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Should car adverts
a) be on empty roads
b) show cars apparently going fast
I personally don't think these adverts make too much difference in most peoples final choice of car, but IMO they do reinforce the image of the car being the only road user.
That is funny,I was actually thinking about car adverts today and wondering how much influence they have on driver behaviour. It would explain a lot of things.
"If you buy this car, you are entitled to drive very, very fast through narrow city streets"
And so you take every opportunity to put the foot down.
I'd have car adverts banned, like cigarette adverts.
They probably help to perpetuate this CAR WHOOSH FAST MMMM ZOOOM BRRRRMMMM AAAH NEEEOOOOWWWWW thing that some people try to recreate in inappropriate circumstances, such as on the public road.
@min & @wingpig, Absolutely agree.
Cycling should do a similar advert to promote cycle commuting, split screen;
Left Hand screen
cycling to work, passing queing cars, locking bike near the office door
Right Hand screen
typical car advert
Advertising has a huge influence in normalising anti social motoring deviancy
The seduction is perceived as kinetic freedom in a private space
Rinse and repeat
The Myth of the Open Road - Bikeyface explains car advertising.
Driver on the open road, I think they might be enjoying it as much as me; maybe the silence and clean air of rural cycling is only the equal of the feeling of power an unhindered car gives.
Driver in rush hour snarl, no monkeyhooping way are they enjoying themselves at all, whereas I am fauxengering like a boss on my fixie. Okay, I'm both cackhanded and gunshy compared to actual messengers, and my fixie has two handbrakes, mudguards and a pannier rack, but I don't care about that when I'm filtering.
Do car adverts make people drive in a certain way?
Do tampon adverts make women go skydiving?
Don't think car ads make people drive in a certain way, but do think it fosters a attitude, of impatience perhaps.
"Do car adverts make people drive in a certain way?"
Adverts don't make people do anything, but they can persuade. The force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.
In a slightly related empirical instance, playing WipEout 2097 solidly for a weekend certainly affected a former flatmate's driving style when we drove back to Blockbuster to return the rented Playstation.
In view of cars' impact on health, car advertising should be banned.
Car adverts may influence car brand? Won't persuade you to go out and buy a car but do portray cars as normal, which lets face it, they are. Even on this forum we all have a car or access to one (except anyone who doesn't).
Tendency that they all drive down the middle of the road too so that the same advert works in left hand and right hand worlds
If a commodity has real intrinsic value it does not need to be advertised? in East Germany the canoes were never advertised as everyone had one but it was the same one.
Our world is full of stuff we don't need. A great deal of it is bad for us
Of course advertising influences peoples behaviour. If it didn't, advertisers would not be spending the multi millions of pounds they do on it. I am sure many psychological studies have been done on it but it can be summed up thusly:-
Watch a big shiny advert with really cool people in it. You can be like those really cool people if you buy this and behave like they do. Simples*.
*See what I did there?
min one of the key successes of advertising is to have convinced us that advertising influences people. They have succeeded in influencing us about themselves, therefore they succeed in influencing clients that they are necessary. marks and Spencer used to have such a powerful brand that they never needed any overt advertising, look at the schimucks now.
I base these opinions on watching mad men. The ad execs con the clients into thinking they are essential.
I believe that a lot of the effort of advertisers goes towards enforcing brand loyalty.
So the VW advert you see on TV is not so much aimed at the Ford owners, but at the VW owners to make sure that, next time, they buy another VW.
"Watch a big shiny advert with really cool people in it. You can be like those really cool people ..."
I can see where you're coming from, but I'm still not sure this influences behaviour, but rather aspirational purchasing. For instance, taking that 'buy something that these really cool people have' example; sure, someone who doesn't fit that definition of cool may buy it because they've been sold the lifestyle, but will it mean that they then stop liking Warhammer 40k, and suddenly discover an inate raconteur within?
Okay, extreme example, so let's go back to cars. The advert has an empty road, with cars hairing round them without a care in the world; driver buys into the dream, sits in traffic jam because the road isn't clear, so okay, his behaviour might be influenced, but he can't actually attain that behaviour. Does an advert make someone pass a cyclist too close then left hook them without indicating? I have my doubts (but then I also don't think death metal and computer games turn teenagers into rampaging killers - which is the extension of the adverts-make-bad-drivers argument).
I'm going to pay attention to adverts over the weekend (not just car ones) and see what behaviours they could be creating, and see if there's any other product where it could be argued that those adverts do indeed create a general behaviour in a large swathe of people - if there isn't then I'd actually be more inclined to believe that with or without car adverts the roads would be exactly the same.
We know that advertising produces deep emotional responses. Companies pay researchers to track people's eyes as they watch TV or read newspaper advertisement. We know that pupils dilate, heartbeats rise and sweat glands kick into action when people are presented with images, soundtracks and ideas that appeal to them. I don't know if anyone's done the research but I'm pretty sure if those external signs exist then adrenalin and dopamine are released. Powerful perception altering chemistry is at work.
We know that adverts create memories and associations and that good advertising enters the culture and shapes our language. We know, for instance, that many people still go to work on an egg and that others find that a Mars a day does, indeed, help them work, rest and play even if they're not allowed to say it any more. More recently people have learned to know when they've been tangoed, that every little helps and that only some people have that certain va va voom.
If those things work in general there's no reason to think that they don't work for car adverts. If a good car advert can release a shot of adrenalin then the association is made and is reproducible in your own car, even in a traffic jam, if you just cut in a little quickly.
Collusion has always existed across the global automotive industry to ensure that first and foremost, motoring is seen as normative, ie. people *should* drive, that is the key message, before any brand loyalty is considered.
This is achieved and maintained via saturated advertising coverage.
Primarily they are all in it together, lest the insanity of car culture becomes visible beyond the veneer of conformity.
"If a good car advert can release a shot of adrenalin then the association is made and is reproducible in your own car, even in a traffic jam, if you just cut in a little quickly."
So to take another extreme, would someone without access to a television not cut in too quickly?
Alternatively, there are no bike adverts on television, yet some people still ride like morons, why are they doing that? And if it's because 'some people are just morons' then why doesn't that apply to drivers?
(genuine questions, the issue isn't black or white, I just don't think that if all car adverts were to stop tomorrow that the roads (in a few years time, give it time for the effect to take hold) would become havens of good behaviour).
No one ever said that were it not for the instructions beamed by a global conspiracy of mind-control extra terrestrials that everyone would be slumped like slack-stringed puppets.
Subtle influence. Nudges. Affirmations.
"I'm going to pay attention to adverts over the weekend (not just car ones) and see what behaviours they could be creating"
I suspect you'll find that the main behaviour they are creating is wives taking the piss out of their hapless/workshy/incompetent/just-plain-dumb husbands.
"Subtle influence. Nudges. Affirmations."
Struggling to see the distinction. So we're not saying that television adverts make people act in a certain way; but rather that television adverts affirm that they can act in a certain way?
Okay, actually, no I can see it: so it's reinforcing how people act anyway. Right, I can see that. So, without car adverts people will drive like morons; with car adverts they'll drive like morons and have it affirmed?
So, seriously, genuine question, what difference would taking the adverts away actually make? Or do we need to enforce a rule that car adverts should all be 'realistic'? Would the 'lack' of affirmation lead to better driving norms?
Subtle influence. Nudges. Affirmations.
it doesn't seem all that subtle to me..
but as they say..
"your mileage may vary"
Not make, Mr Wilmington. Bad driving would exist without any broadcast media. Relatedly, you often note the daftness of business-speak - hearing others around them hoot semi-nonsensically encourages/persuades otherwise normal-speaking people to start talking corporate pseudocobblers, but it had to start somewhere.
The ability of moving visual advertising (where the emotional impact of the presented false reality is strengthened by the addition of music and soothing/hypnotic/suggestive pretend internal voices) is clearly recognised by the recognition of the need to curtail the insidious misprepresentation of cigarettes and boozestuffs as shortcuts to a glamorous and fulfilling life.
In attempts to counteract the "smoking instantly wreathes me in sophistication/success/hardness/Bogartic inscrutability!" and "drinking alcohol is the only worthwhile use of an evening!" we have stuff like HEBS public information adverts, offering images of the downsides of indulgences in order to break the association with states to which people might wish to aspire. Don't know if it always works - the equivalent for driving would be adverts consisting of people sitting in traffic jams looking all stuffy and uncomfortable or having their limbs mangled and internal organs mortally decelerated in crashes, though there's still an element of "on the telly/on the cinema screen" which would elevate the images above reality.
what difference would taking the adverts away actually make?
Over time people would begin to question the validity of the activity.
"Not make, Mr Wilmington. Bad driving would exist without any broadcast media."
So banning car adverts would be pointless as it's already established, and equally whether they now portray winding empty fun fast roads or traffic jams is irrelevant?
"Over time people would begin to question the validity of the activity."
Or this?
To have an idea of the impact of removing advertising you'd need to decide where advertising sits among the various influences on how a person drives. I'd put it pretty far back on the grid.
I reckon that by far the biggest influence on people's day-to-day driving is that nothing happens. All the time, nothing happens. Whatever error, lapse or violation you can think of, people are doing it all the time and almost every time they do it, nothing happens. No one crashes or dies. No one is caught, arrested or fined. And in that circumstance, why change anything? Stop trying to fix what plainly isn't broken. OK so sometimes some people have accidents but you know, as Elvis said, accidents will happen. Or they're idiots. Or any of a number of cognitive defence mechanisms kick in to place the problem somewhere else, especially on the other guy who came out of nowhere, just appeared or shouldn't have been there anyway. Nothing to do with me.
What would taking adverts away do? Nothing, I suspect. Experience trumps advertising.
"So banning car adverts would be pointless as it's already established, and equally whether they now portray winding empty fun fast roads or traffic jams is irrelevant?"
I remember one car advert where someone's stuck in a traffic jam but then glances slyly at their dashboard, swerves off the road and is magically transported to empty mountain roads, whilst stirring music plays and the driver smiles lasciviously at his steering-wheel. Adverts also focus on the whole being-inside-this-car-is-really-comfortable thing, so that whether stuck in a traffic jam or sweeping along a smooth mountainside motorway you're always inside a really comfortable and smugly-expensive-feeling car.
Banning car adverts wouldn't be pointless as it would be one less source of the ongoing potentiation of the car-normal-success-WHOOSH-NEEEEEOWWWW myth. Still lots of other sources about, though, particularly film and telly.
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