Cool World
7 HN mentions · mentioned in 7 months, 2009–2018
9:33 · 321K views · Feb 9, 2007
Chapter 11 of the documentary The Corporation, on how marketing targets children, including the Nag Factor study that taught kids to nag their parents more effectively.
HN cites it mainly as a damning example of manipulative advertising aimed at children rather than recommending it as a watch.
7 comments from Hacker News
""brutal capitalism" is both more efficient and more compassionate in the long run" I'm not sure about that. I've watched a lot of scuffles in capitalist markets eliminate most of the competition to turn into lock-in via strong brands, control of territory, copyrights, or patents. The lock-in typically lands on a few companies that become an oligopoly of sorts. These are most noticeable in telecoms, operating systems, big chains of any kind, and so on. Once they form, they barely compete with each other. They mostly screw customers and employees over in common ways to maintain high margins. Internally, they usually form rigid hierarchies that push control more than innovation with the evidence showing they're driven by politics more than performance. If they pay a lot of advertising money, the media will also misrepresent their incompetence taking about how they're in a competitive market, struggling, or so on. Quite a few years on my resume was in one of those companies on Fortune 100 with general public none the wiser. That doesn't even get into all the horrors of capitalism which stim from its incentives and operating environment. These companies systematically mislead people to get talent in the door, demand as much from them as possible, do as little for them as possible, do as much as possible for their controllers, discard them whenever opportune regardless of promises made, externalize as many bad things as possible, and pay bribes to lawmakers to make their evils leg
I think that you should take a comedians word with a grain of salt. What Bill Hicks was literally getting at was that to use your talent as a wordsmith to create wants where there are none and to pursue money without any consideration for ethics by trying to translate each and every human emotion into the dollar equivalent and a 'hook' by which to gain acess to peoples wallets is a very wrong thing. Comedians will exaggerate grossly in order to make their point. See Carlin, Connolly and many others for more examples of such behaviour. It's up to us to separate out the core facts from the poetic license. The kind of marketing that the great-grandfather post of this comment referred to is exactly the wrong way to use marketing. There is a book by some guy called 'how to win friends and influence people', it is a great example of how not to use skills with words, it is simple manipulations and there is a world of a difference between manipulation and reasonable discourse between consenting parties. The latter is what sets us - amongst many other things - apart from the animals, not our ability to 'market' or to 'sell' where no need exists. Marketeers now routinely employ psychologists in order to learn better which of our buttons they should push in order to get access to our innermost feelings so that we go and do what they want, consume their product. For a nice example have a look at this: this video And tell me what you think of that.
> From my perspective, I've found various things via advertising that I would have never come across by other means. If you want to make a fair comparison, that should be compared to all the things you didn't find because useless ads took up your time and mental space. Also, whether or not you found something through an ad is not the point; one isn't not going to convince a smoker to quit smoking by trying to convince them that nicotine doesn't make them feel good - it's the other shit about it that is bad. In the case of advertising, there's a lot of cynical manipulation going on. The nagging factor in children's advertising comes to mind as one really evil example: this video I've been TV- and ad-free since 2001 (yes, yes, I know: the "how do you know someone doesn't watch TV? They'll tell you" -smugness curse strikes again). In my case it was accidental however: I was living in a student appartment with no access to TV and Internet for over a year, having only books to read and rented movies to watch. Even when forced upon you you start noticing the difference pretty quickly, and wondering how you ever was capable of considering this normal. Nowadays ads just feel invasive, like strangers shouting at me on the street claiming they want to have a conversation while really they just want to get into my pockets.
"The Nag Factor": this video You don't have to accept the position of the documentary, that the corporate form is intrinsically a bad thing. But tell me that the marketers behind the "Nag Factor" report don't disgust you. It is nice to imagine that each family is an island of rationality, well-informed about choices and their eventual effects, never choosing the easy path, immune to marketing and peer pressure. In the real world, things are a little more complex. And the marketers behind reports like "The Nag Factor" make millions by subverting family relations to serve their purposes. It is good to be skeptical of regulation, but this is so clearly a case where more good can be done than harm.
The story about the salesman pushing the grand piano and a wall being knocked down into the bedroom to make room for it. It was clearly meant tongue-in-cheek, or at least that is how I took it. Of course nobody buys a piano because of a pushy salesman if their house can not accomodate it, but it is a nice analogy to describe some of the process that goes on when people buy stuff they don't need or have the ability to use. Have a look at this for how far the 'salespeople' are willing to go: this video