HarryShearer.com

When I was a kid, I believed in advertising. On shopping trips with my mom, I’d nudge her away from store brands, urging the purchase of stuff I’d heard or seen being repeatedly advertised. A decade later, my mom schooled me. She ran a Texaco gas station (!), and I worked there during the summers. One day a big tanker truck pulled up to refill the pumps, and it had a big sign on it: “Chevron”. I asked my mother about this perplexing mixup, and her answer was simple: “They just send the trucks from the nearest refinery.” Our TCP was no better than their Techroline?

My next lesson came when, as a summer copywriting intern at a New York ad agency (!), I was assigned to a beer account. Admitting to my supervisor that I needed some guidance on this particular beverage, since “I’ve never drunk beer”, his reply was simple: “You don’t need to know anything, it tastes like horse piss.”

So it occurred to me that advertising was, to put it harshly, lying.

But I had read stuff, going back to the early heyday of the practice, back when ads were long screeds giving “reasons why” to buy something, that claimed advertising benefitted consumers by resulting in lower product prices. Was that really true?

This from The Econosphere:

Advertising has a significant influence on price sensitivity by shaping consumer perceptions and creating value propositions for products and services. Through strategic messaging and branding, businesses can position their offerings in a way that justifies higher prices and reduces price sensitivity among consumers. The influence of advertising on price sensitivity can be seen in the way businesses use marketing campaigns to create a perception of quality, exclusivity, or uniqueness, ultimately impacting consumers’ willingness to pay for their products.

Tim Wu, a Columbia professor, wrote a book called “The Attention Merchants”, documenting the incessant increase in the amount, and location, of ads. What used to be a couple of 60-second ad breaks on primetime network television are now three-minute cascades of 20-, 10-, and even 5-second blurts of promotion on CNN. Online services jam ads before, after, and even during what you’re trying to watch. The Citizens United decision has brought this same onslaught to American politics. Advertising, the legal system has decided, is free speech, which is its own kind of irony. It’s the free speech that’s paid for.

Our media ecosystem is now crowded with subscription products, as ad-supported media like broadcast television slowly decline. It’s so much easier, and supposedly cheaper, to sit through parades of ads than keep up with which media services deserve continued payment. But which system is actually cheaper for consumers? We pay the possibly inflated price of advertised goods whether or not we watch or read their ads. We pay in precious time for the increasing onslaught of pitching. We just notice those costs less.