Investigation and Critical Analysis on Advertising

Written assignment #2 - Chapter 2, Advertising is Death from The Big Leap - An Ethics of Insight volume1

advertising is death

"The idea is simple – to brief and make a different kind of value marketing, one that measurably demonstrates a more ethical business behavior, we’re need new insights. Deeper insights than the superficial and self-serving insights we’ve been using to make advertising for the past hundred years. If we’re going to brief and realize a more vital marketing we’re gonna need less fatal insights."

Kennon, Advertising is Death, The Big Leap - An Ethics of Insight volume 1

Consider the evidence of numerous studies and texts over the past 100 years revealing the manipulative, extractive, violence of the false stimulation of desire which has fueled advertising since its adoption as the primary revenue source for broadcast media. Our text cites the research and writings of media critics Packard, Sedivy, Key and McCluhan. But there are many more.

1. Research the original founder of advertising, Edward Bernays (Propaganda) rationalizing the need to manipulate and shape consumers AND voters. Also look at Noam Chomsky’s take-down of the media+government’s complicity in his Manufacturing Consent. Cite addi6ional evidence from your expanded research of this great and enduring con. Consider the chapter’s cases and insights (along with any of your expanded research) and use it as the inspiration for applying the chapter’s insights to your group project brand’s permanent campaign brand + audience alignment strategies.

2.Critique the advertising industry through the lens and implications of these insights from our text about advertising as a sort of performative deathcult.

Which brings us to death. It’s been my sobering experience that the deepest insights naming human desire, at their very bottom, all concern a threat of loss, best understood as some form of death. Social death – see FOMO. A death of innocence - see paranoia. A death of love – see alienation. A death of hope – see nihilism. Mortal death – see denial. When people tell me I’m mad to believe you can re-imagine marketing to become an ethical force in the world, I say to them: you’re right, unless you believe what I believe which is that we’ve reached a point where everything is at stake. Your job, your family, your business, your community, your capitalism and of our shared worlds. All of it. When the stakes reach such existential heights, and we agree to keep playing, it’s all these ferocious fears of loss we not only can solve for, but now must.

Chapter 2

3. Within the context of your analysis of the chapter and your expanded research, consider this ultimate challenge

“[a] definition of marketing strategy – authentically aligning the human and the brand whys - isn’t revolutionary (see again Simon Sinek’s golden circle). But if pursued to its radical realization it produces a kind of marketing that explicitly serves the human condition, not seduces it. A kind of marketing which keys into a deepened human insight in order to humbly fulfill desire, not to cynically stimulate it. A kind of marketing which – philosophically and technically – is precisely the opposite of advertising.

Chapter 2

Then, using the following citation from our chapter as a brief –

We situate our insight of advertising is death as a battle cry: a call for the obliteration of advertising’s death machine. It is a provocation towards a shattering of essential technique in the service of an entirely diff erent outcome. It is the call for a new method and kind of marketing, one charged not with manipulating human desire to make decisions in our (the marketer’s) interest, but instead acting in the service of desire, the active desire of our human audiences. It is constituted as a set of ethical procedures, representing nothing less than acts of business behavior meant to solve for a relevant need of the human condition. The role of the insight in the process is to brief this behavior. The insight – a deeply authenticate expression of human desire – is applied for and with people, not against them.

--- leverage insights from your ethnographic research to suggest THREE specific marketing 1activation strategies (experiments) which all pass a single test: they ARE not manifest as interruptive advertising powered by measured media but rather they are organically activated – discovered, shared, and engaged with via real human to human marketing procedures.

1,000 words, make them all count.