Objective taste

>As I've posted before, I have literally witnessed 2 Frenchmen get into a fistfight over whether or not a proper cassolet contains goose or not

nope

not getting that one past me pal

>how does advertising rob a food of cultural context
It doesn't.

But if you pay attention you'll see that most foods which tend to be advertised are industrially produced versions which cut corners in some way or another. On the other hand, the traditional superior products simply aren't advertised.

For example: I'm sure you've seen or heard ads for big name brand deli meats like Boar's Head or Oscar Mayer. Well, have you ever seen or heard an ad for Jamon Iberico?

Likewise I'm sure you've seen ads for Kraft Singles and other processed cheeses. You ever seen one for Cato Corner Hooligan?

>But if you pay attention you'll see that most foods which tend to be advertised are industrially produced versions which cut corners in some way or another.

not what you said

>Well, have you ever seen or heard an ad for Jamon Iberico?

yes you pretentious fucking ass

>not what you said
Correct. That wasn't my post, I was just paraphrasing/explaining for you.

>>yes you pretentious fucking ass
Would you say that a premium product like that gets advertised to the same degree as the cheap industrial knockoffs?

I'm not sure why you seem to be so confused here. Do you really not see the correlation between advertising and crappy industrial products?

>Would you say that a premium product like that gets advertised to the same degree as the cheap industrial knockoffs?
shifting the goalposts

>I'm not sure why you seem to be so confused here.
i'm not confused. you're just making a leap. ads are still cultural. cultural products still get mass-produced.

>Do you really not see the correlation between advertising and crappy industrial products?
that is not what you were saying in the first place.

this whole passage
>It's delicious and does not require advertising to sell it. That's my acid test. If you've seen an ad for it then it isn't good food. Because good food is a cultural artifact, not a commodity. Which means good taste always has a cultural context.
clearly implies several things that you are now backpedalling from.

>shifting the goalposts
Nah, just a clarification of a misunderstanding.

>>i'm not confused. you're just making a leap. ads are still cultural. cultural products still get mass-produced.
Missing the point.

>>clearly implies several things that you are now backpedalling from.
Again, that wasn't my post, but I agree with the general idea of what user is saying. Or perhaps what I think he's saying.

It's as simple as:
Cheap knockoff products are highly advertised and are usually tied to big brand names.
The authentic real deal they try to imitate rarely are advertised to anywhere near the same degree.

Is it a perfect rule? Of course not. Are there exceptions? Of course there are. But don't sperg out over nitpicking details and look at the general trend.

it's not a rule with exceptions. the idea that something is only good if it doesn't 'need' advertising is repugnant to me. any product that can be mass-produced can be mass-marketed, and hams and cheeses are perfect examples of that, so when you brought that up it was a total gimme.

there is no direct relationship between something being advertised and it being a 'cheap knockoff'. you're brainwashed by all the other cunt snobs in the world who don't realise how thoroughly commercialised their entire life experience is.

>the idea that something is only good if it doesn't 'need' advertising is repugnant to me.
Why?

>>any product that can be mass-produced can be mass-marketed, and hams and cheeses are perfect examples of that
Sure, they "can" be mass marketed, but they usually aren't. It's an observation: you see countless ads every day for crappy industrial products and you very rarely, if ever, see ads for the good stuff that those commoditized products are based on.

Surely you must agree, for example, that you see many more ads for generic industrial "cheddar" made by big brands like Kraft than would would see ads for a small local producer that still makes their cheese the old-school way.

>>there is no direct relationship between something being advertised and it being a 'cheap knockoff'
Correct. But there is an empirical one that we can observe. And it applies to all things. For example: how many Ferrarri ads did you see this past week compared to ads for Ford, Toyota, or Jimmy's Red Hot Used Car Deals?

>>who don't realise how thoroughly commercialised their entire life experience is.
That's the exact thing I'm arguing *against*. Commercialization has resulted in many people failing to realize the differences between different types of a product. They just see the one commodity name. Keeping up the cheese example, most people would simply be familiar with, say, "cheddar". The idea that there are different types of cheddar with different textures and tastes comes off as snobbish to them.

"good " is subjective
"taste" is subjective (witness the eterneal debate between cilantro/soap tasters)

So no, it' not possible for something to "taste good" objectively.

/thread

you've just changed the argument from a repugnant causative one to a boring correlative one. the fact that a product is advertised does not mean it sucks. the fact that a product sucks does not mean it will be advertised. the fact that a producer feels the need to begin advertising does not mean their product sucks.

there are many mass-produced 'crappy knockoff' products which are not advertised. there are also many premium/artisanal/whateveryouwannacallit products which are. these are not exceptions which prove the rule. you just have the wrong idea about the relationship between commercialisation and quality of food.

i won't dispute that a product scalable to be highly competitive in a generic market like 'cheese' will have to be stripped down to its bare essentials, but that's a different thing to 'advertising'. the post i started arguing with was talking about 'advertising'. you're talking about 'mass-marketing'. it's a different thing. the consistent thing you're doing, however, is conflating the two. and that's fucking stupid.

>you've just changed the argument from a repugnant causative one to a boring correlative one
It was always a correlative one, you just didn't realize that.

>> the fact that a product is advertised does not mean it sucks
No, we just agreed it's correlative after all. But in my observation it's fairly true that the more something is advertised the crappier it is. Applies to food, cars, tools, you name it.

>>there are many mass-produced 'crappy knockoff' products which are not advertised
I agree 100%.

>>there are also many premium/artisanal/whateveryouwannacallit products which are
Yep, and I agree with that too.

>>you just have the wrong idea about the relationship between commercialisation and quality of food.
How so? Can you give a counterexample maybe? I can't think of a single instance in which the highly advertised product is actually better than the premium ones.

>>the post i started arguing with was talking about 'advertising'. you're talking about 'mass-marketing'. it's a different thing.
I agree they are different on a semantic and pedantic level. But let's face it: to the average person (i.e. conversation on a random online forum) the two are pretty much the same thing. This isn't an academic paper on the finer points of advertising. It's a casual conversation on a food forum online. I think the average poster probably sees "mass marketing" and "advertising" as being fairly synonymous in this context.

it's not pedantry you fucktard. unless you have that little faith in the guy you're responding to he should be able to tell the difference between an advertised premium product like roquefort or some shit and cocoa cola. the relationship isn't there. advertising is a tool every producer has the option of using.

and as to the 'it was always correlative' thing, no. that is just the first big way in which you shifted the goalposts. the original poster said 'if you've seen an ad for it then it isn't good food'. the whole rest of that paragraph showed that it wasn't just hyperbole - he clearly thinks that there's a fundamental difference between food that is marketed and food that has developed 'culturally' - my inference is that he means things which have developed out of pre-industrial or otherwise parochial contexts. the reality, however, is that those things are being advertised too, now.

when you took up the mantle of this argument you accepted those claims as your own, and they clearly aren't what you actually believe. what's true is that mass-marketed products are often of low quality. there's a strong correlation there. there is not a strong one when it comes to whether or not those products will have advertising.

There's no accounting for taste.

Great post

This was a good post, thank you user

>what's true is that mass-marketed products are often of low quality

Phew. That took ages. I'm glad we're finally on the same page. You can stop all your pedantic rambling now.

And that is not what the original post said.

>And that is not what the original post said.
Sure it did. You just missed the forest because of the trees.

Try turning down your pedantic and sperg dials and turn up your common sense.

If it requires advertising to sell it's not that good to begin with. Think about it. What foods do you see ads for? Convenience shit and fast food. Shit like breakfast cereal, salad dressing in a bottle, Coca-Cola, Budweiser and McDonald's. They are cultural icons, but as business and advertising triumphs, not as good food. You don't see advertisements for Pastrami on rye, Neapolitan (or Roman) pizza or cassoulet, because good food is not something that can be marketed from the top down. It's not a commodity. It comes from the culture, not the corporate test kitchen.It's completely undermined by concerns over cost cutting, mass production and shelf stability. The kind of food created with those priorities requires advertising to sell.
>even in those cultures there is very little consensus as to the "proper way" to make a given dish.
Correct, but at least there's consensus on what those dishes are, what order they might be served in to make a proper meal and what beverages would accomplish it. Watching people from these countries argue over the little details is so striking because it's only possible to get so heated about minutiae when you have a larger agreement on the big picture.
>The idea that one breed of animal tastes different than another is a foreign concept.
The supermarket is the enemy of good taste. Because it sets the standards at mass produced commodity grade shit. And as a result you have an entire generation thinking bread comes sliced in plastic bags, pork chops are dry and tough, chicken breast has no flavor and pasta sauce and salad dressing comes in jars and bottles. And vegetables LOOK perfect, but are watery and flavorless. That's the norm, and it's a shit norm. If you want good taste you have to look elsewhere. Same is true for chain restaurants.

Common sense would lead me to infer that he *could* mean something other than what he says. Basic rationality would prevent me from assuming that he does. You lack the latter.

And here you go. Another post consolidating the idea that advertised products are inherently mass marketed and so inherently inferior. Thanks for vindicating my interpretation of your idiotic idea.

>. Basic rationality would prevent me from assuming that he does.

Why? Didn't we already both agree that it is ludicrous to believe that the act of advertising something must necessarily degregate it's quality? Given that the only possible assumption is that it is a correlative argument.

>Another post consolidating the idea that advertised products are inherently mass marketed and so inherently inferior.

And we can see from casual observation that is, in fact, true most of the time.

>Another post consolidating the idea that advertised products are inherently mass marketed and so inherently inferior.
In theory there is no reason for this to be the case, but it practice it's almost ALWAYS true. Finding a mass produced and mass marketed product that's really good is a very rare thing. I'd have to really give it some thought to come up with a list of them. Can't even come up with one off the top of my head.

But even if I accept that mass marketed products are inferior often enough for reasonable discrimination, that's not the same as advertising. Advertising applies to almost every level of the marketplace. Not just Budweiser but so many other products with which it competes.

I settled on the face value interpretation of what he was saying because it was clear and consolidated with several reinforcing statements. What he said is just wrong. What you said is *less* wrong, but it's not what he said.

There are a few cardinal tastes that instinctively appeal to humans; fatty, salty, sweet and umami (meaty taste from glutamates), as these are typically the hallmarks of safe and edible food. If a foodstuff contains significant quantities of either, it would have a very high chance of being considered delicious due to appealing to our instinctive needs, perhaps even a delicacy (e.g. muktuk for Inuits, or caviar for Russians).

Beyond that, however, cultural practices and local environment would dictate the particulars of a society's cuisine based on what food was available from foraging and farming, with intercultural trade providing luxuries. Rare ingredients would indeed be prized above others, such as spices. Thus, it is necessary to consider the greater context of a society's history, anthropology and geography when studying the standards of its cuisine.

>I settled on the face value interpretation of what he was saying because it was clear and consolidated with several reinforcing statements.
And yet we know now you were incorrect, given both my explanation as well as the original poster coming back in >>Advertising applies to almost every level of the marketplace.
To the average person "advertising" is synonymous with "mass marketing".

>>Not just Budweiser but so many other products with which it competes.
That's a great example of the difference in magnitude here. Everyone knows Bud ads. Some of them are even famous like the Bud...Weis....Er one with the frogs. They're fucking everywhere. But compare that to how often you see ads for traditional or microbrews? Sure, they do exist. But they're far less prevalent than the big brands.

It's not much of a stretch to say that the more prevalent the advertising is the worse the product is.

I don't see how you can read that other post he made more recently and conclude that my interpretation was incorrect. He doubled down on it.

Each individual mass marketed product has a higher advertising budget and do more slots in more universal media. But that is still competing with a plurality of other, higher quality products with a small individual market share. So the ratio of adverts you see is not as heavily weighted towards mass market products as you are claiming.

Good posts like this instill hope in me that Veeky Forums isn't all garbage. Thanks user.

That entire post ( ) was an empirical description. It's what we observe when we look at what foods are out there. The cheap industrial knockoffs are heavily advertised while the higher end products are not (or at least not to anywhere near as large a degree).

You are missing the forest because of the trees yet again. Is English not your first language, perhaps?

My point is the kinds of products advertising applies to are inherently not good. Because good food isn't branded most of the time. Once you get to the point of branding stuff it's been stepped on my concerns other than quality. What makes a great brand is a very different set of criteria than what makes good food.
>the more prevalent the advertising is the worse the product is.
This is something I made it a point to stress to my sons when we watched TV together when they were kids. The more heavily advertised a product is the more useless it's likely to be. What do you see ads for on television? When my boys were kids it was mostly crappy plastic toys, breakfast cereals, fast food, the toilet paper that claims to be the softest, fucking air fresheners and overpriced luxury cars. None of that is shit anyone needs. None of it is really all that good. There'd be no real market for it without advertising. No one would choose to drink Bud Light based on the quality of the product. It's the most popular beer in America just because advertising has made it a default choice for many when they think "beer".

Fpbp, thank you for this one, user.

>My point is the kinds of products advertising applies to are inherently not good.

And that's absolutely wrong.

Can you post a counterexample of a product which is heavily advertised yet actually is good?

Not OP, but what an entirely useless post unless you're going to suggest why, faggot. Most of that seemed pretty on point to me.

Stfu you enormously pedantic faggot. His point is well clear

If you're talking national brands it's true, because stuff made by Nestle, Unilever, Kellog's, Tyson, Hormel and their ilk is awful. The branded food that's actually good, like some of the Bob's Red Mill products or Brooklyn Lager beer is such a small segment of the market as to barely be relevant. And really good stuff like fresh seafood, heirloom tomatoes and vegetables are rarely sold under brand names, and when they are they're usually shitty examples.

Wine is a good illustration of this. Good wine comes with labels that tell you the chateau or bodega that produced it, the region, sometimes the grape(s), the country of origin and the alcohol content. But not a brand name. When you see wine with a brand name it's usually shit like Yellowtail or Whispering Angel.

There are a few exceptions, but overwhelmingly branded food is mediocre at best.

I'm not the guy you're replying to, but I do agree with him and I think it's very self-evident. I'll go step by step:

>>cost of ingredients
I do agree that sometimes times better ingredients are more costly. But that is far from the end of it. A lot of great ingredients can be had for very little money: fresh vegetables from a home garden or wild-gathered. Fresh-caught fish. Wild game you hunted yourself, wild-picked mushrooms or berries, and so on can be had for very little money and are often better than expensive premium stuff flown in from halfway around the world.

>>Time and number of steps
Time or number of steps have no correlation to the quality of a dish. Yes, some very complex dishes might take a long time to make. Good cured meats alone can take months if not years. But it takes very little time to pull a salmon out of the river when you're out camping and pan-fry the fillets on your campfire. The majority of stir-fry dishes take only a couple of minutes (at most) to cook. A good piece of meat (or fish) needs only basic cooking for it to turn out delicious. Many things don't even require cooking: some really good wild berries picked off a bush can be god-tier with no work whatsoever. In fact one of the things you'll see a lot of high-end chefs talk about is that when you have really good ingredients you don't need to do much to them to make them shine.

>But "fresh" isn't always best
>uses fish as an example

You're a fucking retard. Any time some retard argues about freshness not being best, I die a little inside. Having a good pickle doesn't negate the fact that the freshness of an ingredient is what brings out the most flavor.

Fish is the worst example since it is the prime example of a food which deteriorates in taste in quality after time of death. I'm sorry, but if you seriously argue that fish which is aged or fermented, something which increases the odor, growth of bacteria and revolting ammonia smell then you should never EVER set foot in a professional kitchen and swear on your mother's grave you will never serve seafood to another human being.

This. Some things that have become emblematic of good taste are scarce and require a lot of time and or effort to make. Aged cheese, vintage wines and truffles are great examples. But a lot of great food is just good quality ingredients shown off simply.

The myth that the really good stuff requires a lot of time and money to acquire exists to make the person pouring bottled dressing over salad from a bag while heating up a frozen pizza feel like they can't do any better, so they keep buying that shit.

>Thisfuckingguy.jpeg

It's clearly wrong, too.

>>doesn't negate the fact that the freshness of an ingredient is what brings out the most flavor.

Sure, freshness is important for many things. Perhaps even most things. But my point was that it's absurd to insist that fresh is always best. What about cured hams? Cheeses? Liquor? Dry-aged steak? Where would those foods be without a deliberate process that is very far from being "fresh"?

>>Fish is the worst example
Educate yourself bro. I'm not making this up. A lot of the highest-end sushi really is deliberately aged in order to improve the taste and texture of the fish. Of course it's not rotten or literally fermented. The conditions are carefully controlled just like that for aging meat.
Here's a documentary about the Tsujkiji fish market which mentions that:
youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-CqnTSvUo

>really good stuff like fresh seafood, heirloom tomatoes and vegetables are rarely sold under brand names

Kek could you be more wrong

>the difference between an advertised premium product like roquefort or some shit and cocoa cola
There's a huge difference. Coca-Cola is a brand name owned by a major corporation. Only the Coca-Cola company can sell the stuff. And they have a huge advertising budget to sell it. Roquefort cheese is not a brand. It's a protected designation of origin. No corporation owns it. It's a government designation that assures the product was made in a specific region and conforms to the standards it must in order to bear that name. When you go to buy Roquefort you look for that name instead of whatever particular brand it's sold under speaks volumes, because that regional designation is a far better indicator of quality than any particular brand name.

And both are advertised. Thanks for proving my point

Who gives a shit if both are advertised?

What matters is the degree. I can barely breathe without seeing a coca-cola ad somewhere. I've never in my life seen an ad for DOP Roquefort.

You just keep getting caught up on pedantics and missing the big picture, don't you?

Advertised products are still perfectly likely to be good products. That is the point.

>That is the point.
No. That's you getting hung up on semantics again. Nobody is making that point other than you.

Someone made the opposite of that point, and I corrected him.

Maybe advertised by the retailer in whatever circular they use to hawk their weekly specials. But because no corporation owns the name Roquefort you're very unlikely to see ads for it they way you see ads for Coca-Cola, because there's no corporate ad budget to pay for it.

You are more likely to see an ad for Coca Cola during the Super Bowl than for Roquefort, that's true. But that's not the point. Someone came into a thread about objective indicators of quality and pitched non-advertisement as one. That is thoroughly, categorically wrong.

So why haven't you responded to yet?

And why are you hung up on this issue of "advertising at all" as opposed to the magnitude of advertising aka mass marketing?

We already established long ago that the idea of advertising suddenly changing the nature of a product was ludicrous and therefore obviously not the point, but you're back at it again, suck in a pedantic rut. Go back and read again, as well as the two posts after it.

I thought we had moved past this semantic shit and then you drop right back in it again.

This point is wrong. Advertising pretty much requires corporate $$, and corporations only sink money into brands they own. And by the time a food product has been reduced to a corporate brand it's been stepped on enough that it isn't all that good when compared to actually good examples of that product. Because you have to cut corners to mass produce and market a product.

I think Captain Pedantic's point is that at some point any food is "advertised". If I walk up to a mom-n-pop cheese shop in France and they have a sign up mentioning they have Mimolette for sale then our good buddy Capn' Pedant is going to say that's an example of how a good product is indeed "advertised".

You're dealing with a sperg who has become fixated on a particular literal definition. No amount of rationally or reason is going to break through.

>Someone came into a thread about objective indicators of quality and pitched non-advertisement as one. That is thoroughly, categorically wrong.
That was me, and I stand by it in concept. Advertising is a great indicator of product quality. The more heavily a food product is advertised the more you can be sure it's trash. You can find examples of advertising for many unlikely things to say any product sold has some level of advertising behind it. But how much advertising is used to sell a product remains a great indicator of quality.

Keep telling me the guy didn't make the point he made and continued to make, it's very clearly evident that he did.

Slippery slope argument. Advertising exists at a wide range of different budget levels. The kouign amann I bought at a farmers market in guenrouet this summer was advertised all around Brittany. Mass marketing is not a precondition for advertising.

I got that. Usually this board isn't this autistic, so it took me a little while to get where he was coming from.

And that's you shifting the goalposts. Once you concede that advertising exists for a wide range of high quality products, your initial argument is gone. Obliterated.

>it's very clearly evident that he did.
Your reading comprehension is beyond awful.

>kouign amann I bought at a farmers market in guenrouet this summer was advertised all around Brittany.
And do you think that's even remotely comparable to, say, Budweiser beer or Kraft cheese?

>>Mass marketing is not a precondition for advertising.
This is going to be my third attempt at this since the first two apparently didn't get through your sperghead:
we. are. talking. about. mass. marketing.
the only person in this thread making a distinction between "advertising" and "mass marketing" is you.

see Did I call that shit or what?

If you read where I first brought up advertising it was here My point is a lot of what's in the supermarket wouldn't sell at all without advertising. Those are what I mean by shit food. I'm talking mass produced national brands here with big corporate ad budgets behind them.

>And that's you shifting the goalposts
Nah, that's you misunderstanding what was claimed before.

We told you this already. Why are you still repeating your spergisms? Stop that.

>Did I call that shit or what?
You turned a shades of grey concept into a black and white thing by completely missing the point. Good job.

You said if it requires advertising to sell it, it's not a good product. Do you actually think no one would buy Coca Cola without ads? If it was just on the shelves and spread through word of
Mouth, it would still sell units. You don't distinguish between high and low quality by the use of advertising in its marketing strategy. That is a fools errand.

>You turned a shades of grey concept into a black and white thing by completely missing the point

I did neither. I was just happy that I accurately predicted how you were going to talk about a little shop in France being an example of "advertising"

It's an example of advertising because it advertised.

>Do you actually think no one would buy Coca Cola without ads?

Nobody? That's a reach for sure. Would their sales drop immensely? You bet.

Thankfully we don't need absolutes here, we only need trends.

>It's an example of advertising because it advertised.
Yeah, I know. That's why I was so sure you were going to mention it. I can see you just can't manage to separate the concepts of magnitude of marketing vs the mere existence of it. I can see your sperghead can't handle that concept so I was sure what was going to be posted next.

Why are you still hung up on the mere concept of muh advertising? We've already made it clear, multiple times, that this is about magnitude. Why do you keep repeating mistakes that you've already been corrected on?

And the trends don't categorically suppprt your point. Many enormous brands don't even need advertising. Many small, high quality products do. Advertising and mass marketing are not synonymous.

>Do you actually think no one would buy Coca Cola without ads?
Yes. Coca-Cola, Bud Light, McDonald's and Malboro cigarettes back in the day are all products that advertised and distributed themselves into being positioned as the default choice for their category of product. Consumers purchase them unthinkingly and consume them the same way. Their quality doesn't matter one bit, as long as they're the same every time and available everywhere. If Coca-Cola weren't in the position of familiar default my guess is most folks who drink it now probably wouldn't. Because if you taste it critically it's really not very good.
I didn't. I said it's an indicator in a quantitative way - the heavier the product relies on advertising to sell the crappier the product.

The original post was about the mere existence of advertising, which was 100% wrong. Now you've shifted it to being about mass marketing, which is a different thing, and you're selectively conflating the two to provide a somewhat incoherent, watered down version of the original argument. I've already said I believe mass marketing is a more accurate indicator. It's still not as accurate as you're saying, and you also clearly think that advertising and mass marketing are highly interrelated - which they aren't, as much as you think

>And the trends don't categorically suppprt your point.
They don't have to support it "categorically". They just have to hold most of the time. We've discussed several examples in this thread and nobody has yet to challenge them.

Oh, and that reminds me. I've asked you a question twice already and you have yet to reply. Let's try it again:
>>Advertising and mass marketing are not synonymous.
Yes! Captain Pedant Sir!
We've been over this before, user. This isn't an academic paper on marketing. In casual conversation they are the same fucking thing.

I'm not talking about whether they would be the 'default brand' without advertising. The fact is that th y would still sell, and so the point that 'a product that need some advertising to sell is a bad product' is a weak one. Not a strong relationship. Advertising is not a crutch for quality.

>Advertising is not a crutch for quality.

I disagree. Ask most people why they brought a certain brand of something. I will bet you dollars to doughnuts that you will never get an answer of "well, I tried every option out there in a double-blind study and I chose this one as my favorite". Whatever answer you get can be tracked back to marketing one way or another. And if you don't get an answer--which is common too--that's an even stronger indication that the person relies on subliminal rather than objective means for making purchase decisions.

I don't care what the 'highest end sushi joints' do, the 'highest end' sushi for centuries has been fermented fish, the highest end sashimi now is the toxin-filled liver of a blowfish and being high end doesn't make the practice correct.

Maybe if you actually handled seafood, been to fish markets and learned something about fish you would understand why freshness is important. The taste between a freshly caught fish and a day old fish itself is even night and day.

I'd also add the term 'educate yourself' is an oxymoron which is used by the simple minded, try not to lose it when you want to type up your pretentious pseudo-intellectual drivel.

The original post was me, and I said the product requires advertising to sell is what makes it bad.
>Advertising is not a crutch for quality.
It ABSOLUTELY is. McDonald's, Coca-Cola and Bud Light are perfect examples of really poor quality products people consume because advertising has made them seem totally normal, and people usually just buy whatever seems normal. Even people who know better. Even people who know there are better burgers and drinks out there still buy these products because it's just a normal thing to do. That's advertising.

I think you need to educate yourself on the definition of an oxymoron. Does the sentence, "I educated myself on the definition of the word oxymoron using a dictionary", contradict itself anywhere? Then it's not an oxymoron.

Considering nothing is objective, no.

He obviously thinks there's a contradiction in the idea of educating yourself. Like it necessarily involves an educator and educatee

>Even people who know there are better burgers and drinks out there still buy these products because it's just a normal thing to do. That's advertising.

no it's not.

mcdonalds is everywhere and it's fast as fuck and people do actually enjoy the product. that's marketing.

advertising is about awareness and brand recognition. it does not make people buy the products, take off your tinfoil hat.

>Maybe if you actually handled seafood, been to fish markets and learned something about fish you would understand why freshness is important. The taste between a freshly caught fish and a day old fish itself is even night and day.

you obviously don't know as much about fish as you think you do.

>mcdonalds is everywhere and it's fast as fuck and people do actually enjoy the product.
I doubt that many people actually enjoy the product beyond the first bite or two. This is stuff people eat mindlessly, and usually very quickly because it gets disgusting once it comes to room temp. Enjoyment is much less a factor in the McDonald's experience than convenience, price, familiarity and positive feelings about the brand.
>advertising is about awareness and brand recognition. it does not make people buy the products
Yeah, it fucking does. Very few people buy stuff while thinking critically about their purchases. When it's time to grab a bite to eat you're not analyzing which place will give you the best food experience for dollars spent. You're thinking about what you FEEL like eating. And that is totally determined by how you relate to the brand. For some McDonald's is a treat, for others it's a routine thing, and for others it's something beneath them that would be degrading to eat beyond maybe a guilty pleasure once in a long while. How you feel about the brand has a lot to do with marketing, though in the case of McDonald's it also has to do with a lot of negative press about them over the last few decades. A lot of middle class people see it as trashy and kinda ghetto, which has opened up the door to the fast casual thing. People who might have been McDonald's customers a few decades ago now choose Five Guys or Shake Shack because the identify more with those ever so slightly more upscale brands. And that is advertising. At the end of the day the choice to eat at McDonald's has a lot less to do with whether or not you objectively LIKE it than whether or not you consider yourself the kind of person who eats there. How you FEEL about the brand. And where does that perception come from? Experience? If you think about how much time most people spend engaged with the brand advertising counts for as much if not more than actually eating the stuff.

>I doubt that many people actually enjoy the product beyond the first bite or two.

people don't buy products they don't like

>Enjoyment is much less a factor in the McDonald's experience than convenience, price, familiarity and positive feelings about the brand.

those all contribute to enjoyment and they are to do with marketing as a whole, not specifically advertising.

>Yeah, it fucking does. Very few people buy stuff while thinking critically about their purchases. When it's time to grab a bite to eat you're not analyzing which place will give you the best food experience for dollars spent.

citation needed you mong

do you seriously think people are not considering the options available and choosing the one they're gonna get most satisfaction from? you're pretentious as fuck if you think the world around you is so unthinking and uncritical.

all this shit about advertising is just pulled out of your ass. if you see an ad for coke, buy it and it tastes like shit you're not gonna buy coke just because of the ad dude.

>you're pretentious as fuck if you think the world around you is so unthinking and uncritical.
topkek. I'm being realistic. People do not have the energy to put critical thought into the trivial decisions they make, like where they're gonna grab lunch. So it isn't a matter of thought, it's almost always a matter of feelings. I FEEL like McDonald's today. And I'm not claiming to be any better than this shit. I don't identify as the kind of person who ever eats there, and as a result it's been nearly 20 years since I have. I'm the guy who searches out mom and pop joints, even if they look a little sketch. Because I see myself as the kind of guy who supports indie businesses. And what a surprise, both me and my wife are self-employed. So my emotional bias runs that way. I'll admit it. My point is that when it comes to casual food purchases emotion plays a much greater role than objective thinking about what you actually consider good food. You either feel good about going to McDonald's or you don't, and THAT'S what determines whether or not you do. Not the actual quality of the food, which is pretty poor.

Also who the fuck is really paying attention to what they're eating when sucking down a fast food burger in their fucking car? No one.

>eople do not have the energy to put critical thought into the trivial decisions they make, like where they're gonna grab lunch

they don't have the time or energy to do it exhaustively, but they can put critical thought into what they eat. literally everyone is constantly talking about what they've eaten and what they should eat next, it's probably like 30% of all conversation.

>My point is that when it comes to casual food purchases emotion plays a much greater role than objective thinking

that's fine, i don't disagree with that. but people do eat mcdonalds because they enjoy eating it. i mean, mcdonalds hasn't managed to advertise its way out of a shit reputation, but people still eat there because it sits at a nexus of convenience and satisfaction and they KNOW that. advertising can only support a product people actually enjoy.

>people don't buy products they don't like
Sure they do. People weigh all sorts of factors when making a purchase decision and taste for food is just one of them. How many times have you eaten food that you didn't really care for simply because of factors like cost or convenience?

For example, I generally don't like most fast food. I think it doesn't taste very good. In my experience it's guaranteed mediocrity. But when I'm traveling on business? You bet I eat fast food. I do that not because I like it, but because of convenience and speed.

>>do you seriously think people are not considering the options available and choosing the one they're gonna get most satisfaction from?
Yes. I have this issue all the time with my co-workers. Most of them honestly don't care where they eat. One of them makes his decisions based on who has the best Wi-fi. Another decides based on the closest starbucks to the restaurant. The other two honestly don't care one way or the other.

>ow many times have you eaten food that you didn't really care for simply because of factors like cost or convenience?
only ever when i've been eating for fuel or presented with severely limited options have i ever chosen to eat something i don't enjoy.

>For example, I generally don't like most fast food. I think it doesn't taste very good. In my experience it's guaranteed mediocrity.
i don't really believe you. i don't have a boner for fast food at all but the once in a couple months i do eat a mcdonalds i thoroughly enjoy it.

>Yes. I have this issue all the time with my co-workers. Most of them honestly don't care where they eat. One of them makes his decisions based on who has the best Wi-fi. Another decides based on the closest starbucks to the restaurant. The other two honestly don't care one way or the other.
well, that's not really got anything to do with advertising, has it?