Journeyman Philosopher

Recently I’ve been watching the Olympic games which are quite wonderful this year, excluding the smog, China’s doing a great job I feel. But one thing I’ve noticed is all the damn advertising by car companies claiming to be: “Official Vehicle of the Olympics” “Official Vehicle of the Canadian Olympic Team” and etc. I have seen at least three different car brands that all claim the same. I mean who are they tricking and what is their objective? I guess thats obvious… selling cars.

However this type of advertising irks me. Our society’s advertising tactics are getting progressively worse and worse. It’s all about branding loyalty through comprehensive marketing campaigns. Free market systems are great and all but the constant false bombardment of advertising makes it harder to be a member of society.

Constantly now when buying a product it is necessary to do your own research beyond the commercials. More often then not you find that the commercials have been intentionally misleading. We have come to the age where advertising is only used to generate interest rather then showcase a product.

I can summarize the main things that irk me with advertising in two points:

1) Misleading terminology (Cancel Anytime, Eco-Friendly Chevrolet Navahoe etc.. )

2) Pages of contracts flashed across the screen (I once noticed a joke a day text service which took me at least four commercials to read all the fine print at the end; there was about a page of it. If you signed up you were locked into a charge of 2 dollars a day with a minimum month cancellation fee; thats 60 dollars minimum with sign up)

We’re being taught to trust nothing. Which I guess is a good thing for a philosopher, but in general I feel the trend in advertising is moving onto taking advantage of peoples trust.

What do you think?