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An ad is worth a thousand bombs... Advertising's crimes in modern warfare, Yves Frémion |
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Some criminals act in a brutal way: they prefer the gun, the dagger, the bomb, the immediate violence, to end in the moment. |
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Others, more cautious, prefer to take their time: poison is their favorite weapon. Discreet, insidious, invisible, slow and progressive. |
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For a long time, we believed that the world of merchandise, the one where everything is bought and sold, would remain confined within the limits of the commercial world. |
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That the part of our life that escaped the market and financial logic would do it forever. |
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That education, information, health, transport networks, energy supply, justice, security, telecommunications would remain in the hands of the community. |
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We even thought that the quality of the environment, water or air, culture, would add to it naturally. |
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But the opposite has happened. In all rich and advanced countries, the dismantling of public services has shown the extent of the war waged underground for years. |
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Aided by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern Bloc, the world of merchandise has invaded everything. |
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It first invaded the countries that were little, but also, in the countries of the West, the sectors that until now escaped this grip. |
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Education, health, information, everything has been delivered to profitability, market share, commercial success, immediacy. |
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The armed arm of this colonial conquest is advertising, which prepares minds by its incessant bludgeoning and kills more massively than a bomb drop. |
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One of its main actors, Oliviero Toscani, whom his scandalous campaigns for Benetton made famous, lists himself in his book \emph{La pub est une charogne qui nous sourit}[Advertising is a carrion that smiles at us] (Hoëbeke ed., 1995), where he willingly spits into the soup that made his fortune: |
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“Advertising now lines every street corner, every historic square, every square, bus stops, the metro, airports, train stations, newspapers, cafes, pharmacies, tobacconists, lighters, phone cards, |
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it cuts movies on TV, invades radios, magazines, beaches, sports, clothes, even the footprints of the soles of our shoes, our whole universe, the whole planet! (...) |
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It's Big Brother, always smiling! I find it frightening that all this huge space of expression, exhibition and display, the largest living museum of modern art, a hundred thousand times Beaubourg and the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York combined, these thousands of square kilometers of posters plastered all over the world, these giant panels, these painted slogans, these hundreds of thousands of pages of printed newspapers, these hundreds of hours of television, of radio messages, remain reserved for this imbecile, unreal and misleading paradisiacal imagery... ”. |
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And all this financed by the consumer, its cost being integrated into the price of the product (“Advertising is the first direct tax”). |
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Under various names: sponsorship, corporate sponsorship (remember that sponsorship is disinterested, so there is abuse of language), communication, bartering, advertiser, sponsorship, etc., advertising has introduced commercial interest everywhere. |
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The following examples show the extent and coherence of this offensive. |
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\section{Education} |
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In the USA, the wiring of primary schools was not carried out by public authorities, but by private firms. |
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They equipped the schools free of charge but, in exchange, the educational programmes with |
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"Channel One" thus broadcast includes, for 10 minutes of program, two minutes of advertising for these firms. |
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Throughout the year, students are intellectually harassed by the promotion of commercial products. |
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The France is in turn affected by this phenomenon and the pressure is strong for it to pass the walls of our schools. |
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For example, slipping into the vacuum of sex education, never really provided by teachers, the firm Tampax offers an “educational program” in colleges, for girls in 4th and 3rd grade. |
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60,000 adolescent girls already receive information on the body, health, hygiene... and of course on the products of the firm Tampax. These programs are taught over time and as part of biology courses, which teachers no longer provide. |
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These courses are subtly given by nurses, transformed into “salespeople”, who distribute samples at the end of the course. |
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Too happy to offload an education that they generally wish not to do, the teachers have hardly opposed it, and neither have the parents. |
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A representative of Tampax recently said in the press: “The professors welcome us willingly, even solicit us.” |
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The National Education has blessed the operation: everything is free, a superior argument of any state reflection now! |
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A recent agreement between the National Education, authors' societies and audiovisual producers authorized the broadcasting of television programs in schools: |
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it is enough to sponsor these shows so that advertising easily enters a universe that was forbidden to it. |
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How many establishments today include in canteen meals “sugary drinks” that are none other than Coca-Cola, under pressure from the firm; |
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the same youth beverage companies (Coca, Fanta), install “free” distributors in these schools, without the establishments ever making a call for tenders or offering an alternative: it's free... |
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It is the same for companies that “offer” football jerseys to school children, with their advertising on them naturally; |
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but it is “free”, and therefore the public service forgets that it is the public service... |
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Christian De Brie, in \emph{le Monde Diplomatique} wrote a few years ago: |
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“Will we one day see the sponsored teacher in schools and the teacher, covered in badges, announce that the arithmetic lesson is “offered” by a brand of electronic games and recreation by a soft drink with a taste of adventure?” |
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At the time, De Brie was humorous, it is no more. |
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As for universities, it is common in the USA for chairs to be, especially in economics, financed directly by firms that appoint professors. |
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As Susan George showed in a resounding article in the same \emph{Monde Diplomatique}, prestigious French intellectuals have already benefited (one of the French champions of the historical revision of the Workers' Movement, François Furet, in the lead). |
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Operation Fukuyama, named after an American state official who wrote “The End of History,” artificially highlighted by a brilliant publicity stunt, was entirely organized by the chemical firm Olin; |
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like that of the Heidelberg Appeal was fabricated by the pharmacy and asbestos lobbies to discredit environmentalists. |
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Academics in need of funding have lent themselves in both cases, with great complacency, to these manipulations. |
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\section{Culture and media} |
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The American model, where 90\% of culture is financed by private companies, has helped European countries dismantle their public funding in this area. |
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Gradually, the state, in France as elsewhere, disengages financially, but also politically. 30\% of French culture sponsored is sponsored by banks, insurance companies and the agri-food industry, whose disinterestedness can be guessed. |
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Who can believe that the content of the works thus framed does not change? |
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Almost all of the written information had been held financially for years only through alcohol and tobacco advertisements. |
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The European directive banning all incitement to smoke, which became in France the “Évin law”, led to the fall of several publications and weakened the others. |
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This gives an idea of the fragility that our media had reached, tied up by these firms and totally dependent: |
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a simple change in the firm's strategy or a “dir.com.”[Abbreviation of Communication director], and publications could stop overnight, ruined. |
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Who can then be surprised that whistleblowers of the dangers of tobacco, one of the most addictive drugs, can never find an echo in the French press. |
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(unlike hashish, which does not sponsor anyone and whose “dangers”, derisory in comparison to tobacco, make the headlines every week)? |
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For culture, a change of mentality is gradually revealed: |
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many creators no longer rely on their success with the public, but on the sole satisfaction of the funder, on whom whether the work exists or not depends, with the consequences that we guess for its content. |
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\emph{sponsoring} now accounts for 75\% of TV shows in France (including 20\% for stupid games that occupy the most followed slots). |
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It has gradually replaced, in the eyes of advertisers, advertising \emph{stricto sensu}: |
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it is a response to the zapping of viewers harassed by advertising, who change channels when it arrives. Now, impossible to escape, advertising is \emph{in] the program! |
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Worse, nearly 50\% of France-Television's budget comes from commercial revenues when in principle there should be 0\%... |
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The climax is called “bartering”; they are simply entire programs offered to the channels, turnkey, already fully realized, with the advertising inside: soap opera, game, documentary show ... |
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The channel has nothing to do, it does not need to pay a director, nor authors, nor technicians, nor animator, nor even the film or the studio, even less to think about how to seduce the viewer, it does not have to look for the money to produce, it just has to buy a cassette and broadcast it: a dream come true... |
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More and more, these sponsors want to get out of hiding and some blunders are revealing. |
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The name of the sponsor is often larger than that of the artist on the posters, disfigured by the logos. |
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For a writer, what is the value of an award where the name of the firm appears in the title, such as the Premio Strega or the AKO-Literatuurprijs? |
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Is it rewarding to perform at the Belga Jazz Festival? |
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The firm Cointreau had sponsored at the Zenith of Paris an evening “Young Dance”. |
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But its logo in letters of fire, placed at the back of the stage during the performance of a well-known choreographer, was not well received by the audience, who booed the sponsor. |
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All this influences the content. For fiction, for example, the stories must be necessarily family (in the house, you can slip a lot of products); |
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the ends are happy; politics, religion, reflection are banned; everyone must be able to attach themselves to the heroes, the villains are well identified. |
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The songs are cheerful. The animators are mostly animators, preferably with big breasts. |
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Ambitious or research works have no chance and the principle of “more of the same” reigns supreme. |
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More radically, companies fully finance channels, especially in countries too poor to produce their own programs. |
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In Africa, for example, Nestlé is rampant, which is bludgeoning the unique thinking and dominant culture of the West triumphing over viewers who have no alternative or access to their own culture. |
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Elsewhere, the major institutes of “studies” and scientific expertise, created by the firms themselves, feed the media with unique thinking, which is reluctant to look for information at the source. |
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This is how the worst absurdities are repeated and perpetuated; to go in the same direction as what advertising imposes. |
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The scandal of polluted air in Paris took ten years to penetrate our newspapers financed by the automotive industry; that of child labour in some countries as well: |
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these children work for the main sponsors of our channels (Nike in the lead). |
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The famous Jean-Pierre Coffe, although widely used by advertising, but who left television disgusted by what he saw there, recently confessed to the Parisien Libéré : |
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“Try going to F2, F3 or a commercial channel and giving a review on a Danone Group product. It's forbidden, you're cut off. And since I am a free man, I do not want to submit. That is why I am doing something else.” |
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The other animators did not have this modesty. |
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For zapping fanatics, who change channels as soon as the advertisement interrupts their film, the parade has been found: the ad is no longer in the advertising break, but in the film itself. |
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The last chic is to buy a few seconds of a film from a “major company” and slip its propaganda into it. |
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International hits (\emph{Total recall, Back to the Future 2, Day of Turmoil, all James Bond}) are thus full of close-up products with the name of the brand, inserts designed by the firms themselves and no longer by the author, director or producer; the writers, on the other hand, have to adapt their story to this presence that sometimes happens like a hair on the soup. |
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In France, the two \emph{“Les Visiteurs”}, public triumphs, brought this principle to its climax, using the parody force of effect. |
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\section{Sport} |
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80\% of the \emph{sponsoring} of sport — actually competition and not sports practice — goes to motor sports and the sports programs that show them are sponsored... by the same firms. |
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Only one sporting competition, the Prix automobile de Monaco in 1992, saw the same name of a tobacco company appear on the screen... 1134 times, while it is forbidden. |
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The Pardubicka horse race in Czechoslovakia, deliberately intended to be very dangerous, offered viewers around the world spectacular horse falls; many had to be shot because of their fractured legs. |
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This show, a real massacre aimed at a morbid audience, so moved animal lovers that a boycott campaign was launched against sponsors, including Martel cognacs, until they gave up. |
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Many sports competitions, which should have been banned for bad weather conditions for example, were maintained because of TV schedules and contracts with firms that were waiting for their passage on the air at these moments of prime listening. |
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The high number of competitions multiplies the opportunities to promote brands, so it is in full inflation. |
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Athletes are exhausted there, especially since sponsors demand records all the time. |
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This has exploded the market for anabolics and other dopants, which have killed more than one athlete and distort the spirit of sport. |
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False conflicts have multiplied the “world authorities” of each discipline, which multiplies the championships (in boxing: four different). |
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To arrange the cameras, schedules and rules are changed. We have seen marathon runners running in the heat for these reasons. |
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As you can imagine, these practices have increased the pressure for all cheating. |
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The Tapie case is only brought to light to better cover widely generalized methods |
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[Bernard Tapie, A french businessman, actor and politician among other things, In this particular case, the author refer to Tapie rigging games in favor of a Marseille's soccer club]. |
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Advertising doesn't just choose what to finance, it invents what exactly it wants. |
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An exhibition as lamentable and colonialist as the Paris-Dakar was created from scratch by advertisers, it was not requested by sportsmen or rally enthusiasts. |
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It has no other purpose than to sell products. |
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Television broadcasts of sporting events or events depend only on the sponsors, not on their actual importance or the taste of the spectators. |
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Interesting events are not even mentioned, while golf, which interests only a few people in France, reigns everywhere. |
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And for good reason: golf courses built everywhere have the juicy advantage of allowing to bypass certain legislative obstacles to real estate on protected land ... |
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Berlusconi, the club boss, once demanded a “look” from F.C. Milan footballers that would allow them to appear on TV often. |
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He chose blondes, rather beautiful kids, even less good players, but more media. |
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Elsewhere, tennis players are asked to shorten their skirts, to move the consumer, male of course. |
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But the worst is yet to come, electronic sponsorship. A first attempt took place recently. This consists of adding virtual elements to the actual image. |
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For example, in a football match broadcast, a 23rd player, entirely electronically made, taps into an equally electronic ball, covered with the advertising of a brand (Axe in this case). |
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The experiment was refused, but for reasons that were at least light and temporary, according to the director of the French Football Federation: |
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“We asked for cancellation, as nothing had been negotiated with us. The rights of virtual publicity belong to the F.F.F.” (\emph{Liberation}, February 11, 1998). |
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To these cynical remarks responds the attitude of the C.S.A., which, without qualms, had accepted. |
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How can we be surprised when we know that all the big bosses of Olympism or international federations have been or are linked to the big companies interested, and continue to be paid by them during their mandate. |
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That juicy contracts are granted to these firms, while those that do not "spit" are ruthlessly eliminated. |
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If one were to investigate seriously in this area, one would find that politics is comparatively much less corrupt than sport. |
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We are less surprised then to see the great captains of industry, the kings of corruption in all directions (Tapie, Berlusconi, to name only the best known and convicted) have invested fully in the clubs of which they display themselves the leaders. |
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“\emph{sponsorship} is a legal way to launder dirty money,” said one European elected official, referring to the close links between sport and mafias. |
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\section{environment and solidarity} |
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The most polluting companies compete with who will set up the “foundation” or the most dynamic association to help the quality of air, water, landscape, renewable energies or waste recovery. |
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E.D.F., COGEMA or the chemical industry are all very active in these areas that they destroy on the one hand and help repair on the other, winning in both cases, in brand image or subsidies. |
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E.D.F., the biggest river wrecker in France, never fails to help a fishing film festival or a kayak event, useful to neutralize associations in conflicts on the ground. |
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It is all the associative work that is thus used, diverted, discredited. |
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Similarly, “humanitarian” NGOs are plagued by pseudo-NGOs. entirely assembled by agri-food or pharmaceutical companies, which make them bridgeheads for their products. |
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For example, pharmaceutical products banned in Europe or having exceeded expiry dates are sold, or juicy contacts are made in certain devastated countries whose elites are easily corruptible. |
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The same, by rendering valuable “services” to more secret agencies, receive irreplaceable support from various governments. |
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The “African policy” of the France has used this type of relay a lot, under both the right and the left. |
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\section{Politics} |
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The American and French public naively believed that President Clinton's setbacks with his zipper were a matter of salacious jokes. |
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Under its scabrous underbelly, the business is actually economic-financial. Sent by the powerful tobacco lobby, Kenneth Starr, the prosecutor who went after Bill Clinton, was their former lawyer. |
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It was because the president's health policy thwarted their interests, in particular by banning all advertising for their products, that the big companies launched this offensive. |
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Puritan vogue has done the rest, and the picturesque that the mainstream media is more fond of than substantive analysis. |
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More seriously, it is trivial to say that foreign policies are more often carried out by a few oil companies than by states. |
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Without Shell, whose interests were threatened by its public action, Ken Saro-Wiva would never have been hanged in Nigeria. |
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Without Total, which has deported thousands of Burmese peasants obstinate to live on the territory of its pipeline project (75\% of foreign investment in Burma), Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi would be free and... Prime Minister instead of military dictators. |
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The examples are legion and the simple list of political crimes committed on the orders of Elf in Africa would hold pages. |
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We better understand the usefulness of advertising hype to silence (by buying the media), correct the image and pretend to be harmless traders. |
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\section{Ideology} |
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Everyone was able to make the comparison between advertising and propaganda, as if there were a difference in nature, while there is only a difference in object, which fades today when politicians (Bush, Gorbachev, Alexander Kwasniewski) praise products in spots, and when others are promoted (which does not mean “promoted”, no offense to the Academy) by famous advertising agencies. |
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The parallel with the propaganda of totalitarian regimes is obvious, for example with the Nazi ideal. The characters shown conform to the dominant models, today as in the past. |
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The men are well built, the blonde girls with generous breasts, all smile and are unanimous no matter what. |
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The places are always the same: clean and beautiful cities, charming and sunny countryside, the sea or another place of enchanting tourism, the Third World is exotic and good-natured, as at club Méditerranée. |
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The body is sovereign, the décor willingly futuristic, but a pleasant future, to which we aspire, competition seems to be the only engine of people, power and strength are exalted, the feat constantly evoked. |
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This ideal of “Scout happiness” that Toscani denounces in his book, irresistibly evokes the images of Nazi magazines or their edifying films (Toscani shows how the image of Claudia Schiffer realizes the dream of the Hitlerjugend). |
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But also those of Russian, Chinese or Korean socialist realism, in their propaganda for youth. |
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Above all, like the slogan of the camps, joy is obligatory and the “natural” so forced that it would make the cinema laugh. |
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The dominant choices are also revealing: alcohol and tobacco, cars and speed, futile and expensive purchases, or low-quality food products presented as elite consumption. |
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Advertising constantly plays on sexual desire, rarely with finesse, but rather with a grivoiserie without great variations. |
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It always reinforces the discourse against the environment, social rights, the real Third World, poverty, citizenship, except when it is necessary to sing them... |
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It is the reign of absolute liberalism, which reinforces the unanimity of the economic editorialists of the media where it is broadcast. |
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And of course the little touch of rebellion, so incentive to buy, and false novation. |
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This is the often denounced reign of the “housewife under 50 years old” supposed to represent the average consumer, whose dictatorship over the audience is responsible for the widespread rolling of quality. |
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It sells, says Toscani, “a adulterated and hypnotic model of happiness” in which, with the proposed product, the consumer is supposed to buy eternal youth, power or energy, definitive health. |
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And he adds this appalling summary of the vast majority of ads on our screens: |
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“Ah how good it is to be 20 years old, to ride in 4 X 4 at the end of the world and to jump into the sparkling water with pretty chicks smiling ear to ear”. |
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A bourgeois dream, colonizing, dominating, Western and white, proposed as a model of society, as a conception of the world instead of the great defeated ideologies. |
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As in the Nazi regime, deviants to this model are eliminated from the world that advertising transmits: |
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those who do not look like Aryans, are not heterosexual, nor healthy, do not have the ease that money gives, are not aggressive in the face of the world, do not have the conforming physique, the unproductive, the protesters, the pacifists, the sick, the poor, the "loosers"... |
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As in any totalitarian propaganda, strength and power emerge from the muscles of beer drinkers or vehicle drivers. |
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Victory is omnipresent, whether the hero runs or flirts, pilots or confronts a boss. |
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Finally, it only plays with stereotypes and each time to push them even deeper into people's heads: male and female stereotypes, nationals, rural, young people, commuters, etc. |
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\section{Numbers} |
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For fun let's compare: |
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- In 1994, advertising (stricto sensu) spent 330.5 billion francs in Europe, 406.7 billion in the USA and 172 billion in Japan; |
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- These figures are the equivalent of 50\% of the debt of all of South America, or 100\% of Middle-East's or North Africa's debt du Moyen-Orient. |
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- In France by comparison, the budget of Culture is about 50 billion. |
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\section{A crime against spirits} |
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Like these modern bombs that kill everything that lives by preserving buildings and equipment, advertising kills all intellectual and civic activity by letting the individual live the only reflexes of consumption, like overconditioned Pavlov dogs. |
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Doubt, thought, ideas, selflessness, spiritual and personal development, public interest, collective sense and solidarity, everything is swept away as an obstacle to the single thought: buying. |
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Merchant culture is no longer distinguished from culture at all, as an advertising spot is no longer distinguishable from a short film or a music video: |
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same characters, same references, same staging, same editing, same clichés, same aesthetics, same sitcom-like situation - and for good reason, the directors are the same. |
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With cultural regression helping, and passivity encouraged, advertising is often the only information available to some citizens, about products, foreign countries, or elements of knowledge. |
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Young people are particularly affected by this phenomenon. Main plagiarist, especially of the cinema, the advertising lives only from what it apes or plunders, one would look in vain for an original idea from its ranks. |
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This pumping, paid a hundred times more than the plagiarized work, is not worth the candle: |
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so much “brainstorming” for a result so poor, so inefficient (its impact on sales is overall ridiculous), it is an unspeakable waste. But it maintains confusion. |
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For the average viewer, the difference between a show, documentary or fiction film, and advertising, is blurring. |
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We believe as much the one who presents the television news as the comedian who praises a car or we believe him as little. |
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As it is true that what has not been “seen on TV” does not exist (let us remember the Gulf War) and that what has been seen, even if faked, is accepted (same example). |
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Advertising is also the main vector of the virtual, whose promotion does not aim to make it compete with reality, but to replace it, as shown by the relentlessness of some products to pretend to be those, authentic and prestigious, to which they want to replace (example: the ads for Lipton tea shot in the Himalayas, or those for American rice shot in the rice fields of Asia that he will ruin). |
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The world of advertising, organized like a mafia, works like it, in the service of the most authoritarian ideology there is. |
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The commercial harassment it unleashes even in the most remote parts of the world leaves its opponents no space to survive. |
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We must therefore salute the new fighters of this anti-capitalism of the twenty-first century: Resistance to Advertising Aggression in France; London-Greenpeace led the lawsuit against McDonald's for lying damaging to their brand image. |
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And of course the “sub-commander Marcos of the antiadvertising”, Kalle Lasn, of The Media Foundation, who makes counter-spots, anti-slogans, dismantles advertisements by revealing their lies, and created the “Days without purchase”. |
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We must dismantle the world of advertising as we do for weapons of mass destruction, since it is one of them. |
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Useless or harmful socially, environmentally, artistically, culturally, and even commercially (quality products are often sold without advertising), this “crime against intelligence, creativity, language” (Toscani again), which offers us a macho vision, racist, colonialist, totalitarian, Western and exclusionary, serves only those who lead us to the abyss. |
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A psychological weapon, it replaces conventional, nuclear or chemical weapons, because today capitalism must keep alive its victims, transformed into mere consumers: it no longer kills, it decerebrates. |
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This generalized offensive of the commodity creates famines, ecological and health disasters, unemployment and exclusion. Its missiles are called advertising. |
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The offensive is carried out through the new provisions of the WTO, the European treaties (Maastricht, Amsterdam), the globalization agreements (A.M.M., N.T.M.), and thanks to its instruments (IMF, World Bank, central banks). |
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This first planetary war has now taken over from the two classic world wars: it has already caused more deaths... |
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Yves Frémion |
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Yves Frémion is a writer and journalist, author of more than 80 titles in all fields. He leads the workshops of Tayrac, associative edition. |
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Vice-President of the Voltaire Network and of the Permanent Council of Writers. He directs the series “La Planète verte”[The Green Planet] at Hachette Jeunesse. |
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An ecologist, he was an MEP and in charge of the Greens' International Relations. He is currently a regional councillor for Île-de-France. |
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Latest books published: \emph{Deluge sur Monteyrac}[Deluge sur Monteyrac] (Hachette), \emph{Attention chien léchant}[Beware licking dog] (Audie), \emph{Le Tueur} [The Killer] (Gallimard). |
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\chapter{An ad is worth a thousand bombs... Advertising's crimes in modern warfare} |
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\chapterauthor{Yves FRÉMION} |
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Some criminals act in a brutal way: they prefer the gun, the dagger, the bomb, the immediate violence, to end in the moment. |
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Others, more cautious, prefer to take their time: poison is their favorite weapon. Discreet, insidious, invisible, slow and progressive. |
|||
|
|||
For a long time, we believed that the world of merchandise, the one where everything is bought and sold, would remain confined within the limits of the commercial world. |
|||
That the part of our life that escaped the market and financial logic would do it forever. |
|||
That education, information, health, transport networks, energy supply, justice, security, telecommunications would remain in the hands of the community. |
|||
We even thought that the quality of the environment, water or air, culture, would add to it naturally. |
|||
|
|||
But the opposite has happened. In all rich and advanced countries, the dismantling of public services has shown the extent of the war waged underground for years. |
|||
Aided by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Eastern Bloc, the world of merchandise has invaded everything. |
|||
|
|||
It first invaded the countries that were little, but also, in the countries of the West, the sectors that until now escaped this grip. |
|||
Education, health, information, everything has been delivered to profitability, market share, commercial success, immediacy. |
|||
The armed arm of this colonial conquest is advertising, which prepares minds by its incessant bludgeoning and kills more massively than a bomb drop. |
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|
|||
One of its main actors, Oliviero Toscani, whom his scandalous campaigns for Benetton made famous, lists himself in his book \emph{La pub est une charogne qui nous sourit}[Advertising is a carrion smiling to us] (Hoëbeke ed., 1995), where he willingly bite the hand that made his fortune: |
|||
“Advertising now lines every street corner, every historic square, every square, bus stops, the metro, airports, train stations, newspapers, cafes, pharmacies, tobacconists, lighters, phone cards, |
|||
it cuts movies on TV, invades radios, magazines, beaches, sports, clothes, even the footprints of the soles of our shoes, our whole universe, the whole planet! (...) |
|||
It's Big Brother, always smiling! I find it frightening that all this huge space of expression, exhibition and display, the largest living museum of modern art, a hundred thousand times Beaubourg and the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York combined, these thousands of square kilometers of posters plastered all over the world, these giant panels, these painted slogans, these hundreds of thousands of pages of printed newspapers, these hundreds of hours of television, of radio messages, remain reserved for this imbecile, unreal and misleading paradisiacal imagery... ”. |
|||
And all this financed by the consumer, its cost being integrated into the price of the product (“Advertising is the first direct tax”). |
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|
|||
Under various names: sponsorship, corporate sponsorship (remember that sponsorship is disinterested, so there is abuse of language), communication, bartering, advertiser, sponsorship, etc., advertising has introduced commercial interest everywhere. |
|||
The following examples show the extent and coherence of this offensive. |
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|
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|
|||
\section{Education} |
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|
|||
In the USA, the wiring of primary schools was not carried out by public authorities, but by private firms. |
|||
They equipped the schools free of charge but, in exchange, the educational programmes with |
|||
"Channel One" thus broadcast includes, for 10 minutes of program, two minutes of advertising for these firms. |
|||
Throughout the year, students are intellectually harassed by the promotion of commercial products. |
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|
|||
France is in turn affected by this phenomenon and the pressure is strong for it to pass the walls of our schools. |
|||
For example, slipping into the vacuum of sex education, never really provided by teachers, the firm Tampax offers an “educational program” in colleges, for girls in 4th and 3rd grade. |
|||
60,000 adolescent girls already receive information on the body, health, hygiene... and of course on the products of the firm Tampax. These programs are taught over time and as part of biology courses, which teachers no longer provide. |
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These courses are subtly given by nurses, transformed into “salespeople”, who distribute samples at the end of the course. |
|||
Too happy to offload an education that they generally wish not to do, the teachers have hardly opposed it, and neither have the parents. |
|||
A representative of Tampax recently said in the press: “The professors welcome us willingly, even solicit us.” |
|||
The National Education has blessed the operation: everything is free, a superior argument of any state reflection now! |
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|
|||
A recent agreement between the National Education, authors' societies and audiovisual producers authorized the broadcasting of television programs in schools: |
|||
it is enough to sponsor these shows so that advertising easily enters a universe that was forbidden to it. |
|||
How many establishments today include in canteen meals “sugary drinks” that are none other than Coca-Cola, under pressure from the firm; |
|||
the same youth beverage companies (Coca, Fanta), install “free” distributors in these schools, without the establishments ever making a call for tenders or offering an alternative: it's free... |
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|
|||
It is the same for companies that “offer” football jerseys to school children, with their advertising on them naturally; |
|||
but it is “free”, and therefore the public service forgets that it is the public service... |
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|
|||
Christian De Brie, in \emph{le Monde Diplomatique} wrote a few years ago: |
|||
“Will we one day see the sponsored teacher in schools and the teacher, covered in badges, announce that the arithmetic lesson is “offered” by a brand of electronic games and recreation by a soft drink with a taste of adventure?” |
|||
At the time, De Brie was humorous, it is no more. |
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|
|||
As for universities, it is common in the USA for chairs to be, especially in economics, financed directly by firms that appoint professors. |
|||
As Susan George showed in a resounding article in the same \emph{Monde Diplomatique}, prestigious French intellectuals have already benefited (one of the French champions of the historical revision of the Workers' Movement, François Furet, in the lead). |
|||
Operation Fukuyama, named after an American state official who wrote “The End of History,” artificially highlighted by a brilliant publicity stunt, was entirely organized by the chemical firm Olin; |
|||
like that of the Heidelberg Appeal was fabricated by the pharmacy and asbestos lobbies to discredit environmentalists. |
|||
Academics in need of funding have lent themselves in both cases, with great complacency, to these manipulations. |
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|
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|
|||
\section{Culture and media} |
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|
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|
|||
The American model, where 90\% of culture is financed by private companies, has helped European countries dismantle their public funding in this area. |
|||
Gradually, the state, in France as elsewhere, disengages financially, but also politically. 30\% of French culture sponsored is sponsored by banks, insurance companies and the agri-food industry, whose disinterestedness can be guessed. |
|||
Who can believe that the content of the works thus framed does not change? |
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|
|||
Almost all of the written information had been held financially for years only through alcohol and tobacco advertisements. |
|||
The European directive banning all incitement to smoke, which became in France the “Évin law”, led to the fall of several publications and weakened the others. |
|||
This gives an idea of the fragility that our media had reached, tied up by these firms and totally dependent: |
|||
a simple change in the firm's strategy or a “dir.com.”[Abbreviation of Communication director], and publications could stop overnight, ruined. |
|||
Who can then be surprised that whistleblowers of the dangers of tobacco, one of the most addictive drugs, can never find an echo in the French press. |
|||
(unlike hashish, which does not sponsor anyone and whose “dangers”, derisory in comparison to tobacco, make the headlines every week)? |
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|
|||
For culture, a change of mentality is gradually revealed: |
|||
many creators no longer rely on their success with the public, but on the sole satisfaction of the funder, on whom whether the work exists or not depends, with the consequences that we guess for its content. |
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|
|||
\emph{sponsoring} now accounts for 75\% of TV shows in France (including 20\% for stupid games that occupy the most followed slots). |
|||
It has gradually replaced, in the eyes of advertisers, advertising \emph{stricto sensu}: |
|||
it is a response to the zapping of viewers harassed by advertising, who change channels when it arrives. Now, impossible to escape, advertising is \emph{in] the program! |
|||
Worse, nearly 50\% of France-Television's budget comes from commercial revenues when in principle there should be 0\%... |
|||
|
|||
The climax is called “bartering”; they are simply entire programs offered to the channels, turnkey, already fully realized, with the advertising inside: soap opera, game, documentary show ... |
|||
The channel has nothing to do, it does not need to pay a director, nor authors, nor technicians, nor animator, nor even the film or the studio, even less to think about how to seduce the viewer, it does not have to look for the money to produce, it just has to buy a cassette and broadcast it: a dream come true... |
|||
|
|||
More and more, these sponsors want to get out of hiding and some blunders are revealing. |
|||
The name of the sponsor is often larger than that of the artist on the posters, disfigured by the logos. |
|||
For a writer, what is the value of an award where the name of the firm appears in the title, such as the Premio Strega or the AKO-Literatuurprijs? |
|||
Is it rewarding to perform at the Belga Jazz Festival? |
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|
|||
The firm Cointreau had sponsored at the Zenith of Paris an evening “Young Dance”. |
|||
But its logo in letters of fire, placed at the back of the stage during the performance of a well-known choreographer, was not well received by the audience, who booed the sponsor. |
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|
|||
All this influences the content. For fiction, for example, the stories must be necessarily family (in the house, you can slip a lot of products); |
|||
the ends are happy; politics, religion, reflection are banned; everyone must be able to attach themselves to the heroes, the villains are well identified. |
|||
The songs are cheerful. The animators are mostly animators, preferably with big breasts. |
|||
Ambitious or research works have no chance and the principle of “more of the same” reigns supreme. |
|||
|
|||
More radically, companies fully finance channels, especially in countries too poor to produce their own programs. |
|||
In Africa, for example, Nestlé is rampant, which is bludgeoning the unique thinking and dominant culture of the West triumphing over viewers who have no alternative or access to their own culture. |
|||
Elsewhere, the major institutes of “studies” and scientific expertise, created by the firms themselves, feed the media with unique thinking, which is reluctant to look for information at the source. |
|||
This is how the worst absurdities are repeated and perpetuated; to go in the same direction as what advertising imposes. |
|||
The scandal of polluted air in Paris took ten years to penetrate our newspapers financed by the automotive industry; that of child labour in some countries as well: |
|||
these children work for the main sponsors of our channels (Nike in the lead). |
|||
The famous Jean-Pierre Coffe, although widely used by advertising, but who left television disgusted by what he saw there, recently confessed to the Parisien Libéré : |
|||
“Try going to F2, F3 or a commercial channel and giving a review on a Danone Group product. It's forbidden, you're cut off. And since I am a free man, I do not want to submit. That is why I am doing something else.” |
|||
The other animators did not have this modesty. |
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|
|||
For zapping fanatics, who change channels as soon as the advertisement interrupts their film, the parade has been found: the ad is no longer in the advertising break, but in the film itself. |
|||
The last chic is to buy a few seconds of a film from a “major company” and slip its propaganda into it. |
|||
International hits (\emph{Total recall, Back to the Future 2, Day of Turmoil, all James Bond}) are thus full of close-up products with the name of the brand, inserts designed by the firms themselves and no longer by the author, director or producer; the writers, on the other hand, have to adapt their story to this presence that sometimes happens like a hair on the soup. |
|||
In France, the two \emph{“Les Visiteurs”}, public triumphs, brought this principle to its climax, using the parody force of effect. |
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|
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|
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|
|||
\section{Sport} |
|||
|
|||
80\% of the \emph{sponsoring} of sport — actually competition and not sports practice — goes to motor sports and the sports programs that show them are sponsored... by the same firms. |
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|
|||
Only one sporting competition, the Prix automobile de Monaco in 1992, saw the same name of a tobacco company appear on the screen... 1134 times, while it is forbidden. |
|||
|
|||
The Pardubicka horse race in Czechoslovakia, deliberately intended to be very dangerous, offered viewers around the world spectacular horse falls; many had to be shot because of their fractured legs. |
|||
This show, a real massacre aimed at a morbid audience, so moved animal lovers that a boycott campaign was launched against sponsors, including Martel cognacs, until they gave up. |
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|
|||
Many sports competitions, which should have been banned for bad weather conditions for example, were maintained because of TV schedules and contracts with firms that were waiting for their passage on the air at these moments of prime listening. |
|||
The high number of competitions multiplies the opportunities to promote brands, so it is in full inflation. |
|||
Athletes are exhausted there, especially since sponsors demand records all the time. |
|||
This has exploded the market for anabolics and other dopants, which have killed more than one athlete and distort the spirit of sport. |
|||
|
|||
False conflicts have multiplied the “world authorities” of each discipline, which multiplies the championships (in boxing: four different). |
|||
To arrange the cameras, schedules and rules are changed. We have seen marathon runners running in the heat for these reasons. |
|||
As you can imagine, these practices have increased the pressure for all cheating. |
|||
The Tapie case is only brought to light to better cover widely generalized methods |
|||
[Bernard Tapie, A french businessman, actor and politician among other things, In this particular case, the author refer to Tapie rigging games in favor of a Marseille's soccer club]. |
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|
|||
Advertising doesn't just choose what to finance, it invents what exactly it wants. |
|||
An exhibition as lamentable and colonialist as the Paris-Dakar was created from scratch by advertisers, it was not requested by sportsmen or rally enthusiasts. |
|||
It has no other purpose than to sell products. |
|||
|
|||
Television broadcasts of sporting events or events depend only on the sponsors, not on their actual importance or the taste of the spectators. |
|||
Interesting events are not even mentioned, while golf, which interests only a few people in France, reigns everywhere. |
|||
And for good reason: golf courses built everywhere have the juicy advantage of allowing to bypass certain legislative obstacles to real estate on protected land ... |
|||
|
|||
Berlusconi, the club boss, once demanded a “look” from F.C. Milan footballers that would allow them to appear on TV often. |
|||
He chose blondes, rather beautiful kids, even less good players, but more media. |
|||
Elsewhere, tennis players are asked to shorten their skirts, to move the consumer, male of course. |
|||
|
|||
But the worst is yet to come, electronic sponsorship. A first attempt took place recently. This consists of adding virtual elements to the actual image. |
|||
For example, in a football match broadcast, a 23rd player, entirely electronically made, taps into an equally electronic ball, covered with the advertising of a brand (Axe in this case). |
|||
The experiment was refused, but for reasons that were at least light and temporary, according to the director of the French Football Federation: |
|||
“We asked for cancellation, as nothing had been negotiated with us. The rights of virtual publicity belong to the F.F.F.” (\emph{Liberation}, February 11, 1998). |
|||
To these cynical remarks responds the attitude of the C.S.A., which, without qualms, had accepted. |
|||
|
|||
How can we be surprised when we know that all the big bosses of Olympism or international federations have been or are linked to the big companies interested, and continue to be paid by them during their mandate. |
|||
That juicy contracts are granted to these firms, while those that do not "spit" are ruthlessly eliminated. |
|||
If one were to investigate seriously in this area, one would find that politics is comparatively much less corrupt than sport. |
|||
We are less surprised then to see the great captains of industry, the kings of corruption in all directions (Tapie, Berlusconi, to name only the best known and convicted) have invested fully in the clubs of which they display themselves the leaders. |
|||
“\emph{sponsorship} is a legal way to launder dirty money,” said one European elected official, referring to the close links between sport and mafias. |
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|
|||
|
|||
\section{environment and solidarity} |
|||
|
|||
The most polluting companies compete with who will set up the “foundation” or the most dynamic association to help the quality of air, water, landscape, renewable energies or waste recovery. |
|||
E.D.F., COGEMA or the chemical industry are all very active in these areas that they destroy on the one hand and help repair on the other, winning in both cases, in brand image or subsidies. |
|||
E.D.F., the biggest river wrecker in France, never fails to help a fishing film festival or a kayak event, useful to neutralize associations in conflicts on the ground. |
|||
It is all the associative work that is thus used, diverted, discredited. |
|||
|
|||
Similarly, “humanitarian” NGOs are plagued by pseudo-NGOs. entirely assembled by agri-food or pharmaceutical companies, which make them bridgeheads for their products. |
|||
For example, pharmaceutical products banned in Europe or having exceeded expiry dates are sold, or juicy contacts are made in certain devastated countries whose elites are easily corruptible. |
|||
The same, by rendering valuable “services” to more secret agencies, receive irreplaceable support from various governments. |
|||
The “African policy” of the France has used this type of relay a lot, under both the right and the left. |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
\section{Politics} |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
The American and French public naively believed that President Clinton's setbacks with his zipper were a matter of salacious jokes. |
|||
Under its scabrous underbelly, the business is actually economic-financial. Sent by the powerful tobacco lobby, Kenneth Starr, the prosecutor who went after Bill Clinton, was their former lawyer. |
|||
It was because the president's health policy thwarted their interests, in particular by banning all advertising for their products, that the big companies launched this offensive. |
|||
Puritan vogue has done the rest, and the picturesque that the mainstream media is more fond of than substantive analysis. |
|||
|
|||
More seriously, it is trivial to say that foreign policies are more often carried out by a few oil companies than by states. |
|||
Without Shell, whose interests were threatened by its public action, Ken Saro-Wiva would never have been hanged in Nigeria. |
|||
Without Total, which has deported thousands of Burmese peasants obstinate to live on the territory of its pipeline project (75\% of foreign investment in Burma), Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi would be free and... Prime Minister instead of military dictators. |
|||
The examples are legion and the simple list of political crimes committed on the orders of Elf in Africa would hold pages. |
|||
|
|||
We better understand the usefulness of advertising hype to silence (by buying the media), correct the image and pretend to be harmless traders. |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
\section{Ideology} |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
Everyone was able to make the comparison between advertising and propaganda, as if there were a difference in nature, while there is only a difference in object, which fades today when politicians (Bush, Gorbachev, Alexander Kwasniewski) praise products in spots, and when others are promoted (which does not mean “promoted”, no offense to the Academy) by famous advertising agencies. |
|||
|
|||
The parallel with the propaganda of totalitarian regimes is obvious, for example with the Nazi ideal. The characters shown conform to the dominant models, today as in the past. |
|||
The men are well built, the blonde girls with generous breasts, all smile and are unanimous no matter what. |
|||
The places are always the same: clean and beautiful cities, charming and sunny countryside, the sea or another place of enchanting tourism, the Third World is exotic and good-natured, as at club Méditerranée. |
|||
The body is sovereign, the décor willingly futuristic, but a pleasant future, to which we aspire, competition seems to be the only engine of people, power and strength are exalted, the feat constantly evoked. |
|||
This ideal of “Scout happiness” that Toscani denounces in his book, irresistibly evokes the images of Nazi magazines or their edifying films (Toscani shows how the image of Claudia Schiffer realizes the dream of the Hitlerjugend). |
|||
But also those of Russian, Chinese or Korean socialist realism, in their propaganda for youth. |
|||
Above all, like the slogan of the camps, joy is obligatory and the “natural” so forced that it would make the cinema laugh. |
|||
|
|||
The dominant choices are also revealing: alcohol and tobacco, cars and speed, futile and expensive purchases, or low-quality food products presented as elite consumption. |
|||
Advertising constantly plays on sexual desire, rarely with finesse, but rather with a grivoiserie without great variations. |
|||
|
|||
It always reinforces the discourse against the environment, social rights, the real Third World, poverty, citizenship, except when it is necessary to sing them... |
|||
It is the reign of absolute liberalism, which reinforces the unanimity of the economic editorialists of the media where it is broadcast. |
|||
And of course the little touch of rebellion, so incentive to buy, and false novation. |
|||
|
|||
This is the often denounced reign of the “housewife under 50 years old” supposed to represent the average consumer, whose dictatorship over the audience is responsible for the widespread rolling of quality. |
|||
It sells, says Toscani, “a adulterated and hypnotic model of happiness” in which, with the proposed product, the consumer is supposed to buy eternal youth, power or energy, definitive health. |
|||
And he adds this appalling summary of the vast majority of ads on our screens: |
|||
“Ah how good it is to be 20 years old, to ride in 4 X 4 at the end of the world and to jump into the sparkling water with pretty chicks smiling ear to ear”. |
|||
A bourgeois dream, colonizing, dominating, Western and white, proposed as a model of society, as a conception of the world instead of the great defeated ideologies. |
|||
|
|||
As in the Nazi regime, deviants to this model are eliminated from the world that advertising transmits: |
|||
those who do not look like Aryans, are not heterosexual, nor healthy, do not have the ease that money gives, are not aggressive in the face of the world, do not have the conforming physique, the unproductive, the protesters, the pacifists, the sick, the poor, the "loosers"... |
|||
As in any totalitarian propaganda, strength and power emerge from the muscles of beer drinkers or vehicle drivers. |
|||
Victory is omnipresent, whether the hero runs or flirts, pilots or confronts a boss. |
|||
|
|||
Finally, it only plays with stereotypes and each time to push them even deeper into people's heads: male and female stereotypes, nationals, rural, young people, commuters, etc. |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
\section{Numbers} |
|||
|
|||
For fun let's compare: |
|||
|
|||
- In 1994, advertising (stricto sensu) spent 330.5 billion francs in Europe, 406.7 billion in the USA and 172 billion in Japan; |
|||
|
|||
- These figures are the equivalent of 50\% of the debt of all of South America, or 100\% of Middle-East's or North Africa's debt du Moyen-Orient. |
|||
|
|||
- In France by comparison, the budget of Culture is about 50 billion. |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
|||
\section{A crime against spirits} |
|||
|
|||
Like these modern bombs that kill everything that lives by preserving buildings and equipment, advertising kills all intellectual and civic activity by letting the individual live the only reflexes of consumption, like overconditioned Pavlov dogs. |
|||
Doubt, thought, ideas, selflessness, spiritual and personal development, public interest, collective sense and solidarity, everything is swept away as an obstacle to the single thought: buying. |
|||
Merchant culture is no longer distinguished from culture at all, as an advertising spot is no longer distinguishable from a short film or a music video: |
|||
same characters, same references, same staging, same editing, same clichés, same aesthetics, same sitcom-like situation - and for good reason, the directors are the same. |
|||
|
|||
With cultural regression helping, and passivity encouraged, advertising is often the only information available to some citizens, about products, foreign countries, or elements of knowledge. |
|||
Young people are particularly affected by this phenomenon. Main plagiarist, especially of the cinema, the advertising lives only from what it apes or plunders, one would look in vain for an original idea from its ranks. |
|||
This pumping, paid a hundred times more than the plagiarized work, is not worth the candle: |
|||
so much “brainstorming” for a result so poor, so inefficient (its impact on sales is overall ridiculous), it is an unspeakable waste. But it maintains confusion. |
|||
|
|||
For the average viewer, the difference between a show, documentary or fiction film, and advertising, is blurring. |
|||
We believe as much the one who presents the television news as the comedian who praises a car or we believe him as little. |
|||
As it is true that what has not been “seen on TV” does not exist (let us remember the Gulf War) and that what has been seen, even if faked, is accepted (same example). |
|||
|
|||
Advertising is also the main vector of the virtual, whose promotion does not aim to make it compete with reality, but to replace it, as shown by the relentlessness of some products to pretend to be those, authentic and prestigious, to which they want to replace (example: the ads for Lipton tea shot in the Himalayas, or those for American rice shot in the rice fields of Asia that he will ruin). |
|||
|
|||
The world of advertising, organized like a mafia, works like it, in the service of the most authoritarian ideology there is. |
|||
The commercial harassment it unleashes even in the most remote parts of the world leaves its opponents no space to survive. |
|||
We must therefore salute the new fighters of this anti-capitalism of the twenty-first century: Resistance to Advertising Aggression in France; London-Greenpeace led the lawsuit against McDonald's for lying damaging to their brand image. |
|||
And of course the “sub-commander Marcos of the antiadvertising”, Kalle Lasn, of The Media Foundation, who makes counter-spots, anti-slogans, dismantles advertisements by revealing their lies, and created the “Days without purchase”. |
|||
|
|||
We must dismantle the world of advertising as we do for weapons of mass destruction, since it is one of them. |
|||
Useless or harmful socially, environmentally, artistically, culturally, and even commercially (quality products are often sold without advertising), this “crime against intelligence, creativity, language” (Toscani again), which offers us a macho vision, racist, colonialist, totalitarian, Western and exclusionary, serves only those who lead us to the abyss. |
|||
|
|||
A psychological weapon, it replaces conventional, nuclear or chemical weapons, because today capitalism must keep alive its victims, transformed into mere consumers: it no longer kills, it decerebrates. |
|||
This generalized offensive of the commodity creates famines, ecological and health disasters, unemployment and exclusion. Its missiles are called advertising. |
|||
The offensive is carried out through the new provisions of the WTO, the European treaties (Maastricht, Amsterdam), the globalization agreements (A.M.M., N.T.M.), and thanks to its instruments (IMF, World Bank, central banks). |
|||
This first planetary war has now taken over from the two classic world wars: it has already caused more deaths... |
|||
|
|||
\rauthor{Yves Frémion} |
|||
|
|||
Yves Frémion is a writer and journalist, author of more than 80 titles in all fields. He leads the workshops of Tayrac, associative edition. |
|||
Vice-President of the Voltaire Network and of the Permanent Council of Writers. He directs the series “La Planète verte”[The Green Planet] at Hachette Jeunesse. |
|||
An ecologist, he was an MEP and in charge of the Greens' International Relations. He is currently a regional councillor for Île-de-France. |
|||
Latest books published: \emph{Deluge sur Monteyrac}[Deluge sur Monteyrac] (Hachette), \emph{Attention chien léchant}[Beware licking dog] (Audie), \emph{Le Tueur} [The Killer] (Gallimard). |
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