{"id":1228,"date":"2012-11-23T17:52:35","date_gmt":"2012-11-23T12:22:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/teekhapan.wordpress.com\/?p=1228"},"modified":"2012-11-23T17:52:35","modified_gmt":"2012-11-23T12:22:35","slug":"ads-everywhere-do-we-want-a-society-where-everythings-for-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/2012\/11\/23\/ads-everywhere-do-we-want-a-society-where-everythings-for-sale\/","title":{"rendered":"Ads everywhere: Do we want a society where everything\u2019s for sale?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nVivek Kaul\u00a0<\/strong>
\nInnovation is a weird word. It means different things to different people. For people working in the marketing department of a newspaper it sometimes means an advertisement which makes it difficult for the readers to read the newspaper.
\nIt could mean a sidebar before the front page which makes holding the newspaper difficult. Or it could mean a newspaper smelling in a particular way on a particular day. It could also mean an advertisement as the front page of the newspaper, something that can really get the regular reader irritated.
\nAnd at times it could mean an advertisement being splashed across different stories that appear on the front page of the newspaper.\u00a0 Most editions of\u00a0The Times of India, for example,<\/i>have one such advertisement of Britannia Good Day biscuits.
\nWhen money becomes the be all and end all of all decisions in life market values tend to crowd out non market values.
\nThe advertisement comes with a\u00a0 tagline\u00a0har ghante ek tola sona khanke<\/i>. Five gold biscuits with Good Day printed in their middle are spread through the front page of the newspaper.
\nOne such Britannia gold biscuit in the Mumbai edition of the newspaper appears bang in the middle of a story about a twin murder, where a father strangled his two kids and tried to kill himself.
\nSurely, the marketing department that places the ads would not have known that a gruesome story would be wrapping the biscuits. Nor could the advertiser have known that his ad may appear at an inappropriate place.
\nThe issue does not relate just to print advertising. Ads placed on internet sites \u2013 including possibly this publication \u2013 may sometimes send the reading public that money can buy everything. This is how mishaps occur. Also are brands as big as Britannia is okay with advertising themselves in such a way? Bang in the middle of the story of a father strangulating his kids and then trying to kill himself. Is this the association that they want to build for themselves? Or has it all become about hit and run where you can just put an advertisement one day and forget about it the next day?
\nThe question is can money buy everything now? This clearly seems to be the issue in this case.
\nI recently spoke to Michael Sandel, the foremost political philosopher of our times, who is a professor at Harvard University. A part of this\u00a0interview appeared in the\u00a0Daily News and Analysis<\/i><\/a>. Sandel has most recently written\u00a0What Money Can\u2019t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets<\/i>.
\nAs Sandel put it, \u201cThe last three decades have been a period of market triumphalism\u2026We have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. And the difference is this. A market economy is a valuable and effective tool for organising productie activity. And market economy has brought prosperity and affluence to countries around the world. A market society is different. A market society is a place where almost everything is up for sale. It\u2019s a way of life in which society uses markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods.\u201d
\nThe Britannia gold biscuit advertisement is a part of this larger phenomenon. Even a story of a father killing his two daughters and then trying to kill himself is \u2013 inadvertently \u2013 up for sale. As long as some money can be made, nothing else really matters.
\nAnd this is a phenomenon visible at other places as well, even temples. You don\u2019t want to stand in the long queue at the Siddhivinayak temple in Mumbai; you can just pay a few hundred rupees extra and beat the queue. Other temples across the country allow you specialdarshan<\/i>\u00a0if you can pay a little extra. Religion and god have been turned into a perfect business model which never goes out of fashion. Ask those who paid Rs 2,000 to get\u00a0darshan o<\/i>f Nirmal Baba.
\nSandel gave me an interesting example of\u00a0 Pope Benedict XVI on his first visit to the United States. \u201cWhen Pope Benedict XVI made his first visit to the United States, free tickets were distributed through local parishes. But the demand for tickets far exceeded the supply of seats. And soon a market for those tickets started to develop and one ticket sold online for more than $200. Church officials condemned this on the grounds that you cannot pay to celebrate a sacrament. Turning what are essentially sacred goods into what are essentially instruments of profits values them in the wrong way.\u201d
\nThis phenomenon has even been visible everywhere from war to even medicines. \u201cIn Iraq and Afghanistan there were more paid military private contractors on the ground than US military troops. We never had a public debate whether we wanted to outsource war to private companies,\u201d said Sandel. \u201cOr consider the aggressive marketing of prescription drugs by pharmaceutical companies in rich countries. The funny thing is if you have ever seen the television commercials that accompany the evening news in the United States, you might come around to believing that the greatest health crisis in the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping sickness, but erectile dysfunction,\u201d he added.
\nWhen money becomes the be-all and end-all of all decisions in life, market values tend to crowd out non-market values. Let me explain this through an example narrated to me by Sandel. \u201cSome years ago in Switzerland they were trying to decide where to locate a nuclear waste site\u2026.There was a small town that seemed to be the likely place for the nuclear place site. The residents of the town were asked to, in a survey carried out by economists\u2026if they would vote to accept a nuclear waste site in their community, if the Swiss Parliament decided to build it there. Around 51 percent, or a little over half of the respondents, said they would accept it.\u201d
\nThe economists then asked a second question. \u201cThey asked the residents of the community that suppose the parliament proposed building the nuclear waste facility in their community and at the same time offered to compensate them with an annual monetary payment, would they still favour it? You might sense that the number would have gone up to 80 or 90 percent but in fact the opposite happened. The support went down and not up. Adding the financial inducement to the offer reduced the rate of acceptance to 25 percent from the earlier 51 percent. Even when the economists upped the monetary incentive further the decision of the people did not change. The residents stood firm even when they were offered yearly cash payments of $8,700, which was more than the median monthly income of the area.\u201d
\n<\/i>So what is the moral of the story? \u201cThis is an illustration in which a cash payment can crowd out a non market value. When the people were asked to make a sacrifice for a common good without paying them the majority said yes out of a sense of civic responsibility. But when they were asked to change their mind (with money) many of them said we didn\u2019t want to be bribed. The offer of money changed the character of the offer.\u201d
\nA similar thing could be happening with the sale of advertising space in newspapers to the highest bidder. If Goliath sets a trend, the Davids are more than likely to follow.
\nAnd in this case it isn\u2019t really a good trend. Do you want newspaper readers reading the story of a father killing his daughters and feeling disturbed by it or do you want them looking at the Britannia Gold biscuit ad which appears bang in the middle of the story and thinking maybe even I can win them? Do we want to build a society that is sensitive to what is happening around it? Or do we want to build a society which thinks of winning gold biscuits all the time?
\nAs Sandel put it, \u201cMost people would agree that there is a difference between prostitution, which is paid sex, and non-instrumental and non-monetised sexual intimacy\u2026 So do we want a society where everything is up for sale? Or are there certain moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy?\u201d
\nAnd that is something worth thinking about.
\nThe article<\/a> originally appeared on November 23, 2012 on www.firstpost.com<\/a>
\nVivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at vivek.kaul@gmail.com. He has worked for the Times Group in the past.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vivek Kaul\u00a0 Innovation is a weird word. It means different things to different people. For people working in the marketing department of a newspaper it sometimes means an advertisement which makes it difficult for the readers to read the newspaper. It could mean a sidebar before the front page which makes holding the newspaper difficult. … <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"qubely_global_settings":"","qubely_interactions":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,14,33],"tags":[539,1455,2294,2521,3353,3743,3977],"qubely_featured_image_url":null,"qubely_author":{"display_name":"Vivek Kaul","author_link":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/author\/vivekkaul\/"},"qubely_comment":0,"qubely_category":"Analysis<\/a> Business<\/a> Firstpost<\/a>","qubely_excerpt":"Vivek Kaul\u00a0 Innovation is a weird word. It means different things to different people. For people working in the marketing department of a newspaper it sometimes means an advertisement which makes it difficult for the readers to read the newspaper. It could mean a sidebar before the front page which makes holding the newspaper difficult.…","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vivekkaul.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}