So sayeth Fast Company, that socialist bastion of austerity and commonwealth.
The "Don't Get Mad" part is interesting. In some sense, it is an admission of guilt. ETrade knows firsthand that the last decade of easy money has brought little recovery, but great wealth. "Don't Get Mad" sounds like an expression of concern that the plebeian's might start agreeing about what their problem is. As an aside, I don't get any sense that money correlates with quality of character. I've long thought it to be the case. However, recent experience has given me the sense that politic-free-ideology is a bit more prevalent in conversation among the wealthy as it is among the middle class. That is, salaried people tend to use politics to express their ideology, whereas wealthy folk tend to turn it around, putting ideology first, which then informs their politics. Most often, the ideology is noble enough, but it is necessarily less bounded by pragmatism. In fact, in that manner, IMO wage earners have something in common with the wealthy; they tend to put ideology ahead of politics (or at least give the two fairly equal footing). This actually might be a deep part of the success of the Conservative Strategy in the US. This thought has been on my mind long enough that I have been fashioning a pithy way to describe it: The rich and the poor are susceptible to ideology because the poor cannot afford a worldly education, and the rich can afford to avoid one.
This is an example of how our environments affect us. We're programmed to constantly seek fulfillment of all our desires. Those in the advertising sector are the great manipulators of our time. Every add promises wealth, beauty, sex, perfect relationships and on and on. And we're unable to escape being marketed to. It's a bit scary to realize how much we are managed by a consumer society. The question becomes, how do we mitigate this, individually and as a society?
I think the situation is going to get more complex and more nuanced as the effect of traditional advertising falls to the wayside under the adoption of less traditional media. An eTrade commercial is only as effective as its viewers and nobody under 30 watches television anymore. They're also adblock-native. The marketing that reaches them is of a different kind entirely.... and its advertising comes with its own perils.
True. And I don't think trying to control unwanted advertising intrusions is the way to go. It all seems to go back to upbringing and education. Are we teaching our kids how to manage themselves in this new global world? It's very hard to resist, and teach our children to resist, the results of "trickle-down" greed, selfishness, and just plain meanness. Sometimes it feels like being sucked into a vortex where there is no choice, just automatic compliance with buying whatever update or new version of the things we already have.
Negative, Ghost Rider. It is far easier to predate on the naive than it is on the savvy. This is a commercial for a company whose livelihood is dependent on Joe IRA thinking he can beat this shit: That's 10 milliseconds worth of trading of one stock (Merck) on May 16, 2013. But don't get mad, get even, right?Are we teaching our kids how to manage themselves in this new global world?