The word advertising itself has been co-opted. It is like "freedom" or "justice" that is ambiguous and means one thing to advertisers and another to the public.
I'm reminded of the vitamin water lawsuit
"Coca-Cola criticized the suit as "ridiculous" on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage"
The point being that normal people think "advertising" means showing a picture of a car or cereal, and google thinks advertising is identifying the individual.
I really hate that “reasonably think” defense. Yes most people, including myself, did think that vitamin water was healthy until reading the nutritional sheet. It’s one step away from selling chocolate as, “good for you bars,” and claiming no reasonable person would think they’re good for you.
I hate the lawsuit in the first place because nutrition information is printed on the back of every single bottle for exactly this reason and any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions. It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. So what do we call it? Vitamin Sugar water? This drink has vitamins but please don't drink it persistently or you’ll develop type2 diabetes water? Relatively healthier than Coke but not as “healthy” as diet coke with added vitamins water? Does “smart water” make your smarter? Also most vitamins in dry form are mixed with 2-8 grams of sugar. Should those be renamed?
The real tragedy is people are woefully undereducated on the damage that over consumption of carbohydrates and sugars does to your body. So even when they do look at the label and see 13 grams of sugar per serving and 2.5 servings per bottle (the comparable bottle of Coke has 55g sugars so you don't have to search it) they’re helpless. And that seems, as far as I can glean, to be a giant corpo-political conspiracy because we had a lot of grains and corn syrup in the US and needed to make people believe it was okay to consume it all despite conflicting science. “A healthy (carbohydrate filled) breakfast (of Cheerios) is good for the heart kids.” So if anyone is to blame it’s essentially ourselves for letting capitalists control the narrative around what goes into a healthy diet and lacking the political wherewithal to develop dietary recommendations that are based in science and not big cereal marketing. There it is: advertising.
> It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins.
water + vitamins = vitamin water. But that's not what this is. So it's a misleading name.
People shouldn't have to be educated in order to make good decisions. A beverage company shouldn't be misleading people, it should be making beverages and helping people find the beverages they would want if they were educated about them.
To respond to your point, though, the application of your philosophy simply doesn't yield a remotely familiar society. I understand how it is alluring to, in an isolated example, argue that stupid people must be coddled. But if we have to build a society where nobody can make bad decisions then we have to apply this filter everywhere. What's the end result? Humans are no longer allowed to make any decisions because they could make the wrong one. Instead a central authority must decide for them. I don't see how this is even remotely tenable.
Now if you want to devolve into a discussion about how democracy itself is in fact a failure because it depends on an educated electorate, which we clearly don't have because we can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, that's a whole different topic. But I'm trying to apply my argument in the context of the world we live in currently to keep it somewhat grounded.
Fantasy names are a psychologically manipulative marketing tactic deployed to cause you to associate the thing you are consuming with something unrelated to the thing you are consuming so as to divert your attention from the thing you are consuming to some other (presumably more exciting) topic thereby increasing likelihood that you consume the product. Or they're a brand identity entirely divorced from the actual nature of the product which would also require you to look at the label into order to discern the healthiness of said product.
My side is that it’s absurd to hold Coke responsible for not choosing a name that might be misleading to somebody. And that I find the VitaminWater trial absurd. My point about fantasy names is exactly that they’re not any different from VitaminWater so what gives? It’s rhetorical.
Marketing is all manipulative tactics born out of a desire to push more product not help people be healthy. Assuming Coke is somehow responsible for our health is skirting personal responsibility and passing the blame no different than the “fast food makes you fat let’s tell McDonalds what type of oil to use but not the restaurant down the street which is twice as unhealthy” mentality. It’s downright irresponsible to operate under the assumption that a company’s marketing department is going to give you an unbiased wholesome view of reality. I don't see how pretending Coke is some angel of healthy drink knowledge and herald of good diets that fell from grace with vitaminwater because they neglected to mention in the title “oh btw there’s some sugar” so must be punished is anything other than blissful ignorance at best.
My visceral reaction to the absurdity of the trial is derived from what I perceive as lazy inconsistency in how we approach the ethics of advertising. Cherry picking VitaminWater, a drink where the facts are spelled out explicitly on the label on every bottle, of all things, feels more like an effort to dodge responsibility by attacking big soda than a true attempt to ask whether we should be allowing corporate propaganda to influence certain aspects of society. I really don't want the courts having an opinion on what makes a healthy diet. And I don’t want companies doing so either. It’s not a disagreement that we shouldn't try to stop manipulative marketing. It’s that I don't want any company anywhere trying to tell me what is healthy and what isn't when there is money to be made based on the message they present.
Essentially I believe all marketing is manipulative and we should do away with all of it of we truly want to build a smarter society.
I knew parents who didn’t let their children consume media with commercials. The internet has certainly made that more difficult and I don’t know how it turned out for them.
So everything that has sugar in it but doesn't explicitly spell it out in the name must be renamed to include a reference to sugar in the name? Frosted flakes -> sugar frosted flakes, rice crispy bars aren't just rice + crispy, they're rice + sugar + crispy. Orange juice -> orange juice and added sugar. I mean come on it doesn't work.
All that said, the term vitamin is also entirely subjective. Nothing about "vitamin" to me ever implied "healthy". It simply implied "has vitamin". It's just all around absurd.
Having a small (200ml or so) glass of orange juice once a day is going to net you most of your daily vitamin C requirement and a third of your recommended daily sugar intake. Whether it's healthy really depends on what the rest of your diet looks like: if you mostly live on sugary cereal, pizza, and chicken nuggets, OJ means you've got something vaguely fruit-like in your diet. If it's possible to substitute it for actual fruit, actual fruit is better, but the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Sometimes I worry that "X is unhealthy!" can make people eat an even worse diet.
> any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions.
That isn't the definition of a reasonable consumer. Reasonable people don't have infinite time to second guess everything that people trusted to give them health information are saying. If they imply it's healthy and they're trusted to tell you whether it's healthy or not (i.e. they're trusted to publish nutritional information on their bottle), then a reasonable person should be able to trust the implication. We've all got too much to do to assume that someone is both misleading and telling the truth at the same time.
As for names, the could have called it Nigglepuff Drink. Nigglepuff Drink does not imply any untrue health claims and it is not associated with any f&b products.
You've trusted Coca Cola to give you health advice? No offense but that's patently insane. Your doctor gives you health advice not a sugared soft-drink company with a motive to withhold any negative information about its products from you so you'll continue to consume them. I assume you trust Google to give you privacy advice, no?
I don't know what a reasonable consumer is then. The first thing I usually do when reaching for a new drink is glance at the nutrition label to make sure I'm not consuming 55 grams of sugar. It takes less than 10 seconds. I learned this from my mom, who was generally concerned as a parent about making sure her children were eating healthy. It's not rocket science.
I personally don't understand how Vitamin == Healthy. Maybe I'm N == 1, but the claim "has vitamins" which is what "vitamin" in the name implies to me is not, in fact, false. The leap from "has vitamins" to "is healthy to drink with abandon" is the problem here. Maybe if you could prove that the company knew the drink was unhealthy and deliberately fabricated the name so as to mislead their consumer base into making unhealthy choices, you might have a case?
But by this argument any instance of a name where somebody could plausibly make that type of jump must be regulated. If I was taught that fish are healthy because they have healthy fats then I could reasonably make the association that fish stix are healthy. Couldn't I?
>To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable financial operation.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.
Reminds me of a video I'd seen on nestle chocolate drink/nutella being advertised as healthy foods[1]. Marketing/advertisers are the real villains in 2XXX.
Yeah they should really teach that at school: There are only a few things that are true on food packaging and they are government regulated. The rest is baloney and should be ignored. Oh and for next week prepare an essay on why some still thing small government is a good idea.
I'm reminded of the vitamin water lawsuit
"Coca-Cola criticized the suit as "ridiculous" on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Brands#vitaminwater
The point being that normal people think "advertising" means showing a picture of a car or cereal, and google thinks advertising is identifying the individual.