Advertising: the Power Of Positive, or Mitt Romney’s Gay Mattress Loves You

 Note: I know this is supposedly an “art blog,” but right now all the art I’m doing is pretty boring planning stuff for The Fun Family, so I’m just writing now, for fun.

Please don't believe in miracles, it's just a lie to sell you garbage!

Let’s get something straight. Advertisers do not care about you. Not at all. No matter how much they insist they care about you, they don’t. They are lying to you. Anytime an advertiser has ever made an emotional appeal to you, they are flat-out manipulating you. Never forget that.

You see, advertisers ONLY job, the ONLY thing they are paid to do, is trick you into buying stuff you don’t need. You may say, “well Benjamin, what about INFORMATION? Don’t advertisers provide valuable INFORMATION to consumers?” Haha, no. Information, facts, truths, are not the stuff of advertising. Think about it, what good is information when you only have 20 seconds or 200 words to sell your sweat-shop garbage to dumb people? Pretty much the only place to get real consumer information is Consumer Reports, which no one reads, sadly.

When was the last time you heard a CLEAN COAL® commercial relate a basic fact like: “Coal mining is a hugely destructive and costly practice that finances yachts for rich people while forcing those West Virginia poors to die of the black lung.” LOL never, because CLEAN COAL® is “ENERGY FOR TOMORROW,” or some other horrible, meaningless, manipulative slogan.

These made a white man very rich, remember that!

It wouldn’t be such a problem if advertisers just admitted that their only job was to steal your money. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? If advertisers actually just admitted what they were after? Well that isn’t going to happen, because we’re just too stupid and we will fall for anything. Want proof? KINOKI FOOT PADS®. People bought them!

Take the company AMWAY®. Please! Are you familiar with AMWAY®? It’s a pyramid scheme. For some reason they don’t tell you that in their ads. Let’s take a look at one, shall we?

Well I’m convinced! Positivity is great! Wait, no it isn’t. Positivity is just an easy substitute for actual facts, like:

Amway is a huge corporation, and like many corporations, they have been targeted often as a pyramid selling scam. A large amount of Amway’s profits come from business tapes, books and compact discs rather than from direct selling. Other controversies surrounding Amway include tax evasion and customs fraud. In 1983, Amway was fined 25 million Canadian dollars (CAD) after being found guilty of both. Amway is also very vocal regarding reports of deception and has tried to shut down Internet sites that have run reports on their practices.

POSITIVITY! That’s what you should take away from AMWAY®, positivity! They positively love exploiting people, for money! AMWAY® was also featured on the Celebrity Apprentice this season— they got an 1 1/2 hour-long infomercial made for them by a bunch of celebrities and NBC KABLETOWN. Do NBC or Donald Trump care that AMWAY® is a pyramid scheme? No, because they just want to sell you garbage as well— positivity!

FUCK YOU

Remember how, for the last 2000 years, how it was horrible to be a gay person? If you lost the genetic lottery and ended up as one of those %5-ish of people who happen to be gay, you had a guaranteed miserable life. Imagine, never being allowed to be a fully realized person, for 2000 years, imagine being lonely and sad and depressed and suicidal your entire life! The simple and profound joy of being able to TO BE YOURSELF was denied to millions of men and women throughout history thanks to the pope and lots of other rotten institutions.  Well, thankfully SEALY® has remedied all of that with the ad on the right (found at the excellent Sociological Images). Isn’t it great that SEALY® supports gay people in 2011? Hell no it isn’t. Where was SEALY® during the AIDS crisis? Were their award-winning POSTUREPEDIC® mattresses supportive of the entire generation of (now dead) gays who had the incredible courage to live their lives AS THEMSELVES in an environment that was openly hostile to their existence? Haha, maybe if SEALY® sold coffins.

Fun facts about SEALY®: SEALY® is owned by an even larger mega-company called BAIN CAPITAL®, which is a private equity firm. They own DOMINOS®, STAPLES®, and lots of other terrible businesses. Do you know who founded BAIN CAPITAL®? Mitt Romney did. So does this ad mean MITT ROMNEY® supports the disgusting sexual habits of gays? DRUDGE SIRENS. Clearly Mitt Romney doesn’t care about you, and neither does SEALY®. No one in advertising cares about you, if they pretend to care about you, it means there is money in your pocket, so congratulations on having money! But never ever get it into your head that advertisers care about blacks or gays or women or being “green.” They only care about where their money comes from, and if an advertiser says they care about your race, class, or minority, it means their money comes from you.

Edit: This piece was posted prior to news of Jeanne Bice’s death  (the lady in the picture up top), I posted some thoughts on that here.

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