Conspiracy theorists... are they all just a bit thick?
Discussion
coldel said:
Dagnir said:
Not literally 
But they are so manipulative, its verging on the immoral. You can generally work out what psychology they trying to use in real-time.
Every pixel has been though a process to maximise subconscious manipulation.
Like I said, we've come to understand ourselves far too well and can literally control people's thoughts with the right triggers.
What doesn't help is the blatant bias towards a progressive, post-modern world.
I have to watch stupid people being mislead......and I hate it.
Well of course every advert has an agenda and works hard at convincing you, otherwise whats the point. But they are so manipulative, its verging on the immoral. You can generally work out what psychology they trying to use in real-time.
Every pixel has been though a process to maximise subconscious manipulation.
Like I said, we've come to understand ourselves far too well and can literally control people's thoughts with the right triggers.
What doesn't help is the blatant bias towards a progressive, post-modern world.
I have to watch stupid people being mislead......and I hate it.
Unless of course someone has an inherent paranoia and sees them as manipulating the public into something nefarious instead of just selling more chocolate bars, holidays or cans of coke.
isaldiri said:
Well, when these 'verified experts' are clearly also misrepresenting things (as seen over the pandemic) because they believe it is important to get compliance in the belief that it is for the greater good, it can't really be a surprise that they have, in many ways, directly exacerbated the whole mess as well.... People, and not just the bad conspiracy theorists, can and do believe in whatever they want to.
I don't think it is at all reasonable to generalise that way though. The communications coming out were controlled by the government. There will be behind the scenes I am sure various conversations around various scenarios of a fast moving and unpredictable global issue.
There will have been of course a huge mixture of confusion, a reluctance of enforcing controls vs balancing public health, the various data sources coming in and changing daily, trying to create statistical models that used this data to guide decision making, and many other issues including individual incompetence that made the whole thing very difficult to manage - our government were not the only ones struggling with this.
Now, the rational person accepts the above, and during the time frame made informed and rational decisions on a case by case basis. This group is actually a thing (something the CT group would try have people not believe) and it is very sizeable, in fact the majority.
Then you have two extremes. CTs who think its some nefarious global big pharma plan to take everyones money, restrict freedoms, some sort of great reset so on and so forth. The other those that just did as they were told without fail. Both are small groups with extreme immovable views.
Dagnir said:
coldel said:
Dagnir said:
Not literally
But they are so manipulative, its verging on the immoral. You can generally work out what psychology they trying to use in real-time.
Every pixel has been though a process to maximise subconscious manipulation.
Like I said, we've come to understand ourselves far too well and can literally control people's thoughts with the right triggers.
What doesn't help is the blatant bias towards a progressive, post-modern world.
I have to watch stupid people being mislead......and I hate it.
Well of course every advert has an agenda and works hard at convincing you, otherwise whats the point. But they are so manipulative, its verging on the immoral. You can generally work out what psychology they trying to use in real-time.
Every pixel has been though a process to maximise subconscious manipulation.
Like I said, we've come to understand ourselves far too well and can literally control people's thoughts with the right triggers.
What doesn't help is the blatant bias towards a progressive, post-modern world.
I have to watch stupid people being mislead......and I hate it.
Unless of course someone has an inherent paranoia and sees them as manipulating the public into something nefarious instead of just selling more chocolate bars, holidays or cans of coke.
I find watching tv in actual time very tedious due to those ‘evil’ ads.
Dagnir said:
You're oversimplifying and missing the point I think.
Then please explain. In the context within which you first mentioned it i.e. Films Adverts TV Shows etc. What nefarious propoganda is Neighbours portraying?
I think you are right of course when it comes to social media and the swathes of nonsense that exists there, everyone has an agenda.
Maybe if you defined what you see as 'propaganda' with regards to advertising because if its in the way of programming people nefariously, then its clearly not, if its literally psychologically profiling people to ensure messaging for a product or service lands as effectively as possible then yes of course it does, and has done for hundreds of years, there is nothing new here.
coldel said:
Well of course every advert has an agenda and works hard at convincing you, otherwise whats the point.
Unless of course someone has an inherent paranoia and sees them as manipulating the public into something nefarious instead of just selling more chocolate bars, holidays or cans of coke.
Or someone is selling medical treatments? Or even a War?Unless of course someone has an inherent paranoia and sees them as manipulating the public into something nefarious instead of just selling more chocolate bars, holidays or cans of coke.
isaldiri said:
Blown2CV said:
and that's the post truth world we live in. Previously we overall trusted empirically-derived evidence as an indicator towards truth/facts. If we didn't understand what that meant, we trusted people that were verified experts. If we didn't know how to verify an expert, we trusted people who reached the public arena by virtue of their excellent contributions to the single body of knowledge which was 'science'. Yes we just had to sort of put faith in it for the most part, but it was accepted truth.
Now we have a parallel world including its own body of 'knowledge', 'experts' and means to 'verify' them, approaches to 'research', 'evidence' and of course its own 'facts'.
It's all pretty f
ked up now because for the vast majority of people, either of these worlds requires at some level just a bit of faith as it reaches the boundary of expertise and understanding.
So, now it seems to be basically which do you prefer, rather than one refutes the other.
Well, when these 'verified experts' are clearly also misrepresenting things (as seen over the pandemic) because they believe it is important to get compliance in the belief that it is for the greater good, it can't really be a surprise that they have, in many ways, directly exacerbated the whole mess as well.... People, and not just the bad conspiracy theorists, can and do believe in whatever they want to. Now we have a parallel world including its own body of 'knowledge', 'experts' and means to 'verify' them, approaches to 'research', 'evidence' and of course its own 'facts'.
It's all pretty f
ked up now because for the vast majority of people, either of these worlds requires at some level just a bit of faith as it reaches the boundary of expertise and understanding. So, now it seems to be basically which do you prefer, rather than one refutes the other.
jameswills said:
coldel said:
Well of course every advert has an agenda and works hard at convincing you, otherwise whats the point.
Unless of course someone has an inherent paranoia and sees them as manipulating the public into something nefarious instead of just selling more chocolate bars, holidays or cans of coke.
Or someone is selling medical treatments? Or even a War?Unless of course someone has an inherent paranoia and sees them as manipulating the public into something nefarious instead of just selling more chocolate bars, holidays or cans of coke.
The reality is there is a very small percentage that go to the extreme you mentioned, the majority, and its huge, are just companies looking to sell product, increase ROI, raise brand awareness. Satisfy shareholders, create growth, employ people, sell more product, employ more people.
coldel said:
So, going back to the original statement that 99% of advertising is propaganda. This includes coke cans and chocolate bars.
The reality is there is a very small percentage that go to the extreme you mentioned, the majority, and its huge, are just companies looking to sell product, increase ROI, raise brand awareness. Satisfy shareholders, create growth, employ people, sell more product, employ more people.
I think you're misunderstanding the point I am making, everything in the media space is an advert, propaganda aimed at you the viewer to manipulate your thinking from encouraging you to buy things, to eat something, hold a certain view or to vote a certain way. I don't see an advert for a chocolate bar any different than a "news" article on the BBC website. Both are selling something or training your thought.The reality is there is a very small percentage that go to the extreme you mentioned, the majority, and its huge, are just companies looking to sell product, increase ROI, raise brand awareness. Satisfy shareholders, create growth, employ people, sell more product, employ more people.
jameswills said:
coldel said:
So, going back to the original statement that 99% of advertising is propaganda. This includes coke cans and chocolate bars.
The reality is there is a very small percentage that go to the extreme you mentioned, the majority, and its huge, are just companies looking to sell product, increase ROI, raise brand awareness. Satisfy shareholders, create growth, employ people, sell more product, employ more people.
I think you're misunderstanding the point I am making, everything in the media space is an advert, propaganda aimed at you the viewer to manipulate your thinking from encouraging you to buy things, to eat something, hold a certain view or to vote a certain way. I don't see an advert for a chocolate bar any different than a "news" article on the BBC website. Both are selling something or training your thought.The reality is there is a very small percentage that go to the extreme you mentioned, the majority, and its huge, are just companies looking to sell product, increase ROI, raise brand awareness. Satisfy shareholders, create growth, employ people, sell more product, employ more people.
Lets focus on advertising as that is the point in hand...the idea of psychological profiling or propaganda (which is the wrong term for it but of course used by a CT to make it feel more nefarious than it actually is) is not a new one, Advertising is millennia old, the format has just changed from men on the streets to posters to tv to internet. The psychological profiling designed to make you want the product or service has been in evidence for hundreds, if not, thousands of years. The word propaganda is completely incorrect by definition and misleading, interestingly it is used to deliberately mislead away from the truth in this case.
What of the news? We have always had politically leaned news, if anything if you went back say 500 years, you got nothing but government controlled news alongside back street gossip. We can better list out and measure news leaning and political bias, as I've said, we all have biases. But again, there is nothing new here.
However to lump news and advertising in the same bucket called 'propaganda' is fundamentally incorrect and attempts quite badly to over simplify what is a much more complicated landscape of industries.
paulguitar said:
jameswills said:
I don't see an advert for a chocolate bar any different than a "news" article on the BBC website. Both are selling something or training your thought.
But for sure, if the BBC has a leaning that favours the climate change agenda its probably because the majority of science is pointing that way and it is reporting in line with that. A CT might flip that and just say they are all 'part of the great climate rip off' but who knows. I can see why the word propaganda gets tossed in the mix here.
As for advertising for an independent company whose main goals are to satisfy investors, secure the employment security of its staff, create growth strategies be it through product innovation, product distribution or a mixture of both - quite clearly this is not the same as the above and they are not the same. This isn't propaganda, this is called brand growth and ROI which is what advertising supports as part of a wider timetable of activation and activity.
No I think they are very closely linked, and go hand in hand. You can't just see an advert as wanting you to buy a product, it's doing way more than that by the people they use, the situations and context. If you watched today's adverts in the UK you'd be thinking that most families are of mixed race or half the population are gay for example. You may think this is just some levelling up policy, but it really isn't, it goes way deeper than that. It is whether you like it or not, programming your thoughts. Adverts very much lean into your emotional wellbeing to grab you and paint a picture that is often not real. They mislead.
jameswills said:
No I think they are very closely linked, and go hand in hand. You can't just see an advert as wanting you to buy a product, it's doing way more than that by the people they use, the situations and context. If you watched today's adverts in the UK you'd be thinking that most families are of mixed race or half the population are gay for example. You may think this is just some levelling up policy, but it really isn't, it goes way deeper than that. It is whether you like it or not, programming your thoughts. Adverts very much lean into your emotional wellbeing to grab you and paint a picture that is often not real. They mislead.
Are 'they' trying to turn us all gay then?jameswills said:
No I think they are very closely linked, and go hand in hand. You can't just see an advert as wanting you to buy a product, it's doing way more than that by the people they use, the situations and context. If you watched today's adverts in the UK you'd be thinking that most families are of mixed race or half the population are gay for example. You may think this is just some levelling up policy, but it really isn't, it goes way deeper than that. It is whether you like it or not, programming your thoughts. Adverts very much lean into your emotional wellbeing to grab you and paint a picture that is often not real. They mislead.
They mislead? Who are 'they'?I work for a media company, this is not the case. It really isn't. Advertising is expensive, and most companies have a one hit at it opportunity per product push. I can guarantee you the people in charge of these companies advertising their products and services have none of the above in their agenda.
It is true that they go through a process of profiling and wanting people to think, feel and experience things. But its not the nefarious view you have above. Their laser focus is on ROI and Brand Uplift, this is even part of the process, where the media planners measure these to demonstrate to advertisers that the planning they suggested had the impact they had in the brief.
There will be then a targeting, you use different media formats, audiences, locations, etc to reach the audience you have targeted, and yes you have creative teams that build out creatives which are then tested against test audiences via research to maximise the impact. But the above, it really isn't part of the creative process. There is no one sitting in the room saying that we must have mixed families in the imagery to convince everyone thats the world they live in, none.
All these companies care about is brand uplift, increased sales and ROI. They will use the best means to get it. There is no side agenda to use chocolate bar advertising to convince the masses via some sort of huge social experiment.
coldel said:
I can see why the word propaganda gets tossed in the mix here.
propaganda
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
https://g.co/kgs/W5zqB1G
Very emotive...
jameswills said:
No I think they are very closely linked, and go hand in hand. You can't just see an advert as wanting you to buy a product, it's doing way more than that by the people they use, the situations and context. If you watched today's adverts in the UK you'd be thinking that most families are of mixed race or half the population are gay for example. You may think this is just some levelling up policy, but it really isn't, it goes way deeper than that. It is whether you like it or not, programming your thoughts. Adverts very much lean into your emotional wellbeing to grab you and paint a picture that is often not real. They mislead.
Maybe you should accept that adverts are for selling stuff. Nothing more/nothing less. CT's seem to like conflations but good luck to them as they can't see past their cognitive biases.Al Gorithum said:
jameswills said:
No I think they are very closely linked, and go hand in hand. You can't just see an advert as wanting you to buy a product, it's doing way more than that by the people they use, the situations and context. If you watched today's adverts in the UK you'd be thinking that most families are of mixed race or half the population are gay for example. You may think this is just some levelling up policy, but it really isn't, it goes way deeper than that. It is whether you like it or not, programming your thoughts. Adverts very much lean into your emotional wellbeing to grab you and paint a picture that is often not real. They mislead.
Maybe you should accept that adverts are for selling stuff. Nothing more/nothing less. CT's seem to like conflations but good luck to them as they can't see past their cognitive biases.Companies live and die by staying ahead, creating growth, securing the best talent, innovating and developing - advertising is a big part of that process.
But hey, maybe I am part of the conspiracy
Bill said:
propaganda
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view.
https://g.co/kgs/W5zqB1G
Very emotive...
Advertising is not propaganda, it really isn't.
I can though see why a CT might get into a place where they cannot see the difference where they see things that aren't really a thing.
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