There's a different between 'promotion' and 'bait and switch'. There's also the matter of the externalities of the products you're promoting.

If Hicks marketed his shows as life-changing experiences which'll give you a bigger dick, then just ran normal stand-up, it'd be right to criticise him.

Just as it's right to criticise companies who claim to sell 'food', show ads of nice happy, healthy families, and throw buzzwords around to manipulate customers at the detriment of their own health and lives.

The hijacking of language by megacorps is sad. Words have meaning, backed by history, tradition, and culture, and shouldn't be used as marketing tools to get consumers addicted to slop.

he's a comedian; his entire job is standing up in front of people and saying shit and having a message. thats... the point.

it's not nameless widgets or whitelabel switches where you can just ignore it.

He didn't take out ads or anything. He lived his life the way he wanted to and spoke his mind. That's not 'marketing'.

I don't think this is true, do you have a source for this? What does it even mean that he constantly marketed himself, is doing lots of shows considered "marketing yourself"?

I think manipulating people is a broader surface area to describe the problem. Most people think marketing is about just showing a product, but it's not. Marketing is about psychologically manipulating people and creating subconscious associations within peoples' minds using deeply researched strategies and techniques. See stuff like the Elaboration Likelihood Model. [1]

The next time you're watching a commercial from some company renowned for marketing success (Apple, Coke, etc) pay attention to how much time in the ad the product is in any way mentioned, and how much is... 'other stuff.' That other stuff is the point of the ad, the actual product is largely irrelevant. The world would be vastly better without large scale marketing.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model

"Men of America smoke Chesterfields" Is that a lie?

What about invasion of public and private spaces? Sidewalks in my neighborhood are plastered with dozens of political signs. It’s garish and in some cases hinders traffic visibility. Radio stations near me have started using the album art/song title metadata to display ads on the screen in my car in the middle of a song. Nearly every website tracks you, your phone provider tracks you, stores track you and then they roll up all of this “anonymous” information to target specific ads.

The whole industry is creepy, garish, tasteless, and rude. And that’s without lying.

I would agree with you if we were just talking about the abstract idea of marketing. But like everything else, the devil is in the details.

The marketing industry in the US is built not only to get the word out about your product, but also to gatekeep who can compete in our free market.

With marketing being so pervasive as to monetize the entire internet it effectively levies a tax on every business that wants to compete.

If you dont have the marketing budget to outspend your competition then they have no competition.

I took that to mean "addictive drugs are uniquely bad compared to the general category of 'consumer goods'"

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Rational...

Tobacco ranks pretty high in term of dependence and physical harm, especially considering that it's legal.

Not every drug has the same effects and side effects. For example, marijuana is much less dangerous than heroin.

There are entire categories of ads that operate on insecurity, they just don’t come out and scream “this is because you’re insecure” as that would make for bad copy. E.g. you think adult diapers advertise on anything other than insecurity (even if that insecurity is well-founded)?

Also, GP was talking about enterprise (B2C) and ads for B2C are pretty scarce in consumer-focused spaces. Insecurity, FOMO, etc is absolutely used to advertise to people in middle management on up.

That's actually really interesting about all ads being public like that! Didn't know that. Is it because of some regulatory requirement or just because it's useful business wise?

(anyway many of the coca cola ads you linked have some theme of togetherness and community, which can be said to prey on people's insecurities around being lonely. Drink this sugar+caffeine solution and you'll be less lonely. Yes you start to sound like a paranoid schizophrenic when analyzing ads like that but that is how it works.)

Who said anything about insecurity? "I like this thing" (which I don't need) is also an emotion.