A world without ad's

[Klaue]

OK, but what about the political implication of advertisement?


Say I'm a weapon manufacturer that sell weapons to third-world countries, and I buy a lot of advertisement space on a newspaper, or TV channel, or whatever. Now that media wants to broadcast a show about war, peace, terror and how it would be good to stop selling weapons to some countries. Of course I'd be unhappy. So I'd phone this media president, threatening to pull off my ads money if they go with that. How do you think they'd react? They withdraw the show. It does happen, I have some real life examples.


Basically, if I pay for ads, I own the media. That's why I never trust newspaper or websites that rely on ads to live.

That is indeed a legitimate issue that I diddn't think about. Or rather, I diddn't think about while writing the post, but I did think about it in length before


While your example with the weapons manufacturer is (probably) made up, that kind of stuff allready happened. The cases I know about happened in game testing magazines/websites, where negative scores for games of big advertisers are discuraged. This is, by the way, the reason I started to write my own game reviews (no link because it's in german and it would be blatant advertising itself). One of the most-known cases was Kane&Lynch, where the editor of Gamespot was fired for giving it a too low score. No one knows for sure if this is really true, but everything points to it.. Massive ad campaign by Eidos, Editor giving the Eidos game a 6.0 rating, Editor being fired. And this (alleged?) insider report.


Also, I suspect this happening way more often than you would think. I recently cancelled my [big german games mag]-subscription because every big-name-game gets a very high rating, while my own experience was rather.. not so good. Of course, this could also be because of them wanting to submit to the hype or even because my own tastes differ (I found GTA IV to be worse than GTA San Andreas in pretty much every aspect, but there seem to be many people who really think of it as the best GTA game yet), but it happened so many times that it is at least suspicious.


So now, what could be done about it? Sure, you could just scrap the ads completely, but, since mags/websites/tv-channels without ads would be way more expensive, many would probably be "sponsored" by such companies to keep prices low, which would in turn lead to non-objectivity. Or the media is paid for by donation and doesn't want the biggest donator to stop. Or the companies would resort to just plain old bribing err I mean "giving presents". I think the underlying problem goes deeper than just ads - corruption was there before the ads were. In fact, I think you could just be as objective with ads as without, because even if you lose an advertiser, there are plenty of others. Of course, that would imply that you really want to be objective, which many media providers do not seem to.


I don't really know how you could fix this issue, but doing off with ads, in my opinion, doesn't fix the issue, because the issue is not advertising, but corruption.

 

[Prometheus]

^ Klaue, you may find this to be an interesting read. (For the record, it's far from the first such article I've read.)

 

[Klaue]

^ Klaue, you may find this to be an interesting read. (For the record, it's far from the first such article I've read.)

It wouldn't really surprise me if it was real, but to be fair, all we know about the autor is the statement that he's "a former 'game journalist'" - there's no way to tell if this isn't just bullshit.

 

[Prometheus]

Considering so many corroborating reports from so many other such people, I'm inclined to think that there may be some truth to it, sadly.