When I need something, and have some money to spend, but don’t know where to find something suitable, I ask someone I trust. Should I find something advertised, I will tend to think it’s probably the worst there is. If it was any good, no one would have to advertise it.
At least, they wouldn’t be using modern methods. What we have today is the summation of a long path to ever more manipulative efforts. Look up people like Edward Bernays and you’ll learn it was all about doing everything possible to deceive people so the only thoughts they have on a subject are the lies which profit his client.
Humans are fallen, vulnerable to lusts and temptations. The Bible makes it clear you will not keep God’s favor if you take advantage of weakness in your fellow humans. That advertising works is hardly any justification. The idea we must do all we can to pump up the market volume with tons and tons of useless crap nobody really needs, just because there is some possibility of getting them to pay for it, shows a complete and conscious rejection of God’s Word. This is a critical part of why God is destroying the modern West, in particular the US, a nation founded on manipulative marketing lies.
There are a few individuals here and there who seem to have a certain modicum of conscience on this, and their marketing is restrained. Indeed, a tiny handful get it. That is, they understand the only rightful way to obtain the attention of their potential market is to offer something which justifies their attention. The product must meet a genuine human need. That standard alone makes the vast majority of products useless, even evil, because most of what we consume offers a well established record of harm: high fructose corn syrup, empty sweet or fat calories devoid of nutritional value, fluoridation, false health claims (mainstream medicine is a big fat lie), plain old government propaganda, etc. “Just giving them what they want!” That’s a lie. It’s going out of your way to find out what triggers the general human lust and selling trash as the answer to their desires. Precious few understand you have a moral obligation to earn that hearing and seeing.
The best advertisers will actually entertain, and don’t confuse entertainment with deception. They tell the truth while presenting something of good moral value in entertaining the prospective buyer. If all you care about is dollars in your pocket, you are evil. If you care about people and their needs, and are willing to do the work, you will do fine in the competitive market place. But it’s so rare these days, we always remember them gratefully. This against, say, the flashing bright colors of banner ads which won’t sit still. Yes, annoying people makes your pitch memorable, but people justly hate you and your painful death at their hands would not disappoint God one bit.
Sure, the foregoing is a lot of platitudes. If I were to start naming names, it would only divert attention over the nit-picking details. The whole point is to remind folks the biblical standard is honesty. That includes the notion you don’t take yourself too seriously, nor your products and services. Honest folks are simply asking for a chance to compete on whatever grounds, letting the buyer decide what matters to them, not trying to manipulate them.
No, God forbid anyone should have to regulate these things. Our cultural legacy, thin as it is, offers no moral restraints which are based in reality. The only effective restraint on human evil is voluntary self-restraint, backed up by a cultural frame of reference which encourages such restraint. Our is utterly false in assumptions about what is real, just and right. Thus, our sins are egregious, our restraints totally inappropriate, and the result is so offensive to God, we wonder why it took Him so long to destroy it all.
So let’s boil it down to this: If someone has to spend a lot of money to get your attention for their stuff, chances are you need to run in the opposite direction as fast as you can. Develop a web of trust among people who, as a group, have sampled the broad range of things out there. All the more so if they have nothing to gain by telling you, aside from your continued trust. Everything else is manipulation, and that is reason enough by itself to reject their claims.
As you know I loathe certain companies for their over the top “expansion” of the truth. To think we use to call them Snake Oil salesmen. Unfortunately, as tech progressed to a level where the avg Joe could no longer pick out the lies things started to go down hill fast. So of it is just downright using people’s perceived perception against them.
For example, I recently read how the Mozilla corporation has been looking into how users perceive Chrome to be sooooo much faster then Firefox. Now we’ve all seen the benchmarks but they noticed some very basic things. The spinning “thing” spun faster on Chrome compared to FF’s when it was loading a page. This gave the impression that Chrome was loading the page faster whether is was or not. For me
this is where it really gets bad because it’s so subtle.