Two-thirds of consumers say that they like advertising.
As for my own views, if television were nothing but ads I might watch it from time to time.
Source link: http://blog.mises.org/10299/take-that-galbraith/
The Ludwig von Mises Institute
Tu Ne Cede Malis
Advancing the Scholarship of Liberty in the Tradition of the Austrian School
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Consumers don’t know what is good for them. Advertising should be forbidden and get replaced by Galbraith-speeches.
I am grateful for advertising. Like the article says, advertisers pay for all the free content. I feel a little guilty for ignoring my gracious benefactors, but I realize that plenty of other suckers make it all worth their while. So long live the free market and voluntary association with advertising!
“Consumers” don’t know what’s good for them, but somehow they know what politicians are good for them. “Consumers” are being exploited in the market, but somehow they know how to avoid exploitation by the government.
I think Galbraith has a point – advertising is manipulative, but people are manipulative to begin with. That’s not to say that the state should come in and regulate – but it was just pointing out the obvious.
@ alan
I mus say that I find your statement highly manipulative.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Galbraith’s retort would have been that people simply don’t know what he knows, so they should be regulated like everything else. I think it is hard for the average person to understand the sheer arrogance that Galbraith and other “elites” have demonstrated over the years.
To them, people are simple sheep to be manipulated by the wise sages of Harvard and Yale. Nothing else.
Sometimes regular TV adverts can annoy me, because they are often the cheap, badly directed kind. At the cinema, however, you get all the ultra-budgeted car adverts and the avant-garde adverts that just advertise a brand or ‘lifestyle choice’ – these are great. Then you get the trailers, which are really just adverts that have been elevated into an art form.
My favourite advert of all has to be this dunlop commercial:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLWWtgqDG2M&NR=1 (yes, an advert for tyres) which serves as the only decent music video to one of my favourite songs and introduced a generation to one of the greatest rock bands of all time.
My current favourite is this utterly bizarre offering from comparethemarket.com, a price comparison website. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ust9YBlEfY&NR=1 Last night, the host of a popular panel show remarked that that meerkat is so popular with the British public (and Our Great Leader so unpopular) that it could quite easily beat Gordon Brown in the next election!
Galbraith is a hypocrite, he played Lurch, the butler on the Adams Family, and thus his salary was payed for by advertisers.
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