Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Milorad Miša Antonić
TV ads in Serbia are still dominated by those TV blabbermouths and the infantile sentence “Before using the product, read the manual carefully! In case of contraindications, precautions and adverse reactions to the drug consult your doctor or pharmacist”!
What or who is the measure of value here!? If someone failed to follow the advice from this sentence, and prematurely punched out their card out of this world, should advertisers then have to declare: “Read carefully before using … because this many consumers died from this product?!”
If that’s the practice in Serbia, and it is, let’s see what the theory says. I read Media Marketing from Sarajevo, and also follow the great McCann Talks Belgrade, and I conclude: it’s the 21st century. By theory, we are stepping into the distant future. But Serbia isn’t there in practice! Here, the marketing scene is actually a ring in which a battle is fought by modern advertising fellows and TV blabbermouths (people who in the tv ads of most advertisers claim that “since they’ve been using the products, they are free of the pains in their spines, joints, stomachs…” But there are not yet those who would claim that they’ve been relieved from issues in their heads).
Just as it befits us, Serbia always has two halves: the front and the back.
But we’re in the 21st century, so I feel justified in my resignation. Or am I at fault for thinking that marketing must follow technological progress?! The domination of the said advertisements is depressing, but it brings more profits. TV blabbermouths are still believed more. They are omnipresent on our screens. They’ve became preachers.
My question is: what is the point of the fact that the authors of Media Marketing and the team from McCann Talks, headed by Vladimir Ćosić, are so contemporary?! Both these media pave the right path which marketing, and media, should take, but alas – the TV blabbermouths still reign supreme!
Why is their influence bigger than that of modern ads? Why am I filled with hope that better times for marketing will come?! Maybe I’m predicting endangerment – or is there no solution?! There’s even no consolation in the fact which Mr. Ćosić so nicely phrased, that “technology has never had such an impact on changing individual and collective behavior of people” as today?! Why did the people accepted this as a must?! Even technology can have (or not) its own future! Has the global human power yielded before the insatiable curiosity of individuals?! Since the dominance of technology is created and fueled by man, why is the humankind working against itself?! Why does it give technological inventions more power than that which it grasps in its own hands?! If man provides technological advancement, and if the advancement is changing us, for the worse, then man is crazy, and technology as a product of a madman should be avoided.
That’s exactly what’s happening in Serbia. So TV blabbermouths have the advantage in the ring.
Can technological progress bring more profit and be dominant? Ie. GMO. This advancement demands from people that they don’t care about whether they will have the brain, or ears of cows, whether their offspring will be half people half plants, or pigs (although we already have some people who are called pigs)?!
If we can’t do without such progress, the question is – what will happen with marketing? A person in such a world wouldn’t need clothing, shoes… They will have fur, paws, …! And if it’s such a good thing, why don’t those scientists grow a tail themselves?!
I propose a ban of the technologically advanced inventions that don’t bring us a change for the better. Neither I, nor you, dear readers, would consider it an advancement if we had the ears of a donkey and the snout of a pig! Right?!
The chances we will get out of this sludge are next to none. And I don’t accept the excuse ‘you don’t need to watch TV, change the channel,’ etc. OK, then you don’t have to produce TVs!
And where is the solution? There is none!
Same as there’s no solution for that other evil – that sentence: “Read the instructions carefully before use”.
If it is a legal obligation to point out the danger of a product, I wonder: is it possible for the manufacturer to be obliged not to create a hazard? The order of things as it is now is an insult to common sense. We are accountable if we don’t read the warning, but the manufacturers are not responsible for what they produce!? Obviously someone wants to wash their hands and consciousness in an easy and inexpensive way. The easiest way to do it is with a disclaimer – the infantile sentence from above. All they need to do is read it as quickly as possible, and save a couple of seconds! Was it the manufacturer who came up with this and made it a rule? No! They had to get the approval from the Big Brother!
So, when customers, inundated with the messages of TV blabbermouths, and enchanted by the infamous sentence, enter the store, they aren’t even aware that by looking for products advertised this way they might have simply asked: “Please, give me 100 grams of poison!”
And marketing?! Marketing is holding the hot potato. By blindly listening to the advertiser’s orders, marketing is more and more like a “contracting service” doing all kinds of labor for some money!
That’s why I wonder: What would happen if someone, pressured by illness, tried some product before ‘consulting’ their doctor, and because of it passed away? Shouldn’t it, by law, that infamous sentence then have to read: “Read carefully before use … because this many consumers died of this product?!” I don’t think so. Because then, the TV blabbermouths would have to say: “A neighbor tells me that another neighbor died from this, but I’m quite fine, and I feel no pain whatsoever.”
And again, it all falls down on marketing, and in the ring between modern advertising and TV blabbermouths, the former are recognized as, bad guys.
In reality, it looks like this: in the one corner you have the TV, in the other, a bunch of fools. There is no estimate of how many of us are in that bunch.
