Advertisers could have invented this constituency: and they need it now, more than ever, since as businesses become more global, ever more complex ways must be devised to discover the specificity of each market – or, more simply, who they\’re supposed to be selling to. If nobody operates locally, there will be things about customers that can only be discovered via Facebook\’s dodgy privacy settings.
There\’s no point, in other words, of either courting or repelling advertisers. You could try to create a place where people gather and isn\’t immediately swarming with salespeople, but you would fail. People congregate because they\’re looking for distraction; those people are the lifeblood of consumerism; the congregation gets bombarded; and one day it tires of the bombardment and dissipates.
There\’s something really quite joyous about a woman so ignorant of business that she bemoans the advertising, the commercialism, the specific slicing and dicing of the market to maximise the value of those ads, when that same woman\’s salary is paid by the advertising, the very specific advertising in The Guardian\’s jobs section for example, which is carried by the newspaper in which she writes.
I am going to steal that final para for the Samizdata quote of the day.
Brilliant.
Need one support something than one also profits from? She doesn’t seem to be implying that adverts are innately immoral; just something regrettable.
Awful woman!