BOO BOO BEAR Herman & Chomsky

The power behind advertising

“Before advertising became prominent, the price of a newspaper had to cover the costs of doing business. With the grown of advertising, papers that attracted ads could afford copy price well below production costs.”

I never really thought about the whole process behind ads in newspapers and on televisions that much before I read this article. In CMC 100 we learned that we are exposed to thousands of ads a day. I felt like the majority of the class looked at this as an awful thing. The reality is that is postmodernism at its best. Isn’t this media and advertising saturation a great thing for everybody? I don’t really understand the full scale economics of this thing but to me this seems great. Companies can reveal themselves to the world in magazines and tv commercials. Newspapers can sell more copies for the same amount of work because they are lower and price but they are making significantly more money. And I can buy a newspaper for fifty cents. This advertising saturation makes my life easier with the lower prices and it also allows everybody else to make more money. This article goes on to discuss how the papers lacking advertisements sell less copies because they have to charge more but that is survival of the fittest. There is a certain bank slogan (I don’t remember which bank) out right now that says, “when banks compete, you win!” I look at this at the same thing. When newspapers are fighting to have the lowest prices, I benefit from it.

I have always wondered how TV game shows can just hand out thousands, even millions of dollars everyday but still make millions of dollars. This finally makes sense to me. If a TV station is making thousands of dollars every second a commercial is on their station, then they can get away with handing out thousands of dollars every show. This is also how shows like Seinfeld and Friends, at the end of their production, could pay their actors up to 1 million dollars an episode.