly see it, it no longer strikes us as the bizarre contrivance that it is. I am constantly marvelling at the talent and resources that go into it. As a visual artist, a painter, I can only drool at the billboard-sized computer enhanced photograph-based images that can be seen in any short walk from my home, indeed out my very window; and every few weeks these visual marvels of technology are replaced with a whole new wonderful set of images! It's magic!

It's just so sad the language and content of this imagery is limited to the depressing and insulting monoculture of promotional advertising, all calibrated sound-bite style to quickly grab the attention and penetrate the subconscious, shorn of the deeper and more reflective possibilities of imagery. It ratchets up the visual noise level of the street but like empty calories provides only superficial stimulus and ultimately abrades the nervous system.

It is hardly radical, but equally unthinkable that billboards be used to deploy socially useful or informative content; only in the rarest occasions do we see visual polemics not associated with commercial self-interest. How shallow and one-dimensional, how modest of our culture!

It's a huge and fascinating subject.

The advertising industry spends $12 billion per year on ads targeted to children, bombarding young audiences with persuasive messages through media such as television and the Internet. The average child is exposed to more than 40,000 TV commercials a year, according to studies. And ads are reaching children through new media technologies and even in schools--with corporate-sponsored educational materials and product placements in students' textbooks.

A simple fix for this is Don't Watch TV!! We don't have cable or satelite at home. If kids watch something it will DVD collections that we purchase. Seriously.. Why do people even bother paying for Cable? you're mostly paying for commercials! You get at least 20 minutes worth of commercials on a 1hr program! Our connection to the world is with the internet and through social media radio!

This solves the problems of kids always demanding the latest toys and gadgets.

Take resonsability of your kids and stop letting your TVs tell your kids what they want and must have!!

Take your kids out and play! Take them to Adult restaurents!

No, I agree that it wouldn't fly to make fast food illegal, even though it's killing so many people.

Perhaps MARKETING unhealthy food should be illegal.  Especially marketing it to kids.

Is the problem really the food?  I'm not suggesting that a Whopper is health food, but then neither, really, is a club sandwich or a pizza slice, or about half of what most people cook in their homes.

Personally, if fast food is making a person unhealthy, I'd start by asking how often they're eating it, what kind of portion sizes they're choosing, and what other factors are exacerbating it.  I find it very hard to believe that a moderately active, otherwise healthy person who eats a Whopper once in a while is really chopping years off their life. 

Perhaps you haven't read the contributors immediately preceding your contribution,  Snert. It's not just the harm from a bad diet, but also what might be done with those social resources released from the wastefulness and harmfulness of corporate marketing and advertising. We have plenty of problems that need solving but, somehow, advertising and marketing get, e.g., a trillion dollars in the US every year, but schools have to have bake sales to raise money for kid's books. Am I clear?

Not really. You seem to have a bit of a gap in your plan. Why, pray tell (and I hope the answer isn't "goverment takeover") would a company decide that if it can't use its advertising budget for marketing, it'll donate it to a school, or whatever? How, specifically, does the advertising budget become public money?

I'm starting from the point of view of what's a good use of resources in society. Period. You seem to be starting from the point of view of the idolatry of private property. Big difference.

Report: Hostess May Have Marketed Unhealthy 'Twinkies' To Minors

Back in 1998 when that was first published in The Onion, that story was a far-fetched Onionesque joke.

It's always easy if you just start with Utopia and work backward. Anyway, you still seem to believe that the resources in society are all communal. You should probably check with the population to see if that's what they really want first, and then we can worry about how we use them.

I suppose we can just put our hands together and pray that corporations will have a conscience in the amoral world of accumulating capital. Oh, wait is that what we really want? No, we want the media to tell us what to think; after all, they do that for a good part of our conscious lives. Carry on with business as usual!

Private property is leading humanity to death. Death of the planet, death of the biosphere, death. Keep worshiping that idol ... right up until everyone, and everything, is dead.

OTOH, It's a fair question to ask how to get from the current shithole of the rule of capital  to a better future. However, the clock is ticking. If a remedy isnt' found, and quickly, we're all dead. And our children as well. I don't think the defenders of the rule of capital really get it.

Retire Ronald!

Quote:

Why Retire Ronald?

For nearly 50 years no one has been better at hooking kids on unhealthy food, spurring an epidemic of diet-related disease.  Ronald deserves a break, and so do we!

Great link, Michelle. There's a really significant point made on that site about the efforts to disguise marketing as charity. But then, that's capitalism for ya. The section deserves a lengthy quote ...