We Interrupt This Blog to Bring You... posted by Richard Seymour

I know I've been rather lazy the last week or so. Someone should take away my "cut n paste" privileges. Nevertheless, in view of the fact that my girlfriend is sick and expects me home in half an hour, I'm going to do it again. Some lovely quotes on advertising for you from the MediaLens message board :

“My name is Octave… I’m an advertising executive… I pollute the universe. I’m the guy who sells you shit. Who makes you dream of things you’ll never have… when, after painstakingly saving, you manage to buy the car of your dreams… I will already have made it look out of date. I’m three trends ahead, and I make sure you’re always frustrated… No one in my profession actually wants you to be happy, because happy people don’t spend.” (Frederic Beigbeder, £6.99, 2002, Picador, London, p. 5)

“These individuals have nothing but contempt for the general public. They want to keep them in a permanent, conditioned state: buying.” (Frederic Beigbeder, £6.99, 2002, Picador, London, p. 25)

“It finances the television, dictates what’s printed in the papers, governs sport, shapes society, influences sexuality and encourages inflation.” (Frederic Beigbeder, £6.99, 2002, Picador, London, p. 35)

“Advertising is essential to our economic system, because it disguises the truth and encourages forms of behaviour that maintain the system and make it seem tolerable.” – Denys Thompson (Quoted, Fred Inglis, The Imagery of Power. A Critique of Advertising, 1972, Heinemann Educational Books Ltd, London, forward)

“The alienation and isolation of individuals in mass society, cut off from old loyalties and former group ties, spawns a need for new guides to behaviour and new clues to identity. Advertising must therefore sell, not only goods and services, but also definitions of life and of status, images, hopes and feelings.” (Terence. H. Qualter, Advertising and Democracy in the Mass Age, 1991, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, Basingstoke, p.viii) – Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada


The Republic of Cancer Needs You.

“Advertisers, the missionaries of the consumer society, envisage a world in which well-being is equated with the accumulation of things.” (Terence. H. Qualter, Advertising and Democracy in the Mass Age, 1991, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, Basingstoke, p.viii) – Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

“It does this first by restating essential dilemmas of the human condition and second, by offering a solution to them… The general argument runs something like this: If the advertisers product is purchased, one will belong rather than be excluded, one will have happiness rather than misery, good rather than evil, life rather than death. Advertising simultaneously provokes anxiety and resolves it.” – V. L. Leymore, Hidden Myth, 1975 (Quoted, Terence. H. Qualter, Advertising and Democracy in the Mass Age, 1991, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, Basingstoke, p.viii) – Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada


You're Still Driving This Piece of Shit?

“Advertising is, overall, a reluctant and largely ineffective initiator of social change beyond the trivia of fashion. Even as it introduces an endless array of new products, and new models of the old, it is an overwhelming conservative social force, powerful in defining and preserving the status quo… They do not encourage reflection on the underlying character or motivation of a consumer society, or of the social attitudes that sustain it. On the contrary, almost all the images in advertising contribute to the preservation of the existing order. Advertisers prosper through the perpetuation of traditional stereotypes of class, race and sex.” (Terence. H. Qualter, Advertising and Democracy in the Mass Age, 1991, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, Basingstoke, p.69) – Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

“Advertisers thus present two conflicting and irreconcilable claims about themselves. The first assertion, intrinsic to a liberal ideology, is that advertising does no more than provide necessary information for autonomous, rational individuals. Its persuasive powers are limited to encouraging buyers to test new products. The second argument, that advertising stimulates demand and generates new desires, seriously undermines the notion of autonomous self-determining human desires… They like to boast of their contribution to an expanding economy, and their special talents in securing a greater share of the market for their clients. At the same time they are anxious to avoid any charge of sinister manipulative power, so that when addressing the general public they tend to deny they have either the psychological insights or the technical instruments necessary to dominate thought. Advertisers want to appear enormously skilled and influential, and at the same time not particularly powerful providers of neutral information.” (Terence. H. Qualter, Advertising and Democracy in the Mass Age, 1991, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd, Basingstoke, p.103) – Professor of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada

If all that is far too creepy for you, let Bill Hicks settle the score:

"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself. No, no, no it's just a little thought. I'm just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day, they'll take root - I don't know. You try, you do what you can. Kill yourself. Seriously though, if you are, do. Aaah, no really, there's no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan's little helpers, Okay - kill yourself - seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good, seriously. No this is not a joke, you're going, "there's going to be a joke coming," there's no fucking joke coming. You are Satan's spawn filling the world with bile and garbage. You are fucked and you are fucking us. Kill yourself. It's the only way to save your fucking soul, kill yourself. Planting seeds. I know all the marketing people are going, "he's doing a joke... there's no joke here whatsoever. Suck a tail-pipe, fucking hang yourself, borrow a gun from a friend - I don't care how you do it. Rid the world of your evil fucking machinations. I know what all the marketing people are thinking right now too, "Oh, you know what Bill's doing, he's going for that anti-marketing dollar. That's a good market, he's very smart." Oh man, I am not doing that. You fucking evil scumbags! "Ooh, you know what Bill's doing now, he's going for the righteous indignation dollar. That's a big dollar. A lot of people are feeling that indignation. We've done research - huge market. He's doing a good thing." Godammit, I'm not doing that, you scum-bags!


"Kill Yourselves."

Quit putting a godamm dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!
"Ooh, the anger dollar. Huge. Huge in times of recession. Giant market, Bill's very bright to do that." God, I'm just caught in a fucking web! "Ooh the trapped dollar, big dollar, huge dollar. Good market - look at our research. We see that many people feel trapped. If we play to that and then separate them into the trapped dollar..." How do you live like that? And I bet you sleep like fucking babies at night, don't you?"