Advertising or Having Public Relations?

What do I know?  Opinion polls matter.  People with lots of money are desperate to find out what they can do (or not do in many cases) to make your life better (or less obviously bad), so that they can be better positioned to get their name in the history books.  When something bad happens to them or theirs, they are going to go to just as much effort to minimize the public backlash by carefully wielding their influence to recast the event in better light.

What happened now?  Maybe that's not the right question.  What could make it worse?  This is an expanding field, crossing the fields of marketing & sales, publishing, psychology, chemistry, politics, and is invading every aspect of our lives.  Many folks have been able to selectively block out these intrusions into their lives, while others are always waiting for the latest instructions from the subversive secret cabal.  This was demonstrated to me by my children's ability to pick up on advertising jingles and commercials.  One of their favorites songs of late is from truth.org's "Magical Amount" commercial.  They were instantly hooked by the animated characters and the word "magic" mentioned in the lyrics.  They wanted to watch it over and over again, so we had a nice little talk about what it really meant.

There's a lot more to talk about here, but I'm having a hard time not getting spun up thinking about it.  Just keep a watchful eye and you'll see more opportunistic product placement and hear more carefully worded quotes than you would have ever thought possible.

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