“Consumers are dumb. For decades, this has been the bedrock assumption of advertising. For obvious reasons, no one in the field wants to be caught voicing it out loud, but think about it: You endure an unwanted interruption in a TV show you’re watching or an article you’re reading, and somehow that annoyance causes you to spend money you wouldn’t have spent on something you didn’t want.”
Another snippet from “A.D.D. Men,” an insightful piece about the shifting approach to advertising — a.k.a. strategies to get you to buy stuff — written by Jeff Bercovici for the New York Observer:
No longer is it fashionable to look down on consumers as soft-headed rubes to be pumped full of artificial desires and relieved of their paychecks.
Instead, they’re being treated as enlightened beings to be flattered, courted and cultivated. The old script went something like this: We’ll tell you what to crave and you’ll crave it because we are the almighty gods of culture and you are a bunch of herd animals in Day-Glo Crocs. The new one says: You tell us what we should be and we’ll become that—and if we’re not doing it fast enough, won’t you please let us know via email/SMS/Twitter/Facebook?