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How about this reduced thought experiment:

The skateboarding teenager sees a nike bonfire and an adidas bonfire. The nike ads associate enhanced skateboarding with throwing money in the nike bonfire.

How much money should the teenager throw in the fires?

If throwing $50 in the nike fire motivates him to achieve his dreams, then surely it's worth it. How does he know that will happen though? What if after burning the money, he is disappointed by his lack of supernatural enhancement and gives up skateboarding? What if he misses out on the valuable lesson of motivating yourself without burning money first?

What if after burning $50, he achieves minor success and then tries burning $1000? Should he burn additional money monthly or weekly?

How will he know if burning the money actually helped him or if he would have been better off keeping the money?

Any ad can try to associate intangible positive benefits with an arbitrary action, but it doesn't mean there is truly a causation. If you could create causation between arbitrary actions and intangible positive benefits with an ad, wouldn't it be much better to make the action something more productive than burning money?

The causation is in his mind, both in deciding to purchase it and being uplifted by the cognitive spirit. What if's can't prove or disprove mind reading.

The entire point is that it doesn't motivate him or change his feelings, those are his to have on his own terms. It provides a direction (buy sneakers) and a comforting spirit to support his behaviour.

Here's the reverse to your thought experiment. A man sees a small boat and a big boat. The small yacht can take 4 people out frequently on small trips. The large yacht can take 100 people out on bigger trips deeper into the ocean. Both are holes in the ocean into which you pour money, which one is more performant? The bigger one has bigger engines, can fish more, can go further into the ocean and is unquestionably the better boat. It also burns money like the space program, just through maintenance time instead of fire.

What if the bigger boat doesn't deliver all the parties that was promised, or the fish have left the accessible sea around his port? What if he finds out people only like him for his boat and it sinks his self worth? What if he could support the payments up front but found out he couldn't support them over time, too late?

Would it be better if he spent money on shoes instead?

> The entire point is that it doesn't motivate him or change his feelings, those are his to have on his own terms

But they are not on his own terms, as you admitted in your earlier post ("He buys the Nike’s because he wants to live the dream of athletic achievement that he saw in many Nike ads").

He wants Nikes because Nike ads told him he would feel victorious/cool/whatever by buying them. Nothing in the skateboarder's mind intrinsically wants to buy Nike over Adidas. Nike shoes have no meaningful difference in utility or material to give him different "cognitive spirits". The "athletic achievement" in the ads are not connected meaningfully to the shoes; they are intended to manipulate his thinking into buying the shoe or associating it with an abstract value that is not inherent to any single brand of shoe. The reason he wants Nikes is because of the ads; his desire for them is manufactured by the media he consumes.

Consciously separating them in your mind does nothing for the reality that the concepts in the ad exist in the shoe for everybody who does not reject it.

It precisely is his own terms, you can choose which spirits you want to participate in, or none, as you have just shown multiple times.

If ads are capable of brainwashing, why wouldn't they just put out an ad that removes the idea of disagreeing with ads forever? It's nonsense. Where are these totalitarian ads that prove that you have no free will and are open to manipulation all the time? Why do people rebel against foreign ads?

Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany him on his self selected journey and help his own desires and achieve his goals?

The anti-ad argument is that he shouldn't have to buy this spirit. If Nike ads were replaced by a non-commercial alternative, then the boy could have that spirit without needing to spend the extra money on fancy shoes.

Can you do that?

Elvis Presley's guitar/clothes are worth more than the sum of their parts because he imbued it with that meaningful connection to whatever was higher than him.

Can you have a spirit without it being imbued in an object? The only other way of distributing connection to this stuff I can see is via people and you end up with a socially mediated distribution system.

If not, you're stuck with capitalism distributing spirits like it does everything else.

You can get 'spirit' through art in the form of books, pictures and music. It's a lot more potent and designed for the purpose rather than just having that purpose tacked on to sell a product.

That’s not really the same thing. The US military doesn’t read books at people about how their plane should look fearsome when they are flying a hunk of junk. You have to occupy it to some degree, though I will give you playing the radio in the car can create an enjoyable synthesis of mediums.

And how do you find these books, pictures, and music? Someone has to deliver book X in front of your eyes and song Y close to your ears so you select these instead of millions of other books, pictures, and music.

Since we don't want the advertising industry to just evaporate over-night when we regulate it out of existence we can fund it collectively to solve this problem.

Wall to wall advertising to help everyone live a better life as cheaply & with as little environmental damage as possible.

>Is that manipulation of his preferences for good skateboarding shoes, the ad making him impulsive and changing his desires and making him buy a worse product?

In your example, yes.

>Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany him on his self selected journey and help his own desires?

No.

One shoe is better for its purpose, the other has stronger associations with positive ideas and feelings.

The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Conversely, the brand you buy from is not necessary to having certain thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations, etc.

The notion that buying X product with Y association in some way supports Y is exactly the deception. Flowery language about buying access/hope/a way of life is romanticizing the deception.

Rejecting the spirit doesn’t mean it’s a lie or deception, you haven’t disproved it for the teenager and if we study his behaviour he will act as if his Nike’s are more uplifting.

Nike (née Kay) used to be the Greek goddess of victory. Nike the shoe brand is the updated copywritten form of that spirit that has been a part of humanity since forever. It’s not brand related despite the commercial rules, but the spirits are real.

Teacups can be bought with a gold trim that does nothing for performance and yet is seen as higher quality. You can’t divorce the mind from qualitative judgements.

There are qualitative ranks of fictional stories. You can judge the quality of spirit something embodies. We reject a lot of soulless, dispassionate product because it may be functionally viable or performant, but looks like it belongs in the soviet era (ugly concrete, hard unfriendly edges, ect). The US military puts high value on making sure it's equipment looks the part as well as plays the part, because of the impact it has on judgement.

> Nike (née Kay) used to be the Greek goddess of victory. Nike the shoe brand is the updated copywritten form of that spirit that has been a part of humanity since forever. It’s not brand related despite the commercial rules, but the spirits are real.

This is ridiculous. The name of the shoe is the brand name, the name used to market the shoe! It is used in advertising! Any company can name themselves after some Greek goddess, regardless of the quality of their product. The name of a shoe has no impact on its utility/meaning to consumers, unless that name has been associated with flowery, false emotions instilled in them by ads. No one intrinsically feels uplifted by the mention of some Greek goddess that likely very few people would have heard of if not for Nike's decision to name themselves after her. The spirits are not real; survey a group of random people and ask them what Nike's namesake is; most will not know. Ask them if they like Nike shoes; they likely will. But hey, maybe Greek mythology enthusiasts do buy Nikes because the name gives them pleasure or confidence. But in comparison to Nike's ad budget and mindshare, this is minuscule.

The spirit isn't the name of some "greek goddess", it's the concept of victory and the associated conscious and conceptual space.

I'm not dumb enough to say that Nike is a reference to a dead culture from thousands of years ago. I'm saying that the concept and conscious idea of victory expressed as a piece of culture has existed for thousands of years, in roughly the same way despite the different window dressing; like seeing it as a god or as a brand. It's the same spirit in a different frame.

It's the same as the idea of a rich man being framed as Mansa Musa, Bill Gates, Aladdin from the 1992 film and many more examples. They all have similar culture connotations in some sense that make up the spirit of the 'rich man' and if you kill all cultural representations of the 'rich man', people will make new ones regardless of who it is. They will be framed in a way that is culturally successful at the time. Bill Gates is occupies the spirit of the rich man, framed as smart guy business savvy leader with a touch of ruthlessness. A catholic priest from before lutherian protestant reform would have occupied the spirit of the 'rich man' though he would have been framed very differently to bill gates, draped in catholic finery and religious imagery. When people want to access the spirit of being rich they would seek a catholic influence instead of a SV tech influence. Ages before that they would have saught the culture influence of Mansa Musa and his billions in gold. It's still the same spirit of the 'rich man', with different frames.

The same way Nike and Nike are the same spirit of victory with different frames.

Jesus christ. Read some Paglia.

>The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Is that really true if the mind is what makes it so?

Product advertising convinces you that you can do a thing, so you succeed. Emotions are much more powerful than rational thought and in the case of the shoe, can be a catalyst for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Performance is almost never purely mechanical with products that interface directly with the human body.

Yes, it's necessarily so. The quality of the shoe determines how well the shoe performs.

Whether the customer performs better based on the (sub)conscious influence of the brand on the shoe is a different question entirely. But it's not one that anyone in these comments has provided the faintest whiff of evidence for.

So far, we've had romanticized assertions about emotional impacts nobody has measured.

The real question is whether this advertising process produces any unique benefits vs. a more product information based process. People found motivation and inspiration in things before the rise of modern branding. IMO, the presumption should be that sources of ephemeral emotional inspiration could be replaced without requiring the attention-hijacking form of advertising.

I’ll give you a better example: motorcycle helmets. There is little information about relative safety of one vs the other (they are all basically “tall enough”). They do all have slightly different features but there are so many little ones that it’s nearly impossible to compare a good $400 helmet with another good $400 helmet. But some helmets are worn by MotoGP champions and some are not and yes to some people that will be a deciding factor.

// Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany him on his self selected journey and help his own desires and achieve his goals?

That's a false narrative.

We know brand advertising is generally psychologically bad for people. There's no psychologist who will recommend you "watch more ads".Almost nobody watches most ads out of their free choice.