All Thoughts Being Equal

So the lots of people (especially on the Internet) got mad at a video advertisement recently. Fair enough; I watched the ad in question and it's cringe-inducing, clearly the product of too many marketing meetings and too many focus groups from not the right demographics. But almost immediately after seeing the first think-piece headlines, a more troubling question came to my mind. See, the narrative was overwhelmingly "the company really dropped the ball with this ad," "the company totally misunderstood the current political climate with this ad"... generally this ad was disappointing . But unspoken seemed to be an  agreement that there is a hypothetical "good advertisement." The question, then, that came to mind: Do people actually see advertising as a worthwhile element of their lives? Apparently, yes; they jump at the chance to extol the virtues of "radvertising" but are just as quick to shame "badvertising." From the Gawke...

In many discussions that swirled around the Internet in the wake of Brendan Eich's resignation from Mozilla Corp. , someone invariably invoked the concept of the "marketplace of ideas"—just as in the market for physical goods or services, ideas themselves are brought to the "marketplace" of discussion, weighed on their merits, and adopted or discarded as this "market" dictates. If you hang positive traits like "freedom," "openness," and "meritocracy" on the market-metaphor, that's all the more reason to apply it to many different spheres. But it's worth noting some possibly uncomfortable implications.