stat counnnter

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Stealth Advertising?

For those who worry that cell phones will fry their brain, and haven't seen the CNN report on it, check out this video. Then see what Snopes says about it here. To see the CNN report on how it was done scroll down to the last paragraph to the CNN link. I gather this is called 'stealth advertising.' Seems quite irrational to me. I didn't see a product identification in the video.

I agree with Dr. Piekoff in his lecture "A Picture is not an Argument" (which can be purchased here) in which he opined that today's advertising looks the way it does mainly because of our income tax laws. I couldn't agree more.

7 comments:

Aaron Davies said...

Both links are to the video (i.e. not to Snopes).

cs said...

Here's the Snopes link. The ad was for a company selling bluetooth headphones, "Cardo".

madmax said...

"in which he opined that today's advertising looks the way it does mainly because of our income tax laws."

I'm curious as to how the income tax laws affect advertising. Could you briefly elaborate?

Michael Neibel said...

Max;
It's my understanding that companies get to write off or deduct so much of their advertizing expendatures from taxes. Without those deductions, advertising would look differently I do believe.

Michael Neibel said...

Thanks Cal for providing the link.

Amy said...

Wow, Mike. This is awfully funny. As I work in advertising, I know that this is a growing (and legitimate) form of advertising. Sure, no one could see that brand name of the cellphones -- BUT -- Cardo was able to get a 2 minute gig on CNN (worth thousands).

The upside is that is was fun to find out it was a hoax. The downside is that, if people didn't see the reveal on CNN, they were left to believe that cell phones actually had damaging effects. But then -- the other upside for Cardo was precisely that the phones were unrecognizable, so no harm done to their brand name if people were left thinking that the phones were dangerous. The CNN time used to get their name out was the purpose.

Michael Neibel said...

Amy:
" The downside is that, if people didn't see the reveal on CNN, they were left to believe that cell phones actually had damaging effects."

So true. I don't remember who said it but a man once said in print that you can't unring an alarm bell. Someday I'm going to post on that thought. (It was said in the context of the GW scare.)