The Fallout TV series did a good story about this
Oh, a meme bashing marketing. That is a good meme market. You really got a sense for this stuff, I know, I’m in marketing. Now I will go home and dream happy dreams of how I market ad marketing strategies targeting children.
You… You ok bruh?
somewhere between 30 and 5 years ago there used to be a thing, a very crass irregular webcomic of extremely low quality, made by a collective that eventually boiled down to two dead inside dudes working in advertising that escaped from ideological armpit of poland into buddhism and syndicalism, and they had like 3 blogs and fb and got locked out of all of them, their badly drawn jpegs lost to link rot and inexorable passage of time
anyway, they wrote also this, machine translated:
I have an idea for all these advertising festivals. Not like now, where some fucking ghosts* get awards, which were broadcast somewhere on channel tv9 once at 25:68, created after hours by sad advertisers, who somewhere subconsciously regret finishing this ASP [Academy of Fine Arts] and have to enlarge the logo and call to action. No, my idea is for all advertisements to be broadcast at festivals. Obligatory. Every brand manager, and every advertiser who produced something in a given year - all 10, 15 thousand people will be herded into one hall, everyone will be tied to a chair, they will get a tasteful, metal harness for eyes and ears like in A Clockwork Orange and we will start.
We are running a marathon without a break for peeing. We watch all your achievements, television, radio, internet, print. New media. A radio show about urinary incontinence? There it goes, in a loop. TVC where your shitty soda is love and solves the problems of racist violence? In all versions 45, 30 and 15 seconds and the storytelling 3:20. Then a short break for advertising banners obscuring reality. Buy. Buy. Buy. Billboards on quick assembly. Yogurt that loves children. Bathroom furniture assembled on Amiga with overcompressed, screaming voiceover. Shitty content on Facebook, where brands take long-dead memes from the trash can of history and shittily stick their logos on them.
A special section where we exclusively assemble warnings consult a pharmacist and it goes at 130 dB to the entire room. With boosted treble. If you go deaf, we’ll cure you, bitch, if you faint, we’ll revive you. If you die, you win. Maybe after the awards at this festival they would think more about what they are doing. Maybe we would finally stop wondering who came first: the stupid message or the stupid recipient. Maybe there would be no one left to revive (15,000 won! for a total sum of - ).
The award would be not to “win”, but you try so hard all year long that you have no chance. #dreams.
- works that prove to you that you still have some value, and that your thinking is needed (I’ll give you a hint - it isn’t)
There’s a great section in the second Hitchhiker’s book about this exact topic – if anyone’s interested.
David Graeber wrote an entire book about it called Bullshit Jobs.
You mock now, but when you next need your telephone sanitized…
But how am I supposed to know which iPhone to buy without billboards, pre-roll ads, and 3,621 partners who have a legitimate interest in logging everything I do 😱
They’re on the B ark.
The Golgafrincham jokes in the comments restore a little of my hope for humanity.
