Friday, March 19, 2010

2. The Analogy of The Cave in Plato's Republic




The bathroom advertisements we see on campus are mostly provided by Zoom Media, a company that promotes itself as "Canada's Leading Targeted Lifestyle Media". Upon learning that this company specifically "targets" it's viewers, we started to question whether choosing targets was an invasive act, or an innocent move to promote good business. In our group, most of us found that these Zoom Media ads were less invasive than some of the others. More specifically, they do not interpellate the subject in the bathroom as directly as some of the aforementioned ads. But the company itself is inviting people to advertise in places that are otherwise associated with privacy.

Zoom Media prides itself on having found the best places to advertise in order to reach their targets. On the Zoom Media website, an interested advertiser can access information on media habits, purchasing power or market concentration of specific demographics such as students, generation X, generation Y, young families, business executives, or teenagers, to name a few. The access to this information is important for successful marketing, but members of the advertised demographics might feel vulnerability, or a loss of privacy when learning that bathroom advertisements are chosen based on their own market behaviour.

The workings of media agencies are largely hidden to the viewers. Most people do not understand the research and statistics that are required to achieve "Targeted Lifestyle Media". These hidden media processes are analogous to the hidden sources of shadows in Plato's Cave. The Cave describes a group of chained prisoners who understand shadows on a cave wall to be reality with no understanding of their source. In regards to bathroom advertising, we see only the ads which are but an imprint of our market behaviour with very little understanding of how that imprint landed upon the wall in our bathroom.

With this in mind, it is important that viewers of advertisements question why advertisements are posted in private places, and what is gained by those advertising in these places.

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