That's just naive.
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Replying to @ashleylynch @arthur_affect and
Do you know what works for getting people into the military? Poverty and the fact that the military offers them a way out, not Twitch advertisements. You're poor? No healthcare? No avenue for paying for college? No job prospects? In swoops the military recruiter.
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Replying to @Eristae @ashleylynch and
The price of college or technical training is an exponentially more effective recruiting tool than any movie can or will ever be
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Replying to @Nymphomachy @Eristae and
The whole thing about DARE is that it was a program pushed by advertising professionals to enrich themselves based on their self-serving theory that advertising in isolation is extremely effective
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
I.e. the premise of DARE is that there were totally happy content well-adjusted kids who were "seduced" and "brainwashed" into becoming addicts by sinister "drug pushers" And therefore you needed anti-drug propaganda to counteract the pro-drug propaganda everywhere
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
And while there may have been some influence at the margins by media -- all the stuff about creating the "positive cultural association" with the cool pot-smoking rebel vs. "negative cultural association" with the fucked-up junkie loser etc. -- it's not the main thing at all
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Drug use rates had way more to do with someone's overall material circumstances, which swamped the effect of TV commercials and celebrity endorsements and so on
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
Anyway it's not just DARE, DARE is just the most obvious embarrassing failure It was a long long time ago and I don't think I did a particularly good job but I wrote my undergrad thesis on 20th century American advertising, and the weird detached incestuous world ad men lived in
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
DARE was an outgrowth of the Ad Council, which has existed for decades (since WWII) as a nonprofit initiative for the ad industry to sell itself to the government as using their powers for good to propagandize people into being better citizens and not just being greedy bastards
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
And the evidence that ANY of the Ad Council's campaigns actually WORK (whether or not you approve of the cause in question -- it includes wartime propaganda and military recruitment but also public health campaigns, antiracism ads, etc) has always been very sketchy
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It always comes back to "Okay logically there's probably some effect of blasting this stuff at people all the time but the problem is all the data is coming from the people getting paid to tell you you're not wasting your money The principal-agent problem is massive"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
My thesis was a typical college thesis about the idea that these ads are something the professional class felt compelled to create *for their own sake*, as a way of telling a story to themselves about what American values were and what kind of citizens they themselves were
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy and
An industrial-capitalist version of ritual and religion -- whether the ads ever really change anything is almost beside the point, just as the ancients never really did empirical studies if their prayers to the gods actually changed the likelihood of a good harvest
2 replies 2 retweets 23 likes - Show replies
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