Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 When they're standing in front of that vending machine, they're not consciously thinking sex, but they're feeling sex and they're pressing the button to get the same brain chemistry effect they were taught to experience by the advertising.
That's how advertising really works, and that's what advertisers will almost never admit to you. Why do you think there's so much sex in advertising? Sex sells. Everybody knows that, but few people are willing to admit the process by which sex sells. It's a process of association. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And don't trust the advertising, either. It seems that the more money a company has for advertising, the crappier their products are. (Which makes sense, actually, because higher margins on crap products leave more money to spend on advertising and sponsorship.)
Truly, some of the best companies I found at the show do no advertising at all and couldn't afford it anyway because they only have a 12% margin on their raw materials. Those are the companies I like to promote, and you'll see me listing a lot of them here in upcoming reviews.
You stuck us in the basement? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This is the purpose of advertising, of course: To increase sales of drugs, not -- as is claimed by Big Pharma and the FDA -- to "educate" patients about medical treatments.
75 percent agreed that the allowing of drug advertising has resulted in the over-prescribing of pharmaceuticals. Fifty-nine percent said the government should restrict pharmaceutical advertising, and 26 percent said they "strongly agree" with such restrictions.
Direct-to-consumer advertising is the bread and butter of Big Pharma, and it is the primary reason the industry has exploded its revenues and influence since 1998. |
Ann N. Martin
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 Where Is Truth in advertising?
Pet food advertising shows prime cuts of beef, plump chickens, whole grains, and fresh vegetables. Pet food manufacturers want us to believe that these are the healthy wholesome ingredients used in their products. This has been very bothersome to me, and I have often questioned where is the "truth" in advertising?
I approached the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States, and Industry Canada requesting that they investigate the advertising undertaken by pet food companies. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| That's how advertising really works, and that's what advertisers will almost never admit to you. Why do you think there's so much sex in advertising? Sex sells. Everybody knows that, but few people are willing to admit the process by which sex sells. It's a process of association. It's pure Pavlovian psychology -- the same thing as teaching a dog to drool when he hears a bell or teaching a lab rat to press a lever in exchange for food. You can teach human beings to press buttons, spend money, buy a certain clothing label or wear a certain brand of cosmetics. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 This week, the Annals of Family Medicine published an analysis of popular drug advertisements that concluded the ads essentially lie to the public about the benefits of pharmaceuticals while utterly ignoring alternative health strategies like dietary or lifestyle changes.
The advertising practices of drug companies are so outrageous that even David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, penned an editorial condemning them. |
Abram Hoffer, PhD, MD, FRCP(C) and Dr. Jonathan Prousjy, DPHE, DSC, ND, FRSH
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 This will be very difficult because an enormous advertising industry drives home the message that all these foods are good for you. They emphasize that sweet is healthy. Public education will have to displace all that commercial advertising. We would recommend that advertising for junk foods should be placed in the same category as advertising for tobacco, alcohol, and addicting drugs.
Modern high-quality nutrition depends upon the combination of good nutritional education and an adequate supply of foods, so that the education can be applied to the selection of a healthy diet. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 No reasonable person could possibly believe that drug companies should advertising prescription drugs to patients who don't have medical qualifications to even understand if they should use those drugs in the first place. The idea of pushing these drugs to patients so that they go to their doctors and request them by name is medically reckless. It has no medical basis whatsoever. It is clearly just a ploy that was approved by the FDA to financially benefit the drug companies at the expense of public health. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Why do you think there's so much sex in advertising? Sex sells. Everybody knows that, but few people are willing to admit the process by which sex sells. It's a process of association. It's pure Pavlovian psychology -- the same thing as teaching a dog to drool when he hears a bell or teaching a lab rat to press a lever in exchange for food. You can teach human beings to press buttons, spend money, buy a certain clothing label or wear a certain brand of cosmetics. All you have to do is make sure that it is associated with sex.
Of course, the reality is that these messages are pure distortion. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| It seems that the more money a company has for advertising, the crappier their products are. (Which makes sense, actually, because higher margins on crap products leave more money to spend on advertising and sponsorship.)
Truly, some of the best companies I found at the show do no advertising at all and couldn't afford it anyway because they only have a 12% margin on their raw materials. Those are the companies I like to promote, and you'll see me listing a lot of them here in upcoming reviews.
You stuck us in the basement? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| You do it through mass media advertising. The training with the lab rats is a little more personal, but the population at large in the United States or other developed countries is trained through television, cable, magazines and so on. You train them by flashing positive imagery, usually involving sex, and then quickly interweaving images about your own products.
If this is done back and forth quickly enough, it creates an almost subliminal effect. It's sex -- and then, soda. Sex, soda, sex, soda. |
Ann M. Coulston and Carol J. Boushey
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 The 2005 Institute of Medicine report focused on food marketing to children concluded that there is strong evidence that television advertising influences children's food preferences and requests, short-term food consumption patterns, and possibly usual dietary intake, and that exposure to advertising is associated with adiposity in children [95]. Television watching is associated with increases in energy intake and repeated episodes of eating while watching television may result in television's becoming a trigger for eating [96]. Crawford et al. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Plus, direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is illegal everywhere in the world except the United States, meaning Americans are the only people crazy enough to tolerate the advertising of prescription drugs to a mass audience that isn't even qualified to prescribe those drugs. Only a doctor can prescribe them, so why isn't drug advertising limited to doctors?
It's going to get ugly around here
The bankruptcy of America won't be pretty. |
Lynne McTaggart
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 Schlitz and her fellow researchers decided to seek out couples with a wife suffering from breast cancer, and began advertising around the San Francisco Bay Area for volunteers. It soon became apparent that they would have to widen their original brief. The breast-cancer population of the Bay Area, which is higher than average in the United States, has been extremely well studied. From the lackluster response to their advertising, it appeared that sufferers were unwilling to take part in yet more research. |
Jay Joseph
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 Let's look to the advertising industry to illustrate another example of this untenable position. advertising agencies and their clients understand that messages created in certain ways for particular audiences can indeed "influence behavior." If Coca-Cola pays $2 million for a thirty-second Super Bowl television commercial, they certainly expect that thousands or millions of people will change their cola buying behavior. Furthermore, modern advertising not only targets behavior but seeks to change the way people feel about themselves in society. |
Gary Null and Amy McDonald
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 The financial connection to a pharmaceutical company whose purpose was promoting sales of a controlled addictive substance was considered hidden advertising. Not until the spring of 2000 was a lawsuit on these matters filed. So clearly one just has to follow the money trail.
"In the 1996 elections, Eli Lilly Company, manufacturers of Prozac, made over $770,000 in soft money contributions to prominently placed politicians. By 1996, there were already over 600,000 minors on Prozac and they had a well-honed advertising campaign targeting children ready to go. |
Abram Hoffer, PhD, MD, FRCP(C) and Dr. Jonathan Prousjy, DPHE, DSC, ND, FRSH
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| Public education will have to displace all that commercial advertising. We would recommend that advertising for junk foods should be placed in the same category as advertising for tobacco, alcohol, and addicting drugs.
Modern high-quality nutrition depends upon the combination of good nutritional education and an adequate supply of foods, so that the education can be applied to the selection of a healthy diet. But we do not think that the education needs to be of the caliber required of nutritionists, dietitians, and physicians. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 But common sense has not prevailed: the industry pressured the FDA to legalize direct-to-consumer advertising in 1998, and since that time drug ads have polluted the airways and the world of print publications, and prescriptions for those advertised drugs have risen considerably as a direct result of the advertising.
The drug companies know this: advertising works. Thus, they continue to run those ads and they continue to focus on the promotion of pharmaceuticals for profit rather than education about chemical agents that should be used with caution, and only in specific circumstances. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And I think you can add advertising to your blog by adding Google ads, for example, you know in the right or left hand column, even little links or little pictures that go back to products and services on your site -- that's very clear. You're saying, "Okay, these are things we're advertising or promoting." But to do it within a blog is, I don't know … I used to be a journalist, so I kind of go back to those roots, a kind of separation of church and state between editorial and advertising. That separation doesn't exist on the web. The line is blurred. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 In 1999 the company spent $867 million for advertising in the United States alone -- $174.4 million for Coca-Cola beverages, $68.4 million for Sprite, $41.4 million for Minute Maid, and $17.6 million for Powerade"
"PepsiCo spends even more on advertising. Its total domestic advertising budget was $1.31 billion in 1999 -- $165 million for Pepsi beverages, $37.7 million for Mountain Dew"
"Some soft drink companies go so far as to license their logos to makers of infant-feeding bottles. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Thanks to countless dollars McDonald's has spent advertising to children over the past several decades, children are programmed to feel a sense of trust when they see the big "M" logo (the golden arches). But as this photograph clearly shows, the golden arches appear almost directly above these signs advertising beer. What's the message to children here: Trust McDonald's, drink beer?
Acute observers might point out, no doubt, that this particular McDonald's appears to be an "Express Stop" restaurant, which means it's sort of a combination restaurant and mini grocery store. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 In talking to the CEO of FruitFast, I learned they were about to launch a nationwide radio advertising campaign to offer this 30-day supply of their CherryFlex product to the public. Through phone negotiations, I was able to encourage the FruitFast company to hold off on their national radio advertising campaign and, instead, reserve 20,000 bottles of CherryFlex exclusively for NewsTarget readers! But this offer is only good for the next few days, while supplies last. So if you want to get a 30-day supply of CherryFlex for yourself, jump on this rare opportunity right now. |
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
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 By the mid-18th century, Massachusetts sea captains were bringing back cacao beans from the tropics as cargo, for there was already a chocolate-drinking public in New England (Boston apothecaries were advertising chocolate as early as 1712). In 1765, Dr. James Baker of Dorchester, Massachusetts, joined forces with John Hannon, a chocolate-maker newly arrived from Ireland. Baker put up the money to rent space in a grist mill in Milton Lower Falls, where Hannon ground the cacao beans with water power. In 1772 they started advertising their product as Hannon's Best Chocolate, in the form of cakes. |
Ann N. Martin
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| This has been very bothersome to me, and I have often questioned where is the "truth" in advertising?
I approached the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the United States, and Industry Canada requesting that they investigate the advertising undertaken by pet food companies. I have also requested that the labeling of these pet foods show the exact ingredients contained in the product, including road kill, condemned material from slaughterhouses, and euthanized dogs and cats. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Oh yeah, and they were advertising the cartoon character from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Scary, huh?
Thanks to over five years of fear mongering by the Bush Administration and Fox News, Americans believe they live in a country under siege by terrorists who use size "D" batteries to plant advertising displays of mass destruction in large U.S. cities. The same devices were also planted in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle and even Atlanta, but for some reason, only the people in Boston were stupid enough to mistake them for bombs. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Direct-to-consumer advertising is the bread and butter of Big Pharma, and it is the primary reason the industry has exploded its revenues and influence since 1998. The invention and marketing of fictitious diseases via television advertising has proven instrumental to the drug industry's successful pushing of medically unjustified drugs onto consumers. (See the Disease Mongering Engine to invent your own fictitious diseases and disorders right now!)
The survey further revealed 54 percent of consumers think that viewing drug advertisements allows them to "take charge of their health care. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If I were in charge around here, I would immediately ban all advertising of junk foods, sodas, snack foods, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals and other harmful substances. It's the only sane thing to do if we care about the future of our children. Of course, such advertising bans will never actually take place because corporations run the government. See my CounterThink Cartoon, Government of the People for a humorous depiction of this current state of affairs.
And as far as Pepsi's water brand goes, I think it should be renamed to AquaFib. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Which makes sense, actually, because higher margins on crap products leave more money to spend on advertising and sponsorship.)
Truly, some of the best companies I found at the show do no advertising at all and couldn't afford it anyway because they only have a 12% margin on their raw materials. Those are the companies I like to promote, and you'll see me listing a lot of them here in upcoming reviews.
You stuck us in the basement?
Some vendors were grumbling about being stuck in the "basement" of the show -- Hall E, which is downstairs from the main floor. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 And, of course, the advertising worked: Tens of millions of Americans marched into their doctor's office and began asking about a long list of drugs they saw advertised on television by healthy-looking actors who never even took those drugs in the first place.
Direct-to-consumer advertising is the bread and butter of drug company profits today. Without it, drug sales would plummet and the number of Americans killed by drug-related heart attacks, strokes, traffic accidents and suicides would fall sharply. That's why Big Pharma has to keep the media racket going. |
Bill Sardi
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 A University of Maryland report says: "Despite their public pledge, the tobacco companies routinely violate a variety of aspects of the Cigarette advertising and Promotion Code." This includes use of young-aged models in TV ads, building upon the image that cigarettes increase sexual attractiveness. [Journal Health Communications 10: 419-31, 2005] While cigarette manufacturers have adopted a code not to advertise to youth in the United States, at the very same time it is conducting youth-targeted advertising overseas. |
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