Random Thoughts from B.C.'s Mind

Adbusting and All That (Dec. 15th, 1996)

Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.

-- Stephen Leacock

Siobhán recently introduced me to Adbusters, a magazine dedicated to making advertising unattractive.

I have long had a loathe/hate relationship with advertisements. On the one hand, they're very manipulative and, IMO, deceitful (just what is 'chocolatey' coating, anyway?). On the other hand, they're very intrusive.

The Coca-Cola Dilemma

I've never been able to quite understand this:

A litre of gasoline, in Canada, currently costs about 60 cents. A litre of Coca-Cola costs somewhere between one and two dollars. Gasoline is drilled out of the earth, refined, dangerous to transport and heavily taxed by the government. Coca-Cola is just flavoured water. Does this make any sense?

During the Gulf War, Ben Chin of Toronto's CITY TV did a news report on the rising price of gasoline during the crisis. He seemed to suggest that the oil companies were inflating their prices -- but even during the Gulf War, gasoline prices never even approached Coca-Cola prices. Go figure.

What amazes me more is that nobody I mention this to seems to care that Coca-Cola is vastly overpriced. One of my coworkers merely said: "Pepsi costs the same!"

Why so expensive, I wonder? Well maybe it has something to do with the fact that high-priced shills like Michael Jackson and Michael J. Fox don't advertise for gasoline companies.

Reduce Unwanted Life Expectancy!

I'm one of those rabid non-smokers. I don't like the smell of cigarettes and I think the tobacco industry is evil incarnate. I grew up in a household with chainsmoking parents who just could not grasp that maybe their cigarette smoke was bad for me.

I'm not in favour of making cigarettes illegal. I strongly believe in the right of individuals to engage in self-destructive behaviour in the comfort of their own homes. But I'm against tobacco advertising. Adbusters recently published a letter from a reader who reported that

In the United States, advertising is a tax-deductible business expense. [...] Scientific American recently quoted a figure of $5 billion as the annual cost of tobacco advertising. Thus we can figure the savings to the tobacco industry as [...] about $1.75 billion.¹

It only stands to reason that taxpayers are compensating for the $1.75 billion tax revenue shortfall. In a sense, taxpayers are assisting the tobacco industry to pay for its own advertising.

I often have a big problem reconciling my anti-censorship stance against my strong anti-smoking stance. I can't. Despite my feelings of anti-censorship, I cheered when the Canadian Liberal government imposed tough new laws against tobacco advertising. I just feel too strongly about the evils of the tobacco industry. Douglas Hofstadter wrote:

Patrick Henry spoke of "defending to the death your right to say it" -- but does "it" include anything? Recipes for how to murder people? How to build atomic bombs? How to destroy the free press?²

It's a dilemma I haven't completely worked out.

I do feel strongly about the tendency of big-businesses to muscle the magazines whom they advertise in, and I believe that legislation should be put in place to insure that the effects of tobacco advertising is offset. We see that now, with warnings on cigarette ads, but I also think magazines should be obliged to print material highlighting the adverse effects of tobacco.

Why do I feel so strongly? Because tobacco is one of the most (if not the most) harmful products on the market. Considerably less harmful products (such as marijuana) have been made illegal. Jonathan Ott (citing A.Goldstein and H. Kalant) provides material about addictiveness of drugs such as nicotine and marijuana:

Ott further points out that

[c]ompared to the estimated three to four thousand deaths per year as a result of all illicit drug use combined, approximately 320,000 Americans die prematurely each year as a consequence of tobacco use.³

My Advertising Commitment

I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of advertising entering the internet. To express my distaste, therefore, I have decided that I will link to no page that performs third-party advertising. I don't mind people who advertise their own services, but I really dislike pages like Webcrawler, or The Dilbert Zone that have all these garish, winky-blinky advertisements that take forever to download.

² Douglas Hofstadter. Metamagical Themas. p.109.

³ Jonathan Ott. Pharmacotheon. pp.30-31.

Copyright © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 by B.C. Holmes. Last updated January 9th, 2000

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