For
a start, is advertising a consensual activity? Clearly it is not,
though some people might say that it is neutral, since people who see
the advertising haven’t actually said 'No'.
This
is an important issue, since a significant part of our spending
relates to goods we would not otherwise have bought, and therefore
don’t need. In particular we have the phenomenon of pester power,
where kids see adverts and what the eye seeth, the heart grieveth.
In one country at least, Sweden, advertising that targets children is
banned.
At
present, in Botswana, the government is trying to do all it can to
evict the Bushmen, or San, since the area they inhabit offers
opportunities of wealth from diamonds. But they need neither
diamonds, nor the goods that advertisers want us to want. And they
have skills that our ancestors lost when they ate the apple of
knowledge and were expelled from the Garden of Eden. So perhaps what
we can still learn from them is a greater asset than the diamonds.
In
my view, it is an infringement of our liberties that we need to take
positive action to avoid seeing such advertisements, and further,
little in our society trains us to resist the misleading elements of
advertising. Thus there must be a freedom from psychological
conditioning to aid somebody’s thirst for
profit. What this really means is that people will not see any
advertising unless they go to the classifieds or click on the
appropriate button.
Big
business will throw up their hands in horror, saying that advertising
promotes growth. But in reality it doesn’t hold back growth, but
redistributes growth.
However
there is one way in which advertising creates growth in addition to
redistributing it: the advertising industry.
This is a form of growth – including the branding and marketing -
that clearly doesn’t add to people’s standard of living. This is
what the East Germans found out when they had the opportunity to buy
Wessi goods – if they could afford them after losing their jobs –
the packaging might have been more glossy, but the contents were not
necessarily better. So the packaging doesn’t really add to their
standard of living either.
So
if a restriction on advertising really does cause people to spend
less, they won’t mind paying more in taxes for such things as the
environment, health and education.
I
would still permit unsolicited advertising for road safety campaigns,
charity advertising, public opinion campaigns and the like, where
such knowledge is in the public interest. And maybe for small
businesses, to some extent, though not much positive action is needed
to avoid those little cards in the newsagents’ window.
And
coming back to Page Three, which is essentially an advert for the
Sun: anyone has the right to read a newspaper that claims to be
opinion-forming. But Page Three is nothing to do with
opinion-forming, or shouldn’t be. One should not need to take
positive action to avoid it, which you do in fact need to when it is
the first thing you see when you start looking inside the paper. Why
not have a don’t drink and drive advert on Page Three? And if we
really are to be foolish and naughty, pop those pictures on Page Two,
which is less intrusive and we only see it after the ‘good’
adverts.
Well
some time ago I presented two diagrams to capture exploitation:
And
here we see a difference between the exploitative methods of liberals
and conservatives. Here the liberals educate the exploiters, and
keep the exploited people happy. But conservatives keep the
exploiters happy, make no attempt to keep the exploited peoples
happy, and scare the fellow exploiters when the exploited start being
‘awkward and unreasonable’. So the grey is the colour here for
exploitation of ignorance and keeping people in blissful ignorance.
But though the powers that be will complain that they are merely
respecting people’s freedom, in reality it is all about anything
but freedom.
So
how do we relate advertising to freedom? In
general, there is a need for advertisers to
positively avoid the need
for readers to positively avoid what they
want to positively avoid.
And indeed, though it is a vain hope, advertisers should want
to positively avoid all this. If they don’t,
don’t buy their goods.
Martin
Prior
