Swine Flu public service announcements from 1976.

In 1976, one single army recruit died from the so-called Swine Flu. People panicked, the government panicked. After the dust cleared, the government had wasted hundreds of millions of dollars, and there were over 500 people crippled for life via Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) caused by the vaccine. Also, the vaccine killed more people than the flu did.

Moral:
Government is more dangerous than Swine flu. Don’t panic.

The free market works.

It’s been less than a week since chicken chain KFC offered to pay for the repair of potholes in some cities so long as they could advertise over the patch, and there’s already a bidding war for the job. PETA has offered to pay double what KFC has, so long as they can stencil in their own, anti-KFC, advertisement, pictured below.

It should say “KFC Tortures Delicious Animals”, amirite?

Now, I’ve talked about how completely batshit insane PETA is before, but their ideology doesn’t matter this time, my point remains the same. This is just a fantastic example of how the free market solves problems without government intervention. Not even a week after a private company offers to do something that most people think only government can do (namely: fix the streets), another corporate sponsor offers to pay double for the same thing. Both corporate sponsors have selfish reasons for doing what they’re doing, and both actions will have a positive outcome for society at large. It will fix city streets and cost taxpayers nothing.

The potential for this kind of thing is endless, and it’s because of the magic of advertising. Let’s hope it catches on.

During a time of controversy, the best way to win over public opinion is to convince the public that there is no controversy. Sometimes, when an issue is too complicated for the general public to make an informed decision on their own, they rely on the opinions of experts, and politicians stop debating the points of the issue, and start debating the consensus. That’s a consensus war. It’s happening with the global warming issue, and it’s happening with the economy. A reasoned, logical debate of the finer points of the fiscal policy won’t convince the average American. The only way to win the hearts and minds of the American people is to tell them the experts opinion.

Recently, Obama attempted to shut down the controversy surrounding his so-called “stimulus” package by saying “there is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.” Then later saying “economists from across the political spectrum agree” on the need for this massive government spending package. Of course, that is not the case. In actuality, many, if not most, economists disagree with the stimulus package. So in response, the Cato Institute took out a full page ad in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times, and Roll Call disputing the president’s claim. Hundreds of top economists, including Nobel laureates and prominent scholars from major universities, signed the statement. There were more than 200 economists signatures on the original ad, and over 100 more have signed on since then. Read on to see the original ad:


the original, full-page Cato ad can be found here in pdf form

Text from the ad:
“There is no disagreement that we need action by our government, a recovery plan that will help to jumpstart the economy.”
— PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA, JANUARY 9 , 2009

Notwithstanding reports that all economists are now Keynesians and that we all support a big increase in the burden of government, we do not believe that more government spending is a way to improve economic performance. More government spending by Hoover and Roosevelt did not pull the United States economy out of the Great Depression in the 1930s. More government spending did not solve Japan’s “lost decade” in the 1990s. As such, it is a triumph of hope over experience to believe that more government spending will help the U.S. today. To improve the economy, policy makers should focus on reforms that remove impediments to work, saving, investment and production. Lower tax rates and a reduction in the burden of government are the best ways of using fiscal policy to boost growth.”

Just when I thought I couldn’t hate PETA any more, they go and do something like this. The cult of PETA has decided that fish need better PR, so they’ve replaced the term “fish” with “Sea Kittens”. Yes, Sea Kittens. This is for real, check out their website, and a quote from it:

People don’t seem to like fish. They’re slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads — which is weird, to say the least. Plus, the small ones nibble at your feet when you’re swimming, and the big ones — well, the big ones will bite your face off if Jaws is anything to go by.

Of course, if you look at it another way, what all this really means is that fish need to fire their PR guy — stat.

Normally, when silly cults with illogical beliefs do bizarre things, it’s funny, and this is no exception, but there is more to PETA than just jackass publicity stunts. The thing about PETA is that they get a good deal of support from regular, generally solid-minded folks; at least, as solid-minded as regular folks can be. Unfortunately, not too many of those regular people really understand what the group is all about. PETA wants total animal liberation, they’ve said it many times. That means no pets, no guide dogs for the blind, no zoos, no fisheries, no beekeeping, no earthworm farms, no animals kept by humans, anywhere; and all those animals would be set free.

On top of that, PETA gives money to the Animal Liberation Front, which is a terrorist group who firebombs buildings and assaults people in the name of total animal liberation. And the money going to these groups is coming from the regular suburban folks who think they’re just helping baby seals. This Sea Kitten business is funny, but PETA’s other business isn’t. Read on to see some videos about how PETA really operates:

Time Magazine just published a series of photos of Barack Obama taken in 1980, when he was a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles. They were taken by Lisa Jack, who was an aspiring photographer at the time, and asked him to pose for some black and white photographs for her portfolio. The word Serendipity has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate; this is a good example of serendipity.

Read on for the rest of the pics:

The UK is the most watched country on Earth, and still the citizens seem to be increasingly preoccupied with crime. As of 2004, England had one surveillance camera for every fourteen citizens, and it’s gone up since then, all in the name of security.

But do CCTV cameras actually reduce crime? The statistics aren’t all that spectacular for the studies that show a positive result, and most studies suggest that camera density has no overall impact on the levels of crime at all, especially in residential areas. A better idea might be along the lines of the West Midlands Police’s ‘Operation Momentum’ – using posters and an understanding of psychology, instead of cameras, to try to limit crime. Read on:


this controversial poster went up in the London Underground in 2002

The above poster, Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes, is an exceedingly creepy 1984-esque public service announcement poster that went up in London a few years ago. The point of the poster is the eyes. Those bizarre, disembodied eyes may be a way to actually cut crime rates without resorting to intrusive and expensive cameras. Psychologists from Newcastle University found people put nearly three times as much money into an ‘honesty box’ when there was a pair of eyes on a poster above the box, compared with a poster that featured an image of flowers. And it may not just be an image of eyes either, the cameras in the first poster may have the same effect by triggering the feeling of being watched.

(via BoingBoing)

Ok AdSavvyites, it’s time for some audience participation.

I was reading one of my favorite blogs, David Friedman’s Ideas, and he had an interesting topic: Ways to promote your political ideology. Let’s say you’re a moderately wealthy and talented individual with a strong desire to promote a certain political viewpoint. How do you go about doing it? What’s the most effective, efficient way to get it done? You want the most amount of change for the least amount of money and effort. I want to hear your ideas.

First, let’s consider some of the more common methods:

1. Political – You can try to work within the existing political framework. Find a candidate who agrees with your views, and work to get that candidate elected by donating and buying advertising for that candidate. You may even try to run for office yourself, although that has a pretty low chance of success relative to the amount of money you need to spend.

The thing is, when they make it to office, most politicians don’t do what they say they will on the campaign trail. Barack Obama is a good example of that. Many of his supporters are starting to realize that his policies won’t be as radical as they seemed to be, and he will end up just another American President, doing exactly what McCain would do, although for different reasons. So, judging from history and what you can see even today, the political route is the least effective way to spend time and money if you really want to political change.

2. Intellectual – You can work outside the political framework and try to use advertising or media. You can write a book, or in a blog, a newspaper, or magazine; or try to spread your ideas to people who are more influential than you are, so they can reach a wider audience.

Traditionally, this is the easiest way one person can make a change in the world. David Friedman wrote “The Machinery of Freedom“, which is one of the most influential books in the history of the whole anarcho-capitalist movement. He’s done more with that book than he ever could have with donations or political advertisements.

Ideas are powerful things.

3. Indirect – Instead of trying to spread an idea or working within the political framework, you can actually do something that may encourage changes in the world. An example of this is Kiva.org, founded by Matt and Jessica Flannery back in 2005. Kiva.org is a microfinance institution that allows regular people to lend money via the Internet to other regular people in developing countries.

An example that David Friedman uses in his blog post is the invention of the birth control pill. Apparently, the development of the pill was funded by a donor who thought a safe, reliable form of female contraception would have the social benefits that she wanted. Another great example is the Seasteading project, initiated by Patri Friedman.

The idea behind seasteading is to develop fairly inexpensive technology for floating housing and eventually small cities. The theory is that it would make citizens more mobile, and that would make governments more competitive. When the cost of switching governments decreases, governments start to operate more like businesses, since there is more competition, and that increases the quality of governments.

Now, my question to you is, what else is there? Are there any other ways that one man can promote his politics and change the world? Let’s hear them, AdSavvyites.

Almost every year we hear about scenes of consumer chaos and lunatic stampedes as shoppers knock each other down while trying to snatch up quality deals on Black Friday. This year an unfortunate man in New York was trampled to death in a Wal-Mart by a bastard herd of sub-humans who didn’t even look back at his body after they crushed him to death with their very nice shoes.

They have to be sub-humans, right? That’s the only way we can rationalize something like this. This has to be a one-of-a-kind incident where a group of sociopaths were all at the same place at the same time. Real, well-adjusted people would have stopped and helped that man. You would have taken charge of that situation and helped that poor man up and scolded the people who didn’t. Everyone thinks that. But no one ever does that.

This is one of the dark secrets of the human mind. It’s in all of us, the potential for this kind of disgusting, deadly apathy is part of every single human being. It’s been shown time and time again: the death of Kitty Genovese, where a dozen neighbors heard a woman screaming as she was stabbed to death, but did nothing; the Milgram experiment, the famous study which showed that average people will give what they believe to be fatal electric shocks to a person as long as another person in authority tells them it’s ok; the stampedes of Black Friday which happen almost every year and almost always end up with some poor unfortunate person trampled underfoot, although not usually killed; and, of course, the Nazi’s rise to power in Germany, the most striking example, where a whole country of seemingly ordinary people followed along with it’s leaders brutal “politics”, and did nothing while six million Jews were killed.

In psychology, these things are called diffusion of responsibility or the Bystander effect. In economics, there’s a similar effect called the Tragedy of the Commons. It’s a well-known problem of the human experience and it’s important that we look at it directly and realize it’s there so we can attempt to avoid it in the future.

Advertising is all about influencing the crowd, and the more you learn about it, the more you realize how easily the crowd is influenced. Use this knowledge to avoid the perils of conformity and obedience. Take responsibility for what happens around you, don’t fall for these cognitive diseases. You’re better than that. If just one person would have stopped to help that fallen man at Wal-Mart, maybe it would have inspired another, and another, and then the people who didn’t help would have felt the pull of conformity drawing them to actually help. In situations like that, one knowledgeable person can make a difference. That person can be you.

Every day, you’re assaulted with advertisements and news and non-stop information. And every single person spewing that information has an agenda, even the “unbiased” journalists and news anchors and political pundits and survey takers. Everyone has a mind, and each mind has it’s own opinions, and those opinions make their way into the information being spewed. That’s just how it is.

So when you read articles or hear reports with seemingly hard, indisputable facts, you have to take it all with a grain of salt. Consider the recent election.

Scientific American ran an article with 6 different maps all showing the election results across the United States, all in a different way. It’s the way they’re displayed that determines everything. Check it out:

Mark Newman, a professor of physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, took maps of the 2008 election and made a series of “cartograms” from them. He took state-level and county-level election results and population data and to make different representations of the United States. It’s a nice example of how facts can be interpreted in many different ways.

This is the main map. It shows the lower 48 states colored either red or blue depending on who won each state: Red for McCain and Blue for Obama. This is the map you’ve probably seen many times over already.

This map is the the United State stretched and skewed by special software so that each state is sized according to it’s population.

This map has each red/blue section broken down further from the state level to the county level, which gives a more accurate picture of the country as a whole.

This map shows each county re-sized according to it’s population, and then colored red or blue. This map in particular shows how Obama has the advantage in large cities and population centers, while McCain has uniform support across the more sparsely populated American landscape.

When the map is broken down to shades of purple indicating levels of support, a whole other aspect of information becomes visible. Instead of just the red/blue or win/loss colors, shades of color in-between can illustrate areas where a candidate just barely won, or won convincingly.

Finally, when you combine all of these maps, you can see the country broken down by the population of each county, and election results shown on a scale of colors from red to blue.

My point isn’t that these maps are a better way of looking at the election results, just that there are different ways of displaying the same facts. They illustrate the ability of the media-makers to broadcast facts in a way that jives with their opinions.