Mindless vs. Mindful Advertising

I keep one news channel on more than I should, and the ads wear on me fast. The same spots, again and again. At one point I considered going into advertising myself, but I kept hitting the same wall: I couldn't sell something I didn't believe in, and I couldn't talk anyone into a product or service that didn't deserve it.

The problem usually isn't that the ads lie. Of course they do, and you know it. Pinning down exactly what the lie is becomes a waste of your time, and they run the thing on a loop anyway. Once in a while one is genuinely cute, the actor sells it, and you don't mind. Then you have news outlets pushing a single political line, sometimes to the point of inventing the story outright. In print and on screen both. It turns my stomach.

Layer the phone calls on top of that, the ones designed to pry money or a card number out of you. Think of the "free" product that isn't. They ship you a trial, and if you don't mail it back inside some window, they bill you, often after quietly signing you up to receive more of it every month with a charge to match.

Or the email announcing a windfall headed your way, provided you first hand over a bit of cash to, say, open an account so the money can land somewhere. Do that and you've cracked the door for every other scam waiting behind it. You've marked yourself as someone who might bite again.

Where did plain honesty go? I remember ads that ran at the top or tail of a program, or in the break, and told you about a decent product without lying. They informed you. Some were funny. None of them trampled the show you were trying to watch.

Maybe advertisers have decided we don't have minds. Or that we own them but never switch them on. That assumption would explain a lot of what gets aired. Meanwhile there's a growing interest in mindfulness, in paying attention to what's happening inside our heads and out in the world, and that attention is exactly what turns mindless into mindful.

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