This is how they get you

Rubie Lyn Pablo
Aug 2
3 min read

🐟 Does the fish recognize that it's surrounded by water?

As the kids are growing up they love to watch sports on TV. Basketball and football are our favorites.

Now, what happens when we watch sports on Live TV?

We get fed advertisements to lure us into buying our next ‘fix’.

It was enlightening recently to see the kids watching TV and then suddenly they wanted to eat or drink something. They commented how delicious the burger looked or how they’d like some soda now.

Heck this happens to us ‘mature’ adults; these young kids are just getting acquainted with the World!

We must become conscious of the trickery of advertisement and stop falling prey to it.

It’s almost comical to think how well the cable TV industry duped us. For the longest time, they made us pay to get cable in our homes AND forced us to watch ads.

Only recently did we get some freedom to skip ads or have a streaming subscription plan without ads. Now some of the same streaming services, to preserve their growth rates, are re-introducing low cost subscription plans with ads.

Our parents never made much fuss about ads. They were just a part of our watching experience. We were never told that we might also be getting brainwashed. In fact, coming from India, ‘entertaining’ ads were a source of nostalgic pride. (They’re not lying, they really are!)

My point is that we need to become aware of the marketers trickery!

For too long, they have worked with psychologists hand in hand to get us to buy their next gimmick. I saw this first hand in my marketing roles where focus groups and A/B tests were run constantly to perfect the message and pitch until the ad was convincing.

There is a reason that ‘fear based marketing’, as it’s known, is the biggest trick in the marketers arsenal.

They feed on our emotions. Hitting us right where it hurts to get us to act and spend on something we don’t really need. They know very well that if they can get us to ‘feel’ it, we’ll buy it.

And the sad truth is that it works. Just look at any of the hundreds of ads on TV bankrupting our wallets and our health.

Poison is often disguised as relief or happiness and sold to us flat out. Look at ads for beer, coke, chips or any other junk commonly promoted on TV. None of it is any good for us. In fact, it does much harm.

But because we were sold a ‘feeling’, we find ourselves reaching for the very poison when shopping. Our emotion driven limbic brain kicks in and suspends all reason.

Realize this - every impression your brain consumes from TV, social media, music etc is a set of instructions inserted into your conscious and eventually subconscious brain. Once a fear or desire has been planted, internal suffering to fulfill the desire or escape the pain and your eventual action - purchase of a good or service - is almost guaranteed.

This is the water that we as the fish 🐟 are all surrounded by!

This is not to say that all advertisements and all marketers are evil. Advertisement is simply a tool for spreading awareness and marketers are good at using this tool. This tool is used by the Red Cross to get donations for a disaster and for Coke to sell you happiness (really poison) in a can.

Just like money, advertising is not evil. It comes down to how it’s used and how it affects its consumers.

Ultimately the responsibility lies with us to raise our consciousness and become aware so that we stop falling prey to the marketers tricks.

What can you do?

The next time you watch an ad on TV, consume a social media post, or simply repeat lyrics to a song -