Sleekit said:
hell, over 80% of people will even "blindly" follow an instruction to kill someone in the right circumstances.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment )
Only if they view the person giving the instruction as a person of authority. We are pack animals so there is that ingrained compulsion to follow authority. The Milgram Experiment would only apply if we saw commercials as authoritative figures. If we do, that would be interesting. Let me know what your thoughts on this are.
I, personally, don't view them as authority. I view them as more of a waste of money than anything because that product is going to be more expensive now than its competitors because the cost of that advertising is now added to the product cost. A Ritz cracker commercial can effectively wet my appetite for a Ritz cracker but what I actually buy is the generic version sitting next to it on the shelf that costs a dollar less. :\
I own a small home business. Home made crafts, buttons, hats etc. I've tried advertising and found I can easily spend more on advertising in a month than I make off of sales. I went into it thinking more advertising means more sales. That was not the case at all. I could have 500 hundred people visit my shop in a day because of my ads and not make a single sale.
What IS effective is word of mouth. Someone mentioning something I make on a forum nets me far more sales than the 30 dollars I spent on ads. Particularly in geek circles.
Here we go back to the Milgram Experiment and the compulsion to follow an authoritative figure. But this person posting on the forum isn't viewed as an authoritative figure. Why would them talking about it sway people? Ah, but they DO have authority.
Hang in there, this gets a bit complicated.
People who embrace a fandom gain something called Cultural Capital in that fandom. You gain this by proving you are as much of a fan or more as everyone else through the things you say, the style you wear, and the things you own. Someone who claims to be in the fandom, but has no cultural capital, are deemed as fake or mocking. This is why people hate hipsters, wannabes, and the "fake fan girls". They claim to be part of a fandom with no cultural capital and we instinctively react negatively to that.
Cultural Capital gives you status among that fandom and status is closely linked to authority. This is why one rabid fan of a tv show mentioning on a forum my button with a quote from that show can get me far more sales than fifty dollars spent on web page advertisements.
This form of advertisement isn't something you can buy though. If the person mentioning it is caught in some way getting something OUT of mentioning it they lose cultural capital and the status that came with it. We call this Selling Out.
So, while my ads do not get me any sales directly, they do get people talking about the things I make. One person with cultural capital mentioning something I make makes the money I spent on the advertising worth it. But it is a hit or miss thing. Luck. I could spend a lot of money on ads and not get one of those influential fans to say anything or it could happen repeatedly.
Celebrities have cultural capital. That's why you often see them in commercials but often when their careers are on the down slope because they're trading in their cultural capital for money. If Nathan Fillion suddenly couldn't get work anywhere he could use his cultural capital to plug Xbox 720. He'd make a lot of money, but he'd be labeled a sell out and lose a lot of cultural capital.
