Karl wrote:Moggy wrote:Forget if you like that YouTube guy or not, what’s the difference between him singing “buy my merch!” and Smyths having a kid singing about all the toys kids can buy at their stores?
I think there are a few points to be made here.
1. All advertising aimed at children is on some level gross. I think advertisements aimed at children are
more evil than those aimed directly at parents.
2. There's a difference in context between advertising presented
as an advertisement and advertising masquerading as content. Although as intelligent adults we can recognise that music video as an advertisement, it lacks the semantic cues & separation of one. It's presented as a genuine "music video" and even has an iTunes page where fans can buy the single. I think this kind of marketing is
more evil.
3. At the risk of sounding out-of-touch I think there's a genuine difference between what a toy store is trying to achieve, and what YouTube Dickhead Jake Paul is trying to achieve. Jake Paul is selling
a personal relationship with his fans. His content is entirely about him as a "personality". At the time he was selling "textjakepaul.com", a way to privately communicate with him via text message. As a parent you are probably OK with toy stores, but I think you may feel there is something inherently creepy and exploitative about the nature of his relationship with his viewers. Advertisements predicated on an emotional relationship that the viewer has with the advertiser are
more evil.
4. On some level I think we expect megacorporations to act cynically, and the context of them being a megacorporation makes us less impacted by that cynicism. Jake Paul is a children's entertainer and personality, and we have an expectation - no matter how frequently we are disappointed... - that individuals in that position should be good role models. But Jake Paul isn't a good role model. Jake Paul is a vacuous, manipulative, cynical dickhead, completely bereft of any talent whatsoever. I think that makes his relationship with his child fans and therefore any business that stems from that relationship
more evil.
5. As Hexx mentioned, it's much easier to be manipulated into buying things on the Internet, particularly when you're young. At least when a kid goes to a toy shop they have to get in a car with their parents then take their parents around the shop then ask their parents "can we get that?", which introduces oversight and fail-safes into the process. Of course, this point applies to many Internet advertisements, but I think advertisements closely linked to the payment method are
more evil.
6. I watched the whole video for you and looked at his shop, and I think a few of my brain cells committed suicide in protest, so I hope you're grateful for that. I think the most problematic components are the following: i. the superliminal repetition of the phrase "buy that merch", which I think has been carefully chosen as a psychological strategy; ii. the "$100 for free shipping" line,
in a music video, which is just hilariously gross; iii. the presence of a very small boy, which lets us know exactly who Jake Paul knows his audience is; iv. the "ask your mum" line, which makes explicit the axiom of all children's advertising (that kids will beg their parents) with an actual instruction, which I think makes things worse; v. the fact that much of his merch pushes the "Jake Paul movements" of "J Paulers" with the tagline "You can't beat us... Join us!", which again makes explicit another reality of children's marketing, that kids will have to buy certain things to fit into certain groups, again with actual instructions to that effect. I don't think any of those items are individually unique to any marketing campaign, but I think they all work to make an instance of advertising
more evil.
7. YouTube video content is not regulated in the same way that TV advertisements or even YouTube advertisements are. This means there's nowhere we can complain about tasteless adverts. Deliberately conducting your marketing in this way makes the affair - yep! -
more evil than it would have been otherwise.
I am sure there are lots of other adverts (and YouTube personalities, and corporations...) out there which are also very evil. I don't think Jake Paul is some unique Hitler figure of online marketing. But I don't think his content is common-or-garden marketing compared to adverts which don't do the above.
Of course, it took 7 lengthy list entries to even begin to (fingers crossed) convince you that the video is inappropriate, and you're an intelligent guy who is used to thinking about the world critically. The "it's just a dickhead on YouTube, why waste time overthinking it?" factor is really strong. But it's worth taking a second to peer through that veil because I think it reveals a lot about how information and ideas have been propagating on the Internet in the 2010s. It doesn't stop with the Paul brothers, who are narcissists that train children to send them money. There are machine learning algorithms automatically creating disturbing YouTube Kids content aimed at literal babies to skim ad money from the platform. There are racists who use YouTube to radicalise young people. There are Russians who signal boost alt-right content via social media platforms in an active attempt to subvert our democracy. And to keep things on-topic there's the content of people like TotalBiscuit and Boogie, which uses platforms built on successful hobbyist interest content to go on to subtly support political views most of us would disagree with.
It's probably not the most important thing happening in the world right now, but it's interesting and significant, and it'll be studied by future historians, so at least we can be kind of ahead of the curve by taking notice of it now.