So, assuming socialism/communism is achieved, how does advertising look to you?
The role is reduced from profit motive to informational - but won't there be a level of personal pride at stake in some cases?
What about all the attention grabby colourful bullshit with a billion cuts? Or the adverts that have a sort of narrative involved? Shouldn't all of this stuff be redundant under socialism?
Curious to know your thoughts on the general ideas of it, because I can't seem to unwrap it.
This is mostly a useless, Utopian question. That said, look at the DPRK. Advertising is a market mechanism. If the market is under control of the state, so is advertising, and there is no reason to advertise something where the profit margin doesn't matter except as a tool of genuine information and PR. That last part is the most complicated bit.
Yeah, it is really, but a man can dream.
There's only so many Disney x Uber Eats adverts I can handle before I fully dissociate.
I think advertising is fine for like local events. "There is gonna be a concert here" or "Come check out these dinosaur statues that we put up in the park for like a week". Otherwise it's essentially always bad.
first we're an doing unlimited genocide on the marketing class so jot that down :mao-aggro-shining:
Sorry to my boy yugopnic but we really ought to just get rid of it. It is just toxic and bad for you. At some point even positive proganda would probably need to be used carefully
Had a roommate that worked for a marketing agency. She told me once how the owner found a reason to fire someone because that employee was a recovering alcoholic and didn't join everyone at happy hour.
All advertising should be eliminated completely. Looking for items should handled by plain-text internet search, like the yellow pages of old. No one needs to be sold anything, a free people should be able to go about their own business and simply look for what they want when they want it.
That's not going to happen as the mental conditioning is so powerful that people will beg to be sold things for the foreseeable future.
Well, yeah, but I find out about a lot of non west-end theatre that I'd like to go and see through adverts because it's not really that mainstream of a thing anymore. I guess it's hard to apply that to the utopia I'd asked about because there'd probably be much better systems of access to arts and stuff and I'd be in a community of creatives.
Here is an article about advertising in the DPRK. Advertising has increased slightly to promote consumer goods but is still way way way less than states that are fully immersed in the world capitalist economy.
Advertising is just propaganda for corporations. Like others have said, once the profit motive is gone, the only reason for advertising will be stuff like awareness campaigns where it actually benefits people to know the information provided.
You might be interested to know that there was an ad agency in Soviet Estonia, and there was a documentary about it: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3216380/
It's more likely than you think :ussr-cry:
Do we not have a Gorby emoji?
No more commercials, no more banner ads, no more billboards or spinning signs on corners. You can have a tasteful sign above your place of business so that people who are looking can see it, and there will be a registry or what businesses are where so that people looking for a specific thing can find it. The time and effort that used to be used doing all of those other things will be redirected towards doing things like PSAs or other public services.
The real violence of advertising is its ability to steal your attention and get into your psyche, so you have to ruthlessly defang its ability to do that. I think that if you only do something like cut ads by 50%, then the result will just be that the 50% remainder will become much more influential - the entire enterprise must be pulled out from the roots.
It's basically going to be adblock irl. Assata Shakur was surprised when fleeing to Cuba how beans would be sold in nondescript brown bags with the word "beans" written on them. The closest thing to ads would be PSA notices of upcoming cultural events or how long a museum exhibit would last, but I wouldn't consider them ads.
Are there national brands or are consumer goods all regional? The only advertising I ever notice is for Coca-cola, Budweiser, Toyota, Ford and other national and international brands. I don't see ad buys for Jones cola, my local brewery, or anything of the like. So I got to figure the character of manufacturing and branding will play a part in what advertising looks like under communism. Do we know what that will look like first?
Capitalism’s other end point is monopoly. Which is what you’re looking at when you realize there’s hardly any regional things anymore (even radio stations, which used to be a delight).
Mergers and acquisitions were the rage in the 80’s/90’s. Corporate conglomeration decimated everything. There are some graphs showing, for instance, how maybe a handful of food conglomerates like Nestle, Kraft and General Mills own and produce pretty much all the crappy processed foods displayed on American supermarkets shelves to give the illusion of many choices. Freedom of choice!
As Bill Hicks said, please do us all a favor if you’re in marketing and kill yourselves.
I like this question. I think advertisements should be focused around public events that encourage positive social behavior. Music and the arts, community projects, gardening schedules, etc. Beyond that, news bytes will fill the role of the "commercial break" - little informative propaganda bits spread throughout your programming. Cable news will largely be made to entertain because we have much better methods to communicate information and the sort of people who watch it probably ought to be contained to their couch.
Most of it will probably disappear. One of the things that struck westerners visiting AES countries was how little advertising and billboards there were in the public space. When you remove the profit motive the need to induce demand through advertising disappears.
What will remain will be public service announcements. "Be aware of these signs of skin cancer", "Remember that next Friday is the yearly communal work day where we clean up the neighborhood", "Want to go back to school? Here's how you apply", that kind of stuff. There might even be some forms of attempting to induce consumption still happening, like giving people recipes for tomato salads when you've had a better tomato crop than expected.
Most of the advertising industry will disappear. Many of the people who work there are skillful and creative and their abilities will be freed for socially useful purposes, like producing artwork to decorate the public space.
