Tuesday, 16 December 2014

Does 'Advertising' really exist?


A lot of articles, I have noticed, say things like, “Advertising needs to go under a revolution


Or, “when will advertising evolve?”

Or, “When will advertising realize what’s wrong?

Such a situation is called a category error. It is an error in the thinking process. Because, in the actual world, there is no such thing called “advertising”. “Advertisements” is the word. Advertising is the main thing and the people who make them as in advertising agencies in new Delhi. But advertising, which is a grouping of all this, is only a concept in our heads. It does not exist in the actual world.

Gilbert Ryle explains this error as follows.

A student’s mother tells him she wants to see his university. The student takes his mother to the Science building, the Arts building, the English literature building, cafeteria, administration offices. Still, at the end of the tour, his mother says, “the buildings are all very nice but I still haven’t seen your university.”

Gibert Ryle the category error is categorizing physical things into a category/concept and assuming that the category/concept actually exists in the actual world. But obviously it doesn't it is just a concept, not something tangible.

One cannot change a concept like it’s something physical and tangible. You cannot say “University needs to change and sit back and wait for it to change.
You have to determine which part needs to actually be changed and physically change it. For example, you can’t say, “English building you need to change.”

Same is the case with Advertising.

Sitting in your office and saying “Advertising needs to undergo a change” will not change it. You need to physically fix things. And, perhaps, the only thing you have control over is your own work, you can start with changing that. 

Pleading a non-existent, indeterminate “advertising” to change will not change it, since it does not exist in the real world. Advertisements are the ones that actually exist. Changing the advertisements will actually make a physical change. Doing that, you will have actually made a difference in the physical world.

I will, here, quote an infamous saying by Gandhi here, “We must become the change we want to see.”

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