Jess and I had an argument earlier this summer over whether advertising was on the whole good or bad. She came down on the side of it being more or less harmless, while I (after some wragling and apologizing and admitting I don't really think it's wholesale evil) thought it was universally composed of lies. A little addendum as a means of illustrating what I mean when I say it's lies:

This morning I ran into a neighbor of my housesit apartment, who I haven't seen all summer. Usually I see him around a lot, and we say hi; he's not much older than me, and I realized at some point we were actually working for the same company when I was proofreading for a medical advertising firm. He's considered a rising star at McCann-Erickson; I was startled at one point to find his face, framed by his familiar silver hipster haircut, in a copy of Advertising Age.

He asked if I was still at McCann, and I told him no, I was now studying video games at Teachers College. Oh, I used to work in video games, he said. Turns out he used to do global marketing for XBox. I'd figured; he and his gal have a Rockstar Games sticker on their exterior door.

Let me know if you want to talk more about the industry, he said. Actually, I do have a question, I said, and we proceeded to commit the New York foul of holding the elevator on our floor to finish the conversation. I want to know more about how the industry makes use of ethnographers, as that's my preferred methodology. He told me that in marketing at least they found it quite useful. While he was at XBox he undertook a study of different gamer types all over the world.

(This is the kind of thing we'd like to be doing in our department and departments like ours, I think, and some of the professors I know think the're breaking totaly new ground when things like this come up. It pisses me of royally, because of course we've never heard of this stuff, because it's proprietary, and because it seems like academics mostly don't even think to go looking for this stuff much less try to ask that companies share. I understand the critique that commercial research is biased by profit motives, but I don't see how it could hurt us to look at this stuff and then confirm or deny it in disinterested research. but I digress.)

I mentioned that I wished I got to hear about this research more often. I told him about the industry panel at DiGRA, and how strange I thought it was when the industry guys talked as if they weren't listening to academics at all, for example how they talked as if player contributions to the gaming experience were expendable and were more a hassle than something they'd view as free value-added material. Not to mention how defensive academics were about it all.

Yeah, Microsoft is pretty enlightened about research, he said, but some of these other companies, you know, they're still geeks. It's like the fat geek kid who goes away to camp, loses a few pounds and gets muscled up, and comes back, but you know, he's still a geek.

This is what I mean to get at. This guy does not consider himself a geek. To sell game consoles, he researches geeks until he's got a clear picture of their essence. He creates a campaign which makes gamers and other geeks feel like he understands them, and that the company he works for wants to fill their needs. And yet when you come down to it, he's a skinny, well-groomed, silver-haired hipster who's perfectly ready to perpetuate stigmas against fat people, against people who don't play team sports, against "non-joiners," against gamers and geeks and other people who don't conform to societal norms of what a good man or good woman does. This man is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, and what he does when he's on the clock is ensure these stereotypes endure.

So as I said to Jess, I find the lie that advertising is about lifestyles when it's actually about profit offensive. But the lie that there are a few narrowly-defined good ways to live your life may be even worse.