This paragraph from the article represents all that I feel about the rise of anti-marketing marketing, but couldn't articulate:
> It’s a counterintuitive sleight of hand: By acknowledging that their central message is unbelievable or at least exaggerated, the branding masterminds gain our trust and bolster our faith in the brand. Will Ferrell, for example, promoted “Anchorman II” and Dodge at the same time by appearing on talk shows as Ron Burgundy and declaring that Dodge’s cars were “terrible.” Dodge sales spiked. (Ferrell also voices President Business.) In New Zealand, Burger King ran YouTube ads of two guys eating Burger King while complaining about YouTube ads. Nearly every Super Bowl ad this year referred to the fact that it was a Super Bowl ad. The brand — and the TV ad, the movie and the fictional spokesman — is hyperaware of its own fictionality and thus earns the right to simultaneously denigrate and elevate itself as divine.
This is the exact problem I have with shows like Jon Stewart and Colbert: when they can make you laugh at all the corrupt shenanigans in politics and government; it diffuses the actual need to do anything about it. It creates a false sense of superiority in the viewers whereby they think "I'm so smart to recognize how corrupt the government is! Ha ha" and then people go on about their lives not changing anything because anger has now become nil via humor.
It's not just the inaction, I despise the subtler shenanigans, which is the tremendous influence of using humor to establish truth or falsehood. "Well it's funny and I'm hilariously entertained, so their message must be true!"
Humor is a great wrapper for the sour pill of deception. At first our conscience might reflect on the acidity, but given enough exposure, eventually the mind will heartily consume the sour pill as if it was the sweet truth all along.
We're firmly at a point in society where truth is not often established by a hard and uncomfortable examination of facts, but whether or not we feel comfortable and entertained by whatever thoughts are presented before our minds. Feelings rule supreme over facts in this country, by far.
Does it make me feel good? / Does it make me feel bad? / Do what makes you happy. -- Just a few of the feeling-oriented mantras society uses for decision making.
Some years ago I wrote up a pretty lengthy piece about how emotional manipulation is the core of all television programming -- I think it was on Kuro5hin.. but I can't seem to find it any more....
Humans who are (intentionally) not taught how to think critically are easily manipulated via their emotions.
Anyone who thinks that there is not a war on your conscious, fought through your pavlovian emotional responses has not been paying close enough attention to the world around them.
Humans ... are easily manipulated via their emotions.
Definitely agree, probably easier to shorten it to that. We all have our blindspots where we're easily influenced, there's just too much daily data and information we vacuum up to even consciously process it all. Hopefully I didn't make myself out as somehow excluded from that aforementioned "society"
Our own personal "McDonald's of the Soul" as Jim Gaffigan says in his stand up.
Is it really that humour defuses anger in these cases, or is it perhaps that the humour is a way to highlight an issue to people who normally wouldn't care? Perhaps it says that something is now "so bad that it's funny"... and that now it's time to fix it before it becomes "so bad that it's just plain sad".
There's a (vitriolic) write up on "The Last Psychiatrist" blog which generalizes this to the idea of the "The Long Con" by discussing the Dove Beauty campaign [0]. It's a more thorough write-up, in part because The Last Psychiatrist says things the NYT can't, but also because they diverge off to examine why this marketing works and where else it's applied.
David Foster Wallace' piece on television and advertising might be interesting in this context. I don't have time to comment further right now, but here's a link. It's well worth a read:
http://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
> It’s a counterintuitive sleight of hand: By acknowledging that their central message is unbelievable or at least exaggerated, the branding masterminds gain our trust and bolster our faith in the brand. Will Ferrell, for example, promoted “Anchorman II” and Dodge at the same time by appearing on talk shows as Ron Burgundy and declaring that Dodge’s cars were “terrible.” Dodge sales spiked. (Ferrell also voices President Business.) In New Zealand, Burger King ran YouTube ads of two guys eating Burger King while complaining about YouTube ads. Nearly every Super Bowl ad this year referred to the fact that it was a Super Bowl ad. The brand — and the TV ad, the movie and the fictional spokesman — is hyperaware of its own fictionality and thus earns the right to simultaneously denigrate and elevate itself as divine.