Governments have a monopoly on violence. And as history has proven (especially in the EU), they tend to use it.
Even in good times, in countries with mostly balanced institutions, the government can lock you up in prison and throw away the key if you piss off the wrong people.
On the other hand, I can assure you the only thing Unilever is aspiring to do is get you to buy more toilet bowl cleaner.
And I know the rebuttal will be..."but stupid people (not me of course) will get duped into buying more toilet bowl cleaner than they actually need!"
While that is indeed a huge burden of responsibility to place upon all the people you think are less intelligent than you, I think they will be okay.
As history has shown, the real risk is the government telling me exactly how much toilet bowl cleaner I get to use.
Others have addressed the surveillance issue plenty (but in case it's still not clear, if your data is for sale commercially, then your government will buy it), but I think it's important to also stress the insidiousness of repeated mass consumer propaganda, given your toilet bowl cleaner example.
Consider Oreo O's: a breakfast "food" with 11.5 g sugar and 1.3 g protein. Allegedly (according to the Wikipedia article), it was a very successful "food" and had approval from parents.
Now, if you ask someone whether it's appropriate to give your child a pile of sugar or cookies for breakfast, they'll probably tell you no, that's neglect. But somehow people have gotten it into their heads that products from Post or General Mills are acceptable, and weirdly enough now almost half of Americans are obese, and over 10% are diabetic, and how this could have come to be is a total mystery.
How did people come to the conclusion that something with marshmallows or cinnamon sugar swirls in every bite is appropriate to give your children every day? Or cans/bottles of sugar water? Something tells me the decades of endless advertising helped normalize it.
Look at the website for boxtops for education: big bold letters "YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE FOR SCHOOLS" (by giving your child sugar for breakfast). You're making a difference! You're a good person! This kind of propaganda is profoundly evil, and this is without targeting messaging to individuals.
The truth is, there are far more complex reasons behind American kids being fed sugary cereal than "the dumb people got duped by the evil advertisers (but not me of course!)."
It turns out kids like sugar, incomes have been stagnant for decades, and food deserts exist. What's the cheapest, shelf stable food item on a per-meal basis that your children will voluntarily eat without a fight before work? Sugary cereal. Could any of those factors possibly be the root cause of the market success of sugary cereal? Or is it all because of the evil mind controlling advertisers tricking the stupid people (not you of course)?
The reality is, in a free society, at some point you have to give people responsibility over themselves. I know the impulse of the elite (and rich people on the internet) is always "let me protect you from your own stupidity, I'm smarter!" However, history has shown that impulse is wrong. Preventing businesses and customers with needs from efficiently reaching each other through targeted advertising is in fact a net negative for society.
If advertising isn't actually necessary and has nothing to do with people buying the product, then companies and their sycophants shouldn't whine and scream in terror whenever somebody suggests that advertising be banned.
I didn't say advertising is not necessary, just that it does not create demand. It only directs it.
Again, products are created in response to consumer needs/wants, not the other way around. Look at the history of Kellogg to see why cereal exists.
Pick even the most frivolous of products, a $12,000 handbag. You probably believe the reason people desire such an object is due to advertising, and they otherwise would be more rational like you -- they must be being tricked right?
Wrong. Women want to signal their social class and that they are successful in attracting high value mates/power, and have since the beginning of time. The 12k handbag exists to meet that existing demand.
Advertising simply directs that existing demand towards a specific frivolous luxury good over another. It didn't create the demand. Before advertising & handbags even existed...social climbers and aristocrats used other things like silk fabrics, spices, servants, etc to meet the same demand.
What you're actually upset about is that other humans want things you don't agree with. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but making you dictator and removing all advertising will not change human nature.
You keep including the (not me of course) parenthetical, but at least my experience was that I grew up on sugar cereal. I vaguely remember schools having things like apple jacks on offer in individual packs. I and other kids brought their boxtops to school. Best I could tell, it was normal. It's still in the aisles and the companies haven't gone out of business, so best I can tell it still is.
We bought it in the same stores where we bought real food back then. We buy food in the same stores that have breakfast cereal now.
I haven't watched TV or movies for like the last 10 years, and I've blocked ads on my computers for ~20, so I've at least minimized the most blatant exposure, but I don't think myself immune. That's why I've done what I can to remove them from my life. But I'm naive too; like I didn't realize until recently that radio "callers" are just iheartmedia employees, or that you can just buy an "interest" piece on the news or Ellen or an "opinion" or "lifestyle" piece in the newspaper or whatever. It makes sense in retrospect, but the extent to which literally all media around us are just ads is hard to wrap one's head around, and a little unexpected IMO. I don't think it's intuitive or that you have to be dumb to be tricked. You just have to be honest enough that it wouldn't occur to you that everything around you is lying and that these people will relentlessly work to construct some Hell version of Plato's cave in order to sell you things and that it's basically legal to do so.
Maybe I'm just one of the dumb ones, but IMO ads like this[0] masquerading as national news should maybe require extremely clear labeling and disclaimers, or just be illegal. Maybe when shills on youtube say "this is sponsored, but this is my real opinion", the second half of that sentence should be illegal. Maybe they should have to say "this video is an advertisement for X, and I am not presenting my opinions on it".
The food desert idea is plausible, but the literal definition is useless (poor people can't walk 0.5 miles?), so I'm forced to be skeptical of any claims around it.
To me the plausible explanation for breakfast cereals is that people underestimate how evil these companies can be, and probably figure it must be illegal to sell candy advertised as food or something, so it can't be that bad if it's so common and if it's allowed to be advertised on TV. Surely they couldn't or wouldn't say it's "part of a complete breakfast" if it weren't at least mostly true. Surely if it's on the news, the reporter would mention if it's actually extremely horrible for you and surely the "report" isn't literally written by the advertiser.
You realize that it wasn't the ads that convinced people to consume sugary cereals, right? Ads are there to promote a brand, not a food group. Your local store or General Mills will sell you what you want, at a price that you are comfortable with. They literally don't care and have no interest in pushing any specific recipe. I bet that their low sugar alternatives are their most profitable products.
Sugary products are cheap to manufacture, specifically because US government subsidizes corn production for HFCS. It's not because General Mills is evil corporation that wants to hook you on sugar.
As an example from the other side - Cheap dairy products in Europe exist because the governments there subsidize the crap out of dairy industry. And will not stop, no matter how bad production of those are for the environment. They will point the finger at air travel, though...
> The food desert idea is plausible, but the literal definition is useless (poor people can't walk 0.5 miles?),
How sheltered are you? No you can't walk 0.5 miles, when there's an interstate separating you from a grocery store that can financially afford to stock fresh produce. Or maybe you should walk an extra 30-60 minutes after you come back from your second shift of the day?
Something convinced people that sugary cereals aren't just something you can use to survive in a pinch, but actually contain acceptable nutrition. People think Special K is healthy. Or Slimfast advertising 10g protein (with milk teehee) when it's actually got 2 g protein and 11 g sugar. People think this is "diet" food. Chocolate milk powder. They really buy it. How sheltered are you? And then it causes real harm to people when they think "dieting" just doesn't work for some people.
This isn't just "lol dumb people got tricked". It's fraud. Plenty of apparently reasonable people take the intended (false) meanings from advertisements. These are intentional misrepresentations. And it's not one or two egregious actors. The entire industry is about deceiving to the maximum extent allowed by law, which is a lot.
Like I said the (colloquial) idea of a food desert is plausible, but there is no information on it. The stats are not looking at how many people have a highway blocking the way and you have to go uphill both ways in a wheelchair after working 3 jobs, so actually that 0.5 miles is burdensome. They tell us nothing (well, they tell us how many people don't even have to walk 10 minutes to reach a fully stocked supermarket). If you think that's the scenario being discussed when people talk about food deserts, it's coming from your imagination. Maybe it exists. It's not what the term means. It's almost like the term was chosen to be evocative and paint a certain picture of reality.
> Something convinced people that sugary cereals aren't just something you can use to survive in a pinch, but actually contain acceptable nutrition
People's pockets did that. And they definitely are perfectly fine for breakfast. They're not the best, but they're not "the cause of the obesity epidemic".
> People think Special K is healthy.
What is specifically unhealthy in Special K?
> Slimfast advertising 10g protein (with milk teehee) when it's actually got 2 g protein and 11 g sugar
What does factually misleading advertising have to do with this? They're literally advertising the opposite of what we're talking about. Neither is 11g of sugar is going to cause you to gain weight.
> If you think that's the scenario being discussed when people talk about food deserts, it's coming from your imagination.
It's coming from me literally having been to a few such areas in Camden NJ, Bronx and in Baltimore. But hey! I must have imagined all of those places...
You're missing an important point in your example - the reason why high sugar cereals were so successful was because of government interventions (buying up grain supplies, unreasonably propping up certain crops, etc)
The utter failures of governments to provide any meaningful guidance, or intentionally boosting certain product consumption.
We can have an argument on how effective that propaganda was, but in the end governments in EU and US make bad food much more available than traditional diets.
We can all rant about how evil corporations are for putting HFCS into their products in the US, but it's disingenuous to disregard the fact that US government spends billions on propping up corn production that makes HFCS more economically viable.
In the end you still choose to buy sugary cereals, but if you are in poverty - you're left without a choice when it comes to calorie sources, because of government interventions.
They do, but a lot of original sins comes from failed public policy.
Like support for dairy industry came before the dairy industry got enough money to lobby... and sustain itself through lobbying.
Same goes with HFCS, and many others.
It's unfair to argue "evil corporations", when these corporations are made evil specifically by the government intervention in the first place.
I can guarantee you, that should US government pull all financial support for the dairy industry and support plant based products - these corporations will move to plant based alternatives. Because their pure interest is to make money the least cumbersome way.
Except when they hire security contractors, and then that 3rd party assumes government powers - including police immunity - without the oversight. Which is what happens when cities ban technology uses such as facial recognition by the police - they just hire a 3rd party to do it with zero oversight. Same with large tourist events in non-tourist cities: those are not regular cops during the event, they are contractors with temporary police immunity and very little official oversight.
This might be hard to grok, but we can actually be aware of both threats without minimizing the seriousness of either.