Advertising

I love advertising.

Of course not actually seeing the ads, but for the love of the game: that idea if you send the right signals in the right places… that you can convince someone of something they didn’t even know they wanted.

To suggest in a way that’s impossible to resist. And it happens everyday, and happens to me where, only in retrospect, do I realize I’ve been swindled.

This path to irresistibility within advertising — an industry driven by many, some would argue, psychologically hostile tactics — shares, despite all moralistic admonitions, the same resonance one may find in Truth. But instead of appealing to some universality, we’re looking to instead dial it up, to overwhelmingly tune every knob and wire toward something that supercharges your “truth”, perhaps even a “truth” you didn’t know you had, forcefully planted, and all pointed toward a forgone conclusion. For catharsis. Of course you’re going to buy that. I mean, when you put it that way, it makes no sense to live without it.

Most of the time I convince myself words mean little, perhaps as an epistemological firewall to remind me not to write too much. And yet here stands Advertising, our amorphous muse, unknown and ever present, reminding me that yeah, actually, there’s a constant hypnosis. When will you learn?

Because advertising, though sequestered to the art of the sale, could be generalized as: “do this for me”. It could be generalized as, “by believing this you make me better off - no, in fact, both of us better off” and though usually that’s a sale, well, sometimes the sale is a whole lot more abstracted. Maybe it’s power. Maybe it’s comfort. After all, the more you get others to agree with your vision and value systems, the better off you’ll be. Everyone is just going to do exactly what I asked!

Maybe you can come up with your own play then, and ordain the roles others aren’t even aware of. Our Maestros driving our world, our very personalities. Even our hopes waiting. Here I am, dwelling in the usual flittings of existential meandering, and then there’s a whole class of people that stare down on the gameboard and decide what’s next, using ideologies as mere tools to move the pieces. I mean, advertising is venturing almost into magic, animating the Will of others. To shape nations through your narrative framing. To chisel in someone else’s very essence of existence.

One can only take inventory of what irresistibly drives you today.