Apparently, cheap marketing tricks do work. Our world is filled with mad men telling us we need things, and us nodding in agreement. And our sense of wanting to need is extremely sensitive: all we look for is the slightest sign of concurrence — which is what every single advertisement is built around. Ads give us a faux need.

On the one hand, we could do away with everything, as our needs are few. The Big Bang Theory sitcom’s Sheldon Cooper (awkward as it seems to quote him) puts forth this idea quite well. But this outlook is rather harsh. It is time to define a new category; a sweet-spot between needs and wants. Benefits, if you will.

“We have to take in nourishment, expel waste and breathe in enough oxygen to keep our cells from dying. Everything else is purely optional.”

— Sheldon Cooper, TBBT

These are things we can ultimately live without, but, on a practical level, are those which will help us in earnest — whether by making sure trivial, repetitive jobs get done faster, or by helping in making work hours more productive, or however else along similar lines.

Do advertisements cost anything?

AMC’s Mad Men is one of my favourite shows currently on TV. And here is one line from Don Draper you would find hard to forget: “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylon.”

From phones to zig-zag shoes, everything becomes a need because a bunch of people tell us they are. Leo Babuta talks of advertisements costing something (even if not money) because, “Your life is worse for having to watch the ads; you are paying for the ads, and thus the content, by buying more … ; and the time you spend watching ads is worth something.” I believe, added to this, that they are costing us our personal space (see “Why special things matter” below.)

All of this is true, and some ads are targeted more towards appealing to our desire to need than logic. Some of the best-selling products are sold not by (seemingly) earnest voices, but by shoving them at our faces. Consider Procter & Gamble and Unilever, for instance. P&G sells such products as Gillette, Head & Shoulders and Olay, all with similar marketing strategies: “we’re the best at doing this, so you need to buy our product.” Unilever’s Dove has been taking what looks like an earnest approach for ten years now with their real beauty campaign talking of every woman being beautiful etc.

Unilever earned a net profit of €5.3b in 2013, while P&G took home over double: €11.3b.

Why special things matter

Everyone wants to feel special — this desire is just as strong as the desire to need. But, while ads do target that, that is not in itself what I refer to when I term this age “the origin of specials”.

Advertisements, in their infancy, relied heavily on stereotyping sections of society. A product when marketed as a symbol for some belief — as products so often are — almost inevitably ended up appealing to one bunch of people while turning the rest off. There were hardly many things everyone could agree upon. This ultimately meant that with every customer a product gained, it lost someone else.

However, around the turn of this millennium, that changed. Around October of 2000, Google came out with AdWords a PPC online advertising solution that corporates could use to reach people on a new platform that was gaining increased social acceptance — the internet.

AdWords would go on to tie up with (as we know pretty well) lots of Google products and third party websites to track a user’s browsing pattern and history and learn a user’s likes and dislikes.

Fourteen years later, any corporation on earth knows your likes and dislikes, beliefs and disbeliefs, favourites and preferences better than yourself. All that was once personal — or belonged to the domain of our closest — is now in the hands of a bunch of men with whom we share a mutual lack of interests. What is more interesting is that they can make an advert only you (and possibly a bunch of people who think exactly like you) can see. Those who disagree will see another ad and in this way, everyone agrees with the product being sold.

Advertising online is cheaper, costing only a fraction of the price of, say, a billboard, and reaching lots more people more effectively. And the baggage of gaining someone’s support at the cost of losing someone else’s is no longer a threat.

This is special advertising. An advertisement specially targeted at you, designed to agree with your views. The ethics of this can be debated at great length, but its effectiveness is hardly questionable.

I do not think we can disregard advertisements any more. In the age where televisions were at the forefront of technology, you could switch channels and skip ads altogether. Not anymore. The origin of specials has begun; its evolution is what we must fear.

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