Friendly Persuasion

"If people don't trust their information, it's not much better than aMarxist-Leninist society." -- Orville SchellDean, Graduate School of Journalism, UC Berkeley"Most people aren't very discerning. Maybe they need good financialinformation, but I don't think people know what good information is whenyou get into culture, society, and politics."-- Steven Brill,Chairman and Editor-in-chief, Brill's ContentOnce upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy torecognise. They had simple personalities with goals not much morecomplicated than selling you a bar of soap or a box of cereal. And theypossessed the reassuring familiarity of old friends or relatives you'veknown all your life. They were Pilgrims who smiled at you from Quaker Oatsboxes or little tablets named "Speedy" who joyfully danced into a glass ofwater with the sole purpose of giving up their short life to help lessenyour indigestion from overindulgence. Yes, sometimes they could be alittle obnoxious but, hey, it was a predictable annoyance. And once, not very long ago, advertisements also knew their place in thelandscape of popular culture, their boundaries were the ad space ofmagazines or the commercial time of television programs. When the ads gottoo annoying, you could toss the magazine aside or change the TV channel.The ease and quickness of their dispatch had the abruptness of slammingyour front door in the face of an old door-to-door salesman. This all began to change around the 1950s when advertisements acquired amore complex and subtle personality and began straying outside of theirfamiliar media neighborhoods. The social observer Vance Packard wrote abest-selling book in the late 50s called The Hidden Persuaders whichidentified this change in advertising's personality as coming from hangingaround Professor Freud's psychoanalysis and learning his hidden,subliminal methods of trickery. Ice cubes in a glass for a liquor ad were no longer seen as simple propsto help sell a brand of whiskey but were now subliminal suggestions offemale anatomy. The curved fronts of automobiles were more than aestheticstreamlined design features but rather suggestive of a particular featureof the male anatomy. Forgotten by the new subliminal types of ads was thesimple salesmanship preached by founders of the ad industry like DavidOgilvy and John Caples. The word "sales" became a dirty word and wasreplaced with modern psychological buzzwords like subliminal persuasion. The Evolution of Subliminal TechniquesThe book Hidden Persuaders made quite a stir at the time, bringing aboutcongressional hearings and even the introduction of legislation. Prominentmotivation researchers Louis Cheskin and Ernest Dichter utilised the newad methods and were publicly admonished as traitors to their profession.The life of the new subliminal advertising seemed short indeed. Even VancePackard predicted its coming demise. "Eventually, say by A.D. 2000," hewrote in the preface to the paperback edition of his book, "all this depthmanipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old-fashioned". Yet, 40 years later, any half-awake observer of popular culture knowsthat things haven't exactly worked out the way Packard predicted. In factwhat seems old-fashioned today is the belief that ads are those simpletonsthey once were before the 50s and that products are sold for features andbenefits rather than for images. Even Vance Packard expresses an amazementat the evolution of advertising since the 50s, noting that today ads forwatches have nothing to do with watches or that ads for shoes scarcelymention shoes. Packard remarks "it used to be the brand identified theproduct. In today's advertising the brand is the product". Modernadvertising, he notes, has an almost total obsession with images andfeelings and an almost total lack of any concrete claims about the productand why anyone should buy it. Packard admits puzzlement. "Commercials seemtotally unrelated to selling any product at all". Jeff DeJoseph of the J.Walter Thompson firm underlines Packard's comments. "We are just trying toconvey a sensory impression of the brand, and we're out of there". Subliminal advertising techniques have today infiltrated the heart ofcorporate America. As Ruth Shalit notes in her article "The Return of theHidden Persuaders" from the 27 September 1999 issue of Salon magazine,"far from being consigned to the maverick fringe, the new psycho-persuaders of corporate America have colonized the marketing departmentsof mainstream conglomerates. At companies like Kraft, Coca-Cola, Proctor &Gamble and Daimler-Chrysler, the most sought-after consultants hail notfrom McKinsey & Company, but from brand consultancies with names likeArchetype Discoveries, PsychoLogics and Semiotic Solutions". Shalit notes a growing number of CEOs have become convinced they cannotsell their brands until they first explore the "Jungian substrata of four-wheel drive; unlock the discourse codes of female power sweating; ordeconstruct the sexual politics of bologna". The result, as Shalitobserves, is a "charmingly retro school of brand psychoanalysis, whichholds that all advertising is simply a variation on the themes of theOedipus complex, the death instinct, or toilet training, and that the goalof effective communications should be to compensate the consumer for thefact that he was insufficiently nursed as an infant, has taken corporateAmerica by storm". The Growing Ubiquity of AdvertisingYet pervasive as the subliminal techniques of advertising have become,the emerging power of modern advertising ultimately centres around "where"it is rather than "what" it is or "how" it works. The power of modernadvertising is within this growing ubiquity or "everywhereness" ofadvertising rather than the technology and methodology of advertising. Theultimate power of advertising will be arrived at when ads cannot bedistinguished from their background environment. When this happens, theenvironment will become a great continuous ad. In the process, ads have wandered away from their well-known hangouts inmagazines and TV shows. Like alien-infected pod-people of early sciencefiction movies, they have stumbled out of these familiar media playgroundsand suddenly sprouted up everywhere. The ubiquity of advertising is notbeing driven by corporations searching for new ways to sell products butby media searching for new ways to make money. Traditionally, media made money by selling subscriptions and advertisingspace. But these two key income sources are quickly drying up in the newworld of online media. Journalist Mike France wisely takes notice of thischange in an important article "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap" fromthe 11 October 1999 issue of Business Week. France notes that subscriptionfees have not worked because "Web surfers are used to getting content forfree, and they have been reluctant to shell out any money for it".Advertising sales and their Internet incarnation in banner ads have alsobeen a failure so far, France observes, because companies don't likepaying a flat fee for online advertising since it's difficult to track theeffectiveness of their marketing dollars. Instead, they only want to payfor actual sales leads, which can be easily monitored on the Web asreaders' click from site to site. Faced with the above situation, media companies have gone on the prowlfor new ways to make money. This search underpins the emerging ubiquity ofadvertising: the fact that it is increasingly appearing everywhere. In theprocess, traditional boundaries between advertising and other societalinstitutions are being overrun by these media forces on the prowl for new"territory" to exploit. That time when advertisements knew their place in the landscape ofpopular culture and confined themselves to just magazines or TVcommercials is a fading memory. And today, as each of us is bombarded bythousands of ads each day, it is impossible to "slam" the door and keepthem out of our house as we could once slam the door in the face of theold door-to-door salesmen. Of course you can find them on the matchbook cover of your favorite bar,on t-shirts sold at some roadside tourist trap or on those logo baseballcaps you always pick up at trade shows. But now they have got a littlemore personal and stare at you over urinals in the men's room. They haveeven wedged themselves onto the narrow little bars at the check-outcounter conveyer belts of supermarkets or onto the handles of gasolinepumps at filling stations. The list goes on and on. (No, this article isnot an ad.) Advertising and EntertainmentIn advertising's march to ubiquity, two major boundaries have beencrossed. They are crucial boundaries which greatly enhance advertising'ssearch for the invisibility of ubiquity. Yet they are also largelyinvisible themselves. These are the boundaries separating advertising fromentertainment and those separating advertising from journalism. The incursion of advertising into entertainment is a result of theincreasing merger of business and entertainment, a phenomenon pointed outin best-selling business books like Michael Wolf's Entertainment Economyand Joseph Pine's The Experience Economy. Wolf, a consultant for Viacom,Newscorp, and other media heavy-weights, argues business is becomingsynonymous with entertainment: "we have come to expect that we will beentertained all the time. Products and brands that deliver on thisexpectation are succeeding. Products that do not will disappear". And, inThe Experience Economy, Pine notes the increasing need for businesses toprovide entertaining experiences. "Those businesses that relegatethemselves to the diminishing world of goods and services will be renderedirrelevant. To avoid this fate, you must learn to stage a rich, compellingexperience". Yet entertainment, whether provided by businesses or the traditionalentertainment industry, is increasingly weighted down with the "baggage"of advertising. In a large sense, entertainment is a form of new mediathat carries ads. Increasingly, this seems to be the overriding purpose ofentertainment. Once, not long ago, when ads were simple and confined, entertainment wasalso simple and its purpose was to entertain rather than to sell. Therewas money enough in packed movie houses or full theme parks to make ahealthy profit. But all this has changed with advertising's ubiquity. Like media corporations searching for new revenue streams, theentertainment industry has responded to flat growth by finding new ways tosqueeze money out of entertainment content. Films now feature products inpaid for scenes and most forms of entertainment use product tie-ins toother areas such as retail stores or fast-food restaurants. Also popularwith the entertainment industry is what might be termed the "versioning"of entertainment products into various sub-species where entertainmentcontent is transformed into other media so it can be sold more than once.A film may not make a profit on just the theatrical release but there is agood chance it doesn't matter because it stands to make a profit in videorentals. Advertising and JournalismThe merger of advertising and entertainment goes a long way towards aworld of ubiquitous advertising. Yet the merger of advertising andjournalism is the real "promised land" in the evolution of ubiquitousadvertising. This fundamental shift in the way news media make moneyprovides the final frontier to be conquered by advertising, a final"promised land" for advertising. As Mike France observes in Business Week,this merger "could potentially change the way they cover the news. Themore the press gets in the business of hawking products, the harder itwill be to criticize those goods -- and the companies making them". Of course, there is that persistent myth, perpetuated by newsorganisations that they attempt to preserve editorial independence bykeeping the institutions they cover and their advertisers at arm's length.But this is proving more and more difficult, particularly for onlinemedia. Observers like France have pointed out a number of reasons forthis. One is the growth of ads in news media that look more like editorialcontent than ads. While long-standing ethical rules bar magazines andnewspapers from printing advertisements that look like editorial copy,these rules become fuzzy for many online publications. Another reasonmaking it difficult to separate advertising from journalism is the growingmerger and consolidation of media corporations. Fewer and fewercorporations control more and more entertainment, news and ultimatelyadvertising. It becomes difficult for a journalist to criticise a productwhen it has a connection to the large media conglomerate the journalistworks for. Traditionally, it has been rare for media corporations to make directinvestments in the corporations they cover. However, as Mike France notes,CNBC crossed this line when it acquired a stake in Archipelago inSeptember 1999. CNBC, which runs a business-news Website, acquired a 12.4%stake in Archipelago Holdings, an electronic communications network fortrading stock. Long-term plans are likely to include allowing visitors tocnbc.com to link directly to Archipelago. That means CNBC could be in theawkward position of both providing coverage of online trading andprofiting from it. France adds that other business news outlets, such asDow Jones (DJ), Reuters, and Bloomberg, already have indirect ties totheir own electronic stock-trading networks. And, in news organisations, a popular method of cutting down on theexpense of paying journalists for content is the growing practice ofaccepting advertiser written content or "sponsored edit" stories. Theconfusion to readers violates the spirit of a long-standing AmericanSociety of Magazine Editors (ASME) rule prohibiting advertisements with"an editorial appearance". But as France notes, this practice is thrivingonline. This change happens in ever so subtle ways. "A bit of pufferyinserted here," notes France, "a negative adjective deleted there -- itdoesn't take a lot to turn a review or story about, say, smart phones,into something approaching highbrow ad copy". He offers an example inforbes.com whose Microsoft ads could easily be mistaken for staff-writtenarticles. Media critic James Fallows points out that consumers have been swift todiscipline sites that are caught acting unethically and using "sponsorededits". He notes that when it was revealed that amazon.com was taking feesof up to $10,000 for books that it labelled as "destined for greatness",its customers were outraged, and the company quickly agreed to disclosefuture promotional payments. Unfortunately, though, the lesson episodes like these teach onlinecompanies like Amazon centres around more effective ways to be less"revealing" rather than abstention from the practice of "sponsored edits". France reminds us that journalism is built on trust. In the age of theInternet, though, trust is quickly becoming an elusive quality. He writes"as magazines, newspapers, radio stations, and television networks rush tocolonize the Internet, the Great Wall between content and commerce isbeginning to erode". In the end, he ponders whether there is anirrevocable conflict between e-commerce and ethical journalism. When youcan't trust journalists to be ethical, just who can you trust? Transaction Fees & Affiliate Programs - Advertising's Final Promised Land?The engine driving the growing ubiquity of advertising, though, is notthe increasing merger of advertising with other industries (likeentertainment and journalism) but rather a new business model of onlinecommerce and Internet technology called transaction fees. This emerging and potentially dominant Internet e-commerce technologyprovides for the ability to track transactions electronically on Websitesand to garner transaction fees. Through these fees, many media Websitestake a percentage of payment through online product sales. In effect, amedia site becomes one pervasive direct mail ad for every productmentioned on its site. This of course puts them in a much closer economicpartnership with advertisers than is the case with traditional fixed-rateads where there is little connection between product sales and theadvertising media carrying them. Transaction fees are the new online version of direct marketing, theemerging Internet technology for their application is one of the greateconomic driving forces of the entire Internet commerce apparatus. Thepromise of transaction fees is that a number of people, besides productmanufacturers and advertisers, might gain a percentage of profit fromselling products via hypertext links. Once upon a time, the manufacturerof a product was the one that gained (or lost) from marketing it. Now,however, there is the possibility that journalists, news organisations andentertainment companies might also gain from marketing via transactionfees. The spread of transaction fees outside media into the general populationprovides an even greater boost to the growing ubiquity of advertising.This is done through the handmaiden of media transaction fees: "affiliateprograms" for the general populace. Through the growing magic of Internettechnology, it becomes possible for all of us to earn money throughaffiliate program links to products and transaction fee percentages in thesale of these products. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that advertisers are mostlikely to increasingly pressure media Websites to support themselves withe-commerce transaction fees. Charles Li, Senior Analyst for New Media atForrester Research, estimates that by the year 2003, media sites willreceive $25 billion in revenue from transaction fees, compared with $17billion from ads and $5 billion from subscriptions. The possibility is great that all media will become like great directresponse advertisements taking a transaction fee percentage for anythingsold on their sites. And there is the more dangerous possibility that allof us will become the new "promised land" for a ubiquitous advertising.All of us will have some cut in selling somebody else's product. When thishappens and there is a direct economic incentive for all of us to say nicethings about products, what is the need and importance of subliminaltechniques and methods creating advertising based on images which try totrick us into buying things? A Society Without Critics?It is for these reasons that criticism and straight news are becoming anincreasingly endangered species. Everyone has to eat but what happens whenone can no longer make meal money by criticising current culture? Cultural critics become a dying breed. There is no money in criticismbecause it is based around disconnection rather than connection toproducts. No links to products or Websites are involved here. Critics arebecoming lonely icebergs floating in the middle of a cyber-sea oftransaction fees, watching everyone else (except themselves) make money ontransaction fees. The subliminal focus of the current consultancies islittle more than a repackaging of an old theme discovered long ago byVance Packard. But the growing "everywhereness" and "everyoneness" ofmodern advertising through transaction fees may mark the beginning of arevolutionary new era. Everyone might become their own "brand", a pointwell made in Tim Peters's article "A Brand Called You". Media critic James Fallows is somewhat optimistic that there still mayremain "niche" markets for truthful information and honest culturalcriticism. He suggests that surely people looking for mortgages, votingfor a politician, or trying to decide what movie to see will continue toneed unbiased information to help them make decisions. But one must askwhat happens when a number of people have some "affiliate" relationshipwith suggesting particular movies, politicians or mortgages? Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at theUniversity of California at Berkeley, has summarised this growing ubiquityof advertising in a rather simple and elegant manner saying "at a certainpoint, people won't be able to differentiate between what's trustworthyand what isn't". Over the long run, this loss of credibility could have acorrosive effect on society in general -- especially given the media'simportance as a political, cultural, and economic watchdog. Schell warns,"if people don't trust their information, it's not much better than aMarxist-Leninist society". Yet, will we be able to realise this simple fact when we all become typesof Marxists and Leninists? Still, there is the great challenge to Americato learn how to utilise transaction fees in a democratic manner. Ineffect, a combination of the technological promise of the new economy withthat old promise, and perhaps even myth, of a democratic America. Americastands on the verge of a great threshold and challenge in the growingubiquity of advertising. In a way, as with most great opportunities orthreats, this challenge centres on a peculiar paradox. On the one hand,there is the promise of the emerging Internet business model and itscentre around the technology of transaction fees. At the same time, thereis the threat posed by transaction fees to America's democratic society inthe early years of the new millennium. Yes, once upon a time, not very long ago, advertisements were easy torecognise and also knew their place in the landscape of popular culture.Their greatest, yet silent, evolution (especially in the age of theInternet) has really been in their spread into all areas of culture ratherthan in methods of trickery and deceit. Now, it is more difficult to slamthat front door in the face of that old door-to-door salesman. Or tossthat magazine and its ad aside, or switch off commercials on television.We have become that door-to-door salesman, that magazine ad, thattelevision commercial. The current cultural landscape takes on some of thecharacteristics of the theme of that old science fiction movie TheInvasion of the Body Snatchers. A current advertising campaign from RJReynolds has a humorous take on the current zeitgeist fad of alienabduction with copy reading "if aliens are smart enough to travel throughspace then why do they keep abducting the dumbest people on earth?" One might add that when Americans allow advertising to travel through allour space, perhaps we all become the dumbest people on earth, abducted bya new alien culture so far away from a simplistic nostalgia of yesterday.(Please press below for your links to a world of fantastic products whichcan make a new you.) ReferencesBrill, Steven. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's Online CredibilityGap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999.France, Mike. "Journalism's Online Credibility Gap." Business Week 11Oct. 1999. .Packard, Vance. The Hidden Persuaders. Out of Print, 1957. Pine, Joseph,and James Gilmore. The Experience Economy. Harvard Business School P, 1999.Shalit, Ruth. "The Return of the Hidden Persuaders." Salon Magazine 27Sep. 1999..Schell, Orville. Quoted by Mike France in "Journalism's OnlineCredibility Gap." Business Week 11 Oct. 1999.Wolf, Michael. Entertainment Economy. Times Books, 1999. Citation reference for this articleMLA style:John Fraim. "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, orWhat Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?." M/C: A Journal of Media andCulture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access].Chicago style:John Fraim, "Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity of Advertising, orWhat Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?," M/C: A Journal of Media andCulture 3, no. 1 (2000), ([your date of access]). APA style:John Fraim. (2000) Friendly Persuasion: The Growing Ubiquity ofAdvertising, or What Happens When Everyone Becomes an Ad?. M/C: A Journalof Media and Culture 3(1). ([your date of access]).