While adverts can and SOMETIMES are used ethically and responsibly, there is a dark side to some advertising campaigns that is a pathway to many dark manipulations, some of which are considered unethical, Star Wars references aside this social influence can be very easily manipulated to an advertiser’s advantage, this has potentially dangerous ramifications that can influence a persons political and/or social beliefs, though for this I’m only going into the social aspect of this, because let’s face it, when it comes to politics, I am not qualified to get into it (I mean, c’mon, what political commentary can you expect from a guy like me, who makes runs around making cartoon characters all day)
Our first example of social influences in advertising is that time one Billy Mcfarland and his buddy Ja Rule paid a bunch of influencers on Instagram up to a quarter of a million dollars (figure taken from how much they paid Kendall Jenner) to make posts about that pesky 2017 Fyre Festival without disclosing the fact that money changed hands.
this of course got many a people to pay top dollar to go to this event because they believed that the influences were being genuine about this (when in reality they weren’t) and thus generated a lot of free press for Billy and Ja and as a result of this new mixture of both genuine and manufactured posts (which at times may have been in-distinguishable from one another) hyping the whole world for what this Fyre Festival nonsense had to offer, and everything was going un-well for the Fyre Festival behind the scenes what with musical acts pulling out and some not even confirmed to go as well as a supposed storm that, in the words of the internet historian video on this subject, turned all of the marketing into lies. When the time came for the festival to commence, things went just about awfully, until the cheese nation attacked on social media, it was then where things went from bad to worse because now the world saw the Fyre Festival as the con-job sham that it was, turns out billy’s been defrauding investors and now he’s in J A I L, and now there’s at least 3 documentaries covering the subject
While this ad campaign may have had a positive effect for the brand at first, when it came time for them to deliver the goods, the whole thing ended up backfiring in it’s richly hilarious faces as now one of them is in J A I L for the next S I X years. And as a reminder, it blew up, because of a P I E C E O F C H E E S E getting on social media.
Another Zany example of things going array thanks to ethics comes in the form of that time EA put those Loot Boxes from Over-watch in that Star Wars game they made
Let me explain, you see back in 2017 the devil spawns over at EA decided “hey, you know what would be cool DICE? If we took the Lootboxes from Overwatch and stuck em in our new Star Wars game for lots of easy money AND give the players an advantage online” so they did, they didn’t even stop with just cosmetics either they put things like Weapons and Characters such as D A R T H V A D E R (you know, the important villain) behind these boxes because P R O G R E S S.
This ended up enraging many a gamer and Star Wars fan alike because the way lootboxes work is that you pay a small fee for a box that contains random stuff (sometimes even duplicates) and if you don’t get what you want (which the odds of that happening can be rigged via updates) and after EA asked why during an Ask Me Anything session on Reddit they infamously said it was to give players “A sense of Pride And Accomplishment”
that comment ended up as the most down voted comment in Reddit history (as of writing this anyway) and after a bunch of regulators around the world started looking into it and noting how similar it is to gambling in a casino, they had to remove the micro-transactions, supposedly at the request of Disney, for a brief period of time, so that they’d be better (or in my opinion, less bad) once they inevitably got put back in later
This has had a negative impact on not just EA and Star Wars as brands, but it also had a negative impact on VIDEO GAMES AS A WHOLE as regulators are still looking into lootboxes and calling them basically gambling to this day, and none of this would have happened had Overwatch not popularised lootboxes. this in turn created what Jim Sterling (who I thank god for every Monday), the host of the Jimquisition on Youtube, dubbed as “The year of the lootbox,” and yet Video Games such as FIFA (which as a reminder, was willing to fight Belgium law to keep it’s card packs before having to pull out by the way) and NBA 2K20 still use gambling mechanics as a part of their gameplay for some inane reason (well, when I say this, I mostly mean profits), but overall the practice has diminished over the years in favour of “traditional” Micro-Transactions.
Overall I’ve learned quite a bit about how manipulative adverts can be sometimes and I’m quite shocked that things like Lootboxes, which seem to have been normalized unfortunately (fight the good fight Jim), and Fyre Festivals which got people hyped over ultimately empty promises, which I’m sure us gamers can relate to a lot given certain titles, even manage to get past the approval stages in the first place. Never the less, I can safely say that the lesson to take away from this is that if you don’t consider the ethics of your decisions, or just plain don’t care like lots of Mobile games, then controversy will very easily be attracted to you like a moth drawn to a light bulb. I mean, look at the games industry, look at Channel Awesome, look at that time paramount rightfully got into trouble over how wrong they got SEGA’s hedgehog, it’s surprisingly common.
This also brings up the issue of whether or not some of this stuff is ethical, an example being EA (they’re back again) encouraging the youths of the world to gamble away their parent’s credit card in games like FIFA via card packs and loot boxes (and in the case of NBA 2K20, literal slot machines)
Sam Gordon's Media Journal 