consumer breaks up with advertiser

snicker...

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

having worked in advertising, i always found it interesting the perceptions (and mis perceptions) people have about what goes on day to day inside the industry. this ad plays on that advertising reputation and i think it's pretty funny.

people seem to think that there are a bunch of people sitting in a room somewhere scheming for a way to get all their money!!! tricks and manipulations and downright lies!!! really, advertisers are thinking more about winning awards, i think, than they are about manipulating people.

the saddest part for me was seeing that clients are always looking to sell more of their product and ad agencies are always eager to help. sell more? we can do that.

nevermind the big question- should we sell more?

crazy question, i know. we should always sell more, right?. at any cost, right? make more money for ourselves, right? nevermind the consequences to making more stuff and selling more stuff and polluting the world in the process and using up all our finite resources. we have to sell more stuff!!!

for example, those little plastic crap toys in cereal boxes- who needs that crap? kids don't. land fills don't. let's sell some more cereal by advertising cheap plastic crap. it's working, let's do more of that. how creative can we be at inventing crafty cheap plastic crap, packaged liberally, so we can sell more stuff?

to me, whether advertisers are listening to consumers is an interesting question, but even more interesting is the scary relationship between brands with money and their hired help, who are infinitely capable of thinking up how to sell, but seem unable to ask themselves the bigger questions- is selling at any cost worth it? is the money we're spending on advertising really doing a disservice to our world? if we sell 5 billion more of these widgets, how does that impact the world we live in?

it's like advertisers skip over that thought completely. we could do ads for x company- wouldn't that be sweet?

this is probably why i could never be successful at running an ad agency, but i also think that's a good thing.

oops, when i decided to blog this video, i wasn't expecting all this to pour out. =)