Modern Advertising

Modern advertising, either the 20th Century’s greatest tool or its biggest sham, depending on how one views products and services, relies mostly on suggestion. Advertisers don’t really make a product, they perform a service. A product is something solid, produced and set out before the customer for use. A service involves attitude, and is of much more restricted duration.
As information slid into propaganda, advertising agents, who began as middlemen between marketers and the media, found need to offer more and more functions for their commissions. One of the most successful was sloganeering. In 1898, Albert Lasker sold a hearing-aid manufacturer the slogan, “You hear! When you use Wilson’s Common Sense Ear Drums.” “My idea of this business,” Lasker said, “was to render service and make money.” The hearing-aid company immediately increased its ad budget from $10,000 a year to $180,000, and tripled the commission it paid. The Advertising Age had started.
Soon advertisers had started capitalizing on anxieties: “When you use you are exempt from the dangers that men often encounter who allow their faces to come in contact with the brush, soap and barber shop accessories used on other people.”
The growing advertising industry soon developed opinion and market research. James Thompson entered the field in 1868, at age 20, working as a bookkeeper; he became a solicitor of advertising, purchased the company from his employer in 1878 then incorporated it as J. Walter Thompson Co. in 1896. In 1921, as head of an agency long one of the largest in the world, he hired Harvard psychologist John Watson, widely considered the father of behavioral research, to help his agency plumb consumers’ minds. Watson developed behaviorism into the dominant branch of psychology in the USA in the ’20s and ’30s; a primary, integral behavioral concept is that learning is best accomplished by small, incremental steps, with immediate reinforcement, or reward, for the learner. This concept was applied to advertising by using sex-interest and status-seeking as titillating reinforcers (reinforcement: the use of stimuli, including praise, nutrition, opportunity to explore, money, sexual provocation, electric shock or direct brain stimulation, to facilitate learning). Watson became vice president of the Thompson advertising agency, promoting the idea that advertisers must tell consumers “something that will tie him up with fear, something that will stir up a mild rage, that will call out an affectionate or love response, or strike at a deep psychological or habit need.” He held that campaigns should “dispense with rational copy almost entirely” as reason was “useless” compared to the pull of emotions.
Status anxiety stoked by Cadillac advertisements about “The Penalty of Leadership” and Woodbury Facial Soap claims of producing “The skin you love to touch” worked with an emerging culture of celebrity infatuation to promote belief that people preferred news, education and entertainment presented by strong, famed personalities, in short, easily absorbed bursts. American Tobacco hired naval heroes and actresses to plug Lucky Strike cigarettes - a product that was to “emancipate” women while enslaving them to the physical ideal of slimness. This, too, was worked on by hearing-aid slogan writer Albert Lasker (1880 – 1952), considered the founder of modern advertising because of his insistence that advertising copy really sell, not just inform.
In 1904, Lasker met John E. Kennedy, a Canadian mounted policemen, who told him advertising wasn’t news: “news is a technique of presentation, but advertising is a very simple thing. I can give it to you in three words, it is ‘salesmanship in print.’” When Lasker had started in advertising, before the turn of the 20th century, agencies just took copy clients had prepared, and placed it in various publications, but Lasker seized this idea that advertising shouldn’t seek to passively inform about a product, but should instead actively promote the product, and introduced and turned into household names Kotex (in 1921) and Kleenex (in 1924). He changed people’s attitudes with use of images, slogans, endorsements, and other sales-promotion techniques, and is credited with being responsible for radio (and television after it) becoming an advertising-driven medium, plus even inventing the soap opera. Radio broadcasting, in its infancy, was just an instrument useful for selling radio sets, but with “salesmanship in broadcasting” came the real money.

Planned, programmed, built-in or ‘Dynamic’ Obsolescence comes directly from annual car-model changes introduced by Harley Earl, ‘father’ of the Corvette, from General Motor’s Chevrolet. He called it “design obsolescence” and in 1956 explained that styling is “where noticeable change must come annually,” that this “amounts to dynamic obsolescence – the creation of a desire on the part of millions of car buyers each year to trade in last year’s car on a new one.” Also, “Since the design of the automobile is the first thing the buyer sees, the stylist is more continuously involved in the annual change. The importance of engineering changes, however, cannot be overestimated, but by their very nature they cannot be changed annually as much as can the appearance of the car.” From the late 1920s, Harley Earl pioneered industry-wide recognition that appearance and function had parallel importance. He introduced turn-signal lights, hidden spare tires, the pillar-less top, heated seats, both tinted and electric windows, and power convertible tops; he also helped introduce the two-tone paint job, quadruple headlights, aluminum wheel hubs, and keyless entry. He put the first telescopic power radio antenna on mass produced automobiles, and sponsored the first safety crash-test dummy and first onboard computer in cars.
General Motors’ president and chairman for over 25 years, Alfred Sloan Jr., presided over GM becoming the largest business corporation in the world; for years GM made more than half of all American auto sales. Sloan saw that the automobile industry depended on changing consumers’ attitudes, and became a primary force behind changing what was at first a low-cost form of transportation (Ford’s Model T) into a symbol of attainment – something that consumers would want to upgrade, almost continually. He promoted planned obsolescence through cosmetic changes, providing “a car for every purse and purpose” while encouraging “conspicuous consumption.”
Ideas that “advertising is fundamentally persuasion,” and persuasion is an “art," about “total-marketing communications,’ and “integrated marketing’ arose after WWII, often using theories derived from contemporary psychology. A theory of “empathy” suggested it was “brand personality” and not “any trivial product difference” that drew consumers to products. Products have life cycles, and soon disappear, but brands, properly managed, can last. Soon the advertising industry’s ‘humorous’ racial-stereotyping ads disappeared; its new desire was not to offend. Johnson & Johnson’s produced heartwarming evocations of mother love; the National Urban League warned that the U.S. had better “give a damn” about its black underclass, and by the ’60s, communication technology was homogenizing markets everywhere, with global corporations selling the same things in the same way everywhere – to anybody.
By the late ‘80s though, new technologies were rendering communications efforts less effective. A glut of new kinds of products taxed the limits of imagination. Network TV, the advertising agencies’ most profitable venue, lost substantial prime-time audience as viewers sought other media. Advertising before TV, of course, was as nothing compared to after – and with color its power increased even more. The image so much more, and so much more quickly, offering an ideal to compare oneself against, not only did expectations rapidly change, but body shapes, even, and, it isn’t too much to say, all interaction between mind and body, self and world. Great Expectations indeed. We all became little kings and queens, able to command “Off with his head!” merely by changing channels. The world in the screen before us was merely to please, and so, soon, utilitarian Ford ‘Model T’ cars, priced under $300, became replaced by status symbols costing ten times as much. The proportion of the economy devoted to advertising soared, and savings and self-sufficiency dwindled.
When, not even half-a-century, not even a modern working life-time, after TV, interactivity really hit (well beyond ham radio), allowing complete irresponsibility through anonymity, and one could try to fully re-invent oneself, more fully indulge and not even feel subject to promotional manipulation (although that was still there), communalism disappeared like endangered species and rain forest – the last voluntary shared group ‘activities’ became ‘networking’ over restaurant meals and (again, of course) getting intoxicated.
Product marketers abandoned media advertising in favor of “below-the-line” disciplines, even returning to direct marketing. With fax, internet, satellites, and overnight delivery, marketers used wickedly challenging slogans to alter readers’ preconceptions about familiar icons – redefining the subliminal. Soon, the Internet had placed renewed emphasis on the importance of brand symbols, the only thing powerful enough to compel attention. Consultants probed the virtues of humor, likeability, refreshing entertainment, arguing that in an age of interactivity and choice, advertising must act more like movies, TV, and conversations with friends. Still, the systematic attempt to make us wasteful, debt-ridden, and permanently discontented individuals continued. Potentially valuable new products like global positioning systems (GPS) merging with wireless Internet might improve traffic management and congestion control plus help mobile users locate alternate routes, generate precise accident reports and call help, but remained mostly status symbols. New possibilities for instantaneous crime reporting, troubleshooting, polling and weather advising opened, but the main thing remained the generation of profits, way over meaningful improvement to quality of life. People had become like Zaire’s Mobuto Sese Soso, who wasn’t bothered by his many cars having but 300 miles of paved road to drive on. Once, boredom was no threat to self-esteem, but now it’s a humiliation. It’s hardly even a twist on the Faust tale: we’ve become enslaved through what we thought was liberating us. But, Oh the fascinating images we’ve seen! And Oh, the distorted information we now receive!

Subliminal means “beneath a limen” - a sensory threshold; thus, below the threshold of conscious perception; inadequate to produce conscious awareness but able to evoke a response; at a level of mind senses aren’t perceptive of (usually - too quick to have a conscious effect). The idea, originally conceived before 1900, got advertisers targeting the subconscious mind, in deliberate attempt to bypass conscious thought. The subconscious mind receives infinitely much more information, and doesn’t filter or discriminate the way the conscious mind does. A person reading a magazine spends perhaps a fraction of a second looking at an ad before turning attention on to other content; therefore, advertisers have very limited time to create impact, to leave a little seed of information, and create product recognition and acknowledgement of place with market-share. It’s not so much that we’re being hoodwinked. Subliminal exposure increases the feeling of familiarity with the subliminal. Repeated exposure to an object increases acceptance of it. This relates to a protective mechanism causing a natural alert-reaction to something un-anticipatable: repeated exposure without harm relaxes this mechanism, reducing tension resultant from its activation.
A subliminal message may be embedded in another medium, and designed to pass below the normal limits of perception not only through speed. Sprite soda used a type of subliminal, with yellow (lemon) and green (lime) objects, particularly cars, shown inconspicuously behind the word “lymon” (combining the words lime and lemon); they called this “Sublymonal Advertising." While not consciously noted, in certain situations associations thus can affect the deeper subconscious mind and, later, actions or attitudes. “Subliminal suggestion” might create a sense of familiarity with new products, and subliminal messages may even turn familiarity into a preference for a product; but the only real effect is when the messages are relevant to pre-existing goals or inclinations. Subliminally priming a brand name for a drink can incline people already thirsty to choose it from a limited selection, but those who aren’t thirsty aren’t influenced.
In 1957, the idea that professional persuaders manipulate us through our emotions caused an uproar, ‘exposing’ motivational research, a marriage of psychology and advertising. Market and motivation researcher James Vicary took credit for a practice he coined “subliminal” projection, and churned out press releases about flashing hidden messages during films - surreptitiously promoting his consultancy business. Vicary claimed that during a movie presentation, he used a ‘tachistoscope’ to project the words “Drink Coca-cola” and “Hungry? Eat popcorn” for 1/3000 of a second at five-second intervals, with the result that sales of popcorn and Coke increased by precisely 57.8% and 18.1% respectively (in some reports these statistics are switched). The press soon expressed condemnation for the subconscious selling, called “the most alarming invention since the atomic bomb”! Use of subliminals was banned. But Vicary became rich - corporations clamored for his services. Cinemas, TV and radio tried out subliminals, some as a “public service tool," for instance warning of “slippery roads” during icy weather. Soon, though, professionals grew suspicious; the FCC held a demonstration in January 1958, for government officials and the press. “Eat Popcorn" was flashed at five second intervals during a TV program, but no-one found themselves craving it. The effect of observation on the thing observed? Who knows? Senator Charles E. Potter said, “I think I want a hot dog."
Vicary later said he’d lied about the experiment, and admitted to falsifying results. An identical experiment conducted by Dr. Henry Link showed no increase in cola or popcorn sales, then another at an International Brand Marketing Conference showed delegates picking the brand suggested by subliminal cut-ins. A control group shown a nonsense syllable of four letters, with exposure time of just 2.7 milliseconds, 40 times over approximately 15 minutes, compared to another group similarly presented with the word Coke (both within a normal presentation), showed statistically lower thirst ratings than the group exposed to the subliminal stimulus ‘Coke’. But a later attempt to reproduce these findings showed no differences in thirst ratings; but, subsequent failure by other researchers to reproduce a demonstration by an enthusiastic researcher may involve, quite simply, the act of observation affecting the thing observed, shown by Werner Heisenberg…
Subliminal repetition of communicators’ faces may make those communicators more persuasive over the next few minutes, but not the next week. Linkage of subliminally induced preference in buying or voting decisions has no clear documentation. There’s yet no proof that a message registered below one’s level of awareness can have effects persisting longer than a few minutes, or evidence that weak stimuli can countervail strong stimuli. Subliminal stimuli, too weak to be observed, are overwhelmed by consciously received, and perhaps even other, stronger stimuli. A major problem in determining the effect of subliminal messages remains defining exactly what is meant by ‘perception without awareness’… Some studies showed that subliminal exposure to images of frightened faces or faces of people from another race increase the activity of the brain’s amygdala (which does some rapid, minimal, information evaluation), and also increase some skin conductance.
Corporations and government have spent hundreds of billions of dollars researching how to manipulate people; most results are kept secret, and information available even to academic scholars is radically less than that available to producers of media campaigns. But, both conscious and unconscious intelligence compares what is already known to new information. Visual images, however, are instantly processed as truth; information presented in a visual format has a much greater impact.
People stopped pumping money into subliminals, and Vicary’s Subliminal Projection Company closed. Then two decades later, Canadian professor Wilson Key renewed the furor, claiming that sinister hidden “embeds” lurk within many commercial messages. The “carefully calculated banality” of soap commercials and beer ads, he said, was to prevent people from seeing media images for what they really were. Key claimed that men masturbate to Playboy, not because of the blatantly pornographic photos, but because of subliminal embeds. He earned millions in royalties and lecture fees, and again, the media, government officials and religious leaders and agencies established policies against subliminals. Then Key began to suspect his efforts were helping the advertising industry at least as much as harming it. He wrote, “subliminal techniques have become far more pervasive, sophisticated, technologically advanced, and more profitably applied to anesthetize the U.S. population against the intrusion of reality into their daily lives. Few advertising or media people are unfamiliar with my earlier books. Many appear so informed that they would pass rigorous examination of the subject. In public, however, they steadfastly maintain innocence, repeating ad nauseam that subliminal perception does not exist.” His concerns had foundation: not only do educators use his books, but PR specialists study them, searching for new ways to influence through media.
In both the 1950s and ’70s, the main critiques of subliminals rested on the premise that ads are designed for emotional, unconscious impact, unmoderated by the conscious intellect. The controversy prompted many to spend time studying ads they’d have otherwise ignored. Many remember classroom exercises devoted to finding the letters “SEX” in liquor ads - supposedly to make them more discriminating media consumers. Hunting for subliminals made advertising intriguing, which any advertiser with a brain prefers to being ignored! Critiques of subliminal advertising thus serve the purported enemy. University faculty have admitted assigning readings on the controversy only because of the prurient interest involved, even saying, “It helps keep the kids interested, if nothing else.” But students began to believe use of subliminals rampant, despite most ad-men mocking the practice as ridiculous - inefficient at best. No-one actually used it, they claimed. Why hide breasts when you can parade them? Even so, tens of thousands bought subliminal tapes and videos – mostly “self-help” – soon to the tune of many tens of millions in sales annually. And anti-theft systems for stores played messages like “Stealing is dishonest” disguised by Muzak.
Subconscious stimulus by single words can be modestly effective in changing human behavior or emotions: a pictorial advertisement might put the phrase “U Buy” embedded in backwards; many viewers unconsciously perceive the message, and their preferences are affected. This doesn’t affect the behavior of most, or manipulate emotion or inclination for them, but when the right fragrance can bring love and household cleansers cure fatigue, subliminals are just another pill to make you happy. But that’s all almost beside the point, compared to more important driving mechanisms – the desire for acceptance and a sense of well-being. Listening to what peers prefer often encourages desire, and similarly, what’s popular is often felt to help create popularity. One learns to recognize what one wants through others, through sense of relationship and association that might lead to acceptance by an in-group; one takes note of influence, of attractions and prompting allure, and by extension, of what one encounters suggested in the environment. As they say, all publicity is good publicity. So, by influencing just a few, many may be led.
Other ‘beneath a limen’ sales strategies include packaging-design capitalizing on intuitive responses to color, typography, and word choice; background music in stores and restaurants that influence the amount of time people linger; product placement in shows, fusing ads and entertainment. Images convey moods and emotional texture, to reflect favorably on promoted brands - doing what any commercial technique tries to do: help sell products. These strategies influence people’s subconscious. The phallic shapes of many drink bottles, ads equating the “power” of drink to sexual performance, juxtaposing a scantily clad female body with a similarly shaped bottle – these images are designed to appeal to us unconsciously, in ways we don’t rationally comprehend. Visual illusion, or allusion, possible as we interpret what we view, creating our visual reality mentally, isn’t subliminal, but subliminal ‘embeds’ may employ visual illusion to direct, quickly, viewer focus.
Distinction between innuendo, metaphor, embeds and subliminals often aren’t clear – what many people are most concerned with are often just hidden pictures or other patterns, sometimes not even intended. Advertisers have proved adept at co-opting critiques of both their methods and of consumerism (some brands have even built themselves up by mocking advertising); but, in an amazing “Catch-22”, the industry doesn’t even need to co-opt its critics - often the effort to expose advertiser manipulation is beneficial to the ad industry!
People are conditioned to associate viewing with rest and lack of tension, and, on average, individuals in industrialized nations spend roughly half their leisure time (3 hours plus per day) watching the tube (videos or TV). The brain focuses its attention on gathering information while the rest of the body rests; but heavy viewers become more easily bored or distracted, exhibit less control, participate less in group activities, and are more obese; they’re more anxious than light viewers in unstructured situations like waiting in line.
If television advertisers don’t like what’s in a program, they pull sponsorship – often millions of dollars. For years, a large corporation’s policy included: “There will be no material that may give offense either directly or by inference to any commercial organization of any sort. There will be no material on any of our programs which could in any way further the concept of business as cold, ruthless and lacking in all sentimental or spiritual motivations… Members of the armed forces must not be cast as villains. If there is any attack on American customs, it must be rebutted completely on the same show." Many preferences simply can’t be expressed, or shown, in mainstream media, constructing a kind of context displaying the socially acceptable – in society as media and its backers choose to define it.
We’re herded into accepting as an acceptable norm what is placed before us, not giving it another thought, merely following the agendas set by those who want to keep us imprisoned by our herd instincts, and even become conditioned to accept degraded values like acceptance of violence. Massive control of reality perception is orchestrated, manipulating what we register through any media source. Media disinformation campaigns discredit or promote various programs and agendas; exploitation of the masses by those with power remains, unfortunately, a defining characteristic of both our modern technology and age – whether subliminals are, or can be, used, or not. No-one ever believes they’ve been brainwashed, but it’s accepted that media attention given contrary to official policy will result in careers summarily ending. As technology developed, advertising changed from presentation to manipulation, through use of subtle insinuations, especially in terms of group acceptance or ostracism. Subtle threats, often presented with a beaming smile, often achieve remarkable persuasion, quite unrecognized.

As marketing research attained increasing significance through the 20th century, large corporations - particularly mass consumer manufacturers - began to recognize the importance of product design, effective distribution, and sustained communication with consumers regarding the success of their brands. Marketing concepts and techniques moved into the industrial-goods sector, then later into the services sector, and it became apparent that successful marketing not only of goods and services but also ideas (social marketing), places (location marketing), personalities (celebrity marketing), events (event marketing), and even the organizations themselves (public relations) required a scientific approach.
Edward Louis Bernays (1891-1995), the original doctor of spin, was one of the most influential people of the 20th century. His mother was Sigmund Freud’s sister, and Freud’s reputation as the “father of psychoanalysis” owes much to the work through which Bernays made himself important: publicity (marketing and public relations). Bernays pioneered many of publicity industry’s techniques for achieving, and maintaining, invisibility and unaccountability… while, in his own mind, he saw himself as a kind of psychoanalyst to troubled corporations.
Feeling strongly that a dangerous abundance of irrational animosity is overly likely in any society, and especially in democratic ones, Bernays considered the public’s judgment “not to be relied upon” and far too potentially treacherous. He wrote that the public “could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so they had to be guided from above” and that if “we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propaganda has proved that it is possible, at least to a certain point and within certain limits.” He argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy, and that deliberate strategy aimed at keeping the public unconscious of forces working to mold their minds was necessary for stability, indeed, essential: “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” For him, to draws on social sciences in order to motivate and shape the response of a general or particular audience was merely being responsible (the duty and obligation of noblesse oblige).
One of Bernays' favorite techniques for manipulating public opinion was the indirect use of “third party authorities” (for instance, physicians) to plead his clients’ causes. He used psychoanalytic ideas, and the stimulus and response ideas of Pavlov, to promote commodities as diverse as cigarettes, soap and books. His corporate clients included Proctor & Gamble, American Tobacco Company, CBS, United Fruit, GE, Dodge Motors, Cartier; and even Calvin Coolidge, for whom he set up a “pancake breakfast” with vaudevillians, in perhaps the first overt media acts for a president. In a Dixie Cup campaign, he helped convince consumers that only disposable cups are sanitary; in another campaign he helped convince the public that beer is the “beverage of moderation.” He also helped initiate water fluoridation, working with the Public Health Service and American Dental Association to aid the Aluminum Company of American (Alcoa) get rid of some of its industrial waste, by putting it into drinking water. He paid a group of young models, supposedly Women’s rights marchers, to light Lucky Strike cigarettes while in a New York City parade - as “Torches of Freedom”. The New York Times reported on it this way: “Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of ‘Freedom’”!
Bernays had no problem with policies based on deception, as he considered that dangerous libidinal energies lurking just below the surface of every individual could be harnessed and channeled by the corporate elite, for economic and social benefit – the elite being the chosen, somehow without those “libidinal” challenges, and able to lead all to utopia. Mass production by big business, he was sure, could fulfill the inherently irrational cravings of the masses, simultaneously making the economy more secure and sating dangerous urges which otherwise threaten to tear society apart. He worked to develop the marketing strategy of the “tie-in”: linking a variety of promotional venues for reinforcement of the message (often combining radio and newspaper ads, “news”, exhibitions and even holidays, for instance, “Thrift Week”).
His tour de force was a propaganda campaign for United Fruit Company (Chiquita Brands International, now United Brands), which directly led to the CIA’s overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala under Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (1954). By painting the mildly reformist Guzman as a “friend of communists”, Bernays helped reinvigorate the a corrupt multinational corporation’s domination of a food-producing nation beset with brutality, slave labor and even starvation, and bring into popular parlance the term “banana republic”. Bernays whipped up media and political sentiment: articles in the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, Time, Newsweek, the New Leader, and other publications discussed the growing influence of Guatemala's Communists. Bernays was a key source of information for the press, even, and perhaps especially, the liberal press, right through the takeover. As the US invasion commenced on June 18, Bernays was giving what he called the ‘first news anyone received on the situation’ to the Associate Press, United Press, the International News Service, and the New York Times. The tragic result of his manipulations was decades of tyranny under a government which condemned hundreds of thousands of people (mostly from the country's impoverished Maya Indian majority) to dislocation, torture and death. But Bernays relished, and apparently never regretted, his work for United Fruit, for which he was paid $100,000 a year (a huge amount at the time). Bernays and those for whom he worked viewed Latin America as ripe for economic exploitation and political manipulation, and that particular propaganda war set precedents, and patterns, for future US-led campaigns in Cuba, Vietnam and a host of other countries.
And since, “spin” has exceeded even the doublespeak of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, the incessant propaganda of Huxley’s Brave New World, and the misinformation presented by despots Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot or Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong Il. And the glory of it all is: the repressed don’t even realize they are so.