Capitalism: Culture of advertising

Literally every normie I know likes something because it’s advertised it to them.

Like SpongeBob? Advertising.
Like “modern music”? Advertising.
Like skateboarding? Advertising.

What I’m trying to say is it seems like the things most people like are the things that are advertised.

Sure, people will argue that the thing is being mass-advertised is because people love it (sort of like a meme)
At first, only a small group liked that thing, and then 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧the capitalists🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 promoted it to hell so that everyone can like it too. A part of me feels like people like stuff because it’s “cool”

People only eat at mcdonalds because it’s the most popular. People listen to earrape music because it’s the most popular. See what I’m sayingg?

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Well they wouldn't be pouring billions of dollars into advertising if it didn't work

It's the opposite retard, people drop things when they get too popular. See vaping, dubstep, fidget spinners etc.

I actually fear more the second level of advertising. As in "holy fuck what a stupid ad", then next year I don't remember anything but there's still a subconscious presence of the brand inside my head.

Explain why rap/trap music is so popular and it too is mass-advertised and still is?

Most new rappers are unknown meme soundcloud rappers

In any city that's anything close to a cultural center music cycles out a few months after release at most. You can hate it but there's no question that anyone "trendy" despises anything even close to mainstream as soon as it spreads

Stop treating the market as some type of bad demiurge.

Kind*

because it's the only music genre about keeping things real. it doesn't try to take you into some fantasy unlike nearly every other genre out there.
it didn't start off massively advertised by black people in lamborghinis and gold chains like it is nowadays. it started in worn down burrows being made by depressed poor people.

You don't even know to what extend corporations have power over media.
I can only talk about cinema really, but a lot of the budget is part payed advertisment or shilling for somebody or something. It's so automatic at this point that no one even notice most of the time

Bullshit. I fell in love with Spongebob as a kid because it was what was on TV at the time. I was quite unaware of the advertising for it prior to its original airing, and just fell into it naturally. Don't you go dragging that gem of my childhood into this.

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SpongeBob is actually one of the best children's cartoons there is and it does contain a criticism to Capitalist greed in the character of Mr. Krabs, and the alienation of the working class, in the character of Squidward.
As for skateboarding, are you a 50 years old in the 1980's or what?

What do you mean by "rap"? There's Kanye-tier shit, and then there are very good rappers who aren't well known because their message isn't exactly one the mass media are comfortable with spreading. One is indeed a commercial product, while the other enjoys popularity simply because it tells the truth.
Most non-commercial rap is staunchly leftist.

I’m not so much against the rap part, I hate the instumentals beyond belief.

Ironically, the instrumentals are what whitey loves the most, but I can’t stand the instrumentals, especially in trap music. Why does whitey enjoy the “hardcore” trap earrape?

Also don’t like the rap beat either, but for some reason, whitey is the opposite of me and likes instrumentals and beat more than the lyrics

I only dont like the beat when they try to make it sound like dubstep or some shit

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I've heard that it's become quite shitty but the first few seasons were fucking excellent.

youtube.com/watch?v=1Ck0su859Ps

This doesn't makes sense. Toys sell because make kids happy, if a toy sucks and it's boring then it won't sell. The purpose of the company is to make toys as fun and appealing as possible, in order to make money, of course, but still.

The same applies to many other things.

Modern toys are made to break. Modern toys are in a way that makes the older models seem lame and outdated. These are both things that kids, especially poorer kids, unhappy.

sometimes i wonder if i just suffer from delayed effect advertising

nothing is quite as good at pulling my heartstrings as a political advert from a failed campaign by a nice party 20 years ago.

You're not taking a vital superstructure element at work here that didn't exist, not in the way it does now, while Marx and Lenin were alive: marketing. American corporate culture has pretty much made it a science, and I know that that's usually a hyperbole but it's dangerously close to real in this case.

Marketing comes into play for a least two reasons. One is simple: as markets for people's needs mostly "plateau" in developed countries, one of the things Porky does is create wants. Whether this want is at all beneficial (e.g. a smartphone) or purely a fad or fantasy (e.g. fidget spinners) doesn't matter, so long as a new market (or a new segment of an old market) has been created.

The second one is more complicated.

Say you want to mass-manufacture something, whether new or old, useful or superfluous, anything really. Any product will have its own economies of scale, the data that tells you how to minimize costs (e.g. buying the amount of raw material that presents the lowest cost per unit) and maximize revenue (e.g. maybe because of the production costs, or speculation, or taxes etc., the highest profit margin may not come with maximum production). These economies of scale, if graphed, will have immensely varying curves, from simple straight lines to ungodly, non-linear scrawls, but as a rule of thumb, the higher the amount being traded (whether it's the final product or its raw materials), the higher the savings. From this, a million tendencies appear: using the same parts for various final products, making these final products near identical anyway etc. beside the usual stuff like using subpar raw material, what said etc. Add all of this, and you have direct material/financial incentive to keep your products bland, unoriginal and same-y. Innovation, originality and creativity can be downright detrimental to your bottom line, so they get quashed.

Further, depending on their material nature, some products can be extremely diversified, or extremely specialized. A juice shop has no trouble catering to the tastes of any demographic on Earth, but a smartphone manufacturer can't. A line of smartphones will have half a dozen models, if that much, that will have to cater to literally the entire world in order to sell. So again, in order to play it safe, the manufacturer wants the products to appeal to as many people as possible, thus they'll tend to be bland, unoriginal and same-y, and innovation, originality and creativity get quashed. Notice this is what happened to AAA vidya this decade; with rising production costs, AAA publishers, porkies that they are, played safer and safer. In other words, stuck to successful formulas. Thus we had a million Brown'n'Bloom Tacticool Shooter, abandoning old fans for the sake of a larger demographic (incidentally, this is one of the roles the clique filled; remember "gamers are dead"?), old IPs being brought back just to be desecrated and sho on *shniff*

Now someone might simply ask: "why not simply make a good product?". First, because as we all know, quality does not necessarily correlate with sales. Second, which stems from the first one, and probably more importantly: suits can't process "quality". It's something that's always at least a little subjective, and in the case of artistic products, 100% so. You can't fit "quality" in a spreadsheet, you can't put it into a formula for projected sales, you can't put it in a Powerpoint presentation so the porkies above you can see it. And more to the point, you can't tell how the consumers will react to it. To put it simply: quality can be risk. When arts are involved, quality is risk. So the suits go with the focus group tests, old sales data and other crap so they can work out the ol' successful formula. The more some data can be reduced to numbers, the better, as far as the suit is concerned.

So then, consumer product manufacturers are incentivized to water down, dumb down, decrease innovation etc. so that the product appeals to as many people as possible. This decreases risk of investment loss, but introduces a new factor: a bland product might be the most appealing one, or it might end up not appealing to anyone. Fortunately, this is an issue that the risk-averse, numbers-loving suit can mitigate with numbers. He can buy ad spaces. He can pay celebrities to use it in front of cameras. He can pay an agency so their employees shill for the product while posing as common consumers. He can organize a million different publicity stunts to convince consumers that his bland product actually seems to be tailor-made for them. Basically, he's hedging his bets by trying to convince as many people as possible to buy his bland crap. In a word: marketing. Modern AAA games are rumored to have half their budget spent on marketing alone. It's ever more present in our lives. Marketers are to late stage capitalism what commissars were in the USSR.