And this is different from all other marketing how?
If tobacco style marketing is a problem that needs to be solved, then 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
If tobacco style marketing is a problem that needs to be solved, then 95% of marketing needs to be banned.
I could get behind this.
If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him.
Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives.
The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.
If ads were informational, like “here is a new product you might like from the makers of this other product you already use,” that would be different.
it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.
I don't think most comedians really have any cogent "message", nor do I think that's part of the job
That’s a very reductive view of comedy, essentially “just a joke with no relevant context or layers allowed,” which rubs against the entire history of the art form. No working comic would agree with you.
Put another way: Not everyone is looking to do revolutionary commentary, but good luck finding a comic with no commentary at all.
Bill Hicks clearly did the normal career-promotion work of a comedian: he auditioned, performed constantly, toured, did TV spots, recorded specials/albums, cultivated UK audiences, and made repeated appearances on shows like Letterman. He opened for Jay Leno, appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, recorded an HBO special, played Just for Laughs, etc.
And for context he worked really hard to get those comedy specials recorded. Those specials are basically a business product, right? It's a way for him to scale his own comedy time and make more money. He partnered with big corporations to do it and they promoted those comedy specials with marketing.
All of that is part of a pretty standard self promotion/touring package of building a comedy career.
The analogy would be if whatever company releases a product that people see out in the wild and it's so good at what it does that they want more of it based on word of mouth.
He aggressively promoted and marketed himself!
Biggest example: Going on Letterman and other corporate talk shows / interviews (he went on Letterman 12 times to promote himself, not making much money, purely for driving awareness - classic pr marketing technique that he used repeatedly)
He also went far beyond live acts when he started monetizing his recorded acts that were playing/distributing through corporate partners. Those recordings and specials were heavily marketed and he benefited from it because it created scale.
The next time you're watching a commercial from some company renowned for marketing success (Apple, Coke, etc) pay attention to how much time in the ad the product is in any way mentioned, and how much is... 'other stuff.' That other stuff is the point of the ad, the actual product is largely irrelevant. The world would be vastly better without large scale marketing.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model
The whole industry is creepy, garish, tasteless, and rude. And that’s without lying.
The marketing industry in the US is built not only to get the word out about your product, but also to gatekeep who can compete in our free market.
With marketing being so pervasive as to monetize the entire internet it effectively levies a tax on every business that wants to compete.
If you dont have the marketing budget to outspend your competition then they have no competition.
While Tesla has (in some years) avoided traditional marketing, the ceo is known for spending ridiculous amounts of money on publicity stunts like having a submarine shipped to a cave and buying Twitter to boost public perception of his companies.
I think this is the exception that proves the rule.
How can it be "uniquely bad" if it's "along with other drugs"?
Tobacco ranks pretty high in term of dependence and physical harm, especially considering that it's legal.
And in doing so you can see that what you're saying is actually not true. Look up any random advertiser and you'll see that it's pretty uncommon for ads to be based around insecurity. Almost always it's on banal product features. The insecurity-focused ads do exist but they tend to be focused on a few broad lowest hanging fruit ad categories.
(anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)
Also, GP was talking about enterprise (B2C) and ads for B2C are pretty scarce in consumer-focused spaces. Insecurity, FOMO, etc is absolutely used to advertise to people in middle management on up.
They’re essentially engineering food to produce subtly mind-altering effects.