advertising

BuyBlue.org just mentioned a new egg-vertising scheme, whereby egg shells will be used as a medium for delivering yet more advertising to the consumers:

On Monday, [CBS,] the U.S. broadcast network was to announce plans for placing laser imprints of its trademark eye insignia, as well as logos for some of its shows, on eggs - 35 million of them in September and October.

Sometimes I really wonder what people are thinking when they read news that run under catchy headlines like "gruesome warnings put Singaporeans off their cigarettes". Do they really think we've made some progress in understanding the human psyche?

Images of diseased gums and cancerous lungs along with anti-smoking warnings on cigarette packages have had an effect on smokers in Singapore, a survey said yesterday.

Twenty-eight percent of the 650 smokers queried said they smoked fewer cigarettes and seven in 10 said they knew more about the effects of smoking on health, according to the Health Promotion Board findings.

(...)The warnings, introduced in August 2004, carry six images: Diseased gums, a cancerous lung, a dying baby, a brain oozing blood, a patient on his deathbed and a family suffering from second-hand smoke.

(...) The average number of callers to the board's Quitline increased from 100 prior to the warnings and images to 300 a month since they were introduced.

(...) Singapore has an international reputation for social engineering, and keeps a close check on an array of public activities.

I applaud the Singapore's administration for daring actually protect their citizens' health, but really, the "findings" have found nothing new: since the 1960s, the consumers' behaviour has been known to be easily influenceable through subliminal and not so subliminal messages, also known as advertising.

What Singapore is doing with its provocative pictures on cigarettes packages is manipulating the consumers in exactly the opposite direction but using the same techniques as the highly influential advertising industry.

I progressively stopped watching television when I started figuring out how detrimental it was for my health.

It's obvious that corporations are cashing in on TV's captive audience.

It's obvious to anyone who dares to seriously think about it that television advertising has a profound influence on our psyche: if ads failed to brainwash us into buying some products, corporations wouldn't spend untold sums of money for a 30 second spot on television. That's why the television industry, to protect its revenue stream, is thinking about new ways to force us to watch the ads: