Glory To The Pitchman

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Like everyone reading this, you have no doubt been hit with an advertisement for a food product, or perhaps a restaurant, and instantly wanted the item. Maybe it was an internet ad or maybe a television ad during your favorite program. You saw the ad or commercial and you just had to have the product. Maybe it was for something you never considered, but after seeing the ad, you changed your mind. Like all people in the modern age, you are highly susceptible to commercial advertisement.

Now, you are probably thinking, “I’ve never had this happen. I just ignore advertisements on-line.” Of course, you would be right. There’s little data to suggest advertisement drives consumer behavior all that much, but the people producing the ads and selling their services to business, are absolutely sure you are easily persuaded by their ads. This is why all of us are bombarded by advertisements. It’s why internet companies steal your information and sell it to marketers.

It is a central tenet of the modern economy, the tent pole that holds the whole thing up, that advertisements increase sales. All of the major global companies have big budgets for marketing. Those ad dollars support radio and television. Those ad dollars make modern sports entertainment possible. The internet, as it currently exists, is dependent upon the belief that ads alter consumer behavior. If the world suddenly stopped believing in the ad men, the world as we know it would change overnight.

The funny thing though, is advertisements have little impact on human behavior, at least not to  the degree everyone assumes. If you see an ad for a new store opening in your area, that may cause you to check it out. Similarly, notices for an event in your area could get you out to the event. Awareness advertising, as the name implies, works, because it does a simple thing. It makes people aware of something they would otherwise not know or remember, like a new store or a special event.

Awareness ads are a tiny minority of advertising. Most ads are about specific products and services. There is always an awareness component to them, but for the most part the ads you see are intended to get you to buy product. Beer ads expect you to buy more beer of the type being advertised. Yet, not only is there no data to back up the assumption, the data says it has no effect on behavior. Here’s a study of ads for alcoholic products over the last forty years. Ads have no impact on sales.

Like democracy, the modern economy relies on people thinking important things are true, even though they are not true. If people realized their votes don’t count, then they would stop voting and resort of other means to change government. It’s why the charade of democracy is so profitable. Similarly, the modern economy relies on the fiction of human suggestibility. Marketing is a lucrative career, because the modern economy needs people to believe people are highly suggestible.

This is not to say that people are skeptics, of course. Fads have made a lot of people rich in the modern economy. A fad is just a commonly held belief that having or doing something increases one’s status or signals belonging to a group. Apple is a trillion dollar company, largely due to the ability of Steve Jobs to position his products as a bourgeois moral signifier. The iPod was not a great leap forward in technology. It was an example of the natural conformity within bourgeois society.

That is, of course, the perceived value of advertising. Global companies that spend their money reinforcing public perceptions about their brand. Dodge runs TV ads suggesting their customers are John Wayne from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. They are the indispensable, yet never appreciated foundation of society. Similarly, Apple marketed itself as the product for the distinguishing, carefree member of upper middle-class America, better that those proletarian zombies of the lower classes.

This may sound like a mark in favor of advertising, but the reality those public attitudes must exist for the ads to work. Every truck maker, even the Japanese makers, pitch themselves the same way. They are not creating a new identity group. They are attaching themselves to one that exists. Trucks were associated with working men long before the ad men thought of it. The term “Apple snob” was in circulation when Jobs was still in the wilderness, during his hiatus from the company.

Nevertheless, people believe advertising works, which is why Facebook is a gazillion dollar company. They sell your information to marketing firms and place targeted ads on their platform. The fact that no one looks at those ads or that the data Facebook sells is garbage is not important. People see the billion eyeballs on the site and believe that putting their product on the site will boost sales. They believe knowing the internet habits of those users will make for more persuasive advertising.

Steve Sailer, who started out in life doing quantitative research on marketing has written about this over the years. Before the internet existed, it was obvious to him that most marketing was a waste of money. Of course, there’s no money in telling people this, so there is not a lot of research done on advertising. It’s a good example of how belief is very powerful magic. Lots of people believe in advertising, so there is lots of money to be made in advertising. There’s no money to be made in debunking it.

That said, while most companies would be better off burning the cash they use for marketing and posting the video on YouTube, there are some forms of marketing that do work and are cost effective. The pitchman has been a staple of western society since the industrial revolution, because a good pitchman can move product. Whether it is the company sales team or the guy recommending product on his radio or TV show, these guys are an indispensable part of a modern economy.

That’s because people are persuadable, by only by other people. If someone you trust or someone whose judgement seems sound, recommends a product to you, you will consider it. Those radio guys pitching various items are monetizing the trust they have built up with their audience. There are limits to this form of marketing, but it is a cost effective way to identity a persuadable audience and have a trusted person recommend the product to that audience. It’s what marketing analytics pretends to be.

Despite the yawning gap in utility between the pitchman and the ad man, the former is considered low-class, while the latter is glamorous. Willy Loman is probably the most favorable portrayal of the salesman in popular culture. Usually, salesmen are viewed as creepy liars. In contrast, ad men are the slick, debonair types, living exciting lives in glamorous places like Manhattan. The TV series Madmen, relied heavily on this image to keep the audience. It looked cool to be an ad man in the 1960’s.

In reality, people in marketing are mostly shiftless sociopaths, while the people in sales are hardworking and honest. If you are ever evaluating a company for purchase, make sure to talk with the sales guys. They will tell you the truth about their bosses. Be prepared to put the marketing staff to sword. They will tell you whatever you need to hear to increase their budget by five percent next year. The most honest people in any company are the guys grinding through sales calls every day.

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189 thoughts on “Glory To The Pitchman”

  2. I have been a “salesman” since 1959. (You do the math.) The comment about marketing vs sales is absolutely true.
    The difference between the “salesman” vs the “marketer” is that we in true sales face our customers, our consumers while the marketing dept. has us as a buffer.
    Most money spent on marketing and sales management would be better spent on training sales people to be knowledgeable, honest and service oriented toward their customers.
    More sales people and fewer marketers/managers would mean greater profits and more customer loyalty.

  3. One actually useful function of marketing that my former employer failed at was search engine optimization. We were the very biggest business in our space, but if you searched on likely terms for our product, we would rarely be on the first page of the results, far below much smaller competitors. It was ridiculous. You should at least catch the people trying to find your product.

  4. Sales in a traditionally masculine world. Marketing has become the natural habitat for women.

    Sales people want to build strong relationships with their clients to the point that the client will follow them to a new company.

    Marketing people need to focus on keeping key people in the company and board happy. Jump on popular bandwagon, give sales what it wants even though you know that it won’t help generate sales, make engineering feel they are a smart about the business side as they think they are without it creating new problems for marketing.

    Sales has to hit numbers that impact the bottom line, marketing just had to hit numbers in most cases that CEOs have been convinced are important even though they do little for the company.

    Consequently good whites from the right schools flock to marketing. Bad whites are more likely to head to sales. Women to marketing (like HR a good fit) and men to positions like sales and engineering where you have the burden of actually accomplishing something.

  5. Church and Dwight is my go-to supplier for lots of household stuff, simply because as far as I know they never advertise. At all. Their strategy seems to be to buy up old established brands that for some reason are out of fashion or otherwise cheap (Pepsodent, Arrid, etc) and sell them based only on historic brand awareness.

    And their main brand, Arm and Hammer, started with their original baking soda well over a century ago and now gets slapped on everything you can think of. But I’ve never seen an ad.

    • I think pretty much all of their marketing dollars are in the weekly flyers – coupons for customers that price discriminate. That’s another place that actually has some marketing value – enabling poorer folks to spend less for your product (but you still make a profit).

  6. Good pitchmen aren’t always slick. Two of the best back in the day: The Crazy Eddie guy and Tom Carvelin’s Carvel Ice Cream ads. Both low budget and high impact. Lindell fits that mold for sure.

  7. Is the nature of the finite mind that makes us susceptible to manipulation – desire (the sense of lack all egos experience).

    Minds engaged exclusively with the multiplicity & diversity of objects in the perceived world look for happiness in objects/substances/relationships. But acquiring any of these only provides temporary relief from the sense of lack.

    That new watch, you study it, shop it, desire growing, you finally buy it. Thirty days later the watch is in the dresser forgotten, and you’re off after that new bass boat.

    Philosophy helps here, you can have the realization that all things are empty of self, and can never give lasting happiness. For that, you need a different realization – there is an Inexpressible Mystery (God in religious language), with a resolve for fear (of death) and desire (sense of lack), the two forms of the finite mind in (some) philosophy.

  8. You can sell anything to a salesman….

    is that true?
    are salesmen just gullible rubes, who believe anything, especially anything another salesman tells them to buy?

  9. Adblock – PiHole, uBlock Origin, Adblock Plus…

    https://wolfstreet.com/2017/09/11/most-online-ad-spending-wasted-ceo-restoration-hardware/

    Ad sellers are selling their services, so they will sell the service even if it is snake oil. They want attention and click throughs hence the annoying big ads – as well as the client (I want to be portrayed this way) and click-throughs.

    But there is probably more click fraud than actual ads.

    The targeting seems to be to push the sale (e.g. you looked at something on amazon but didn’t buy, so they are trying to close (or you happened to look up something for a colleague while logged into your account, so will see a vimpirella costume for the next few weeks), or have things “relevant”, even missing they might want to sell boating accessories on a boating site.

  10. Blacks are particularly susceptible to faddish advertising when it is directed at them. Nike figured this out. It’s why they signed those pro sportsball players to multimillion dollar advertising contracts. Nowadays ghetto rats will kill you for the latest, greatest Nike sneakers you’re wearing.

  11. I have no use for sales people nor marketers as both are bottom feeders. The salesman uses a array of psychological tricks to lure the gullible and greedy into buying things they don’t want or need. A meth dealer is more honest than them.

    If you think those psychological persuasion techniques don’t work – Ed Bernays would tell you differently, Good advertising convinces people to live far above their means and has turned many of them into debt serfs. People think nothing of spending $50,000 -$80,000 for a pickup truck now or dropping $200 for a pair of Nike’s. Or look at Black Friday where people go apeshit over buying TV’s and game consoles they don’t need.

    Even worse those bottom feeders now target our children. At one time TV advertisers didn’t bother with them, later they did and even designed and produced cartoons around various toys. In fact most cartoons are no more than extended sales pitches for various toys.

    • If salesmen and marketers are all so clever and savvy, surely some of them could figure out that I have never, in 61 years, bought anything advertised by direct mail or through a robocall or any unsolicited phone call. NEVER. Yet they call and call and call – the same people. I have got to go buy a loud whistle and start using it; the hanging up just isn’t doing the trick and even lambasting pajeet for being a pajeet wastes too much of my time.

  12. I started my career in the semiconductor and computer/products business in sales. This was in the 80’s. Back then there was a ton of money available for good hard working sales people since a lot of the technologies were on the far left side of the bell curve. Most of those hard working types made a killing. Myself included. Not wanting to travel as much and tiring of the sixty hour work weeks I took a “marketing” position as a product manager at my company relocating to the west coast. The salary and incentives were generous. None of the marketing people outside of the product managers had any product knowledge technical expertise or sales experience. A majority of their time was spent fighting for available marketing funds. I’m guessing they really worked maybe 25% of the time. None were held accountable for any failed campaigns or customer reseller programs. It was the first time I heard someone that was totally clueless about business tout their MBA. Most were not capable of calculating gross profit percentage. If you want to know how savvy any marketing person is ask them about their sales experience. Their answer will tell you everything you need to know about them.

  13. Couldn’t disagree more. Advertising is nothing more than a measurable ROI model (except for pure branding, unless you segment branding efforts by city/MSA). It’s more like a science, that is quite repeatable using the law of large numbers. The idea is to get the right message/offer in front of the right audience. If you do it cost effectively the results can be quite lucrative. In Direct Mail roughly 80 people out of 100 toss the letter in the trash between the mailbox and their front door. The 20 who keep the piece are your prospects. Getting one or two to buy can be wildly profitable. Z Man, looking forward to your posts/podcasts like morning breakfast (perhaps just as vital) but this post I think deserves another evaluation. For those interested in understanding the basics, a great out of print book to find is “How to Start and Operate A Mail Order Business,” which was written by I believe Julian Simon.

    • This is mostly marketing huckster bullshit. I’ve worked with the IT systems that drive massive corporations marketing spend. 99.999% is waste. “Science” with ROI is also bullshit. Show me an Attribution model and I’ll show you a con artist.

      Now, there are small cases where direct ‘marketing’ can be effective, because in *essence* it’s exactly the same as a cold sales call, but without the personal touch. Here’s the thing though – it’s 99% awareness that’s doing it. A customer needing something, and knowing *about* your company is what drove the sale, not your flyer selling them on the product.

      The larger your company and the more awareness they have about you, the less effective your ‘marketing’ is.

  14. Marketing is purely psychological, a manipulation of the covetous and ignorant. I have zero respect for the profession or anyone who willingly subjects themselves to the constant thrum of advertising. That faraway, zombie look you see in the vacant stares of WalMart folk, to the fashion-seekers in high-end boutiques … all suckers of the ad man.

    Thankfully there’s an on/off switch for most advertising. Intelligent people should use it.

  15. The study cited in the OP only claims that overall alcohol consumption is not correlated with advertising expenditures. The function of ads is to increase market share, not necessarily to increase total consumption. In the same period of four decades, some brands of booze increased and some decreased their market share. Ads might have had something to do with that.

    “Before the internet existed, it was obvious to him that most marketing was a waste of money.”
    Some corporate exec once said that he knew half his ad spending was wasted. He just didn’t know which half. So, yeah, they know a lot of the ads don’t work but some probably do. Just like everything else you try in life.

  16. Z Man, excellent article, this topic is grossly under reported and analyzed by the business experts. You did not go into detail on an obvious political angle to this, almost all ad industry people, specifically the ones in digital advertisement are going to be extremely left wing. When every business in America contribute up to 10% of the revenue to this useless expenditure, they are funding and subsidizing the liberal propaganda complex. Your comments on the differences between admin and salesmen are interesting, I would think that most real sales people will be more conservative/Republican leaning.

    For the past couple of years, Google has partnered with MasterCard to analyze all their credit card transactions, if there ever was a proof on effectiveness of advertisement, Google would have seen it already and put out a huge new story on it. They have direct access to peoples search and web doing activities and actual stuff they buy in physical and online world. The fact that there has been nothing on it tells me that Google knows that they are selling snake oil.

    • Sales attribution to marketing is and always has been for suckers. The good news is that there’s a sucker born every minute.

  17. I’ve long said that the main problem is product differentiation…. and it applies on both fronts. In politics, at least, the “I’m not my opponent” campaign always fails, because while you might roll out the slickest campaign ever to show that you’re not Obama, or Bush, or Trump, you still have to convince the electorate that you’re not one of the zillion faceless interchangeable parts of your party machine. Mitt Romney actually ran a pretty good “I’m not Obama” campaign, but since he did the exact same things Bush would’ve done if he’d had a third run, no one cared. Trump, and Obama, won because he was meaningfully different from everyone else — on both sides. It still astounds me that professional political people don’t see this, but thanks to this column, I understand why — they’re just a certain type of ad man, and ad men have to believe their own hype.

  19. Great point on the dividing line between marketing and sales. As ironic as it sounds, sales really is about trust and relationships. The “traveling salesman” was considered shady more because he was a traveler than a salesman. A local salesman with a local clientele who belongs to the same community as his customers is held to a much higher standard than the kind of people who engineer dopamine sinks for statistical strangers on Faceberg.

  20. I’ve always loved the advertising involving artificial scarcity. The latest business to do this is White Claw when they placed media interviews about the “great White Claw shortage.” They just can’t keep it on the shelves! Even though I see massive displays of it by the registers in my Supermarket. Having had my first White Claw last month, I’m not that impressed.

  21. Ralph Kimball, the guy who taught dimensional modeling for data warehousing/bussiness intelligence told us they discovered a lot of unusual and quite specific relations. I think one was for a chain of “quickie type mart’s” (think gas station?), they increased beer sales by putting the diapers directly across the aisle from beer.

    Apparently a lot of male, unhappy dadas have to stop for poo pants, and soothe their bruised egos with Colt 45

  22. I agree wholeheartedly Zman. At our annual national sales meetings there was always a segment on the planned marketing campaigns usually being rolled out in various trade mags particular to our industry. In 38 years I never had a legitimate lead from any of these ad placements. Much more successful was a lunch/dinner presentation by a prestigious user or a nearby customer’s recommendation to my prospect.

  23. Tastes Great! Less Filling!

    Lite Beer, the best commercials ever. They were the sole reason why I drank Miller Lite for years. I mean, Bob Uecker “I must be in the front rowwwwwww….” LOL.

    • Haha, thanks Pro!

      During the break at a hockey game, some schlubb on the other side of the arena yelled out “Hey! Heyyy…!! It tastes great!”

      So I jumped to the rail with “Nah, nah, nah… no, it’s less filling!”

      Both sides of the crowd immediately rose to the call in a rousing back-and-forth sally.
      “Tastes Great!” “Less Filling!”
      Ended in laughter and applause.
      A good moment, much fun!

  24. All I can tell you, Z, is that of all the disciplines taught at the b-schools, marketing is the most useful and relevant. It’s not just advertising. Finance reduces itself to simple accounting and management is just good people skills (see, I can be reductive, too!). But without the marketing guys, you have no idea what to make, how many to make, what to call it, where to sell it and how much to charge for it. Among other things. In the modern era, many products, especially consumer products, are sold without any involvement of sales personnel at all. Or may be the perfidious Jews invented marketing and you’re right: just another variation on the theme of exploiting the hapless goyim.

    • “You have no idea what to make?”

      This is a joke, right?

      “any involvement of sales personnel at all” – What do you call a Retail Buyer if not a sales person who buys from salespeople???

      This is where you get to the world of ‘marketing’ as defined by asshole marketers – even the ‘presentation’ of the product on the shelf has been infiltrated by these hucksters.

    • Tiny Duck? [Nobody can really believe you’re genuine in what you said, of course. If you are, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.]

    • If you talk to just about anybody in marketing, you have a pretty good chance of meeting somebody who doesn’t have the slightest clue what the product is or who the customers are.

  25. This article hits the nail on the head. The elites made two very bad miscalculations. 1) they could control the outcome of Brexit; and 2) they could control the 2016 election.

    Brexit is as clear cut as anything. There was a referendum. Brexit won. The machinations of the elites (courts, politicians, etc.) to thwart it is oh so obvious.

    Trump was/is a bit more muddled. But the grumblings are the same. If he is removed by anything other than our electoral process, there is going to be Big Trouble in Chinatown methinks. Or at least a widespread understanding of what is going on.

    I have to say this though, the elites were CONVINCED that Trump was sunk by the “grab them by the pussy” tape. That news preempted the entire “operation” that was about to be launched by Hillary/media/deep state. If you look carefully at the dates, all of the planted stories about “muh Russia” were really starting to come out literally right around the time that the pussy tape came out. Our populist revolution was saved from Killary by Billy Bush. Who would’ve ever guessed. LOL

  26. I think it was Steve Sailer, or someone on his site, who said that the only sale made by ad men is selling their services to the client. Also, from some actual Mad Man, a joke about how studies show that half of all ad spending is wasted, but no one knows which half.

    • James;
      A lot of the discussion here pertains to *consumer* marketing and advertising. But back in the day, (and I’d guess now) most marketing people actually worked in the far less prestigious and glamorous ‘Industrial Marketing’ world. In the days of dot-com bubble of the early 00’s, it was reflagged as B-2-B (business to business) marketing. But the essentials were unchanged despite the hype. Only the means of contact changed.

      In B2B, the point of advertising is to create awareness and, most importantly, provide cover for the purchasing decision maker(s) from criticism from his internal competitors for buying your product.* The sales force’s job was to develop and evaluate potential opportunities and, most importantly. create a tailored business case about how your product(s) would benefit the customers’ organizations. So your sales people had to know potential customers’ businesses pretty well. Because this is a lot to know, they typically had to specialize by industry.

      Hence Z Man’s accurate observation that (B2B) sales people were far more likely to be honest and hardworking than (consumer) marketing people.
      ______________________
      *The IBM mainframe business was the absolute master of this strategy. The (true) saying was that, “No IT director got fired for buying IBM.” It was technological change that removed the IT director from being the main decision maker that did them in. That and the operating units’ built up resentments at being forced to bow to the mighty IT department and to their god, IBM.

      • Al, there is this weird subset of b2b advertising, and that is the advertising of companies to their own employees. Sort of a combination “aren’t we great” and “please do a good job”. Car companies are the most prolific at this sort of thing, and have produced some real howlers. The best ever is hapless British Leyland. You can Google “British Leyland The Quality Connection”. It goes on to say that Jaguars are just gussied up Austins, customers will pay more for basically the same thing because of brand differentiation, we know you hate your work, but fer gawd’s sake do a good job anyway because we are all counting on you, if you don’t quit watching the buxom Madeline Smith sashaying through the parts plant you are going to lose a hand in the sheet metal press, and if you don’t watch out, the cars thus produced will kill babies in their strollers. The logic behind this video eludes me, it must be a British thing. But there are worse ways to waste a half hour or so, as anything with Madeline in it can’t be all bad.

  27. “In reality, people in marketing are mostly shiftless sociopaths, while the people in sales are hardworking and honest. If you are ever evaluating a company for purchase, make sure to talk with the sales guys. … The most honest people in any company are the guys grinding through sales calls every day.”

    I think this is true, and that’s why I find “New Thought” writers like Peale, Hill, Carnegie, so refreshing to read. “Official culture” tells you these “God is my Salesman” types are, as you say, creepy and dumb. Back in the 50s, there was enormous pushback against these “midcult” types, by smug guys like Adlai Stevenson (“I find the gospel of Paul appealing, and the gospel of Peale appalling”) and even Tom Leher (I couldn’t get someone to read Peale because they’re a fan of Lehrer and he has ONE LINE in some song mocking him). I started reading them because Trump was influenced by Peale (and, of course, that’s one more black mark for Peale and Trump both in official culture), and I recommend them to all.

  28. I have always suspected the real reason for adverting is not to get us to buy anything specific but just to be a consumer. Make us unhappy and convince us that buying something will make us feel better about ourselves. Doesn’t make any difference if the product is Mickey D’s faux-food or gold-plated dog turds from Stella McFartney, as long as we realize the secret to life is to be a consumer.

  29. I wonder how many of the video ads are done to buy editorial favor with the networks. The old “Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” thing.

  30. One area of advertising that isn’t discussed much is medical care. The industry is largely funded by federal dollars, I.e. mostly through Medicare and Medicaid, I.e. debt on the backs of our children. Given the absence of price transparency and any metrics that allow the consumer to compare quality at a given price, and the fact that 90% of the money spent does not actually come out of the consumer’s pocket, the money wasted is enormous.

    • Yeah, and every time some pharmaceutical company starts a heavy ad campaign for a new drug, there will be tons of people who start asking their doctors (as instructed in the ad) about it. So, it does seem that there is some effectiveness to it.

      • That’s the “awareness” function of advertising, in action. Creating awareness of a product is the single biggest successful element in advertising. Awareness takes product sales from “zero” to “x”. Beyond “x” depends on word of mouth and the efforts of salespeople. In this case, the salespeople can be the doctors, who might see compensation, direct or indirect, based on the number of prescriptions written.

        • Note that often they don’t even tell you what Xamatril does. Just sociopaths relying on the neurosis of a certain subset of the population.

      • Wondered about that just last night – when I saw an ad for some HIV drug being run on the Evening News over and over again.

        Is there really that many people out there with HIV that a marketing blitz makes any economic sense?

        • I doubt it. However, there are a great number of fags out there who would really rather not have to wear condoms when they have gay sex with large numbers of random guys. The goal is to bring back pre-AIDS gay hedonism, but with the openness of modern pro-LGBT culture. Add in the fact that we are very close to common acceptance of pedophilia and well… “Hey look, with this new drug, I can have sex with your pre-teen son and you don’t have to worry about me giving him AIDS!”

    • The U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that subject their people to the disgraceful medical/pharmaceutical industry ads that so plague us. Those very trippy ads from big pharma. I imagine an ad team sitting at the pharmaceutical company board table taking various colored pills from large bowls of gratis pills set on the table specifically for brainstorming sessions. That’s how they come up with ads where people and animals and towns are all in white cardboard or a cartoon turkey in LL Bean wardrobe that mosies around fishing and feeding the fish in his tank as he’s quitting cigarettes that he stubs out and pushes away with his wings/feather fingers, etc. Pharma people getting on their freak. Stinks of money and drugs. Bubbleworld.

  31. Is there a list out there of dissident-right-friendly products or companies? On someone’s website? If not, maybe we can get the ADL to find them for us, and we can consume dissident-right-friendly products.

    • I don’t know about “dissident-right,” but the My Pillow guy advertises on Tucker’s show when almost every corporation has abandoned him. I always feel good about spending my money at Chik-Filet, since the left hates them, and the kids working there tend to be wholesome-looking, polite kids.

      • It’s amazing how on earth Chick-Fil-A has managed to get a bunch of teenagers to work teenager jobs. In our area, McD’s, BK, etc are staffed by clearly disaffected 40-something white working-class folks (and maybe just 3 or 4 folks working there, making things take even longer). Chick-Fil-A, on the other hand, has about 15-20 folks there, smiling teenagers who generally seem like they’re not about to spit in my food.

    • Chick-fil-a is a good one. I wonder if it has an unspoken racial hiring policy, because the staff is always much whiter and better-looking than any other fast food place.

      • @Marko
        No it’s just one of the benefits of them promoting their Christian Beliefs the scum doesn’t even apply…

        • Hobby Lobby is similar, if any general retail focused company wanted to differentiate themselves, this would be an excellent way to do it.

      • I doubt it. They probably just have a general policy of not hiring sociopaths, something Burger King, McD’s and some of the other places would do well to emulate.

  32. I love beating up on the marketing department, asking, “Do they even know what our products and services are?” When the lead marketing people show up, they’re like aliens visiting a foreign land. They’re not quite sure what it is the locals do or why, but they’re pretty sure it has something to do with the word synergy.

    Talk to most small business owners who are franchises, and they’ll tell you they mainly post the new advertisements in their businesses when the franchisor requires it. They know that most of the advertising is a mechanism to extract cash from the small business. None of it works, and it is horribly overpriced, but they’re required to remove and replace and buy new, and it’s not always included in the price of their royalty. Most business owners will tell you that their #1 marketing strategy is happy customers. Marketing people will tell you that this is insane, and send you a 400Mb file of consumer demographics for how to target your advertising…i.e. they just ignore you and require you to buy your products.

    Anyway, always think of “marketing” as a profit extraction tool. It’s not going to increase your sales except on small margins such as general consumer awareness “Hey, I didn’t know there was somebody/thing that did that.” But, they charge marketing prices designed specifically to lower your overall profitability. Which, for franchises, is just an additional tax on the royalty. Some franchisors provide the marketing as part of the royalty, but you’re left with a bunch of posters and crap that you mostly throw away.

  33. The ads I have been getting on YouTube recently have been downright bizarre. I have been getting graphic anti-chewing tobacco ads and the new insipid sitcom Mixed-ish after watching classical music videos. They must just report back that you had X number of views and expect the purchasers to consider that a success.

  34. If advertising and marketing is a waste of time – why aren’t salespeople?

    I don’t recall a single purchase in my entire life where I was swayed by a salesperson to buy something that I didn’t already want.

    • Well, if they were a truly good salesperson, you’d never realize that didn’t that you were sold anything. You’d just assume that it was your idea.

    • Happened to me *once* in my life. We were planning on getting a new vacuum cleaner because our old one sucked (well, it didn’t suck), and ended up with the Shark Rotator after becoming engrossed in the 20 minute infomercial showing how much more power it had than the Dyson!

    • Salespeople I most often dealt with sold products that were in form and function similar to a wide variety of competitors. Good ones added value by helping find a solution to my need with their product(s). They often worked with me on timing of purchase, installation, and support—and sometimes bending the process to meet a Purchasing Department’s arcane and often Byzantine rules.

      Z-man nailed it with his distinction between a marketing jockey and a “salesman”.

      • Compsci,

        Correct. A good salesman helps you find the right product or service for your needs, even if that product comes from another company. I’ll always go first to a salesman who told me in the past either I didn’t need the product or the best fit was another company.

  35. In one of the Hitchhikers books, Douglas Adams wrote that the marketing guys would be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.

    • Quote:

      The Hitchhiker’s Travel Guide describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:

      “A bunch of mindless jerks who’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.”

      Curiously, an edition of the Encyclopedia Galactica which conveniently fell through a rift in the time-space continuum from 1000 years in the future describes the Marketing Department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as:

      “A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came.”

      Only their complaints department survived the general economic implosion of the company as a whole.

  36. You should probably do more research on direct response marketing. In my career, I can see direct sales coming in from the phone number in the commercial, and from the links people click to purchase. The unique number and link tell me which ad they viewed and are proof that the ad drove the revenue. I will concede that brand marketing is a waste, but David Ogilvy said that 50 years ago, and he was the original Mad man

    • And i’m *sure* the marketing dept calculated the ‘lift’ from the ad and subtracted not only the cost for the ad itself, but the cost for the time of the person doing the calculation, the opportunity cost of doing the ad versus spending the money some other way on the business, etc, right?

      Marketing statistics are generally a con. Marketing virtually never address the counterfactual of ‘would they have bought this product anyway’. Attribution is a HUGE lie told by marketers who want to keep the gravy train going.

      Yes, some of this stuff works in a sociopathic way to separate the old and indigent from their money.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cr6ee0Pkfw

  37. After over thirty years of working tangentially to advertising, here are a few observations about the people who design and make the ads, the creatives as they are so-called. These are the people I know the best. First, as a wider statement most people you meet in an ad agency are hardly salesmen. There is no shortage of bureaucracy and interminable meetings in advertising and you won’t find any Eugene O’Neill character like Hickey from The Iceman Cometh or any other fire-breathing apostle of hucksterism here. Most of it is quite dreary office space. I mention this to get to the one thing I can contribute about who exactly is creating these ridiculous ads we see everywhere: The creatives whose job it is to think of ads really have no interest in selling something. It’s a paycheck, and a way to play artist or director or screenwriter for a living. In fact the dream trajectory for an art director is to eventually shift over into becoming a film director, making commercials, or *gasp* feature films, the holy grail. Copywriters all have an unfinished screenplay or novel on their hard drives. For most creatives, designing a commercial is an opportunity to make a small funny little film, then to go on set and make it. Getting tv spots on your “reel” is gold, and it makes it easier to move up the ladder to higher pay and bigger jobs. While brainstorming the concept of a commercial, creatives rarely discuss sales. The more important thing is making it a little film that says something, something that their creative brief (their given mission or objective) requires.

    As everyone here has noticed, the mission or objective of a growing segment of ads today is plain, bald, hectoring virtue-signaling. The biracial couple thing, the gay couple thing, it’s so prevalent a man from Mars would assume from television that America is half black and half gay. At any rate, the clients who spend so much on advertising clearly seem to be doing so in an effort to show their woke piety as much as hope to boost sales. In fact you will sometimes hear talk among creatives about how the client wants to help the showcase their diversity. How diversity benefits a can of soup or a sports car is a question left unexplored.

    One other little amusing thing. You can’t even begin to visualize an ad until you address the question of who will be in it. Really, it goes like this: you ask “Who will be in this ad? Which gender, which ethnicity?” (You can’t say sex and race.) One of the favorite ploys creatives use to dodge the issue is to say “Let’s cast ethnically ambiguous talent.” In other words, non-white, but let’s not pin down whom we really want yet. But there nearly always has to be an “African-American” in it, and it’s so predictable it feels like a token, which it really is.

    • Most ads are not even about the product. Companies like Geico and Progressive make cute, funny commercials that have nothing to do with car insurance until the closing tag line. I particularly like the “Mayhem” guy, but can’t even tell you which company he acts for. I never once thought about buying anything related to these.

      • Some of those Geico ads went viral (the cavemen; “Mike, Mike, Mike”) but you also remembered they were Geico. I’d put the Subaru ads with dogs driving the cars in the same category: I won’t immediately change stations or FF if one comes on.

      • Hate the Mayhem guy, finding him quintessentially New American in his stupid, gleeful destructiveness. Yuck. The one commercial, where “What?!” is yelled back and forth between Mayhem and his victim is particularly unbearable. Unwatchable stupidity. Mute button. Funny, I don’t know which company Mayhem belongs to, but they are the worst ads! Also, any of the Liberty Mutual ads are unbearable. I remember Liberty Mutual once posted an ad on Twitter a couple years ago of a tranny man who looked like an very husky male ex-con axe-murderer dressed as a street walker. I thought it was a Halloween joke at first! Then when I discovered it was offered in earnest sympathy to trannies (this creature’s name was Bambi, I believe, they sensitively noted), I commented on their ad, advising they have forever lost a customer that might have considered them. Good Lord. Can’t believe we haven’t been invaded yet, such a weak stupid country we’ve become.

    • George;
      My long-term rule of thumb re filmed commercials: If it’s not obvious what product is paying for it, then the ad is all about the makers. I always wondered why this was permitted until, due to job change, I started seeing ad agency campaign pitch videos.

      What these videos featured was usually not any new approach or new marketing conceptual breakthrough. Rather, it was about what awesome thought leaders the corporate marketing VP’s were. Doh: Forehead slap time_!

      IOW, Z Man is absolutely right about the corporate marketing folks being stupid scum grifters. But what was even more amazing was that the ‘C Level’ Cloud People were fine with this. Sat right through the whole thing, smiling and nodding knowingly.

      By that time I knew better than to let out my inner AYFKM reaction. For that and a number of other cogent reasons I knew right then and there that the next time a good buy-out came out, I was grabbing it.

  38. Have worked for two financial services firms where the single most effective marketing was word of mouth from existing customers—built multi-billion dollar businesses that way. Just got done gutting portions of the “marketing” budget at the new place. and re-directed a large portion of the that money to hire real live sales people. Much more effective. Always has been.

    • Whenever we had work done by an outside vendor that we were very pleased with, we offered to act as a reference. (You can’t do the opposite or you’ll be sued.)

  39. Today’s blog post brought to by Z’s favorite bourbon, Makers Mark. Drink Makers, but drink responsibly like Mr. Z does.

    Sam Walton supposedly said that half of his advertising didn’t work, he just didn’t know which half. How did he know that even half worked?

    • I thought about putting pic in the middle of the post with the words, “Your ad could be here” but I did not have time. I’ve been approached by placing ads on the site, but I don’t think they work and I don’t think people like them. I don’t think the companies soliciting me really know anything about the site. They just see the traffic.

      That said, I’d be OK with recommending a product like radio guys do, but I’d have to agree with the company philosophy and like the product. That naturally limits the pool greatly.

      • Ads on this site would not bother me much, as I am immune to it. But it would give the SJWs something to boycott, and the weak kneed companies would soon pull everything. So probably not worth the trouble.

      • I’m already giving you ten bucks a month. That will stop if ads begin appearing, regardless of the product. I occasionally listen to Sam Harris to get a sense of what the semi-rational leftist intelligentsia is worrying about. He may be a half jew prog, but I completely agree with and respect his commitment to making his content free of advertising. The entire advertising based business model for entertainment is making modern life almost unbearable. Even when you pay extra for no advertising, it still creeps in i.e. Amazon prime and Hulu. Advertising is no longer viewed as a means of increasing market share, It has instead become nothing more than corporate virtue signaling and a form of psychological punishment for trad white males. I can only imagine the malicious pleasure the progs crafting these ads must get knowing how much it tightens our jaws.

      • Speaking of giants of old, pbuh Sam Walton, Mr. Wrigley once likened advertising to the coal that powered the locomotive. Stop shoving in the coal and eventually the train stopped. Not sure about the truth of it, but some pretty smart people believed in advertising at least to some extent.

    • How did he know that even half worked?

      Good question. I once talked to a statistician who was, inter alia, a consultant for several marketing agencies, and he cheerily told me that no, there was absolutely no way to know if your campaigns worked.

      Not that he told his customers that, of course. I was a bit taken aback by the open mendaciousness on his part, but he explained that since his customers were in the business of selling bullshit, they might as well buy their bullshit from him, because his bullshit was the best in the market.

    • Those adds are helping our side because it’s so blatant that people are starting to say wtf and not buying those products because of it…If they start talking about it I then gently steer them too sites like this…

    • There are more mixed race couples in ads than same race couples. That’s not to drive black purchasing decisions, but to appeal to whites who like the theory of living with blacks more than the reality.

      • This is correct, and it is very largely whites in advertising making that choice, no one else. Unless it is an explicitly “ethnic” ad agency (there are agencies that specialize in marketing to every color other than white), the bulk of creatives in conventional ad agencies are white, quite a few are Asians, a small number are blacks and browns.

      • My guilty pleasure is to sit back and watch the ad’s and count the numbers of minorities. General conclusion is that in any commercial break, Whites in some form are 25-33% of ad characters, Blacks somewhere around 33-50%, Other Minorities—including Gays around 25-33%. As I’ve mentioned before, even my wife has noticed the unreality of the commercials. No wonder Europeans who are asked wrt numbers of Blacks in America, typically guess 50%!

        Son has a bit of experience with such in his company. He claims that the ad folk take orders for numbers of and types of “diversity” in company’s commercials. And such “thinking” (shenanigans) is why you’ll find a cereal food being consumed by a happy family around the breakfast table consisting of father—Black, mother—White, daughter—Asian, and son—Hispanic.

        • My daughter has done photos and videos for Fisher Price and every time we’ve gone in for a shoot, it’s patently obvious that they’ve called in kids based on race/ethnicity. She’s done it about a dozen times and almost without exception she’s been paired with a black/mystery meat child.

      • I don’t think that Downy commercial would boost sales even if the woman were a young fox. But who’s going to identify with a pear-shaped fashion-victim grandma tossing herself around?

        The classic advertising con has been to convince you that you’ll be as attractive as the model if you use the product. That may have had some success — at least it’s congruent with human nature. But what insanity has come over the ad industry when they imagine that an audience will be influenced by a character seemingly designed to be repellent?

    • They really are at war with our culture. They want to construct a new one, where we’re not welcome. The fat, ugly, angry, brown kid shows a lot about where we are now.

      • Speaking of which, I saw a commercial aimed at kids, I forgot what the ad was peddling because the boy in the commercial was a Guatemalan squat monster. The boy had a torso that looked like a beer barrel on stubby legs, his arms were equally stubby and larded up. He had a face of 40 year old jungle dweller.

        It really gave me one of those WTF moments

      • God I can’t stand Vox Day these days. Such a smug little shit. What’s he selling besides comic books and trad-Cath content?

          • I have to be honest, they’re doing good work in creating alternative entertainment. Let’s not blast each other, we can save that for the actual cucks!! lol

          • Johnny55, Vox would blast you in a second. He is a Christian first and anything else a distant 2nd.

          • That’s ok, I’m a Christian as well. He’s been great, just like Z man, in discussing great things to read and discussing concepts. But in any event, I don’t need anyone’s approval or friendship to appreciate all that people do.

        • Yes, Vox is annoying, but you have to give him credit for being among the very few to actually work hard at creating independent alternatives. Besides, being annoying doesn’t mean he’s always wrong.

          • I don’t think Vox Day is the kind of guy I’d like to have a beer with, but I like what he’s doing. Many more like him would be great. He gets things done, he doesn’t just sit on his ass complaining.

        • He is smug but he’s right when he complains that our side doesn’t bother to support it’s own. He actually creates alternatives and all you guys do is whine and complain because you don’t like his smugness.

          • Vox is a hero for the kids. Especially the cellar dwelling millennial boys that are getting left behind. They’re the ones living in cellars, being raised by psychotic single mothers, going to public schools infested with queers, vibrants, and drugs. With the only escape being video games and comic books (and those being over run by SJW’s and socialists)… to them, the guy walks on water. I can see why the kids love him.

            He certainly grabs those kids and makes them think, and that is a good thing – the dissident right, IMHO, is not doing anything for that demographic and Vox is the only one that seems to know they exist… and he’s about the only one out there that takes the time to talk to them.

            The problem is his personality. If you read him enough you see patterns in his behaviour: he projects, he lies, he doubles down. Then you notice that by his own definitions – he’s a gamma male all the way. I see him as a stepping stone in getting the kids over to our side, and if they think he’s some kind of hero – so be it.

            Personally I can’t stand him… But I am an old fart so whadda I know?

          • Have you ever heard of Nick Fuentes? Daily caller.name? “Durh dem dumb lazy millennials FRICK just sitting in mom’s basement reading comic books FRICK. Soon they’ll join our side and realize…”? Realize what?

            You guys are so clueless.

          • John, that right there is vital for our side of the divide to realize and always remember. We cannot fall into the trap of demanding purity. Like him or not, he’s on our side and has appeal to a not-unimportant demographic.

            He has his audience and our host has his. I’m pretty sure there’s a bit of overlap as well. As it should be. We can have our differences and fight together anyway. Let’s make sure we work to support our fellow travelers.

          • No he’s not, exactly. He’s emotionally unstable, and he won’t hesitate to punch right. He attacked Gab because people said the same kind of things about him that he says of others. The kids don’t see stuff like that, and details like that don’t matter until you grow up and can look past the video games and comic books.
            In dealing with adults… he’s a liability. Jordan Peterson has taken more SJW scalps than Vox ever has – and he’s a centre leftist. Vox is a big fish in a small pond…and that is probably the best place for him.

          • Vox Day is not a fellow traveller, IMHO. He’s emotionally unstable and has attacked Gab. He melts down and throws tantrums when confronted by smarter men – Jordan Petersen fires him up so badly that he can’t even see straight. Vox is out for Number One first and foremost – and his primary interests in dissident politics are financial more than anything else. If he perceives a threat to his position he won’t hesitate to punch right.
            Contrast that with guys like Sailer, Derb, our esteemed blog host – and you see they have a spiritual commitment to creating a viable movement. Vox seeks only to maintain his position in a small pond.
            My feeling is that he has his uses – provided that he is confined to the kids’ table, away from the adults who are actually trying to get things done. For now, if he keeps challenging the kids and actually making them think and feel better about themselves… that’s good enough.

          • Yes, Vox is smug and annoying. He’s also rather clever and has made me think about a lot of things I wouldn’t have previously considered. If I’m not interested in or in agreement with what he posts, I leave – it’s his blog, not mine. If you find him intolerable, don’t read him – but don’t go whining about him everywhere else. That’s emotionally unstable.

      • He’s creating alternate media , books fiction and non fiction and comics to start and a movie on the way. Maybe its pro Christian but it’s guaranteed poz free

        He also has an SJW proof fork of Wikipedia (infogalactic) which is very good

        I suspect after a the latest SJW swarm attacks we’ll have to fork Archive.Org among other things.

        Essentially we will have to make a backup of history than reboot .

        I’m not a huge fan of Day, stopped posting there but whatever else that guy is on my side and helps fellow dissidents which is good enough

        • Didn’t know he was behind infogalactic, what a great resource. People should consider installing the blocked extension InfoSextant, which will redirect all wikipedia pages to infogalactic. Get it here, then rename the zip file to .crx to install: https://crx.dam.io/ext/plieanmckkckfcdfaobonmmmbeniaige.html

          Forking archive.org shouldn’t be necessary, there are nice tools like http://etched.page that let you archive pages directly to the bitcoin blockchain, where they will stay immutably forever. I’ve been archiving Zman there for posterity.

    • The Dissident Right Seal of Approval! So few products will earn it, at least at first, that it will be recognized as meaning something.

  42. I realized early on, that 99% of advertising wasn’t directed at me. Cadillac ads featuring Frank Sinatra singing in the background was a targeted appeal to aspiring middle class, middle aged nobodies who needed to show the neighbors they finally made it. I think most ad buys are about brainwashing/brand awareness. If I say “Golden Arches” “King” or “Red haired girl”, you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about

  43. The people producing the ads and selling services to business (including most internal marketing departments) either know the opposite – that ads don’t move the needle at all, but hey, gotta make a living – or are general idiots (MPAI) and know nothing about data. Just as you said – “shiftless sociopaths”.

    Good luck convincing the idiot executives and MBAs at the *top* that believe that their ad spending is working, data be damned.

    I have some personal experience with this – I worked for a major US retailer in marketing technology. The amount of money and employee time spent on email marketing, online marketing, TV advertising, in-store branding, etc is vast, and the amount of money spent trying to ‘attribute’ a sale to a marketing ‘event’ is vast. I would venture to say that the money spent on the campaigns is nearly always more than *any* movement of the needle. Millions of dollars spent on consultants from ‘data’ companies like AC Nielsen and others. To tell us what, exactly? They’ll do crazy statistical models to identify groups of customers, which then then tell us to send a coupon to.

    Now, there are some things that do work. A/B testing for online product ‘recommendations’ for example has shown that it can lead to a slight lift in sales. But what isn’t measured is the lost sale elsewhere or if the ‘sale would have been made anyway’.

    Also, marketing owns sociopathic things like the permanent 50% off sale – these work wonders on idiot women (and some men) who think “I’m getting a deal!” Kohl’s department store is making a *killing* selling slave-labor made clothes to Susie Soccer-Mom because she had some ‘Kohl’s Cash’!

    • JC Penney tried the same thing when Ron Johnson, a former Apple marketing guy, took over the company. He cut out all the coupons and went to everyday lower prices, figuring people were smart enough to know the difference. He was fired, and the stock is now under $1.

      • A year ago, Proctor and Gamble cut $200M in online advertising and found that their reach went UP 10%. There may be a slow turning to the realization that internet ads dont work. Business gets fed nonsense stats on click thrus that mean nothing as far as actual sales. I search for a saw to cut a low branch in my yard, and I see ads for the next 2 weeks for saws after I already bought one. These “targeted” ads are worthless and a scam. But I dont think its going to last much longer. When we hit a rough patch, these ads will be the first to dry up.

        • Something I’ve always wondered about — aren’t the clicks the ad sellers report as participation from viewers of ads in reality just when we click the red “x” in the box corner to make the annoying ad boxes go away? And these clicks on boxes to make the ads go away are reported to ad buyers as clicks of interested shoppers?

          • No, it only counts as a click if you go through to the advertiser’s web site. Google and Facebook actually punish sites if they get too ridiculous with number of adds, or tricks to get you to click, by ranking those site lower. Clearly not enough though.

    • I was in a department store a while back and from a certain vantage point your eyes could take in a very good sized portion of the floor. Every single rack in the store had a placard proclaiming that the goods below were on sale for a certain percentage. When everything in your store is “on sale” than nothing’s actually on sale.

  44. One of the most annoying advertising methods enabled by technology in this age are the video screens at gas pumps. I’ve already made the decision to buy your gas, Speedway Stores, LLC. You don’t have to keep pitching to me. You won. Shut the Hell up and let me pump my gas in silence for a couple of minutes.

    It’s just so fucking constant now. I remember as a kid watching movies of the dystopian future, like Blade Runner, and seeing all the ubiquitous advertising in the background as some of the elements to set the dystopian mood. Well, we’re there now. We are living in The Jetsons times and it sucks.

    • I have the same thought. They jam ads in every nook and cranny, so the ads become background noise. Another nonsense belief peddled by these people is that these ads work subliminally. In reality, they are more easily ignored.

      • I was watching a hockey game last night, and couldn’t believe they actually have ads on the ice now. It was bad enough when they covered the boards with ads. One other sportsball gripe is that they keep changing the rules to speed up the games, but NFL games still go 3 hours and MLB playoff games are frequently in the 4 hour range. They are merely substituting actual playing time for more ads.

        • “This visit to the mound brought to you by Taco Bell” is satire from not so long ago, but it now real. We live in clown world, brought to you by the makers of product.

          • Another example: The only reason the US Postal Service still exists is because of junk mail. And even then, they cost the taxpayers over a billion dollars a year.

          • This doesn’t bother me. Junk mail has been around forever and the US Constitution wisely mandates a post office

            Given the budget a few billion for a generally reliable means of delivering mail is a bargain

          • The local post office staff are all either Han, Pajeet, or sub-Saharan. They’re set for life with almost free health care and a pension. And I’d hardly call their work “reliable.”

          • At least it’s a billion bucks a year that provides a visible and somewhat useful service to the general population every day. What other federal government billion bucks does that?

        • Ads on the ice? I can almost match that. The nearest Safeway to me not only has ads on the carts, but on the floor. You would think some bright spark at the advertisers’ marketing department would question the symbolism of having customers step on product photos. But the idea seems to be any ad, anywhere, sells.

      • I think Future Dissident society will actually have to a fash element to it and be willing to impose a sense of ethics, style and clean space or human well being

        It’s why every Dissident out to read Wrath of Gnon

        https://wrathofgnon.tumblr.com

        And yes its tumblr, its stil worth it

        They get it

        In that sense, the Libertarian mercantile is culture ethos need to be taken out behind the proverbial chemical shed and shot

        America needs to grow up.

    • Yes. The only plaudit Naomi Klein ever got from me, was for No Logo, warning persuasively about how public spaces are getting corporatized. It is only twenty years old, and still it feels like reading a prophecy that you now see coming true, right down to the massive “insourcing”, as it was called back then, the importation of cheap labor to do jobs that couldn’t be outsourced to China.

      She also acknowledged that politics is downstream from culture and described the resistance tactics of Culture Bombing, which is Millenarian-speak for trolling, where you subvert a corporate message with ironic comments – which in the 20th C., before social media, meant defacing billboards with clever counter-messaging.

  45. The Gillette ad from a few months ago was certainly persuasive. Just not in the direction they wanted. The cost of lecturing us about masculinity was $8 billion.

    • Imagine an advertising campaign calling for women to be better women…

      Aside: David French evidently has been let go by NRO!

        • I’m guessing his brand of turn the other cheek virtue signaling “conservatism” no longer has any appeal. If so, that’s a good sign. He’s joining Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes at something called “The Dispatch”. lol.

      • He’s joining Goldberg and some other neocon grifters at the newest anti-white publication. Something called the Dispatch.

        • I don’t understand why you’d leave NRO to found a new, exactly-the-same publication, with no name recognition. Why not just stay at NRO?

          • They are going to put it behind a paywall. Does anyone know who Hayes and Goldberg found to fund this disaster? The number of people willing to pay to read those three stooges wouldn’t be enough to fund them living together in a studio apartment.

          • The usual suspects, I presume: Koch, Google, etc. . .
            It may also be organized under 501(c)(3), making it a write-off like NRO.

          • I’m sure he was forced out. Here’s Jennifer Rubin’s remarks:

            “Fabulous! The Dispatch is the new serious conservative venture. The NR is too afraid to break with its readers and lead in a time of national crisis”

        • LOL. They’re calling their podcast “The Remnant”.

          as in:
          ” The website will go live today, the first in a string of newsletters begins tomorrow, and Goldberg has begun the first podcast, The Remnant. ”

          How are they going to start this off? “Today – listen to Goldberg discuss Christian issues in a new installment of The Remnant! “

    • Thanks to the direction that Gillette went, I started doing research on razors as I was no longer going to use their products. It was interesting. I now support a company that makes very good safety razors and other products. When I asked them which razor to buy, they actually guided me to their cheapest model–one that was most appropriate for beginners with that type of razor. After that, and the fact I like their stuff, I’ll stay with them.

      Thanks Gillette, for helping to open my eyes to better companies! Oddly enough, I have my doubts that was the intent of their ad campaign…

      • Not directing this at you, but just as a general reminder. Harry’s is as globohomo as they come. Don’t give them your money either.

          • Schick makes the best disposable razors. (They’re on the cutting edge — okay, I’m sorry.) I hope I won’t learn anything about the company that puts them in the same loathsome globohomo class as Gillette/Procter & Gamble.

        • No, I didn’t go with Harry’s. Frankly, I don’t like dragging 15 blades (or however many they put on one cartridge) across my face at a time. As that is all they offer, I never considered them. Also, I have a very deep distrust for “start-ups” with multi-million dollar advertising budgets.

        • Years before the Gillette spectacle, I got tired of paying $$ for fancy disposable shaving cartridges. So I got a safety razor and a lot of blades. Much nostalgia, but crappy shaves, as I found. Then, based on customer reviews, I tried the very cheap Bic plastic disposable razors for “sensitive skin.” These look as cheap as they cost. Absolutely no glitz or nostalgia. But they turned out to give great shaves and last a long time. Been using them ever since.

          Also based on user ratings, I discovered Arko shaving sticks. Very inexpensive, give great lather and excellent shaves, last practically forever, made in Turkey. No $$ to Procter and Gamble via Gilette.

          Getting back to today’s topic, this reminds me that customer reviews (and lo-tech word of mouth) are a useful alternative to pitch men and marketing borgs. But I suppose companies will find ways to corrupt the reviews, if they haven’t already.

          • Same here. Bought a good Merkur stainless—2 actually one for my travel kit and about two years of blades. Use a badger brush and soap. Shave it better and about 1/5 the cost

  46. “In reality, people in marketing are mostly shiftless sociopaths, while the people in sales are hardworking and honest.”

    So damn true. As soon as Marketing starts doing anything other than supplying Sales with materials, they are wasting money.

    • The people in marketing may well be “shiftless sociopaths” – but my main takeaway after decades in high tech is that marketing types are typically women who like to work in a field where hard and fast PROVABLE results are not one of the job requirements.

      As far as salespeople go – I’d agree that most salesmen are hardworking, but “honest” is not a description that I’d apply to pretty much any salesperson I’ve ever met.

      • Cal;
        Salesforce honesty is determined by and is a reliable indicator of the quality of a firm’s management. You are absolutely correct about badly supervised salespeople. They’ll promise and do anything to max out their bonuses.

        It is a real art of wise management to have the proper mix of incentives to sell, create and maintain customers carefully balanced with effective structures to detect and punish both company *and* customer abuse by salespeople. I’ve seen examples of both situations.

        Ordinarily, successful company founders run the balanced situation. That’s why they become successful companies in the first place. But then a second or third generation of managers comes along that shortsightedly sees the quick buck by eating up the established credibility and is too dumb to see the actual system that established it. Or they don’t care.

        Then the grifters pile in and the honest, conscientious salespeople boil off. The reputation is compromised and the spiral begins.

  47. To Z’s point, not only is most advertising useless, it is frequently counter-productive.

    How many times have you refused to by a product because you found their ads to be annoying or obnoxious?

    The most memorable ads are the ones we hate most. How many of you know the 1-877-Kars4Kids song by heart?

      • I’m making a mental list of tv ads that persuade me never to buy their product,
        I was shocked the other day to see a VW ad to the tune of “these are my people” where the ad was full of white people doing white stuff- My wife found a fleeting pickaninny, but it seemed to me that they had chosen a side in the race war.
        We shall see.
        There’s an ad for Mexican beer celebrating immigrants “what matters isn’t where you come from it’s what you are made of” usually followed by one of the DNA companies featuring some Negress celebrating her various tribes of origin where the message is “You are where you came from”.
        I know which one I believe.

    • I think that particular ad is a bad decision for whoever runs it. I will always change the station as soon as it starts up. You think that was the intent?

      • I won’t change the channel, but will remember the ad/vender and not do business with them. Only one ad I remember was so annoying to this extent. Imagine this annoying ad repeated every commercial break for months. Then they changed the ad, to two guys talking about the old campaign and the complaints it generated. Then they agreed it was over the top, giggled and began singing the annoying jingle! How’s that for chutzpah! What I can’t understand is how they figure that a bad consumer memory of the company is better than no consumer memory of the company. Yes, I’ve heard that saying/thinking before in many similar situations.

        • There’s no such thing as bad publicity is the mantra.
          Oscar Wilde said it thusly
          “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

          Some people believe it.

      • No, it’s the cheesy hamhandedness of the k!kes. They need goyim to produce beauty and measured persuasion.

    • How counter-productive is advertising becoming now that these companies are ‘woke’ and increasingly anti-white…A large department store in San Francisco on the west side of the city (a well-to-do area) has been running mixed-race couple advertisements for at least a decade: Black males with White or Asian females. They’ve recently closed their doors. All the other stores in the area seem to be booming.

      • Except the black man/pale woman dynamic is now the norm in these ads. Funny thing is that when I see such couples in real life, they tend to be grossly overweight white females paired with knuckle dragging coloreds, yet I never see that portrayed in advertising.

        • I’ve seen this too, low class Whites with Low Class Blacks. we have a few exceptions here , slightly better looking mixed race couples but nothing amazing at most a 6 max and the women give off a trashy vibe

          Since these people see fit to troll us I see fit to ignore them

          Outside of TV I’ve seen maybe two White guy Black Gal couples, media ges that mostly right. One was actually an good looking hipster with very attractive black lady so a unicorn.

    • Apropos to yesterday’s comments on how we should develop organizations that are dedicated to helping white people, once again, the jews show us how it’s done, enjoying gentile funding for their own jewish people via “charities” such as Kars4Kids. ‘Those goyim, so wonderful, always so willing to hand us their prosperity!,’ they must be thinking.
      *****

      “Where does the money go? Ninety percent of the monies donated go to a sister organization, Oorah, a New Jersey-based charity that operates Jewish youth summer camps in New York.

      “‘My main concern about Kars4Kids is that people don’t know what’s really happening with this charity,’ said Daniel Borochoff, the president of CharityWatch.

      “‘That’s fine if people want to raise money for orthodox Jews, but they need to be clear and state that’s what the purpose is,’ Borochoff said.

      “Kars4Kids issued a statement addressing the allegations.

      “‘Since we are headquartered in the northeast, many of our programs and recipients naturally come from this area,’ the statement reads. ‘We believe Minnesota residents…appreciate that their generous donations to Kars4Kids help children both in and out of state.’ [Note the slippery response, issued with confidence!]

      “The Minnesota attorney general had other concerns as well. Among them, that the charity lost almost $10 million in real estate transactions.

      “‘Oorah invested the money and then lost the money. And we think that, too, is something important for people to know,’ Swanson said.

      “The 2015 budget for their ads? Seventeen million dollars, according to CharityWatch, which is even more than Kars4Kids gave to Oorah.

      “‘So when one makes a donation to Kars4Kids, they’re basically paying for those ads,’ Borochoff said.

      “In 2009, Kars4Kids paid settlements in Oregon and Pennsylvania after those states charged the charity with misleading donors.

      “As for Minnesota’s report, the charity said they have had conversations with the attorney general’s office and are reviewing their suggestions.”

      *****
      So this is known The nice thing about living in a first-world country is how the government protects the public from predatory behavior like this. D’oh!
      *****

      “‘In CharityWatch’s view, the Kars4Kids ads deceive potential donors by failing to inform them that donated cars will benefit a Jewish organization and kids of Jewish faith. Furthermore, the youth programs Kars4Kids supports promote an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle, which CharityWatch believes compounds the deception perpetrated by the Kars4Kids ads.'” …

      “While supporting Orthodox Jewish organizations is a worthy endeavor for those donors who are intending to do so, many donors of other faiths may not be pleased to learn that the car they donated to Kars4Kids may have funded religious teachings that are in conflict with their own faith or personal beliefs. Orthodox Jews, who follow the traditional interpretations of Jewish law with strict observance of Jewish ritual, make up only about 10% of Jewish adults in the U.S., according to a 2013 survey published by the Pew Research Center in August 2015. Moreover, many secular Jews are not enthusiastic about funding Orthodox organizations, as suggested by an official of The Jewish Agency for Israel, a nonprofit that inspires Jews throughout the world to connect with their People, heritage, and homeland. The official said: “The Jewish mainstream, certainly in North America but in other places as well, is not Orthodox and isn’t interested in organizations that proselytize to non-religious Jews,” according to an August 2016 article in Haaretz, Israel’s daily newspaper.” …

      “According to a 2017 compliance review conducted by the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Minnesota (OAG), over 99.9% of the $90 million raised by Kars4Kids from 2012-2014 was spent on charitable programs under the direction or control of Kars4Kids’ “sister charity,” Oorah. Oorah’s two largest programs are its summer camps and tuition assistance programs for Jewish children, according to the OAG, with the camps being operated at two New York locations.” …

      “CharityWatch thinks it is highly unlikely that Kars4Kids would be enjoying the same level of success as it has, averaging over $30 million a year in donated car proceeds from 2010-2015, if its ads disclosed that donated cars are used to fund Orthodox outreach programs for children of Jewish faith. Kars4Kids reportedly has insisted that it is not trying to mislead anyone with its ads, claiming that a 60-second spot does not allow for time to inform people of its mission and that Kars4Kids does not hide that it is a Jewish organization if donors visit its website.” …

      “In connection with Kars4Kids’ failure to disclose in its ads that donated cars are used to benefit children of a specific religion, and not needy children in general, Kars4Kids paid tens of thousands of dollars in settlements to the states of Oregon and Pennsylvania in 2009. (CharityWatch informed donors of these fines in our Catchy Jingle Not a Green Light to Donate article published in 2010.) Under the settlements, Kars4Kids was also required to change its solicitations in those states to include adequate disclosure of the religious purpose of its programs. “It is unacceptable for charities to deceive Oregon consumers,” the Attorney General said in an April 15th, 2009 press release announcing the Kars4Kids settlement, which also involved claims that Kars4Kids misled donors with its offer to provide a “free vacation” with every car donation. Apparently, however, the Oregon and Pennsylvania settlements did not convince Kars4Kids to add a disclosure related to the religious nature of its organization to its ads being run in other states – most likely, in CharityWatch’s view, because Kars4Kids does not want to risk losing potential donors who may not want to support Jewish youth outreach programs.”

      “Especially costly were Kars4Kids’ and Oorah’s real estate investments in an alleged Ponzi scheme in which they were victimized and lost more than a combined $7.6 million in 2009 and 2010. To put the $7.6 million in context, Oorah’s total cash spending on Jewish youth programs was approximately $12.2 million over that same period. The real estate developer behind the alleged investment scheme, which reportedly caused $200 million in total losses, was sentenced to 22 years in prison. Even though Kars4Kids and Oorah were victims, some donors may seriously question the judgment of Eliyohu Mintz, the principal officer of Kars4Kids and Oorah, and their other respective board members in deciding to risk donated charitable funds on real estate speculation.

      “Given all of these issues, it is no surprise that Kars4Kids and Oorah together have averaged almost $500,000 a year in legal fees from 2009-2015. Kars4Kids alone reported spending over $670,000 in legal fees in 2015, which is when it “reached an agreement under the terms of a trademark infringement settlement in which Kars 4 Kids Inc. was required to make certain payments in exchange for specific trademark rights,” according to its audited financial statements. Such legal expenses take a bite out of the charitable funds available “4” the kids – or, in other words, for Oorah’s Orthodox Jewish youth outreach programs.”

      *****
      Ah, our beloved jews and their zany antics! Isn’t it sweet how gentiles make such nice life for them here? In this case, their deception has been known for at least a decade and yet the racket continues. Why? Because it makes money and we worship The Economy.

      https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kars4kids-charity-misleads-donors-report/

      https://www.charitywatch.org/charity-donating-articles/costly-and-continuous-kars4kids-ads-disguise-charity39s-real-purpose

    • K4K is a scam. The money goes to private education and trips to Israel for Jewish kids deemed insufficiently orthodox. They’ve had to pay a lot in fines for misleading the public.

  48. Facebarf is shooting itself in the foot with spam advertising. It used to be that ads were relegated to the side bar, leaving the streams of posts from your “friends” alone. Now about every third post is a spam ad from someone pimping something. It got so annoying that I just got off the forum. I use it to post links to my blog, and get DM’s from people I actually know. Trolling the spammers is becoming a form of on-line amusement, like giving crap to telemarketers.

    JWM

    • I saw a house for sale that I wanted to see more of so I googled the street address and looked at some pics. The next day an ad for that exact house appeared on my facebook home page.

        • jwm, I hate smart phones as well, but they are becoming ubiquitous, and therefore assumed. A few weeks ago I had to do a domain transaction that required two stage authentication with the provider. At the University, one option is to log in, then receive a phone call to your home phone. Answer, get a security code, enter code, proceed with life. However, this domain registrar required a cell phone and text messaging—no other options, except to call tech support. I got Prakeet in India. ;-). However, happy ending, Prakeet got tired of me (old, out of it, White guy) yelling, so he simply generated the authentication codes I needed and displayed them on my screen. Completely obviating all the security efforts of the domain provider. Prakeet is my new “best” friend.

          • A government that was functioning would put an end to call center outsourcing since call centers create or of jobs for college kids and semi skilled workers

            Ours is obviously not and if somehow the Dissident Right gets power, no matter what the Libertarian and Liberty Right think we’ll need a lot of regulation on trade and a way to cut money from speech since the real effect is corrupt rather than freeing

            State to State, IN State try to be easy. Trade with outsiders needs to be mama may I with a very strict mother.

            Now from a Constitutional POV Citizens United was good juris but from a practical one, it was a rocket sled to a corporate state

            This kind of thing makes me think that large corporations and too much personal wealth need to be a thing of the past in a Dissident State with actual wealth caps

            Bernie’s Wealth Tax is stupid but an outright scale limit might work. It wouldn’t be vastly different than the 1950’s tax code only with no loopholes

            This will make it hard to pay CEO’s huge sums but of the minimum wage is say 10K having an income of 1000x (and stocks, benefits all that are income) that , 10 mil is plenty enough for anyone. I’m not convinced that 1 million (100X minimum wage) is plenty so long as inflation is low

            Wealth limits and immigration limits tend to flatten costs anyway .

          • If we are not saddled with dead weight of blacks and other non-skilled, low-IQ peoples, there is no need to go after the wealthy to such a degree. The wealthy can pay now a better wage for higher quality white workers and a functioning high-trust society or they can pay later via high taxes for gov’t-distributed social services for low-skilled, cheap labor and a poorer, rougher society. But if they are the cause of all these low-IQ, unskilled people being in our country, it’s more appropriate to tax the hell out of the wealthy who want it this way.

          • The wealthy are uniformly the cause of our misery.

            They’ve gotten so rich they can pursue policies that allow them to virtue signal endlessly and avoid all the negative consequences of their stupidity but

            Hey what’s an extra $2 a gallon tax on gas or $4 on cigarettes or $750k for a starter house if you are rich? Nothing. If you are a working man it screws you over

            The situation is basically class warfare and non Whites are often as not pawns of the rich used to lower social capital and to virtue signal

            This doesn’t diminish agency on the part of non Whites mind you but anyone would choose to come here and do better.

            The Lefties are kind of right in that way, working people of all colors have more in common with each other than the rich by far

            The fault of them being here falls entirely on virtue signalers, cucks and the cheap labor crowd

            These people must be removed completely from power and everything they have done gradually undone

            It would not be easy and while I get the desire to be rid of Black and some Latinos , how exactly?

            Deporting upwards of 30% of the population is possible but it’s going to require a very different culture and willingness to sacrifice

            if you can get enough hate or offer something far better than you can do that.

            Thus far no one can.

            Punishing the wealthy who deserve it OTOH? Everyone can get behind that

          • I’m not an “eat the rich” sort of guy, but the fabulously wealthy—the gazillionaires—did not make their fortune via a salary. Nobody gets super rich that way. You inherit your wealth (usually a business or some sort of real asset) or you create your wealth via a business creation. So any redistribution scheme has to tax wealth, not income, to touch these folk. And that’s not even to mention the current schemes to pass on such wealth to heirs and avoid inheritance taxes—such as they are.

            The only thing that keeps me interested wrt such a wealth tax is that the super rich have way too much power and influence because of their concentrated wealth. On the other hand, I’m not naive enough to expect that they will ever allow a change in the current political structure that changes the status quo.

          • The US can’t even tolerate the modest change of someone like Donald Trump which suggests to me it’s either going to fall apart slowly (c.f Calizuela where I live for now) or be dealt with by lead.

            If the Dissident Right gets to the top, a wealth cap, tied to the minimum wage is probably going to be needed.

            I think the global wealthy are so destructive they shouldn’t even be allowed a visitors visa much less be allowed to immigrate frankly.

            Make America Mostly Middle class Again (Mamma)

  49. I wonder how Mike Lindell’s sales to airtime cost ratio compares to, say, that of Budweiser.

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