A better question than the title: How do you tell a woman you’ve never met that you love her? Well, ideally you don’t, because that would be weird. Reading Ebony’s journalism work was a breath of fresh air in just the right way.
I am well aware that as a market audience I’m considered quite far left (at least according to the standard Overton Window), and that as a student of business, I have a few too many of those pesky “ethics” to market as a mega corporation would want me to do.
A long time ago I worked in Queen’s Park with the NDP. In the legislative assembly there is a strict professionalism– a rather thin veneer of respectability when the other side is attacking your human rights. These days general online discourse laments that respectability. You see people on all sides wanting to attack each other. Recently, Kamala Harris was supported by Dick Cheney, widely considered amongst leftists to be nothing short of a war criminal. Many leftists claim this to be proof that Kamala Harris is nothing but a stooge– an empire supporting sham of a leftist. Those outspoken people fail to realize how important that respectability is; respectability is how we built alliances and a strong voting base.
So what did Ebony do? She attended a forum where *the head of a shoe corporation* asked consumers to help spread awareness of sustainable buying practices. Meanwhile, the factories under his command in third world countries jam our clothing with plastics and ship them via plane to the empiric core. Ebony’s writing clearly demonstrated that she knew how silly the whole situation was, but that she could not say it. Respectability (and journalistic integrity) demanded that she write an article presenting the facts.
When an oil corporation does a land acknowledgement, how do you do anything but groan?
But that respectability also leads to something that many don’t like to acknowledge: that we live and function within a system of commerce. That does not necessarily mean capitalism. Commerce can be as simple as trading some wolf furs for some clay pots. We *have* to make purchases. Food, medicine, housing on one hand, but also video games, ice cream, and gasoline. Advertising serves a tangential democratic function, in this regard. That of informing you of your choices. Ideally, we would be able to get the information we need to do our research and find what we want. In our current system, though, outbound marketing gone mad shoves ads here! Ads! Look! Billboard! Ads in your books, your video games, ads in your PC search bar! Look! LOOK LOOKLOOK IM BEGIGN YUO IM BEGGIN UOUOYUPLEASE GOD PLEASE LOOK AT MY AD BUY BUY BUY.
Advertising is… legitimately difficult as someone of my political alignments, and within my social sphere. It’s hard to reconcile the need to legitimately inform people of my book they might like, of my thoughts on the new rules of some video game, etc, when the knee jerk of an incoming ad is to block the account on the spot.
How in the world do you advertise to someone who so vehemently despises the system they live in?
I don’t have an answer yet. But right now I’m trying to remove the dirty word stigma from the word advertisement, if only to myself.