PART 5
In 1942, the political economist Joseph Schumpeter warned that rational argument is mostly eclipsed, in modern life, by a barrage of advertising, a political reality whereby, as he put it, ‘direct attacks upon the subconscious’ are at work.
It is instructive to look at advertising, Schumpeter showed, because it illustrates a broader problem: how political messages exploit emotions and unconscious thoughts in ways that are often not visible to the public. He then added (sounding here a little like Freud) that these crafted messages might ‘crystallize pleasant associations of an entirely extra-rational [kind] [and] very frequently of a sexual nature’. The success of advertising demonstrated, in his view, that much of our decision-making in politics is irrational and shaped by unconscious wishes and fears. It is an illusion to assume that masses of people vote, any more than they purchase, in a carefully deliberative manner; Schumpeter believed it crucial to understand how then the process is managed:
Party and machine politicians are simply the response to the fact that the electoral mass is incapable of action other than a stampede, and they constitute an attempt to regulate political competition exactly similar to the corresponding practices of a trade association. The psycho-technics of party management and party advertising, slogans and marching tunes, are not accessories. They are of the essence of politics.1
Modern societies, warned Schumpeter, are dominated by such ‘psycho-technics’. Democracy, he submitted, is not all it is cracked up to be. The electorate might not even know about the policies that will be implemented, thanks to their votes, or understand the real intentions of the parties or representatives to whom they give their support. The voters in one sense hold sway, but he thought that they do not determine the stuff that really matters in government: the important business is organised behind the scenes. The system, in short, is heavily manipulated. It is run by a political class, with no small help from advertisers, who assist by creating emotive messages, vague platitudes, nebulous visions, that people sign up to.
In the 1950s and 60s, several prominent critical commentators, looking at developments in contemporary capitalist societies, while still mulling over the calamity of interwar fascism and Nazism, would take up such concerns and focus on this hidden dimension in modern advertising. They also wanted to show how culture, politics and selling were ever more entwined. The advertising industry, they complained, promoted consumerist values, distorted rational thinking and affected the way other sectors of the economy and society functioned. This choreographing of life through advertising culture might be leading, they thought, towards a stage-managed simulacrum of democracy.
In short, these critics pointed out how this kind of craft was designed to pander to people’s feelings and their most restless desires; and how advertising could prove so massively distorting to the way we live and think now, and to the social fabric that sustains us. Moreover, advertising seemed to be part and parcel of an economy built upon deliberate waste and obsolescence. They anticipated later fears that modern economies were ultimately unsustainable, damaging to human nature and to the world.
A longer story no doubt could have been told in these pages, about mass influence, conditioning and hidden persuasion, in democracies, autocracies, republics, tyrannies and empires; a chronicle stretching over the longue durée, and featuring examples of the underhand selling of wares, the predicament of gullible purchasers and the destructive effects of unbridled consumption, across different phases of history. Ancient storytellers recounted disasters that came in the tracks of bellicose propaganda; calamities triggered by interpersonal misunderstandings, costly misjudgements, made on the basis of sinewy rhetoric. Folklore provides stories of people who imbibe toxic gifts that then cause them to slumber, that paralyse their capacity for appropriate action or thinking. Seemingly innocuous offers from ambiguous hosts to their guests to consume a particular substance, we know, can take people down a terrible, life-changing path. We talk of food for thought, but there is also much said, in legend and literature, about food and drink that corrupts thought, and poisons that masquerade as remedies. Perhaps, if we had pursued such a route, we might even have begun this chronicle with interpretations of the story of Adam, Eve and the serpent. In fact, the story of the Fall was revisited (under the intentionally provocative heading, ‘Persuasion Started with Eve’) by one of the most controversial figures in postwar advertising, Ernest Dichter.2
We will not be tempted further down that path, however; nor dwell long upon Victorian and Edwardian stories about the intoxicating rise of modern advertising. In his popular fiction, H. G. Wells, for instance, had already addressed, as the historian Anat Rosenberg recently put it, how ‘adverts had that seemingly magical power to transport readers to worlds otherwise unknown’.3 H. G. Wells described that sense of transportation effectively in his 1909 novel Tono-Bungay; he chronicled the rise and fall of a quack brand of medicine, using it as a means to explore the frenzied nature of contemporary society, a world where people are caught in the grip of merchandising, promotion and hype.
Rather, here, we will address ideas about advertising and post-war Western subjects; consumers who were seen in the context of new forms of psychological warfare, mass conversions and brainwashing. Critics now frequently warned how we are all vulnerable to ad land. Schumpeter was but one of several notable commentators to set the scene, showing how advertising is integrated into the economy, society and political life.
Advertising firms reached new heights of public prominence in the 1950s and 60s. These businesses made cultural waves, drawing people in and, as the critics complained, making a mockery of the idea that voters really decide for themselves through untainted information. Rather than capitalism as the midwife to a more disenchanted and rationalistic kind of society, what was happening, they feared, was the installation of a system that was ever more seductive, clandestine and deceptive.
Researchers studied the changing methods and effects of the advertisers; the ways in which people can be derailed, and drawn, this way or that, into a domain where material things are infused with fantasies. Some writers also considered the larger systems and structures of which the advertising industry was now an integral part. They wrote with a notable sense of urgency, as though desperate to counter the otherwise irrepressible expansion of ‘Madison Avenue’ (i.e. the Manhattan location of so many advertising HQs, the place that has become a kind of shorthand for the whole industry). The public, it seemed, had to be woken from this state of subjection, helped out of their complacency, or torpor, through detailed analysis of the underhand processes; people needed to be armed intellectually, given a crash course in order to understand the panoply of new methods that were being amassed to undermine their capacities, to learn the array of psychological ploys now routinely adopted to hold them in thrall.
This and the following, final chapter are in part historical, part contemporary analysis, and part reflection upon the litany of warnings (some plausible, others overblown) provided by that chorus of pundits, polemicists, critics and advocates, regarding the power of advertising in modern life. I want to consider here those ideas and arguments, which gained such prominence in the 1950s and 60s, and that provide foundations for so much of our current discourse and shared anxieties about the state of the world and the future of liberal democracy. The post-war literature highlighted the risks we can face of flight into manic unreality, a state of escapism, or of tipping from realistic vigilance about dark forces of persuasion into a more despairing and/or paranoid mode of thought. A lesson we need to take from classic works about advertising in the period after 1945 is surely that the road ahead – in the online marketplace – could be still worse than it is in the present. Not that it must inevitably be worse; the future is open and contestable, potentially changeable from its seemingly relentless course. Whatever the power of the hidden persuaders, we still have existential choices to make. But to say that dramatic reforms, even revolutionary steps, are possible is not to underplay the massive difficulties of effecting progressive changes; nor is it to deny the fact that none of us can be sure quite what the future will hold.
Like many worried observers of the online economy today, that first post-war generation of critical analysts were not always sure to what extent corporate capitalism and the advertising culture that sells this vision of capitalism could be resisted or overturned. They showed how far the craft of hidden persuasion, and the exploitation of human emotions and addictions, had developed, and sought to explain how an increasingly seamless system now worked. They wanted to expose how ideas drawn from behaviourism, mathematics, statistics, psychoanalysis, group psychology, anthropology, neuroscience and even surrealist art were being channelled into the great maw of the advertising industry. One direction possible in such analyses was to urge more protest and challenge, or even to advocate direct actions of non-compliance with the extant market by people acting in concert. Another option, perhaps, either admiringly or with a sad shake of the head, was to insist that capitalism constituted an unstoppable steamroller.
Either way, the post-war advertising industry, as some of these critics counselled (in my view convincingly), was not just in the business of selling products, but often showcasing a whole way of life built around increasing consumption. It so often traded, they complained, in glamourised images, sentimentalism and phony equations of happiness and material acquisition. Advertisers were also often commissioned to foster the brand of a political party, even to shift the images evoked by a nation; to cultivate a sense of belonging, or to recast the connotations of some foreign marketplace we might want to visit or trade with. Commercial campaigns might be used to engender admiration and confidence in certain products, or classes of products, associated with the nation: American jeans, French perfume, German engineering, Italian design, Swedish furniture, and so on. Of course, there had, usually, to be some material basis on which to brand a people, an industry, a product, for the promotion to work effectively; after all, you needed actual sunshine and sand if you were to sell millions the idea of a holiday of a lifetime, via mass travel to beaches abroad.
Several things pinpointed in that post-war literature are apparent to most consumers today, regardless of whether they have read any of those old exposés: capitalist societies are saturated with commercials; these are drummed into our minds, and relayed incessantly into workplaces, homes and streetscapes. They tend to work on our emotions, not just our reason. Advertising has moved with the times, responding to, and reshaping, the digital revolution. That does not mean that we are simply consumers, nor are we exclusively sponges for targeted works of persuasion; nor does it imply that all advertising is equally numbing, objectionable or morally toxic. Discriminations are required between different styles of campaigning, selling, notifying, promoting, etc.
The first commercial messages on radio are usually traced back to 1920; on television to 1941 – in both cases the first use was to be found in the United States. But on both sides of the Atlantic, the 1950s were a big turning point, the decade when large numbers felt the full impact of ‘the box’ as a means of disseminating news, entertainment and publicity. TV was able to transmit little films – commercials – to Western populations with rising spending power, for the accumulation of goods and services way beyond the requirements of mere subsistence.
Messages broadcast into the homes of mass audiences about what to buy, and advice on how to live well, or whom to vote for, might be transmitted nationwide, or conversely targeted at people within niche social groups, age brackets or regions. It may seem unnecessary to spell all this out, for such features of daily life are, at least in a society such as my own, an assumed fact of existence today, both online and off.
Advertising skills were used then, as now, to refine and distribute civic as well as commercial advice. Sometimes adverts tell an intriguing story in miniature, or impart a useful lesson, for instance about what it means to be a good parent or child, only subtly adding as an apparent afterthought: this product will help. By the end of the 1950s, as exposés of advertising intensified, such commercial messaging in the mass media was ever more closely woven into the fabric of life in many societies.
And yet, while critical exposés of the communist world made no bones about labelling national strategies of communication as propaganda, much commentary about advertising in the West shied away from that term. Advertising in capitalist societies was, after all, far more disparate and diffuse than that to be found in the Soviet Union; it could serve benign or malign social ends, and it emanated mostly from a galaxy of private businesses, rather than directly from the state.
Young people today may feel they live in a very different world to the one in which their parents or grandparents grew up, where they enjoyed good prospects, perhaps, of long-term jobs and predictable hours, and, most likely, sat down each evening across the land to watch the same shows. Each nation’s history of TV expansion and programme consumption is different in small or large degrees; but in Britain, to take one example, the venerable BBC faced, from 1955, a terrestrial commercial rival, ITV. By the 1960s the latter attracted about half of the total audience.4 On that service, programmes were not paid for by compulsory licence fee or general taxation; rather they were regularly interrupted by ads.
In many Western states, the 1950s and 60s brought new forms of legal protection for buyers. The idea was to give the consumer greater confidence so that they could watch, and purchase, with safety, knowing the state’s monitoring agencies or at least consumer organisations might save them from the worst excesses. Films continued to be classified, TV output scrutinised, advertising regulated, laws for consumer protection substantially bolstered. So, there was a tug of war between those wanting unfettered freedom to sell, and those in the business of policing mis-selling. If you could not have all the glittering goods that you witnessed in the great churn of movies, you could at least identify with the stars, the jet set or even the secret agents such as James Bond (whose movie career, soon a franchise, began at the start of the 1960s), who appeared to have it all, enjoying their savoir faire, cars, gadgets, travel and sex appeal. And should you seek to emulate all that luxury living, book that fancy hotel, take a flight or purchase a dazzling car, based on the promotions that you’d seen, you might hope that consumer bodies would be there, if you were lucky, to save you from being ‘ripped off’ (a phrase first popularised at the end of the 1960s).
For those who wanted to do their own research into the quality, price and durability of merchandise, from kettles to lipsticks to trucks, consumer organisations and watchdogs were there, in some countries at least, to provide a source of reliable and objective information, in contrast to the ‘castles in the air’, which bad operators might wish to sell them. In Britain, Which? made its first appearance in 1957: this magazine aimed to help consumers (perhaps principally from the middle class) make informed choices, as it were to stage a fightback against those tempting calls to part with their money or to obtain some must-have item on tick. A network of Citizens Advice Bureaus, formally created in the UK in 1939, and offering confidential advice on legal, housing, financial, consumer and other issues, would become a familiar resource on many high streets, in the decades after the war.
In other countries too, consumers were reminded to understand their vulnerabilities, as well as entitlements and motivations, or even to grasp the way they were now being solicited by businesses as an army of, precisely, consumers. Each purchaser, so the extensive advice literature explained, had considerable power, not only to complain, demand refunds, or to feed critical suggestions back to companies, but also to act together, as one, through new kinds of pressure groups to fight for the shopper. The public was thus reminded that it was far more porous and suggestible than it may have previously realised, and more potent than it might think.
The consumer protection movement had its origins in the 1900s, and a framework of legal safeguards, advice manuals and organisations had spread internationally since then, but the 1950s and 60s saw the widespread roll-out of new consumer groupings and further legal protections. So, when the Consumer Federation of America was created in 1968, it was putting the seal on developments in public protection that had been afoot, in many places, for a considerable time.5 Thus advertising, in the post-war era, was not in fact simply a free-for-all. Just as the Wild West of nineteenth-century commercial salesmanship had been gradually tamed (so that, for instance, dangerous ‘medicines’ could not simply be flogged with complete impunity by quacks, who claimed to be doctors, to all comers), post-war citizens of Western societies came to be offered, and perhaps even to expect, certain standards of advertising and codes of accountability, at least on the main terrestrial TV channels, radio, cinema or in the mainstream press.
However, it is always a moot point who sets the standards, and whether it’s a winning or losing battle to enforce them. Commentators on radio in the 1930s in the United States (precursors of later inflammatory right-wing ‘shock jocks’) had been free enough, after all, to peddle anti-Semitism, praise the Nazi pursuit of full employment and racial purity, invite fellow Americans to recognise the achievements of Mussolini, and question the ‘anarchy’ of democracy. An example was Charles Edward Coughlin (known to millions as ‘Father Coughlin’, or ‘the Radio Priest’), who broadcast weekly in the decade before the Second World War, and gained vast audiences, disseminating increasingly brazen anti-Semitic messages. He even defended Kristallnacht (‘The Night of Broken Glass’, when German paramilitaries and civilians murdered close to a hundred people, and ransacked thousands of Jewish homes, business and other buildings in 1938), as understandable retaliation against the ‘provocative’ Jews.
In politics, as in commerce, setting standards of conduct and probity could easily seem like a losing game. Certainly, to revisit now the content of TV shows and accompanying advertisements of forty or sixty years ago in the UK is to encounter a culture, and evidently a regulatory system, awash with stereotypes about race, class, sexuality, gender, disability and age.
Advertisers needed not only to follow regulatory guidelines but also to assess the ethos of the company they were representing, opined David Ogilvy, perhaps the most revered of all ad executives post-war. The advertising agency should never get in the way of the crucial message; it was not about selling the agencies, but rather about mounting a brilliant and credible campaign on behalf of a client, he said.6 Ogilvy had a certain respect for the faculties of the consumer. He was always looking for the edge, the unique selling point that could be turned into the pithiest stories or slogans, without descending into blather and hype the consumer would easily see through.
Ogilvy’s agency was vociferously out there in the marketplace, making its presence felt during those booming decades; using artwork, commercial experience and detailed consumer research to underpin campaigns, showing how human behaviour could be coaxed, or even recast. His and other expanding agencies would trumpet (or maybe just include more discreetly, to show greater suavity) their company name, promote the status of their managers and the brilliance of their designers, artists and technical, back-room staff. Thus, advertising sold itself, increasingly, and often openly, in the public domain, certainly within the business world, as a powerhouse that was worth every penny of those fees. The post-war decades were, indeed, frothy times in ad land.
While Britain had its fair share of experts, the United States provided the greatest land of opportunity. A swelling workforce of copywriters, art directors, consumer psychologists, market researchers, public relations experts, communication strategists, statisticians, data analysts, image consultants and commercial artists would contribute to the advance of the industry. Soon computer engineers and spin doctors (although the latter would not have known themselves yet by that term, in fact coined in the 1980s) would become significant figures too.
The sheer reach of advertising should not be underestimated. The industry spread its influence into the academy, culture and politics; this was so not just in the sense of advertising the wares of universities, movies, political parties and candidates, but through assumptions about the importance of market share, constant promotions, responsiveness to consumer reactions, clear branding, and so on. Advertising also would bring growing public interest in how the various players in the advertising industry were performing relative to one another. Advertising told many stories, but the story of advertising itself was also increasingly prominent, part of economic life and daily news; and the greatest campaigns were also awarded a range of publicised industry prizes.7
Many academic researchers therefore turned their attention to studying the advertising industry. New courses emerged in the 1960s and after, at more innovative universities, on film, mass media and the history of marketing. Luminaries, such as the Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, became internationally famous as much for their intriguing epithets and snappy book titles as for the content of their writing about the mass media. It was good, he realised – if books were to sell – to have quirky titles to catch attention: The Mechanical Bride, The Gutenberg Galaxy, The Global Village and ‘the medium is the message’ are all among the arresting phrases coined by him in the 1950s and 60s.
Students might be alarmed, or relieved, to be provided with such critical lenses, but alternatively they could also use their reading about mass media phenomena to join in themselves on the great and growing bandwagon of advertising, marketing and PR. Thus, no shortage of Oxbridge and Ivy League graduates, who might previously have opted for other kinds of high-status careers, e.g. the civil service or law, came to weigh up the relative prospects of the City of London, Wall Street, Hollywood, TV, or alternatively perhaps a niche at an advertising agency, one of the public relations firms or opinion polling organisations. Advertising culture, with all that sense of dynamism, rivalry, creative fizz and power, was bound up with the American century, and with Western liberal values.
One of the most famous innovators in this new dream (and nightmare) factory of post-war ad land was the psychologist Ernest Dichter. He pioneered, and promoted, a particular approach under the shorthand of Motivational Research (hereafter MR). He claimed that this was a major advance on what went before. Indeed, it might just as easily serve the public good (in contriving the most effective information initiatives) as cater to the interests of private businesses or political parties. MR, Dichter explained, was a set of psychological techniques designed to glean people’s attitudes, in depth. Dichter hailed originally from Vienna but moved in the 1930s to the United States, where he enjoyed a most successful business career. His surname in German also means poet, but in the New World he was far from that, and represented a new kind of commercial ‘strategist of desire’, as he put it. The Viennese connection was marketable for him, thanks to the city’s association with the founding of psychoanalysis, as it had been some years previously for Freud’s nephew and pioneer of the public relations industry, Edward Bernays (about whom more later), whose family had moved from Europe to the United States when he was young.
Dichter designed projects to discover and then take advantage of psychological knowledge, feeding his work to the agencies or to corporations, who then developed, sometimes in partnership with him, the campaigns. He offered his own rather self-congratulatory commentary on this work in various books, articles and media appearances, drawing attention to how businesses in the United States and beyond called on his services.8 The future of the advertising business, he explained, was all about discovering people’s real preoccupations, wishes and fantasy lives, taking proper account of their moods, sensations, revulsions and passions. He promised to deliver profitably that strategy of desire; and he sold MR as hard as he could, while seeking also to explain some of it publicly. So, MR was at one level commercially sensitive, but also a kind of open secret, even something to celebrate.
He founded an institute in New York State in 1946. It provided a base from which to pursue his commercial research and produce reports for clients.9 He promised to disclose and study thoughts and emotions stirred by products and services, and then to make recommendations for new approaches to selling; he could advise on the big picture and on the details. Catchphrases, sounds, colours and backgrounds – in short, the whole advertising package – had to be assembled carefully. Dichter made great use of interviews and focus groups, establishing an approach commonplace today. He was not alone in doing so but he was especially energetic in amassing such research and then exploiting it effectively. He would use a loosely Freudian theory of the mind as he interpreted the data. Perhaps it was not a unique selling point, but certainly it was one he was able to market effectively. Hence the disparaging but also perhaps half-admiring references made about him and his method by his peers and critics: Dichter as a commercial shrink, a psychological guru, Freud for the supermarket age; MR as a form of ‘mass psychoanalysis’.10 Dichter’s premise was that much of our mental life is hidden from ourselves, and not just from other people.
Few would argue now with the basic claim made by Dichter, as well as by Ogilvy, that advertising can affect us emotionally, sometimes unconsciously, and that it may be used for benign, innocuous or sinister ends. These days the government in the UK, as in many other countries, routinely uses adverts to try to change attitudes that might be harmful to public health. Some of this is orchestrated through the Behavioural Insights Team, also known as the Nudge Unit. Communications strategies, for better or worse, have been crafted to affect how we choose to distance from other people, or view vaccination programmes, to beat back the spikes in Covid-19 transmission rates. Although, of course, such oversight can backfire, and offer fuel to the blaze of conspiracy theories about vaccination programmes, etc.
Governments often use techniques that are not unlike MR, perhaps to save us from our own follies, as in the ‘clunk click, every trip’ seat belt campaigns in Britain from 1970 onwards. These days most of us perhaps take that kind of advertising ‘for our own good’ for granted. We may applaud effective campaigns, seemingly simple, but often the product of much labour, designed to assist us to choose to avoid drinking and driving, pick up litter, forgo dangerous drugs, wear masks, or use condoms and practise ‘safe sex’ (a phrase first popularised in face of HIV/AIDS). The advertising business can be channelled for public health purposes just as easily as it can be used to invite us to party, throw out last year’s wardrobe or fly to the other side of the world; either way it draws on a battery of techniques, some long established, others evolving with each passing year.
Advocates of the ad industry claimed, post-war, that far from taking away power from the people, commercials could in fact endow consumers with greater personal sovereignty than ever before.11 Indignant supporters of advertising increasingly strongly demanded by the late 1950s that Madison Avenue should step up and launch an upbeat campaign to defend the whole enterprise on grounds of social utility, and to celebrate those untold arts of selling; stress the positive ethical values of the best companies, and underline their contribution to the public good. They sought to reinstate this virtuous picture, in the face of sometimes very bad press about ad land’s economies with the truth, nebulous promises or outright lying. The American Advertising Federation (AAF) created an education arm to provide materials in schools and colleges to reverse dire narratives from critics about their work, and to insist on the value, even nobility, of this field. The AAF showcased their crucial achievements in sustaining and expanding an information-hungry society and in supporting a modern economy.12 Advertising, it was thus promised, could feed the soul, strengthen the body; educate, edify and nourish, in many ways.
As an example, let us look at the story of the humble prune. In its very banality, the prune campaign illustrates Dichter’s behind-the-scenes influence on companies and on whole markets, as well as the upbeat claims once made about MR and how it could help us live better and longer, while expanding a market.
Why did prunes matter, and why were they ripe for the post-war MR treatment? At the time, California had a huge share of the global prune market (and in fact still enjoys a strong position).13 But it had an image problem. Dichter was first called in by the California Prune Board in 1952, and quickly realised from the customer surveys he conducted that he had a challenging task on his hands.14
The problem was that even if the product might be good for people, or at least not especially harmful, so long as not taken to excess, there were extreme popular subconscious resistances to the prune.15 The product, he found, ‘was ridden with meanings, all unfortunate’.16 It needed a more joyful, if not actually sexy, makeover. Prunes, he found, brought to many people’s minds such images (or rather prejudices) as ‘old maids’; they also evoked, apparently, a world of dreary 1950s boarding houses; and most of all constipation, and thus faeces. He was not squeamish about explaining the bodily aversions and disturbances generated by products in the minds of consumers.
Dichter’s research led him to note the following: the product suggested dried-up skin, dank pools, sinister swamps and even certain shudder-inducing memories of being controlled in childhood, recollections of commands like ‘eat up, or else!’, i.e. associations with being small and at the mercy of controlling parents or haranguing teachers. Prunes seemed to be associated for some with being in the highchair, or stuck, helpless, on the potty. And the fruits might even, apparently, arouse unwanted images of a frightening witch. It sounded rather redolent of The Wizard of Oz. Prunes were a year-round tinned or packaged good, and thus seemed unseasonal. Worse, they connoted the prestige-free, the undifferentiated, and even, apparently, ‘socially undesirable … queer, ungiving people’.17 So if a container of prunes appeared in the customer’s sight at the supermarket, or if a shop assistant at the deli dared to suggest them, the unspoken response, Dichter ‘discovered’, might well be, ‘No, I don’t want the laxative you are trying to thrust upon me.’18
Dichter’s work on behalf of this product was a salutary example of what could be done, and of the limits of selling and advertising; one classic ad from 1958, entitled ‘Let’s Have a Prune Party’, was designed to tug directly at the heartstrings of mothers. The prune is placed in the scene of a little party involving four lively and radiant white children.19 A couple of smart, well-dressed small girls flank two spick-and-span little boys; they are at a table wearing festive hats; the girls pulling open crackers, the boys eating cakes, topped with … prunes. The ad shows they are truly good, wholesome and easily palatable; the accompanying text proclaims, ‘Just yummy, Mummy!’ She is addressed by the message, with the suggestion, ‘win their hearts with prune tarts’. For good measure it is pointed out that this product is ‘fairly bursting with energy, iron, vitamins and minerals’.20
Dichter and his fellow professionals went even further, however. They sought to recast the product as a ‘wonder fruit’, a delightful and good-for-you sun-drenched sweet. Instead of floating in repugnant brown fluid, inside an open can, the product was thereafter to be featured outside of the tin, witnessed in settings outdoors, directly associated with images of whiteness, linked to youth and hedonism; for example, shown amid radiant women wearing vibrant colours, or in the hands of young girls wearing little at all; just there with the prune, consumed out in the sun. They would be pictured at the very moment of eating, acting a kind of rapture at the product’s deliciousness, depicted now holding the food right up to their mouths.
Dichter wanted to make the prune more interesting, bright, ripe and attractive – appealing in itself and, especially, attractive to her. The prune should appear in scenes of people figure skating or playing tennis, he advised. And instead of suggesting it was created through the extraction of moisture, it would be better, he proposed, to focus publicity upon how the product was made through the concentrated capture of sunlight. Prunes should be viewed as loaded with ‘light’ and ‘energy’ – value added – not some withered sack, all about minuses. The prune was in fact ‘bursting’ with solar power. Print, radio ads and TV commercials were deployed in concerted attempts to banish associations in the public mind to the sad, the wrinkled, the dry and the dead.21
The task, for MR, clearly, was to get people involved in a different kind of story about such ‘difficult’ commodities. However transient the scene, however fleeting the image, daydreams could be encouraged, a tempting invitation created. Ads might suggest where the product could take you: it would be designed to offer some promise of movement, of body and mind, a hint that this product might lead the purchaser onwards, to some better, more intense or more exquisite, experience.
What can be seen in the 1950s critical literature about such campaigns is not just a restatement of earlier warnings about mass psychology, alienation or exploitation, but a discourse about the mind-manipulation risks we face routinely, within a form of modern, corporate capitalism, a world that harnesses concerted forms of media, and the power of the human sciences and arts in crafted campaigns. Specific, and seemingly innocuous, examples, such as prunes, pointed to a larger truth: how much money and expertise can lie behind the selling of everyday items, or rather the promotion of unrealisable desires; how we are invited to dream, to associate more wildly, in short to lose our discernment and succumb to unconscious forces, or buy into certain lifestyle stories. Prunes were harmless, but what of the dangers when it came to things such as cigarettes, alcohol, cars, gambling; and what of the lures of personal debt, as you tried to keep up on big-ticket items? And thus, although the language of both the defenders and opponents of ad land could be lightly satirical, then as now, it could also take on more alarming hues, with comparisons to post-war social conditioning, or even totalitarian brainwashing.
As debate about brainwashing, menticide and groupthink had bubbled away in culture and political thought, so too had warnings about the impact of psychologically sophisticated advertising in ordinary life. Indeed, a variety of intellectuals on the Left, such as Adorno, who had written critically of Nazi propaganda, were also increasingly focusing upon the nature of commercial persuasion in modern capitalist societies. Even Truman (two-term US president from 1945) protested how advertising could destroy a liberal society from within. He was outraged, for example, at how private utility corporations mobilised messages, indeed, he said, indignantly, propaganda, to distort mass opinion and undermine government policies.
Such messaging was part of a larger phenomenon. From its inception in the 1940s the Advertising Council in the United States had been instrumental in developing broad campaigns by business leaders to challenge curbs upon corporate freedom, and resist any more serious and effective measures to create a less capitalist-driven form of social democracy. The Council went on to oppose what they regarded as unwarranted extensions of pre-war New Deal policies, in the years after the war. While this organisation supported the Democratic administration’s anti-communist foreign policy, and generally agreed to all national security measures, it attacked domestic programmes aimed at restraining free enterprise. It orchestrated so-called public service advertising campaigns during the 1950s, costing millions of dollars, that stressed how the United States was at its best when it created a climate that maximised corporate freedom; apparently a flourishing society required maximum corporate profitability, lower taxes, constant competition. These developments, it was said, would ultimately foster a dynamic, classless, benignly consensual society. The Council disseminated this kind of story through books, articles, pamphlets, movies, billboard posters, radio, TV, comic books, message cards on trains, buses and trolleys, even matchbook covers. It was highly supportive of the Republican Eisenhower’s campaign and victory over the Democrats in November 1952.22
In a speech to the Electric Consumers Conference in May of that same year, the outgoing Democratic president Truman angrily complained about the amount of money spent by businesses on advertising, or rather on what he regarded as cynical misinformation to thwart his party’s urgent political initiatives. He fulminated against those who were ‘deliberately and in cold blood setting out to poison the minds of the people. They make no bones about it. Their own manuals say that their purpose is to influence the mass mind in this country by playing on people’s emotions.’ And this, he complained, is ‘nothing less than an attack on the fundamental principles of our democratic country’. As opposed to letting citizens make up their minds, according to evidence, ‘this private power company propaganda is deliberately designed to conceal the facts, and to manipulate people’s opinions by appealing to their emotions and not to their reason’. Truman even ventured a comparison between the techniques of ruthless companies (and their lobbyists and advertising experts), and the anti-democratic ideologies that the United States stood resolutely against. ‘They have taken a leaf right out of the books of Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler,’ he thundered. ‘They are following the Soviet and the Fascist lines.’23
To take another telling, if more obscure, example, consider the report issued by the Medical Officer of Health for Twickenham (London), 1956, headed in glaring capital letters, ‘ANY DAY MAY BE BRAIN-WASH DAY’. It contained its own strong cautionary notes about advertising’s capacity to distort people’s minds and pointed to the interface of business and politics. Like Truman, the doctor referred on the one hand to Cold War brainwashing and terrifying interrogation techniques, and on the other to ‘creepy-peepy’ researchers who are acting in unconscionable ways to advance the interests of commerce: ‘Millions of dollars’, the medical officer warned, ‘are spent on schemes deliberately and delicately designed to play on the customer’s hidden weaknesses, his anxiety, his loneliness, cupidity, and fears.’24
Hidden communications strategies were now so state of the art, such commentators warned, as to seriously undermine consumers’ and voters’ capacity for personal decision-making. The political and economic terrain was far from constant: new industries were developing, cultural attitudes evolving, markets expanding; and advertisers were required all the time to respond to the trends, and maintain and stoke demand.
After the war, conditions of labour, patterns of consumption and relationships between the advertisers and consumers were changing fast. For millions, of course, going to work continued to mean toiling in older established sectors, and for companies that produced raw or finished materials, such as coal or steel. Employment in these advanced industrial economies might well require a person to clock in to a factory that churned out material objects, such as airplanes, cars or cigarettes, or it might still mean toiling on the land. All the same, the scale of office work and new service industries, including so-called ‘creative industries’, such as media and advertising, were dramatically on the rise in this period. And as societies recovered from the war years, and as economic growth rates continued to rise in the 1950s and after,25 millions more citizens of the United States and other Western countries found themselves with extra spending money in their pockets, and with an appetite for TV, film, magazines and more. Whatever their basic education, or guile, consumers might be outpaced, and certainly could be vulnerable, as they were now regularly warned, to the messages crafted each day by the ‘Madmen’ in Madison Avenue and around the world.
True, sales messages did not always work as planned, and nor were such messages all alike. Advertising experts were not in unison, still less were they omniscient or omnipotent. But they did have an enormous presence, capturing massive audiences, unleashing a whirlwind of signs, and releasing an avalanche of stories about how to live a modern, fulfilling life, and what the social and political parameters were. The advertisers were able to have an influence, as they were quick to insist, even where the viewer’s or listener’s attention was scant or divided; they might even claim that when prospective purchasers were half-attending, or ignoring the commercials, the message could be exceptionally effective, since information could flow into the mind, or the brain, as it were, without our conscious registering, or at least without full recall.
Long before Facebook and Amazon existed, and we learned of the rise and fall of Cambridge Analytica, critics of advertising were warning the public of where things were heading; how companies and political parties were gaining access to their intimate information, and at the same time modelling and gaming their likely behaviour. These analysts sought to alert the public to how people were targeted, and to expose, for their benefit, the ability of corporations to use computer technology, psychology, game theory and other means to help craft their own strategies, and to deploy words, music and pictures most effectively to reach them as voters as well as purchasers, and thus to sway minds.
The writer who most eloquently exposed the dangers of advertising was Vance Packard. His books, such as The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Naked Society (1964) and The People Shapers (1977), sought to reveal how little the public understood about the sophisticated techniques routinely deployed to invade private life, survey minds, manipulate relationships and influence mass behaviour. He was an acute observer of Madison Avenue and the MR techniques of Dichter. With his withering criticisms and mordant wit, Packard showed how cigarettes, or indeed prunes, were spun into fantasies. He warned that liberty was constantly undermined, even as it was sold as the bedrock of Western societies.
The Hidden Persuaders made an enormous splash and rode high in the best-seller lists. In the book, Packard anticipated many of our later concerns. He showed how advertising might lead people to identify with a product, company or brand without even realising; he exposed how political parties might shepherd the masses, and how covert communications might effectively corrupt democratic elections. Packard’s study foresaw how companies might grow ever more adroit at locating and redirecting the most malleable, marginal groups, and expressed indignation at how a well-resourced industry of ‘depth probers’, as he put it, was on the march, and entering into our very selves. He focused on Dichter as well as several other stand-out examples to illustrate his case. Later commentators built on his critique to analyse more systematically, and with less of this ad hominem style of attack, how Madison Avenue was caught up in a larger ideology, selling capitalism, not simply products.
Packard explained the increasing exposure of Americans to hidden persuasion through advancing media technologies. TV alarmed him, as the cinema and radio had troubled earlier critics such as Bernays, and as the internet does these days for Packard’s successors. Whereas just under 10 per cent of American households owned a television in 1950, nearly 80 per cent did by the time Packard published his book in 1957; by 1960, there were somewhere in the region of 45 million sets, covering around 90 per cent of households across the land.26
Packard saw that although you could – in theory – turn the whole thing off, the TV was likely to be left on for much of the time in the home; and he realised how difficult it would be, in practice, to move your eyes away from the constant flow of images. School-age children were especially vulnerable, he felt, and it was important to note how they were subject to this chronic process, as he put it, of ‘conditioning youngsters to be loyal enthusiasts of a product’.27
In the twenty years following its first appearance, the book sold enormously well, was translated into a dozen languages and remained a frequent subject of debate.28 Part of the appeal, no doubt, was that The Hidden Persuaders promised to fortify readers, to help them resist or outplay the influencers and mind-benders. Better knowledge of advertising techniques, Packard hoped, was the first line of defence; his work invited, indeed urged, the public to get wise to the power of what he accurately insisted was a ‘multimillion-dollar industry’.
Dichter merited a good deal of attention in Packard’s account. The marketing expert was in his view unabashed about maximising this ‘conditioning’ approach (even while half-denying it). He was exploiting insights from psychoanalysis that ought, Packard clearly thought, to be devoted to honest research and personal therapy. Techniques mobilised to free up the patient could also be used unethically to loosen up the purchasers, he explained. Clinicians might invite patients to free-associate on couches, for the individual sufferer’s ultimate benefit. But Dichter and company were not there for that purpose. Rather they were intent on deploying ideas from the talking cure, relaxing their focus groups, seeking the confidence of these sample publics, inviting free associations, and then using them as the basis to craft messages to lure the flock to the market.
MR experts would apparently listen carefully to everything said, and make interpretations, not to the patient or group, but rather to the corporate client; to note and then exploit the unbuttoned, uncensored, personal thoughts (about the horror of prunes or the erotic associations of a sports car, for instance), and see how all this could be subsequently used. Packard thought that this applied form of clinical knowledge was endangering the public and sullying those scientific professions. These days the same criticism could no doubt be levelled by critics at various behavioural economists, cyber experts, psychologists and neuroscientists who move between the academy, the clinic, the lab, the advertising world, business and government.
Does advertising reflect or transform, understand or pervert human nature? Does it go with the grain of widely shared emotions and desires, or in effect inculcate something new and disturbing? Was Madison Avenue in Packard’s own day tuning into the wishes of millions and/or ramping up new kinds of pressure on (especially) women to obsess over the spotless state of their kitchens and bathrooms, stirring guilt, creating obligations, raising the bar on people’s anxieties, hopes, rivalries and expectations? The Hidden Persuaders suggested the answer was all of these things: the advertising industry, thanks to techniques such as MR, sought to register accurately public interests, feelings of hunger, loneliness or insecurity, but also to encourage new commitments, instil novel cravings and fears, and provoke greater ambitions, in order to bring us into markets. Surely Packard’s argument contains an important truth, although many other factors combine to shape social attitudes and individual beliefs; advertising clearly can reflect and help change our inner stories about the worth and purpose of our own lives and evaluations of others.
The issue for Packard was not just whether this or that advertising campaign was directly a semi-fiction or lie. Those who worked in the industry might also be conditioned themselves, he suggested, to become unquestioning contemporary manipulators. He warned how business managers and public relations experts, for example, could easily grow overexcited, lose their own moral compass, forgo their critical judgement or sense of decency, half-brainwashed themselves, mired in the rat race. Those in the trade too often seemed to accept ‘the lore of psychiatry and the social sciences’, Packard complained, ‘indoctrinating themselves’ to pursue these approaches, ‘to increase their skill at “engineering” our consent to their propositions’.29 This was to explore a still more disconcerting possibility; of a process that in the end few really wanted, and everybody was affected by, even those who managed the system.
Packard wanted to revive the old Roman warning, caveat emptor, buyer beware, and to expose how advertising might mesmerise and disable, if we are not careful, both the professionals and the punters at large. He ended his book with this observation: ‘The most serious offense many of the depth manipulators commit, it seems to me, is that they try to invade the privacy of our minds. It is this right to privacy in our minds – privacy to be either rational or irrational – that I believe we must strive to protect.’30
The backlash soon followed. Defenders of the advertising industry complained that his book was injudicious; not an academic and balanced account of the span of the work to be found in the field. Nor did it really say enough, they objected, about the varied ethical stances of CEOs, boards, managers and workers in particular companies; rather it was a polemic that singled out the worst examples and spun them to make a good story. His account was deemed partial, gullible, misconceived, populist or even entirely hysterical. Indeed, as soon as its popularity was clear, ad land’s supporters used magazines such as Printers’ Ink and Advertising Age to challenge his concerns as intellectual (or anti-intellectual) posturing, or to complain the book was itself a work of self-publicity – against the industry.
Many in the industry would also find themselves inspired by reading The Hidden Persuaders. After all, it showed, if nothing else, quite how much advertising really could achieve. It is also striking that the critical popular literature and increasingly familiar form of punditry (where successful authors, such as Packard, were featured in magazines and sought after as experts in media discussion or even on the Hill) could be levelled against this kind of development, in which their own influence on publics seemed like the very symptoms of the disease they described. This was clearly a world where ideas were transmitted constantly, by media-savvy people shapers, best-selling experts, gurus, columnists, lobbyists, style-setters. They represented an expanding, polemical multimedia commentariat, an assortment of ‘stars’ and ‘influencers’, well paid to use new media opportunities adroitly, to glide in that era, from the talk-show studios to Senate hearings, from feature-piece offers to book deals and launches, always willing to be pugnacious, direct, contrarian, eye-catching and opinionated. Packard, like Whyte and other authors and journalists, whose successful book-length exposés of modern society and modern psychology made them famous, gained large audiences and readerships and became sought-after experts thereafter. They acquired influence alongside or sometimes instead of other kinds of authorities who shaped public discourse (including elected law makers, the heads of corporations, union bosses, clergy, scientists, doctors, the university professoriate, wealthy philanthropists, etc.).
Clearly some critics who sought to puncture Packard’s bubble and discredit his work had a skin in the game, tied to the businesses that The Hidden Persuaders attacked. Dichter meanwhile continued unfazed in developing and defending MR. He pointed out that advertising was an old and venerable practice; he liked to observe that messages we can recognise as adverts of some kind had existed for many centuries; and, furthermore, that the arts of persuasion are as old as mankind. He swatted away as best he could fault-finders such as Packard. They were adversaries but both were, in their own way, hot properties in the market of media commentary.
A strong critique of the ethics of the advertising industry, also treated insouciantly by Dichter, was to be found in the activism and literature provided by Betty Friedan and many other women.31 They were intent upon raising public consciousness about the controlling and coercive view of the sexes that was relayed daily through commercial messages. Friedan wrote influentially in 1963 about how vast sums were spent each year to ‘blanket the land’ with propaganda, honed by social scientists, to control the bodies and manipulate the psyches of women.32 By the 1970s many women’s groups, including NOW (the US-based National Organization for Women, which Friedan had helped to found), undertook a range of actions to disrupt the advertising industry and target particular ads that degraded, exploited or insulted women.
Equivalent protests in the UK and elsewhere took place; famously the ‘Miss World’ event in London was disrupted by feminists bearing flour bombs in 1970. Many advertisers duly took note in the following decades; they tried to head off the risk to their businesses by recrafting the campaigns, noting the scale of indignation at commercials that implied a women’s task was to be attractive to men, provide domestic labour, be a homemaker, etc. In response to such protests, one of the largest advertising agencies, Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, headquartered in New York, had swiftly begun conducting focus groups among women to try to explore the scale, depth and particular sources of this rising tide of feminist activism and public anger.33
Dichter would have approved of that effort to recalibrate messages. The business had to change with the times, and the use of focus groups was his métier. His relaxed response to the various objectors he encountered was, in effect: what’s new about advertising, and, anyway, what’s so bad? Advertising is essential in a modern economy, he insisted. This stance was already starkly apparent in his contribution to an NBC radio broadcast in 1957 entitled ‘The Art of Persuasion’. For that event Packard and Dichter had been brought together, head-to-head. They were asked to debate the ethics of the profession.34 No sooner had the show begun than it was interrupted by a commercial (the transcript I’ve seen of this discussion does not reveal what product this was for), as though to make Packard’s point – an experience of such interfering messages, the kind that you could not easily avoid, unless you immediately switched off the set. In that very same year, as we saw earlier, an interview took place on TV with David Hawkins, the American POW who chose to live in China. He was grilled about his own brainwashing. The programme, interrupted by ads, was sponsored by a tobacco company, Philip Morris.
Dichter cheerfully pitched in as soon as they were back from the break, asking the chair, Clifton Fadiman, about the reason for his donning a particular suit, before underlining: ‘Most of us suffer from the delusion that we are rational individuals, therefore there must be a rational reason, a good plausible reason why you are wearing a gray suit today.’35 The discussion zigzagged all over the place; from suits to prunes and their commercial makeover, whereupon Fadiman gamely piped in: ‘You are making me hungry for prunes.’ In a similarly playful mood, Dichter complimented Packard directly on a nicely chosen phrase he had noted in his adversary’s just published book, ‘psycho-seduction’. He then defended the business, drawing an analogy between advertisers and parents; the latter are always required to understand, and then tempt, even condition, their children, through rewards, as well as threats, so why blame the advertising professionals?
Dichter’s response to Packard’s attack on his ethics was essentially to shrug his shoulders, and retort that the activities he pursued were neither new nor sinister, nor worse than others that were equally commonplace; and, if anything, the work that he and his group conducted, he now counter-proposed, should be better appreciated by the public. For such work facilitated ordinary people’s capacity for exercising free choice, enjoying a ‘full life’ and expressing ‘creativeness’.36 He implied, I think, that if those in the business of selling dreams, such as himself, were celebrated, and well remunerated, to convince a segment of a market of this or that arguable truth, so what?
What did readers and listeners make of such counsel about the role of the hidden persuaders, and how far did they take heed of the plugging and pumping, promoting and publicising of goods and of politics? After all, it is one thing to describe high-profile arguments, another to know how they are then received. Some surveys of social attitudes from the 1960s in the United States suggest growing levels of public suspicion of a hidden army of people shapers, at home or abroad. Foreign governments, who might spy, meddle, disrupt, were an object of suspicion, of course; above all the Soviet Union, but also its allies, such as Cuba. Another source of growing mistrust, the ability of corporations to gather limitless data and penetrate the minds of a given population; a third anxiety, the hidden dimensions of supposedly liberal democratic states (be it through the security state, the military–industrial complex, or what later came to be called ‘the deep state’).
There were and still are many reasons for rising public disquiet about ‘psycho-technics’, hidden persuasion, corruption and mass manipulation by the state and the private sphere. Mistrust in opinion polling about such indices of public faith in the system would be worth polling too, since many people would come to assume that the pollsters, no less than the statisticians, can lie or conspire. Admittedly, even the notion that we can reliably measure public levels of trust in an industry, an ideology or a state gives serious academic commentators who study such matters cause for … mistrust.37 Nonetheless, such surveys and polls are still often undertaken to explore public misgivings regarding advertising, business and the machinations of governments.38
There is some evidence that majority views about the trustworthiness of government and its associated bureaucracy, in the United States at least, have changed substantially for the worse over the last sixty years. Although the origins of mistrust of the federal system are much older, the post-war period witnessed growing suspicion of Washington and of the secret state. The percentage of US citizens saying that they could confidently have faith in each other, and in their government, entered a downward spiral, it seems, during (and since) the 1960s. Some social scientists who have analysed polling data claim to have found close to a thirty-point decline in public confidence in the three decades after 1964, the year after President Kennedy was killed.39 The percentage of people, in other words, that had confidence in any ruling US administration’s ability to ‘do the right thing’, most of the time, these reports tell us, was higher in the 1950s, and, despite some fluctuations, broadly heads downwards thereafter.
One snapshot, suggestive of the American public’s concerns about advertising, surveillance and the widespread manipulation of citizens, is provided in Packard’s archives, containing what was clearly once a bulging mailbag of reader responses. The letters of his numerous correspondents, many of them just cold-callers who had read his key work, The Hidden Persuaders, as soon as it appeared, are stored in his papers. Those messages give some flavour of those public concerns, and suggest how divided consumers felt about the scale of the problems he raised. Some talked of the risk that critics like him were overstating the dangers of advertising and mass deception; others, the possibility that the situation was worse than he claimed. Readers provided their own cautionary points about the manipulation of the people through a new mode of political psychology. Others insisted on caveats and questioned any one-size-fits-all theory of advertising’s unconscious impact on populations.
A woman in Henderson, Kentucky, wrote to question his general picture of people like her, housewives as half-knowing dupes, vulnerable saps, unwittingly at the mercy of all this storm of publicity. She went on to say that in her own view she was not some passive receptacle, just soaking up messages. Packard should pay more attention, she and other correspondents urged, to environmental conditions, the fact that people might be exhausted, beset by daily labour, bills, housework and childcare, rather than just supine, manipulated stooges.
It was not altogether clear if she was explaining in different terms her receptivity to advertising (exhaustion, toil, hardship) or challenging his assumption that such campaigns would necessarily affect her at all. But Packard, she argued, seemed to picture a neurotic housewife, in an affluent family, living in placid suburbia. This could not be assumed, she thought; the book did not address those in quite different circumstances, nor register the sense of depletion and hardship endured by so many Americans. It was material reality, more than the tricks of Manhattan-based advertising geniuses, she implied, that might account for the glazed, tired look in many shoppers’ eyes.
It was important to see people as ‘individuals with souls’, individuals who lived complex lives, often in adversity, perhaps in tough neighbourhoods, remote from Packard’s personal experiences.40 Another reader, this time a man, wrote that Packard lived comfortably in a well-off community and mistakenly imagined everybody else was in a similar position. This, the correspondent said, is ‘nonsense’, for what about the many in the United States who are hungry, needy, living from hand to mouth and in debt?41
A former pharmaceutical salesman, based in Kennebunkport, Maine, wrote to make a different point – a plea on behalf of those obliged constantly to sell products to fellow Americans, and who were no less manipulated, he felt, than everyone else. Packard no doubt would have agreed. The correspondent went on: ‘I would like to get this story of the brainwashing of salesmen before the public and think that you would know exactly the best way to tell this story.’ Senior management in the pharmaceutical company in which the man worked were apparently ‘trying to deprive their own sales teams of all individual personality and initiative and at the same time high pressure the doctor into using their products’. It had reached the stage, so this writer suggested dramatically, where big pharmaceutical companies were employing ‘Gestapo-like methods’; he wanted Packard to understand the pressures placed on company staff, not simply on consumers out shopping.42
Packard had no shortage of adoring readers, as well as sceptical critics. Much of the feedback showed a readership appreciative of his achievement. As one of his admirers declared to him warmly, linking his work with other illustrious post-war studies: ‘If I had my way “The Lonely Crowd”, “The Organization Man” and “The Hidden Persuaders” would be made required reading for every American mother.’ Indeed, mothers should ‘think about these books for the sake of their children, if they won’t for their own’.43 Packard also had to deal with his share of conspiracy theorists and cranks. One wrote of the dangers of changing water levels in different parts of the earth as a source of influence over the mind; another insisted the United States was about to succumb to barbarians, as had the Roman empire.
Thus, readers responded to his disclosures and offered advice about ways to pursue his analysis of covert commercial influence, or wider conspiracies. Some were particularly concerned about the effects of technology, notably the onslaught of stories and sales pitches appearing on screen. Packard’s writings were laden with references to the dangers we face on the airwaves, but some readers clamoured for yet more analysis of the mass media, and the elaboration of practical plans to combat the disabling effects of so much screen time in a social domain inundated with ads. Packard explained, in graphic language, how words, sounds and images, absorbed from TV, might become permanently ‘etched’ on young brains, and how all this advertising would have, as he put it, ‘conditioning effects’.44 Clearly many readers agreed, but they also wanted to know what most urgently should be done.
Some of the correspondents shared Packard’s sense that the advertisers and marketers were getting stronger each year, triggering certain receptors in the brain, affecting the nervous system, transporting the entire body, not just the mind. The experts of ad land perhaps knew ever more each decade, post-war, how to reach certain parts and to toy with senses, or even memories of senses.
Feminists such as Friedan, as we have seen, offered their own proposals, but others worried the onslaught of messages might be unstoppable, or require a wholesale reorganisation of all mass media. If TV could be so addictive and so capable of affecting your unconscious thought and feeling, what then? Jane Mayer from New York City wrote to Packard after reading The Hidden Persuaders, urging him to redouble his efforts to investigate the obvious dangers of all this screen time. He must in future, she urged, convey even more fully and clearly ‘the insidious and dangerous workings of our TV system’. She then asked him how ‘those of us not yet TV robots’ might unite to fight back, or at least to establish a new educational station in the United States, even in the knowledge that such ventures could not compete with the great ‘mammoths’, as she put it, of the business. Packard wrote back carefully, alluding, not without pride, to his gratifyingly heavy post from his readers, and thanking her a bit woodenly for her message, as though he did not really know what to do with her more militant call to civic action and just wanted to get back to his work.45
Not to be forgotten here were those readers who, on the contrary, were enthusiastic for advertising, sought openings in companies or asked the author’s advice about how such insights might be redeployed for more altruistic purposes.46 A lecturer from the school of dental surgery in Liverpool, R. H. Birch, wrote to Packard to ask how such techniques as he had described might help support a large-scale dental health campaign in England.47
Packard’s work highlighted the techniques of MR that might also be used to plumb the depths of our emotions, to divert our painful pining, inflame our jealousy, shame, greed, longing, lust, competition and all the many ‘unthinking habits’, as he called them. His point was that we needed to face up to the fact that most of the time we are pitifully unaware of what we take in, and what we project onto the people around us, or what they, in turn, evoke in us. The starkest example of the dangers, Packard claimed, could be seen in the new phenomenon of ‘subliminal messaging’. Adverts, he warned, might go entirely past our consciousness; communications, flashing by, too fast even to knowingly register. A new generation of ‘psy’ experts, it seemed, could breach or bypass, in a quite unprecedented and irresistible fashion, the subject’s ego.
Packard addressed the putative dangers of this technique, for example sudden, imperceptible ‘buy ice cream’ messages projected between frames in a movie reel at the cinema. During his interview with Packard and Dichter, Fadiman upped the stakes considerably when he mentioned this point: ‘Suppose, for example, that a very popular movie was being shown to 50 million people but in between each of the thousands of stills of which your motion pictures are concerned there was a little message saying: “Blow up Washington”. Now obviously your eyes do not read that, but theoretically according to Mr Packard your unconscious … takes it in, and theoretically the motivations of people might be changed: that is, a lunatic fringe might be encouraged to take what would be very unfortunate and disastrous action.’48
The prospects of subliminal persuasion in advertising were promoted hard in the 1950s by one of the so-called MR ‘depth men’, James Vicary. He made his name by claiming he could harness science to get to the parts of the consumer’s psyche that other ads could not reach. Vicary was, like Dichter, an unapologetic salesman for his own work, arguing that images could be transmitted in movie theatres so swiftly that the viewer or listener would not consciously notice them; secondly, that this could then reliably be made to persuade the subject to purchase a product in the interval, such as Coca-Cola or popcorn. The message asking if you were hungry, followed by the invitation to ‘eat popcorn’, was an enticement, maybe even an imperative. The audience, according to this scenario, would feel an inexplicable craving. Vicary made strong claims that advertising was about to undergo a revolution, thanks to such inserts. He boasted of the experiments he had conducted but was then in fact unable adequately to replicate them. His work was later dismissed by others as a hoax.
However, after he made the initial claims, subliminal messaging was decried as a frightening new stage in this modern descent into mass enchantment. Here, indeed, it seemed, was brainwashing proper, a completely scientific form of covert influence that evaded conscious appraisal. Some journalists seized on the notion and had a field day. They predicted the final death of all rational decision-making, and a new age of commercial mind control. Newsday described Vicary’s technique as ‘the most alarming invention since the atom bomb’.49 Aldous Huxley, celebrated author of Brave New World, alluded to the final abolition of free will.50
As the historian Dominic Streatfeild has remarked, this alarm was over the top. Had those experiments proved as effective as promised or feared, it would soon have become ‘impossible not to buy Coca-Cola or Camel cigarettes or to vote Republican’.51 In fact, since its invention cinema had aroused such heated concerns about subliminal mass enchantment. But although Vicary’s work was discredited, the idea was suggestive, and a portent of worse forms of persuasion yet to come. Packard emphasised what he called this ‘post-war phenomenon’, quoting articles in newspapers that also referred to the dangers of ‘subthreshold effects’.52 He warned of the terrible abuse of psychological expertise, and cited an article that had appeared in the Journal of Marketing with the title ‘How Psychiatric Methods Can Be Applied to Market Research’. Debate continues today about the role of the ‘secret sales pitch’, whereby the target audience or readership simply fail to see or hear a part of the message, even as it has an impact. Research has been undertaken on the potential use of optical illusions, and the possible infiltration of some imperceptible or at least hazy background images in otherwise more obviously readable photographs.
A notable example of or perhaps ironic commentary upon this approach was a Benson & Hedges tobacco advertisement in 1976, which appeared in Time magazine. A young couple were shown in an amorous clinch: if you looked closely, you could make out the shape of a penis, airbrushed onto the woman’s naked spine. This phallic shape is not obvious, maybe even invisible to some viewers at first. Once it is pointed out, however, there it is, under the hand of the man, as he holds on to her back. The embrace might suggest she is taking the lead, advancing on him, and expecting more; the look of the man’s face as he holds the woman is arguably intended by the designer to be ambiguous; it is for the viewer to determine whether it suggests a confident, or even triumphant, state of mind, or an anxious and startled look. Is he supposed to be worrying he is not quite up to it? Above the image, the caption reads: ‘If you got crushed in the clinch with your soft pack, try our hardpack.’ The secret or not-so-secret sales pitch plays on men’s fears of impotence, offering them understanding, or even an antidote, as well as a possible sexual fantasy. On the other hand, the message and the image might also be construed as an implicit joke to be shared between the wry advertiser and the observant (and potent) viewer, positioned here clearly as a man.53
Despite dramatic warnings about subliminal messaging, the greater dangers lay in the general lack of informed consent to so much of the marketing – and increasingly data gathering – to which the public have been subjected, and the emotionally labile experience of the half-knowing consumer falling for the object. It is when we are only half-attentive to adverts, registering the image, but then inclined to forget, downplay or discount them, that many work best. The influence can remain, reawakened later, when the consumer sees an item, or merely thinks about what they want on the shopping list; this is the moment at which a generic product such as cough sweets or trainers becomes a desire for a particular make. You can see how this works today with fast food; the way you might be drawn, as though impromptu, by, say, the thought not of nourishment, but specifically, say, a Big Mac or KFC. In short, it is not just the salt and the fat, nor even purely the price, that makes fast food appetising, but the campaigning conducted day in and day out to help us decide when we are hungry (or when we are not) to seek the next fix.54
Advertising, in other words, is mostly not about entirely hidden and subliminal brainwashing, but the cumulative effects of repetitive visuals, jingles and catchphrases that we register consciously, up to a point. These are impressions, often enough, that we cannot ever get entirely out of our heads. Advertising campaigns usually require regular reinforcement; a single advertisement is played over and over; images, slogans and tunes run and run.
Much advertising is effective, not because it entrances us but rather because of this repetitive effect, and because it can key into our generally ambivalent attitude to reality; it offers the knowing attractions of make-believe, a daydream or a getaway. Commercials often play upon our penchant for indulging in fantasy, even half-knowingly. Early critics talked of hypnotic states that occur in people as they move around a supermarket; but in large part the work of persuading is more partial if still effective. The point is to engage us in a conversation, to tap into our wishes, our motives, our perceptions of our own needs, and to respond to what people are longing to find, or desperate to leave behind. As Packard had put it, ‘What the probers are looking for, of course, are the whys of our behavior … why we are afraid of banks, why we love those big fat cars, why we really buy homes, why the kind of car we drive reveals the brand of gasoline we will buy … why junior loves cereal that pops, snaps, and crackles.’55
Citizens are bombarded with messages that can prove hard to forget completely; messages that require them to be consumed by the task of being principally consumers, in a vast virtual assemblage of other consumers. The point for critics of advertising in that postwar period then was to show this invasion of our individual, interior psychic spaces, and of shared, social spaces. Packard was at his most effective in pointing out how much behind-the-scenes work goes on to get through our barriers, and yet also to perpetuate the illusion that consumers are free, discerning individuals; people are at once spun and yet persuaded that they can decide fully realistically, in a functioning market economy and liberal democracy.
Packard’s mistrust of the psychological elements in advertising was well founded; his work a vital contribution to the compendium of ideas about modern thought control that provide the basis for the present book. His files, now archived at his former university (Penn State), were packed with the materials he researched, about all these corporate, political and scientific assaults on thinking capacities, or on the public’s right to be left alone. They contain his critical cuttings, and reflections on drugs, psychiatry, surveillance and assorted forms of ‘people shaping’ which he explored later in his writing career.
On the one hand, such critical dissections of ad land techniques in the 1950s and 60s sought to provide effective analysis to better equip consumers to live as full, political subjects, making their own free choices, and to show that both sexes could be waylaid, and then influenced. On the other hand, that literature, Packard’s contributions included, risked assuming, in a reactionary fashion, that women were somehow intrinsically more likely to be suggestible and emotional, less intellectually muscular, more in need of ultimate protection, than men, from the seductions of the modern marketeers. This work could be read in different ways, for instance as a portrait of a previously largely yielding, passive and naive society, comprising men and women, alike helpless before this advertising juggernaut, or it could reinforce presumptions about ‘the second sex’ that feminists were challenging. More nuanced work was required to temper the broad-brush accounts immortalised by Packard. Academics would soon respond to his exposé, showing that it was more complex than had first been suggested; that people were not simply ‘catatonic dough’ in the hands of Madison Avenue, as one of Packard’s positive early reviewers had said.56 For instance, researchers pointed out that many factors might intervene between the message and the recipient; there were constraints, in other words, on what such mass media influencers could achieve simply by sending out messages to all.
Like Packard’s own feisty correspondents, and readers, these critical researchers emphasised that we do not all receive images or experience the process of advertising alike. We have our own life stories, and our private repertoires of memories and sufferings, imaginings, dreams, and crucially our own varying powers of resistance. The advert is not some elixir that puts us completely to sleep or renders us comatose, abolishing free will. A groundbreaking 1955 book had appeared, in fact, even before Packard’s famous text: Personal Influence, by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld. That study pointed out how people are not just sponges for the flow of mass communications; personal circumstances, the local milieu, social relations and the broader cultural context, they insisted, profoundly affect how any given consumer or citizen receives and responds to such messaging.57 It invited more debate as to how or even if a child absorbs the adverts on screen, and to what degree receptivity is affected by what is going on in a family, the nature of sibling relationships, parental attitudes and an array of other factors.
As the Benson & Hedges advertisement illustrates, advertisers, with or without Dichter’s assistance, often took note of Freud’s ideas, intrigued by his explorations of our divided states, desires and insecurities: they were aware we all have multiple points of view, conscious and unconscious. For an advert to work does not require such extreme conditioning, let alone brainwashing. Some campaigns treated people as children; others promised to have a grown-up conversation, and to play upon the warnings about psychic conflicts, and the use of the hard sell. As Freud described so compellingly and as some advertisers could also see, people are involved in many psychic struggles; conflicts between what he pictured as different agencies in the mind. The ego, Freud had suggested, tries to mediate between forces originating in our id and our superego, and to meet, up to a point, the demands imposed by reality. In one of his many vivid analogies, he compared it to a rider trying to direct a wild horse that is inclined to bolt unpredictably from beneath. Even the ego, he added, is partly unconscious, so we may not in fact be aware of how it is also busy compromising and repressing our thoughts.
Dreams, Freud proposed, are wish fulfilments, among other things. The interpretation of dreams, he posited, in perhaps his most important book (published in 1900), could become the royal road to the unconscious. He did not foresee the extent to which commercial interests would seek to capitalise on his work. The Interpretation of Dreams (which he sometimes referred to simply as his ‘dream book’) was fundamental for psychoanalysis, and an inspiration to many in the arts, sciences and political arena, and of course on Madison Avenue.58
It is worth noting that Freud had misgivings about America, in general, and about American psychoanalysis. His calls for the retention of what he called lay analysis (where the therapy is conducted by practitioners who are not also medics) were not to be heeded for a long period in the New World. Freud had made just one trip to the United States, in 1909. Although he saw psychoanalysis as a new science (and had been steeped in science himself), he was uneasy about the medicalisation of his discipline, and about its vulgarisation and commercialisation. His visit and attendant publicity had inspired many Americans to think about the benefits (and dangers) of psychoanalysis, and to explore its potential applications not only in therapy but also in academic work, social policy, politics and business. Institutes were founded to pursue Freud’s methods and train student practitioners. The impact of psychoanalytic thought in the United States grew substantially, interwar. By the 1940s and 50s, some of its vocabulary had become part of the vernacular for millions of people; the practice of seeking analysis, lying on a couch and free-associating in an open-ended therapy was well understood, an assumed reference point in popular culture, post-war. The psychoanalytic ‘talking cure’ would, however, always face sustained challenges from other theories and forms of treatment; all the more so by the final two decades of the twentieth century, when ‘cognitive behavioural therapy’ on the one hand, and drugs such as Fluoxetine on the other (mostly sold under the trade name ‘Prozac’), were increasingly widely prescribed. But for much of the last century Freudian thought and practice exerted a profound influence on the way large numbers of people in the West, and certainly in the United States, would understand their own minds.
Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, was another path-setter, an entrepreneur who sought to make use of psychoanalytic ideas in the commercial world. Like Dichter later, Bernays had a highly successful career in the United States.59 His family had emigrated there from Vienna in the 1890s; Edward graduated from Cornell in 1912 and by the 1920s was making his mark as a public relations counsel, as well as a commentator on modern politics and business culture at large. He was a precursor both to Packard (the worrier and critic) and Dichter (MR’s promoter-in-chief). Bernays began to hire out his services to corporate clients during the interwar period, i.e. before Dichter would establish his institute and approach. Bernays set the scene, insisting to businesses that they take some heed of psychology, and sometimes directly of Freudian psychology; it did him no harm that he could claim privileged direct knowledge of the great Viennese professor, or, by extension, of his complex ideas.
Freud’s work was a far cry from that of Bernays or Dichter; little is known of what he made of his nephew’s project. Bernays may have sold psychoanalysis to business, but he also evidently had a powerful social and political mission. That mission was to support the United States, uphold what he saw as its basic, decent, liberal values, and to provide alarming analyses about the power of fascist and Nazi propaganda experts in Europe to tap the unconscious. Indeed, as the Nazi Party rose to power, he warned of the demonic skill of sinister mass communicators such as Goebbels, who understood very well how to use rhetorical techniques to woo and excite crowds, exacerbate hatred, and unleash murderous wishes. A war on civilised values, Bernays argued in the 1920s and 30s, could easily spread; democracies could founder and fall, even in those nations where such systems seemed securely established. He was concerned with how minds could be perverted, poisoned, confused or invaded, anywhere.
Bernays assumed that although we all have a mix of emotions, including hate, people are not born as fascists or Nazis. Rather the ideology can be implanted, nurtured and communicated, and with alarming speed, especially where the soil is propitious (in conditions of misery, poverty, unemployment, uncertainty, chaos, etc.). The United States should never be complacent about populism and demagoguery, he insisted: liberal democracy had to be shored up and propaganda used effectively – the arts of emotional communication are required to defend liberty, to counter militarism, authoritarianism and racial hate.
As Bernays saw it, all modern states, as well as all forward-looking companies, had to cotton on fully to the dangers, as well as the opportunities, of modern psychology, and to grasp the advances that had been made in understanding the sinister aspects of human nature. Both Freud and Bernays, in their different ways, explored the vicissitudes of group psychology, and the potential volatility, even madness, that might lurk in all of us, especially when under greatest pressure and strain. ‘Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society’, Bernays wrote, ‘constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.’ Or again: ‘We are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of … It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.’60
Strikingly, the history of thought on advertising was often caught up in larger debates about the nature of the mind and the future prospects of democracy. The question was how to deal with a world in which mass enchantments were always on offer, and potentially orchestrated by extremely sophisticated agencies, drawing upon the human sciences. So, from narrower considerations about how a particular campaign for a product was built to stimulate the public’s imagination, critics would turn to questions about the unconscious and how it played out in the mass psychology of electorates. They wanted to consider the unclear line people might tread between realistic views of the material world, and these dimensions of fantastical thought and longing that shape behaviour and choice.
Rather than subliminal messaging and states of automatism, the real issue was more ordinary and everyday: we are all shaped by unconscious fantasies, as well as inclined to enter into daydreams; our conscious reckonings are always shadowed by thoughts unknown. Marketers and advertisers can skilfully plug into all that. A commonplace example Packard cited was the practice of dealers placing the sleekest and fastest model up front in the window. The aim, he explained, was to try to entice men into showrooms by presenting open-top and powerful limousines first. Once inside, the buyer would probably have to at least partly – maybe even grudgingly – face up to the requirements of reality; the number of people or quantity of baggage they had to ferry around, for example. They might well then opt finally (most times) for the more practical as well as more affordable family car to be found further indoors. But the crucial point was to gain their attention in the first place, catch their desire, through the ‘dream’ in the window or on the screen. A prospective purchaser’s yearning gaze is hooked. We may well be more likely to ‘come in’ and become a customer, if so ‘invited’, Packard showed, even if we do not opt to buy the initial ‘dream’ object (that gleaming two-seater sports car).
At that time the pitch for such an escapist car might be primarily made by the marketing men to other men (presumed to be the most likely drivers or at least the holders of the family purse strings for such large items). But many shop windows, of course, were aimed at women; advertising of everything from cars to furnishings to holiday trips was recalibrated, geared increasingly towards women’s burgeoning spending power, and thus designed to enter into their equally fraught relationships with consumerism, health, family, work, fantasy, romance, sex and escape. Campaigns for cigarettes, for instance, were heavily targeted at women, providing reassurance that consumption of tobacco was truly good: ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet’, advised those reassuring TV physicians to a female clientele. Adverts featuring doctors were commonplace, interwar and post-war, telling the consumer that product was harmless, or even beneficial to health, as well as a marker of effortless style.
The idea that advertising techniques operate entirely beyond our awareness is contentious. Most people grow adept at realising that they are being pitched a story, not just ‘the facts’, aware as they watch, or listen, that sellers have a vested interest, and that elements of fantasy and reality are woven together in marketing messages. In fact, when adverts work too hard, deny the playful elements, they may prove off-putting, like a pathetic and ineffectual suitor desperate to prevail. It became obvious long ago, then, to many if not all consumers, that advertising revels in symbols and constructs, kindles fantasies, or sometimes invites ironic reflections on those very fantasies that we see in the literal or virtual windows. We can probably read the fact that commercials for cars are offering a kind of pipe dream about the driver and passenger’s total escape, the hope of an open and limitless road, even a route to some paradise, and yet the message may work.
Between Bernays’ warnings and applications of psychology to commerce and politics in the 1920s and 30s, and those 1950s polemics by Packard and others, much would change: advertising seemed ever more seamless and total, and complex in strategy, as time went on. Glossy magazines and papers, billboards, cold-calls, mail-outs, radio, cinema and TV were deployed one by one, or sometimes in integrated and sustained campaigns, so that by the 1970s and 80s companies and political parties in the United States and Britain, not just corporations, were required to spend fortunes on a whole phalanx of professional people from ad land. In the first national election that I voted in, Saatchi & Saatchi played a notable role and became globally famous through their work on behalf of the Conservative Party. Stark images of disconsolate people in queues under the heading ‘Labour isn’t working’ were plastered in public spaces and credited as highly effective works of persuasion, including with many working-class voters. Although the precise impact of such posters on the campaign has long been debated, the 1979 election witnessed, as one commentator put it, a ‘quantum leap in the marketing of Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party’.61
But the gap between the 1980s and the 2020s is bigger still. It has grown harder than it was in the 1950s or even the 1980s, with the fracturing of class solidarities and more automatic allegiances to political parties, to be sure quite how to encompass and interpret what is actually happening to all of us, to know how a trend builds, what can swell a particular movement, what ‘news’ is hype, or how the people shapers get to us all. What are we to make of the direction and orchestration of politics and of commerce in this new forest of algorithms, this realm where children grow up scrolling and swiping on tablets and phones, where busy people nonetheless spend so much time on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc., and where consumers influence each other in myriad ways? What would Packard make of all this?
Nowadays people grow up learning, more-or-less well, how to navigate a way through the endless emporium, to choose, resist, like or dislike, cope with the constant invitations and interruptions of the eye by adverts; we must make our own pathways, and sometimes of course fall down rabbit holes, or bat away pop-ups, designed by the successors of those 1950s advertising corporations. We may hope to evade the obvious hurdles and potholes, but the advertisers are on to us too, ensuring our experience is ever more tailored, or that we somewhere believe in the wisdom of (purchasing) crowds. We no longer just flip through glossy magazines, but rather a potentially endless array of sponsored stories, trip advisers and peer recommendations online.
The depths may still be probed by the experts, the heirs to Dichter, but the effect, as so many people now complain, is of a sense of endless time spent on screens, skimming across ever more surfaces, flitting from item to item, caught up in a kind of depthless arena of buying and selling, grazing through factoids, punditry and surveys, sampling bits and pieces of information; and yet many of us feel above all uncertain about where we are now heading.
Predictions at the American Advertising Federation in 1958 that Packard’s bombshell publication and shrill warnings would prove short-lived, and that his basic thesis about the hidden persuaders would soon crash, burn and be forgotten, were not borne out.62 Indeed, many of his depictions still seem relevant, or even gross underestimations of what has befallen us in a twenty-first-century capitalist world where neuromarketing companies seek to use EEGs (electroencephalograms) to study the brain’s electrical frequencies in order to refine commercial online experiences ever further. Many techniques and devices serve now to tighten the bond between the consumer and the product (or the online message), or at least to try to create the perfect fit, the smoothest connection and transaction as possible. You can pay now by waving your phone – no need for physical money at all. One expert put it like this, as he considered the new cutting edges of the advertising business: neuromarketing can help the advertiser read ‘the brain’s secret whispering’.63 To access that whispering is perhaps the aim of the research; but also, the means for companies to whisper back to us.
The technology has changed drastically, the ambition of companies to monitor and manipulate the mind, and even the brain, has not gone away; the means are now far more elaborate than those that the critics identified back in the 1950s. So too is the constant pitching for the benefits of yet more advertising pitching. ‘If pitches are to succeed, they need to reach the subconscious level of the brain, the place where consumers develop initial interest in products, inclinations to buy them and brand loyalty’, so claimed Dr A. K. Pradeep only a few years ago.
With a doctorate in engineering, Pradeep founded and became chief executive of Neurofocus, a neuromarketing firm based in Berkeley, California. Its website advertises the company as the market leader in bringing neuroscience expertise to advertising, branding, product development, packaging and entertainment, and explains how it can call on the skills of experts with training from MIT, Berkeley and Harvard (among others).64 Pradeep adds, with evident pride, that the firm uses EEGs and eye-tracking devices to explore customer attitudes to sales messages, websites and movie trailers, and how ‘[w]e basically compute the deep subconscious response to stimuli’.65
How far this is possible, where the research may be leading, and the potential safeguards required are issues of obvious and urgent concern. Modern analysts of advertising warn of a new conjuncture, where, in real time, all our movements online may come to be integrated with our back histories; an evolving situation where the system can constantly feed us offers, not only of products, but also of culture, news, networks, etc., congruent with our own ever-evolving and indelible profiles.
So far in this chapter, we’ve seen how the Cold War conversation about brainwashing came to be redirected in critical reflections and studies of advertising – or, more broadly, how citizens of a ‘free world’ are also sold a certain vision of life on behalf of capitalism. Indeed, some critics, long before all these recent worries about the attention economy, set out concerns about how the industry might be selling people ultimately not so much a market of things to buy, but rather a far more encompassing visualisation of what it truly means to be a flourishing person, creating simulacra of choice and freedom, while also controlling so many of the levers that determine those choices and the expression of seeming autonomy. The advertisers, it appeared, were not just encouraging an expansion of consumption, but reshaping the very psychic life of the citizens who did the consuming. Some of that discourse was hyperbole, and yet it cannot just be dismissed as fantasy or fiction.
The questions raised by that post-war generation still resonate as we head into a new kind of Cold War (or worse) between the United States and China. How much in either society are people free to think, and shape the future discerningly? What should I do if my every breath, my every waking thought, my sleep, could somehow be read by technology, and then crafted into adverts and political news designed to reach me? What does it mean if ‘I’ am the product when I am browsing? To see where some of the thinking about advertising went, between Packard in the 1950s and the recent literature on surveillance capitalism and the deep state, let’s consider next the argument developed by the French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard during the 1960s. He provides a notable example of this continuing effort to update the story decade by decade, and to analyse the impact and full reach of advertising in determining what we assume to be our reality, or our sense of normality.
Baudrillard offered an ambitious, distanced analysis of the advertising industry. In a book published in Paris in that especially turbulent year of mass protests, 1968, he argued that contemporary consumers were effectively being asked to live inside what he called an ‘ideology of democracy’, as well as consumerism. This was an arena where freedom meant an occasional invitation to vote for this party or that, along with a daily injunction to participate in the market, and to look away from anything that discomforts (such as prisons, homelessness, war, empire, inequality).
As part of this ‘reality’, Baudrillard said, we are constantly informed that the acquisition of stuff will bring satisfaction; we are sold the assumption that this acquisitive pattern equates to social progress. Each of us, he suggested, is not only tempted by, but constantly pressed with, these demands, even obligations to join in. This onslaught is persuasive, yet operates mostly even without our noticing: as though, to achieve our missions in life, we could only accept endless immersion in a constructed, marketised world. It is as though we must live in this scene, be inscribed as players in that theatre of goods, assuming products must be not only possessed but also then swiftly discarded; as though each of us is schooled to this subject position, as acquisitive individuals, in a frantic and interminable cycle.
Baudrillard proposed that ultimately the advertising industry had come to sell us a psychological story of human fulfilment, as though procuring, say, the latest Citroën model, or wearing Dior, was the acme of imaginable, personal achievement.66 The whole thing now had to be deconstructed intellectually before it could be resisted. Advertising, at present, fuels an economy based around this endless circuit of disposal, renewal, obsolescence and repurchasing. This future, according to Baudrillard, was not inevitable. His critique reflected something of the spirit of that year of revolt, with perhaps just a touch of that slogan beloved by students in 1968, ‘be realistic, demand the impossible’.
People needed to realise advertising never can satisfy desire, he insisted. Indeed, it is essential to this kind of economy, and to the mode of advertising that supports it, that desire never should be quenched anyway. Ultimately the whole industry is part of a larger ensemble of forces, a staple ingredient in the economy, culture and society that works at multiple levels to shape our desire for … more desire.
Baudrillard used an idea that had also been explored by psychoanalysts such as Lacan, that we are all too prone to confuse need, demand and (impossible) desire. In advertising’s imaginary realm, each discrete non-essential purchase will do the trick, yet it is part of an infinite series stretching ahead; we are incited to pursue and attend to the next year’s products, egged on by that regiment of human strategists, stylists, fashion experts, etc., only for the carousel of the latest things to disappoint. It is part of the structure of the world as we know it; the system showers down messages about products that can meet the consumer’s wishes, only for fashions to change, with each passing ‘season’; that is the nature of the arrangement, the lever of ‘growth’. We need to realise that desire is never sated, and certainly not by interminable purchasing. The alternative to that need not be some drab, monochrome Stalinist or Maoist world, although often these too were sold to us in this way, and as though we were all in a global struggle, with only two choices before us, capitalism or those modes of communism.
Baudrillard was notably interested in the roles of waste and obsolescence inside this capitalist system, and wanted to think about the despoiling of material resources to sustain it. Detritus, he emphasised, is not supposed to be minimised in such consumer societies; rather the packaging provides meaning in its own right – for instance, associations with plenitude, surfeit, goodness and bountifulness, or the promise of treasures hidden within. The waste is all too easily left unremarked, but this, he said, was a mistake. It may be an important trope of success and of luxuriance: ‘Is not the fact that the glass packaging can be thrown away’, Baudrillard mused, ‘the mark of the golden age?’
We are surrounded by inanimate and animate models of success and failure in life, often associated with youth, freshness and promiscuous disposability of things and people. Baudrillard wanted to alert us to how ‘success’ may be linked by an entire industry to this extravagant cycle of acquiring and then destroying value, searching for ever more novelty – be it for newly discovered scents in ingeniously crafted containers, packets and boxes, to the expectation of moving constantly along a ‘ladder’ in a series of ‘upwardly mobile’ rentals, or trying to find some ideal home, with ever newer furniture too. That perfectly achieved and desirable place provides the private, individual bourgeois conception of a life well lived in the most enviable, private, glossy habitat. Such visions of the good life, projected all around us in modern societies, had grown ever more disjoined, he suggested, from real social solidarities, as well as from needs. And affluence, for some of us in this increasingly frenetic material and confected imaginary world, was occurring amid so much poverty, misery and degradation, all those noises off, in the urban peripheries, or in the so-called developing or third world. We could suffer, as some psychologists and critical economists had also long warned, from this condition of affluenza.
Such an analysis by Baudrillard reflected and contributed to the emergence of an ecological critique, certainly an environmentalist sensitivity, regarding the sustainable and the unsustainable future. It also introduced, or rather reintroduced, the insistent thought (even as that account emphasised structures and systems) that people, if they so wish, might opt to walk away, not spend their lives in this fashion, or rather with fashion. This way of seeing and living is endemic, and yet also requires participation for the system to work. He wanted to show how this ‘spectacular squandering’, as he put it over half a century ago, is stitched into the economic system at many different levels. To illustrate his point, he drew attention to the 1960s marketing of one-use-only disposable knickers (80 per cent viscose, 20 per cent non-woven acrylic), and suspected that the hope of the marketers was that the very wastefulness of this product would be part of the lustre that consumers would buy. Or rather operate as a small echo of the sublimely preposterous notion (the supreme symbol of desirability for many, he thought): a ‘magnificent dress worn by the star for one evening only’.67
Baudrillard and other radical intellectuals of that time insisted that we are prone, even condemned, to function in this ‘useless and unnecessary universe’, as ideological prisoners in a vast virtual shopping mall. The shop-till-you-drop requirement and the matching mania of disposing of the old in favour of the new, he explained, offer an illusory version of freedom. It was crucial to think and fight our way out of this box. ‘The possession of objects frees us only as acquisitive individuals, devoted to that mission (and little else).’ Our dominant social order refers us back to the ‘infinite freedom to possess more objects, the only progression possible is up the ladder of objects; but this is a ladder that leads nowhere, being itself responsible for nourishing the inaccessible abstraction of the model’.68 His argument there is reminiscent perhaps of those ‘impossible’ drawings immortalised by the Dutch artist M. C. Escher. One of Escher’s most celebrated pictures, Ascending and Descending (1960), shows lines of people moving about on those mysterious staircases. Escher was interested in existentialism, as well as in surrealism; he liked drawing out in pictures a personal dilemma for people; his work was concerned with themes such as responsibility, choice and alienation, as much as with formal questions of vision. His picture shows people actively moving about for themselves; even as they may be trapped in a certain space, they are active, not passive, figures in that landscape.
If we are to step off the ladder, envision a different social architecture, choose an unknown future, rather than the continuation of a governing past, we need to consider both the structural features that entrap us and our existential choices. We need, indeed, to take seriously the convergence of surveillance, the cyber-based economy, the manipulation of politics, and all the rest; and keep alive the prospects of protest and major reform, of change to how reality is orchestrated, including online, by those corporations who, over the years since its creation, have shaped and monetarised the internet. We live now, of course, with certain conditions, a framework, just as Packard had feared, conducive to the fashioning of citizens, but as the best critiques of advertising have previously suggested, a current paradigm can also potentially shift, and new fault lines emerge.
Consider the example of Simulmatics. It can be interpreted in varying ways, and linked to different arguments about politics, campaigning and advertising. It might be taken as an illustration of the relentlessness of the psycho-technics that Schumpeter had once described; a key staging post to our present. Or it could be viewed as a salutary example of journalistic challenge to, and public backlash against, that version of reality. ‘Simulmatics’ was a company established in 1959, with premises on the corner of Madison Avenue, promising great things in the field of electioneering, thanks to their ‘election simulator’ machines.69 The company name combined ‘simulation’ and ‘automatic’; clients were offered expertise in artificial intelligence and a new basis on which to craft effective political messages. A revolution was at hand, or so it seemed.
Simulmatics provided services to the 1960 presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy. The Democrats knew that the election would be a fierce and difficult contest; they would need all the skilled professional help they could get. The party had lost the previous two contests to Eisenhower. Kennedy was a controversial choice as a candidate, even if he had, for many people, a certain star appeal. Nixon, his opponent, also dramatically divided opinion. Polls suggested the contest would be close; there was no guarantee American voters would swing the electoral pendulum back to the other side after eight years of living with ‘Ike’, as President Eisenhower was chummily known.
Eisenhower’s decisive victories had given the Democrats pause for thought; his carefully boiled-down so-called ‘Corn Flakes Campaign’ of 1952 presaged the changing world of media-driven and, increasingly, TV-based politics. His advisers back then had encouraged him to keep messages as simple as possible, play up the patriotic angle, cast major doubt on the values of his opponent, and present himself as not only a legendary military leader and a personally likeable man, but also as a safe and trusted product you might safely buy. His opponent Adlai Stevenson complained that Eisenhower was sold as though he were more like a cereal than a serious political figure. He lost, then stood against Eisenhower again in 1956, with the same outcome. Stevenson’s disdain for television persisted, even as the medium grew in importance.
Eisenhower’s team realised much sooner than his opponent’s that the media, above all TV, would prove crucial; and, moreover, they saw that it might be a mistake to distract voters with too much small print. Hence, they provided appealing images, folksy messages and catchy jingles that focused the electorate’s attention on the qualities of the man far more than on policies; they offered simple refrains such as ‘I Like Ike’ (or second time around, ‘I Still Like Ike’). Long speeches were out. Ike was a figure sold as the man the public already trusted and could trust again. His commercials were fun, even amusing – one had elephants marching along to a musical version of ‘I Like Ike’. He had the wind in his sails; the economy was generally doing quite well. Even if voters did not necessarily believe the Red-baiting attacks that rained down from the Right on the left-of-centre Stevenson, Eisenhower had an air of authority, solidity, plausibility. His job in the campaigns was to sustain this aura, play up the personable, ordinary, strong and reassuring persona, and supply inane generalities such as ‘It’s time for a change’.
The latter phrase was sufficiently ‘meaningless ad copy’, as the historian Jill Lepore puts it in her excellent account of the rise and fall of the Simulmatics Corporation. It was ‘written by the guy who came up with M&M’s “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand”’.70 Celebrities, choirs and cheerful birthday messages for the president were also provided along the way, adding wherever possible to the feel-good atmosphere and general sense of Republican momentum. In fact, the two campaigns for Eisenhower were important turning points in the national or even global transformation of politics to a sound-bite culture, carefully choreographed PR and fast-paced media spectacle. The Kennedy–Nixon election in 1960 made that transformation more fully apparent.
Kennedy’s advisers studied the Democrats’ previous failures. Many ingredients combined to produce JFK’s eventual extremely narrow success over Nixon, but, as Lepore argues, we should not ignore the role of Simulmatics. As the research director at Simulmatics would explain, in the Public Opinion Quarterly, in 1961: ‘The development of electronic computers and mathematical game theory has greatly stimulated the simulation of human behavior as a means of exploring the implications of theory and extending the analysis of great masses of data provided by surveys and similar sources.’71
The co-author of that account was Ithiel de Sola Pool, chair of the research board of Simulmatics and an MIT political scientist. The company’s approach was to amass and code data on computers from past election returns and opinion surveys, and then to identify and analyse dozens of voter types and demographic clusters. They sought to model likely reactions to campaign developments, and thus pinpoint what was most needed to produce a result. Kennedy’s statements, they proposed, might be tweaked to reflect such precise advice. New technical and psychological support services would then road-test policies, refine the optics, finesse the mood music – i.e. seek to enhance a candidate’s rhetoric, and adjust behaviour, style and political commitments to create impressions that affect the thinking of groups of undecided voters as the campaign was underway.
Admittedly, this was all still pretty hit-and-miss, and nobody can be sure quite how many votes the approach affected. It was also an extension of something much older: politicians’ use of all means possible to maximise their emotional appeal to voters. The arrival of Simulmatics onto the scene at the end of the 1950s was a crucial development, prefiguring more elaborate forms of data analysis, advertising and targeted messaging. Simulmatics, for example, encouraged Kennedy to go all out to attract the African-American and Jewish vote, by deliberately making an issue of his Catholicism, rather than seeking to hide it away. By insisting that religion should be no bar to any candidate’s perceived fitness for office, Kennedy sought not only to neutralise criticism but also to go on the political offensive. He had to do something, as he was being severely attacked as unsuitable for the highest office – a man who might in future do the bidding of the Pope, it was said, and not the American people.72
Kennedy’s camp endeavoured to counter such charges by taking them head on, connecting the issue of such inflammatory anti-Catholic rhetoric to other forms of oppression, thus making a bridge between JFK and his family on one side and people of colour and other minorities on the other. The message would also play well with younger and/or more liberal voters. The point was to attack all such prejudice as un-American, thus, to change the framework of the national conversation on personal belief, religion and racial politics. Critics of Kennedy on the Left objected that so much of this was fake, and that the policies did not go nearly far enough, but all the same this was a striking rhetorical move.
It turned out that in the key places that the Democrats hoped to win, Kennedy had more to gain than to lose by insisting openly on this point, which also helped to offset his previously lacklustre record on civil rights. The very attacks Kennedy would invite from the Republicans could thus be marshalled and turned around: drawing down fire, as it were. Jack Kennedy’s style, glamorous wife, and especially his assured performance in a TV debate against a somewhat sweaty, tired and shadowy-looking Nixon, were also important to the Democrats’ triumph. On election night, Americans watched the outcome on television. It was to date the fastest-reported result in US history. Kennedy’s success in the electoral college system was substantial: 303 to 219. But his popular vote – 49.7 per cent to 49.6 per cent – was the closest result of the century.
In the aftermath of the election, commentators emerged expressing considerable alarm about the arrival of Simulmatics. A debate ensued in various media about what limits might rightly be set, who appropriately controlled such data, and what safeguards might legitimately be introduced in future to protect people from being studied and turned in this way.
Although from our standpoint the computer technology was still basic, a far cry from current methods, some newspapers took the threat of a new high-tech assault on the voter extremely seriously. Lepore describes how the story was picked up around the country, with dire warnings appearing, for example, in the New York Herald Tribune of this new ‘secret weapon’; a newspaper in Oregon complained that the Kennedy campaign had reduced ‘the voters – you, me, Mrs Jones next door, and Professor Smith at the university … to little holes in punch cards’. That journalist insisted hyperbolically that by comparison with this technological and political development, ‘the tyrannies of Hitler, Stalin and their forebears look like the inept fumbling of a village bully’.73
Kennedy’s press secretary played down or denied the significance of Simulmatics in the election. However, speculation about its role and potential was rife. Storytellers were inspired to imagine the dystopian end point, a hybrid future where the worst of the past (think here of Goebbels and Nazi propaganda, they warned, just as Bernays had done earlier) and the new computer revolution fully converged.
The critical investigation of the science behind the underhand manipulation of public opinion, as we have seen, greatly gained in momentum during the interwar period and even more so after the Second World War. The question of how such opinion is accurately gauged, or how it can be massaged, soothed or distorted by private interests or by mass political parties, had been of obvious concern during the 1920s and 30s (and after); indeed, the subject became a mainstay of social science research much before Packard’s day. During the same period, polling companies were created to measure such fluctuating opinions as reliably as possible.
Such work is not of course entirely concealed; some is hidden in plain sight. Yet we may well suspect now, after decades of work on the psychological impact of advertising, and the depredations of ‘digital capitalism’, that we live not only with ‘known unknowns’, and ‘unthought knowns’, but also the realm of the truly mysterious ‘unknown unknowns’, the phenomena that may entirely blindside us. We are aware, presumably, that our digital footprints are traced, our data tracked and stored, wherever it may be. We are perhaps mindful of tools, techniques and practices that make a mockery of the idea of fair and transparent elections; cognizant, in theory at least, that this process, which ideally would require millions of people to exercise judgement based on extensive knowledge of the options, is conducted with much voter misapprehension, indeed in a sea of propaganda, with campaigns designed precisely to manipulate the necessary data and news.
We might also seek to gauge, however, as best we can, where plausible, critical warnings about the corruption of democratic processes give way to the conspiracy theorists’ overblown fears. All this in a context in which we now give away information daily on our personal computers on a scale that (during the 1950s and 60s) advertising agencies, or companies such as Simulmatics or for that matter Cold War spying agencies, could only have dreamt about. We sign contracts at the click of a mouse, without time or inclination to read the small print. And yet despite the alacrity with which we just press ‘accept’, we might also find ourselves caught up in an apprehensive internal dialogue: what if the phone in my pocket, the tablet, the Kindle or even that beautiful laptop so deftly named ‘Air’ gives unseen others intolerable access? What if I put time into the problem and tried to refuse? Some people tape over the aperture/camera or turn off all the most obviously invasive settings. And yet, who can be sure? Each of us has become so heavily integrated into the ecosystem of digital surveillance that mundane activities – communicating with friends, watching a show, reading an article or hailing a taxi – all come with potential consequences of privacy violation.
We live in a world where we are bound to suspect that corporations know a great deal about us; far more than we may wish, and far more, in all likelihood, than we know about them. Amid the plethora of warnings and theories, it has become harder to know where appropriate – sane – public wariness ends, and a delusional narrative about omnipotent alien powers, hidden manipulations and clandestine interferences truly begins. The world may be in many ways unrecognisable from that described by advertising’s most trenchant critics post-war; and yet strikingly, many prescient accounts emerged at that time about where the industry, in its alliance with business and politics, could be taking us. And about whether a future of corporate and governmental ‘people shapers’ could ever be changed.
To be wary about conspiracy theories and theorists is not to deny that real nefarious plots and subterranean strategies of many kinds are pursued on behalf of commercial and political interests, domestic and foreign agencies. From the point of view of the West, the question of influencers and of advertising today is as likely to be considered in relation to hostile states, notably Russia, China and Iran. As the 2016 US election showed, a state may use multiple tools and hire many proxies to influence people in another country. A foreign power may have an obvious interest to polarise, to unsettle and to encourage scepticism in the very foundations of liberal democracy, just as the West may seek to use cyberwarfare methods against its adversaries.
In one sense all those historical warnings about a brave new world of online propaganda ring true. We require all the help we can get to see more clearly how companies, political parties and governments, not to mention foreign intelligence agencies, exploit new opportunities created by companies such as Google, Meta and so on; to consider how the algorithms work, and what decisions lie behind them; to recognise how corporations create vast data sets that they then sell on to those who are able to pay, and who may have every interest in distorting elections, opening social divisions, or spreading disillusionment in the value of voting. State-sponsored disinformation is rife. For instance, there are credible reports that Russia played a role in seeking to dampen the overall African-American vote in the 2016 election, especially so in the closest-run states.74 The scale of the digital ‘information wars’, authorised by Putin and others, during the 2010s, to achieve certain electoral outcomes in the UK, continental Europe and the United States, is only now becoming apparent to most of us. We have legitimate and rational grounds to suspect webs of deception at work around us. But we also need to be mindful that certain kinds of warnings about these many clandestine forces may also prove disabling, distracting and overblown, leading to cynicism or mass paranoia.
Before ending this chapter, let’s bring these thoughts about surveillance together with a few further observations about continuity and change in the world of advertising.
*
Marketing of goods and services has come a long way since the 1950s. Corporations try, of course, to keep pace with the cultural times, social trends and the latest street fashions and technologies. There are so many ways for businesses to seal a pact, to try to engage with consumers, to keep their business shows on the road, to infuse and sponsor contemporary culture and captivate us. Some advertisements are made by extremely talented film directors and have eye-watering budgets; they can also be so beautifully made they inspire scenes in movies, rather than the reverse. Some remain artistic talking points for years, or decades. A case in point, the now fondly remembered black-and-white Guinness surfer commercial, directed by Jonathan Glazer, which was first broadcast on St Patrick’s Day, 1999. It stunningly portrayed a surfer riding the waves, amid leaping horses. ‘Surfer’ featured remarkable visual effects by the Computer Film Company (CFC), was skilfully edited, boasted a powerful, thumping soundtrack and stylish narration. It is now often still closely analysed, and celebrated as a classic, a work of art, as much as an advert that caught the moment.75
Some adverts or campaigns seem, to the delight of the companies, to transcend the genre, to leap off the screen, become part of the zeitgeist. Coca-Cola campaigns have often sought to capture the era, to reflect or even to lead social changes, ‘growing’ with their customers and casting them in a new light. Each series of Coca-Cola adverts provides a heavily loaded sign of its times. Either way, the endless circuit of assessing and selling remains, and is updated year on year.
Interwar, Coca-Cola notoriously got busy with Santa Claus, helping to rebrand his image. Father Christmas was then heavily used to enhance the reputation of the company and its product.76 The 1950s approach to advertising the drink was often based around pictures of an inviting, carefree blonde American woman. In the 1960s, customers would have been familiar with a jaunty song, ‘Things Go Better with Coke’, and, again, with commercial film sequences heavily accenting American whiteness. (This was in stark contrast to recent company training seminars, urging that Coca-Cola employees think much harder about their own implicit racism or ‘white fragility’; although this has caused a predictable backlash from American conservatives.)77 In the aftermath of civil rights campaigns, the feminist movement and so many political struggles against imperialism, this approach was then replaced, or at least complicated, in the 1970s, by a new message: Coke as the drink to relish in a multicultural, multi-ethnic post-1960s world – the ‘Real Thing’.
Capitalism is, evidently, and as Marx had foreseen in the nineteenth century, remarkably protean, capacious and capable of assimilating and transforming what stands in its path, even gathering up one-time sources of opposition into new sales pitches. That 1970s Coca-Cola theme song, ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing’, became a big musical hit on its own. The advertising agency and film team behind the commercial brought together fresh-faced young people of different ethnic backgrounds and had them singing to the world from a hilltop. The commercial conveyed hope and innocence, harmony and globalisation all in one stroke. That whole aesthetic dimension of advertising has become an important part of the hall of mirrors; the social images, cool styles, quintessential looks and path-breaking campaigns, which came to be widely appreciated, ranked and prized.
Other companies also traded on an apparently inclusive, rebellious, edgy new vision, or allied their promotional activities with art – witness United Colors of Benetton, although in that case, the cause célèbre was the carefully contrived, ever more outrageously provocative images, pushing at the limits of the permissible, on behalf of cultural ‘freedom’. This approach was at its height during the 1990s, where the campaigns were shrilly designed at all costs to draw the viewer’s attention, even at the risk of scandal: scenes of people living with AIDS, ‘transgressive’ nuns, bloodied babies just after delivery, internal organs, Mafia murder victims on the street.78
These examples are part of the branding – in the case of Benetton, the courting of controversy to revive the firm’s fortunes – the creation or recasting of a business with a strong identity or character, designed to inspire customer loyalty and personal recommendation. There is much discussion of late in the advertising industry of how that approach can now work, and how loyalty can be sustained, when consumers, like voters, may be more impatient, fickle, fractious, fragmented … no longer perhaps identifying with one another as classes, communities, generations.
In a recent think piece for the business magazine Forbes, Thomas Dichter, the son of Ernest Dichter and a writer on finance and consumer habits, reflects upon a younger generation of internet users, and muses on changes afoot since his father’s old dispute with the author of The Hidden Persuaders. ‘The generations that live and buy online are savvy about what and how they are being pitched. If advertising is going to work for them now an even more subtle and deep reach into their hearts and emotions is called for than what worked in the Mad Men era.’79 That is surely true: advertising often assumes consumers are cognizant of the most obvious strategies of formal, in-your-face open advertising and make more and more use of intermediaries, of information and imagery shared, transmitted and liked by ‘friends’ on social media. We might be sensitive in some respects, obtuse elsewhere, sophisticated in some transactions and naive in others, and the advertising industry will surely evolve yet further to try to reach people who have grown wise to old techniques. Nonetheless, in that sophisticated and critical response, we can also see how people at large, and indeed often the young, may constitute powerful agents of change, against a particular order of things.
No brand can assume that the relationship with their customers is simply settled or for life: after all, crowd outrage, even informal (albeit usually transient) boycotts, does occur in response to campaigns.80 In 2017 Pepsi released and then withdrew a notoriously ill-judged advert, featuring Kendall Jenner, offering a can to a police officer during a protest. This naked appropriation of ‘social protest’ was roundly rejected by much of its intended audience. It caused a backlash and was widely decried as crass and exploitative. It resulted in a significant slump in sales and was even dubbed the ‘fail of the year’.81
That was a single instance, but more generally, levels of trust by the public in commercial and political advertising are now in question, and regularly surveyed by pollsters; their findings commissioned and then pored over by the big agencies as they study how best to ‘connect’. There is a wealth of data each year on the relative scepticism of different generational cohorts towards such messaging on each particular technology, for example on smartphones.82 Should we be alarmed, or maybe heartened, that some are now rather more confident about the accuracy of commercials for established and dependable brands, than they are of news broadcasts or political messaging?
A 2017 US report describes such changing attitudes: it announced a poll that found that over half of millennials (those born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s) and Generation Xers (born between around 1965 and 1980) generally trusted commercial advertising, compared to less than half (44 per cent) of Baby Boomers (post-war babies, born between 1946 and 1964). Eighty-one per cent of millennials had made a purchase influenced by advertising in the thirty days before the survey was conducted. ‘Baby Boomers come from a time when there were a lot fewer regulatory bodies in advertising,’ declares Julie Wierzbicki, account director at a Canadian advertising agency. In short, they were more wary. ‘For example, cigarettes used to be advertised as good for you, and we found out that these brands we thought were great were lying to us. Millennials feel like brands have to be honest because there’s so much more information out there, and if you’re doing things in a fraudulent or misleading way, it’s going to eventually come out.’83 Evidently, trust and wariness can be distributed in diverse ways and co-reside in people’s minds.84
Many consumers since that ‘golden age’ of advertising post-war have grown more interested in or even hyper-aware of the psychology of advertising – not necessarily hostile to it but inclined to scrutinise campaigns and even to discuss them appreciatively as well as critically. These days much is written on how consumers’ relationships to branding are far more complex, and sometimes more consciously self-fashioned than in the past. To speak of unidirectional commercial influence over us all, let alone absolute brainwashing of a population, cannot quite encompass the complex way minds and markets work, the myriad ways that people interact or, to look at it more cynically, the degree to which they are so fully incorporated into modern consumerism that peer-to-peer advertising or waves of recommendations, and style advice, instant feedback, etc., does much of the work that was previously achieved by explicit and orchestrated commercials.
Critics would now want to qualify Packard’s old account and consider with more nuance how purchasers may be trusting of, and influenced by, brands, even while aware, maybe hyper-aware, that this is happening. Rather than mind-controlled puppets on one side and rational consumers on the other, we are more likely embroiled, in Miłoszian fashion, in those bargains and rationalisations inside of ourselves. Might we even be willing participant observers in such affairs, buying products, absorbing the culture of advertising, the art of the sell, imbibing a form of ideology, even as we decry it and can ‘see through’ it?
It is hard to know how to begin to disentangle culture and markets, advertising and art, today. There is a seamless traffic, after all, between news, spectacle, design, style, fashion and everyday purchasing and consuming. We may gain considerable visual pleasure from looking at certain images in a ‘sponsored’ movie, sporting event or artful TV commercial; are we then being bought? What if we may knowingly consume stories and images of ourselves in the act of consuming, swallow, say, product placements, accept and even savour them, and enjoy our own dream-like submersion in that process? Admire, as connoisseurs, the art of the ads, the brilliance of editing, the mastery of sound and image, the way that products are placed in our field of vision, envelop us with lush sounds. What if we concur, and delight in putting aside our wary attention and critical faculties? People may savour that very capacity of those little movies, such as the Guinness surfer, to sweep over us and into us, thus accepting how we are being ‘called’, and how we are taking part, complying, assuming, with some awareness, our designated places as consumers, while the message works its ‘magic’ on us.
We can be constantly torn, part-analysts, part-critics of advertising, and at the same time consumers; our minds can give licence to our own temporary passivity, or our choice to zone out, and to be surprising strangers to ourselves. For example, we might condemn a campaign on TV encouraging people to bet money on sporting outcomes; be able to see quite clearly how the dream of winning masks the much more likely pain of losing … and yet in the right company, for a big occasion, allow ourselves ‘a treat’, have our own flutter and use the online betting site, whose address is now firmly lodged in our memory. More seriously, many gambling regulars, and addicts, claim to have been directly influenced by such advertising. They may know they are being manipulated by the marketing, the illusory idea, for practically all, of ultimately ‘winning big’ but can’t seem to quit. Of course, addiction to gambling has complex causes, but the onslaught of advertising is rightly a source of much public outrage.
In 2020, the UK Gambling Commission reported that six in ten consumers saw gambling adverts or sponsorships at least once a week. Just over a third of people who had gambled in the twelve-month study period claimed to have been prompted to spend money on a gambling activity by advertising they had seen in the past year. And around one in six adults followed gambling companies on social media.85
If there is much to encourage fatalism in the literature regarding commercial and technological domination over the individual or whole communities, there are also instances of resistance by individual campaigners, and united groups, that remind us of the powers we have to take concerted, collective action, be it through trade unions, pressure groups, legal campaigns or long-running protest movements. Sarah Milov, for example, in her recent history of the cigarette, notes substantial (albeit always only partial) victories that resulted from action in the United States, mostly by women, against the domination of the tobacco industry. One fight was for public spaces free of smoking, and for clean air. For decades Big Tobacco, supported by the state, blocked their demands with denials and smokescreens. Even long after the surgeon general warned of the health crisis smoking was causing, the industry and its powerful lobbyists fought back, although finally, under pressure, it gave up on TV advertising, and later had to accede to further restrictions. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw notable legislative achievements in US environmental protection laws, and commensurate developments in other Western societies too, suggesting that what is deemed politically unrealistic and impossible at the start of a decade may have fundamentally changed a few years later.
In the West smoking has declined, but of course that is not yet so everywhere. Anti-smoking groups became more powerful in the United States, and in other countries too; adroit, effective, witty and tough, skilfully using counter-images, mounting clever campaigns, including cartoons, inviting derision of the idea that smoking is alluring. These were large-scale grassroots endeavours that had considerable success. One important task was to expose how the tobacco industry in the 1950s and 60s had known about the harm that smoking could do and deliberately sowed doubt about the medical and scientific evidence that cigarettes were killing people, delaying action to inform and protect the entire population from the dangers.86
The tactics of obfuscation and spreading doubt employed by the tobacco companies have also been used effectively by fossil fuel industries to intensify scepticism about climate change. For example, lavishly funded campaigns financed by the Koch brothers, huge investors in fossil fuels, did their utmost to postpone effective legislative changes. They took a leaf out of the playbook of the tobacco lobby fifty years earlier, by finding a maverick alternative view within the very broad ranks of science to sow doubt in the minds of the public.
Advertising and campaigning may be as much about creating apathy, hopelessness or confusion as it is an injunction to buy certain products.87 The Koch brothers used their ‘outlier’, ‘specialist’ opinion shapers to stage a kind of public health warning about bogus scientific authority. Behind the claim of making the electorate more sanely cautious and sceptical was a massive enterprise, an orchestrated endeavour, a muddying of the waters. Like the tobacco lobby before it, the campaign against climate change action seemed like a perverse exploitation of the kind of academic work that had emerged in postwar decades and that had pointed out that the truth claims of modern medicine and science did indeed need careful critique, not simply naive acceptance. We do need a better understanding of how knowledge, even in a lab, is produced, of course; not to be credulous about how science generally works. But this kind of critical thinking was then harnessed for obvious financial and ideological ultra-libertarian purposes to cast doubt on the need for urgent collective political and economic action. The cynical campaign thus invited the recipients to imagine that in heeding this call they were being more sophisticated than the gullible, increasingly mainstream ‘green’ view: go deeper, their ‘think tanks’ explained; get behind the facades, and really you would find that those great numbers of alarmed expert advisers and committees, for example at the UN, were just crying wolf, or were in the pocket of lobbies themselves.
We will look at conspiracy theories in the next chapter, and the kinds of measures that are now being proposed to counter their influence, protect societies from orchestrated misinformation, and strengthen democracies. Clearly stronger legal frameworks are required so that corporations and states that subvert liberal democracies and threaten societies and the ecosystem cannot just run riot. Efforts are also underway by legal experts to create a crime of ‘ecocide’, which might lead to prosecutions in the international criminal court.88 The challenges of doing that are immense. Much of the media and business world remain intent on a politics of distraction, disavowing the scale of the climate crisis. However, the potential of such legal reforms, or even of mass public engagement with serious current endeavours to achieve them, could be great.
Packard was right to warn that a great deal of the underlying craft behind selling is at least partially disguised, whether it is broadcast to millions, tweaked to reach a committed target audience, or offered, as today, by an influencer online to millions of fans. Some pessimists predict that ultimately each of us will live inside our own world of commercials, games and tailored ‘news’, a cyber-based unreality, ever more honed to persuade us, and ever further from serious engagement with the existential threats that face us. Information technology will surely advance, but how it is most powerfully used, and whose interests it will ultimately serve, are of course a matter of constant political contention.
Each day brings us closer, so we are warned by contemporary pundits, or sometimes by neuromarketing companies, to a time when machines will be capable of reading our private thoughts via neuro-transmitters in the brain. But even without the ultimate machine–brain reader, the vast bank of information held about us can be hard to comprehend. We may choose to ignore all of that, content to have such miraculous virtual spaces to store our data, photo collections, millions of emails, a lifetime of memorabilia. We should not, of course, keep our head in those clouds. The cloud image we really need to hold in mind is of corporate ownership, or more materially still, that vast array of warehouses, data centres, server farms, that are not in the ‘Cloud’ at all; a global apparatus consuming huge amounts of energy and other resources down on the ground; a physical infrastructure stretching from enormous desert facilities to thousands of miles of undersea cables. It is a vast digital storage system that enables hitherto incredible forms of mapping and analysis of individual and group behaviour, and much of it is sold, in one form or other, not simply stored.
The scale and resources of the giant data-based corporations are hard to fathom. Google and Facebook were once start-ups, the result of far-sighted innovations, often brilliant engineering, maths and technical know-how, the product of clever design ideas and entrepreneurial visions of the future. As they got bigger, the enterprises could often just buy up the competition and incorporate smaller companies into their own portfolios. These were businesses that capitalised on earlier, often publicly funded research and development, and were then able to steal a march on more lumbering rivals, sometimes gaining near monopoly powers, and now providing billions of us with the extraordinary search facilities, social media, and so many other now indispensable tools of everyday life in modern economies, that we take for granted.89
In her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018), Shoshana Zuboff explores the competitive dynamics of the market today, and the forces that have driven, as she puts it, ‘surveillance capitalists to acquire ever-more-predictive sources of behavioural surplus: our voices, personalities, and emotions’. Zuboff shows how behavioural data is now used ‘to nudge, coax, tune and herd behaviour towards profitable outcomes’.90 Packard saw much of this coming, as he surveyed, with dismay, the easy acceptance in the 1960s of surveillance machines and hidden technologies – cameras, lie detectors, closed-circuit TV systems, wiretaps, and so on. Surveillance, he argued, was sold by companies to people back then as a means of enhancing individual power and protection; but it might also provide a means for others to look in and eavesdrop on people in their homes.91
It is companies such as Google and Meta that are now at the heart of the story of advertising and of democratic politics. The data they gather, willingly signed away by us, makes platforms such as Face-book the crucial vehicles for advertisers and hidden campaigners to reach us. The accuracy with which advertising agencies can ensure our awareness of products is what is most valued. TV and newspaper advertising is rapidly declining, the internet giants booming; there, the advertisers have our near-constant attention, our all-too-willing participation, or even our desperate addiction.
It’s hard to forgo being part of the online world, and why should we have to? After all, the digital technology we now practically all rely upon has offered immense gains, and is indeed replete with future possibilities. But the manipulation of the digital economy to change elections, to foment confusion, to engender division and even, as noted, to block meaningful intergovernmental action to address ruinous climate change, is the darkest ‘cloud’. What would it mean to face that reality, and to seek to change the terms of trade and to extricate ourselves from ‘business as usual’? Even to contemplate what is happening in the environment, in politics, commerce, advertising and technology, may be to face an extreme level of anxiety. And yet, as environmental activists urge, we need to try to get our heads around the array of forces at work to resist essential change and recognise the complexity of the problem without feeling defeated; to think harder about the trade-offs we are making, the ways we are implicated, perhaps without even realising, and the degree to which we are self-ensnared in a system.
This was brought home to me powerfully when I corresponded with and then met the late Zygmunt Bauman, in 2015, to film an interview for the ‘Hidden Persuaders’ project at Birkbeck, which we subsequently put online. In our correspondence, Bauman insisted on retaining the word ‘brainwashing’ in considering the effects of this new cyber-based attention economy, with its mixture of surveillance and clickbait. As he said, with evident passion and urgency, the ‘net’ appears to be closing us in ever further: its effects, he said, choosing his words carefully, are ‘evasive’, ‘clandestine’, often ‘unspottable’ and ‘unpinpointable’. We are caught now in a ‘spider net’ of surveillance; and yet, as he added, also ‘drawn into the role of the spiders who weave it’.92