Undercover Advertising

I would like to comment on the issue of undercover advertising we covered in class. I have to say that I find it pretty good. I might be mistaken but I had a feeling that most of the students did not like the idea of undercover advertising so I will briefly try to explain my point.

I made several interesting observations while watching the movie in class. I got really excited about that glove thing for playing computer games. I would be very happy to be the “victim” of the undercover advertising for that product. This is simply because I am interested in computer games a lot. The movie showed only the people who got interested in the glove while passing by. I am almost sure that most people would not get interested, would not stop to comment on the product and would not get into the trap. This is simply because not everybody is interested in computer games. But for the people who are it is a wonderful opportunity to experience a new cool product first hand.

The episode about the lady trying to advertise the cigarettes is a very similar situation. I do not smoke so if it was me she asked for a light I would just say I don’t have it and the conversation would most probably be over there. Even if the lady continued advertising the cigarette to me it would not make me start smoking and I would take it from her as a way of trying to get a conversation going. 

The example about the new, cool photo camera is very interesting because if the camera is actually good and the victim decides to go check it out further and maybe buy it he or she would actually benefit from this. There is nothing wrong with buying photo cameras and if one has the need and money then why not buy a good one. The advertising actually helps consumers get or increase the information they need to have in order to make a good purchase.

The episode I liked most probably was the boy advertising a popular Anime Cowboy Bebop. I know this anime and I think it is great. I do not have a problem with somebody advertising it because I know that it is good. The guarantee the boy would not lie is the fact that he is a fan. Fans exaggerate the qualities of whatever they are fans of anyway, this is just giving them the opportunity or the stimulus to get the word out to more people about something they think is great. Again the idea of only already interested people getting affected also works here. Being an anime fan I would be glad to get more information about some other cool anime series that exist out there. 

Another important point here is the place the advertising takes place at. In the case of the small boy above the advertising mostly took place on the internet, chats and forums. Not everybody writes on forums and certainly not on all kinds of forums. This filters out people and leaves those who have the highest potential interest in, in this case anime. There was also an episode about the bar or some kind of party serving only one kind of Vodka. To use the personal example again I do not drink so I would probably never find myself in a place where alcohol is the main attribute. But also If a person gets pleasure from drinking with other people then participating in this event, even without realizing the true situation will eventually benefit the person by being able to personally try out the vodka and decide on whether it is good or not. So next time that person has a party he or she might choose to buy this vodka to serve something he thinks is good to his guests. 

My final comment on the movie is about the reaction of one of the people after finding out that they were victims of undercover advertising. The man said that the experience reassured him about the friendliness of the fellow New Yorkers and he was disappointed because he turned out to be wrong. I found this very funny because what the comment essentially means is that people in New York are not friendly and the man in the movie got unintentionally swindled about the opposite because of his personal illusions.  

The general question or the problem here is why people get a negative feeling about this new way of advertising. The answer is probably simply the fact that it is unethical; unethical in two most apparent ways. One, people can no longer trust each other, about which I would have to say that the whole idea of capitalism already excludes trust and replaces it with the vocational obligations and responsibilities. Two, undercover advertising is unethical in the sense of not saying and hiding the truth - light version of lying. When the potential consumer does not know that he or she is being advertised to it seems that this consumer is deprived of the ability to assess the product with clear, unbiased mind. My main argument against this is that the undercover advertising is not that much different from the already established ways of advertising. Having a huge mechanism of advertising already established that is constantly lying about the qualities or not mentioning the flaws of the products as well as trying to catch consumers or “make” them buy one thing or another already sounds unethical to me. For some reason people do not have a problem with this and the established ways of advertising are taken for granted. So if we follow this line of thought then undercover advertising might soon become just another common way of advertising. 

If we think about US, for me the consumer culture is a big and most probably inseparable part of American culture. So it is not at all surprising that new methods of making the system faster, more productive or efficient are developed over time. And just like the whole consumerism is based on unethical actions from the part of producers/ advertisers the unethicalness of the undercover advertising is just following the same line. It is the price the society pays for further developing the system it lives in.  

My cousin Goga

I remembered a very curious experience that I had this summer. My aunt had a birthday so I visited my uncle’s house for an evening. It was just me and my mom, who asked me to come because she did not want to go alone. As expected the birthday party was full of adult female friends of my aunt, neither of whom I knew. They also did not take much interest in anything other than gossiping so I had to spend most of my time babysitting my cousins. One of the cousins called Goga is 6 years old and the subject of my story. 
It happened that my aunt’s friends also brought their children with them whom my cousin was friends with. The children having the company of each other did not need much supervision so instead I decided to watch what they do. Now, my cousin’s family is considered to be wealthy enough to afford many things outside human basic needs, meaning that my small friend got almost anything he decided to have. As a result his room was full of luxury equipment he almost never used properly: a huge plasma TV, a new PC, a laptop and a cell phone are just a few that come to mind. Considering all kinds of toys scattered all across the room I assumed that was what the children would play with but something unexpected happened. All of a sudden all three of them pulled out cell phones and started arguing about which one was the latest model. I was stunned at first and later almost embarrassed about how much more the 6 year-olds knew about the phone models than I did. “Well, ok” I thought “It is already not that surprising to see small children having cell phones mostly because of the games that come with them”. But what happened later made me understand the phenomenon a little deeper. After settling down on which cell phone model was the newest the discussion diverted to the size of the memory cards the phones had. I also witnessed some acts of bargaining two small sized memory cards for one big one just for the sake of having a memory card with the largest memory capacity. I make the last point because I know those memory cards were and would most probably stay empty! Moreover the fashion in which the trade was done made me feel like this was a previously unsettled act of trade that could have a chance to be settled at this point. Little later a similar thing happened with the new PC sitting proudly on the desk. Goga was very curious to ask me about the memory capacity of my computer. I answered that it was 250GB and as a return I got a smile and statement with a big smile “mine’s better”. I got interested and found out that Goga had hardly any files other then the windows system ones installed on his 350GB computer. He actually did not get the point when I was trying to explain what the memory space was used for, or what the numbers 350GB meant. The funny thing was that Goga is not too good at counting yet, he can compare numbers in terms of which is more than what but just listening to him trying to articulate the words for 350 was hilarious.

Now that I am taking the course and get to think about consumerism more seriously I ask myself a question: what was that? We said that consumerism is a way of buying your status in the society. Some of the authors that we read spent a good amount of words trying to explain this phenomenon but what my example illustrates is how simple the idea in reality is. It is so simple that even children can keep up and make it the main system of their interrelationship. The only thing they need to have is the simple sense of comparison of values (in this case numbers). The system can function without its participants understanding the products being used, their true use and potential; we could also say that people generally get affected by the simple and attractive idea of consumerism as a way of getting status in the society on a subconscious level. Maybe this is why consumerism spread, got accepted and deeply internalized so fast and well.  

It is also interesting why the object/s of competition in my example was technology and not for example the toys that were on the floor or the cloths that the children were wearing. It might be the case that the toys were already an object of such discourse at some time in the past but I think if we take into account the age of the children we might conclude that technology seems to give a very easy way of judging the value of its products. This mainly has to do with the fact that industries of technology tend to follow a straight line, not being very willing to change the quality, appearance or complexity of the products substantially or often, but instead progressing gradually with small steps. 

And the last point: children, especially male children always compete over something, which would most probably be the same for the past generations of children but the fact that the main object of the competition, in my example at least is technology, which is a clear representative of the consumerism culture makes me think of the depth of the influence consumerism has today.