“The Persuaders” - Unwittingly Part of the Problem?

Just finished watching the excellent documentary “The Persuaders” on PBS's “Frontline” show. You can watch the whole thing online at the show's home page (starting this Friday, there are video interviews there now, though.): Link.

It was produced by sidebar-dwelling blogger Douglas Rushkoff, and is another good peek into the world of advertising, the most morally bankrupt industry on earth who's ability to create evil out of thin air dwarfs the evil of some company who has to burn coal to do us harm.

“The Persuaders” started off by showing us a doomed-from-the-start marketing campaign being put together to sell the near-bankrupt Delta Airlines' new sub-brand which they called ‘Song.’ (Song, being just like every other attempt to copy JetBlue's image without actually changing anything about their dinosaur business model.) We were shown a room full of what anyone would immediately describe as marketing creatives, young purveyors of cool who are looking to create a brand that would reflect the demographic that Delta wanted to go after.

We watch as they elaborately attempt to create something from nothing, integrate the brand name into their very language with phrases like “you are so song!”, and act in exactly the fashion in which someone satirizing advertisers would portray such a construction of a tower of hubris. We see this as the result of an incestuous advertising industry which as come to serve itself more than its clients as individual ad creators seek to make a name for themselves at the expense of reliability or dependability.

The immediate parallel I drew when seeing the “Song” group in action was the second television ad that Homer Simpson had created for Mr. Plow as he desperately tried to compete with the Plow King. So the expensive ad company pursues their artistic vision and Homer ends up not even knowing what his own ad was for. And we see the same result in market research done for the “Song” brand, people might recognize the name but have no idea what it's supposed to be.

The Reptilian Mind

But the sideshow is quickly passed and we get to the real minds behind advertising powerful hold on our minds. The main focus of this part of “The Persuaders” is a French psychologist, Dr. Cloture Rapaille, who's previous career involved trying to communicate with autistic children. His motto is that you can reach people at a deeper level than verbally, that it's the fleeting images and fragments of thought that get jumbled together in consumers' minds to form their concept of ‘luxury’. Companies like Acura pay him millions of dollars to help develop their brands and embed them into consumers' subconsciouses.

Dr. Rapaille put a very fine point on the fact that you can go a lot further convincing the reptilian part of people's minds and bypassing the reasoning component completely, rather than trying to appeal to reason which marketers now say only accounts for about 20% of people's reactions. This is why, he says, an environmental argument will never convince a Hummer owner that he's made a bad choice, because it doesn't understand the gut feelings that the Hummer owner is seeking to satisfy with his utterly counter-logical consumer choices.

Political Advertising: Speaking Directly to the Lizard

The final segment of the documentary shows us the most insidious arm of the advertising industry, political advertising. Because an ad for soup has to at least be remotely truthful, and tell you that it is selling soup, politicians are bound by hardly any limits on what they can say. So the game is to paint an idea, to tell people's lizard minds what they want to hear and to twist the language you so that the lizard will associate your guy with his positive reactions and the other guy with negative reactions.

The key example was a political advertiser, Frank Luntz, who specializes in picking out exactly which words elicit what reactions in people. His classic coup was to change a perfectly acceptable idea, the estate tax, into something 75% of people were against, simply by insisting that it be referred to as the ‘death tax’.

This use of language goes along with something I've said before, that John Kerry and the Democrats lost the election the moment they started using the Republicans' own made-up words like the “war on terror”, something which can't exist but, by using the word, Kerry allowed to be legitimized, but then lost because he was seen as playing catch-up to fight an unwinnable war.

The Unwitting Accomplice to the System

The triumph of the appeal to the lizard mind over people's ability to reason acts as the climax of the documentary, the big revelation that the viewer wasn't aware of, that advertisers are peering into our very depths to find and manipulate the emotional building blocks before they even get constructed into thoughts and ideas.

Where I think Rushkoff is losing a bit of a handle on his subject is in the need, as a filmmaker, to accentuate the compelling aspects of the subject matter, to make it larger than life and to create in his audience an emotional response of his own.

His aim is to tell a PBS audience who style themselves as free-thinkers and non-conformists that they are up against a powerful force that seeks to further push a consumer culture that his audience deeply distrusts. At first the audience is re-assured by the silly bunch of marketers trying to sell ‘nothing’ and turn it into a brand, but he quickly brushes that aside and punches you in the stomach with the ‘real stuff’.

I don't mean to insinuate anything about Rushkoff with this, because I really enjoy his writing and I agree completely with the ideas in “The Persuaders”, as far as they go, but I am reminded of the character O'Brien in the novel 1984, whom we first think of as a sympathizer to the rebellious Winston Smith in his quest against Big Brother, someone who has intimate knowledge of the inner circle which controls life in the dystopian setting. O'Brien, after initiating Smith into what he thinks is a secret network of rebels, goes on to describe just how powerful and sneaky Big Brother is in its abilities to spy on people and control every aspect of life.

*** stop reading this now if you haven't read 1984 ***

When O'Brien betrays Winston and his love and reveals that he was never on his side, that the whole rebellious movement was a fake creation of the inner circle, in order to prevent the forming of any real resistance they couldn't control, the feeling of helplessness and smallness is driven completely into Winston Smith's psyche, and he submits to the idea that he can't fight big brother. That the rebellious figure he looked to, Emanuel Goldstein, was himself a creation of the system and that his ideas of his own differentness were as inconsequential as any prole who obsesses over the lottery.

*** OK, you can keep reading from here ***

Now, back to “The Persuaders”. Rushkoff, as a film maker, wants to create a compelling piece of material, one that people will talk about and remember. He is under the same pressure to create a ‘sticky’ brand as every other purveyor of product, certainly to a lesser degree, but the pull is still in the same direction.

So, in the process of putting together his arguments, Rushkoff is building up a to a climax where he paints certain characters as being much more powerful than they really are.

Is he, while unaware of it, contributing to the feeling of powerlessness that the sellers would obviously want to engender in the hearts of those who think of themselves as perhaps politically active thinkers? Does painting the system as more powerful than it is do the work of those in control for them?

Frank Luntz, the coiner of ‘death tax’, doesn't have some magical microphone that he talks into that causes members of the media and his political opponents to adopt his new buzzwords. They do it on their own. This isn't a sign that Luntz and the other advertisers are all-powerful, it's just that, right now, no one is thinking to point out that these are merely twisted words that have nothing to them.

Luntz, just like the ‘Song’ crew, is simply selling us a brand with no substance. It's just that no one has pointed this out yet, or found the effective way to do it, to show that there's no ‘there’ there.