Brainwashed: Part 3
Part 3 – Convincing and Advertising
Welcome back to our discussion of how we shape each others’ minds and brains. It should be obvious by now that even I am trying to convince you of something! If only one of us were certain what that something is.
Convincing
We spend an awful lot of time trying to convince one another: what to have for dinner, whether to have dinner; which peanut butter to buy, or whether one should buy peanut butter at all. Restaurants are advertising that we should eat there. Peanut butter companies are advertising how yummy their spread is. Nutritionists are trying to convince us that peanut butter might not be good for us. Medical professionals are trying to get us away from eating salty, fatty meals at restaurants.
There are all types of convincing. There is friendly discussion, there is gentle nagging (of the positive, helpful, loving variety – “I know you will remember to call them at 3:00”), there is serious nagging (“how many times do I have to tell you to pull up your pants?”), there is constant repetition, there is guilting (“you said it, but you obviously didn’t mean it!”), there is gentle persuasion (“honey, would you please help me with this?”), there is deal-making (“if you take the dog now, I’ll take him at midnight”), there is the “fear of God” (literally or figuratively), there is displaying of wares (“on sale only today!”, there is advertising (“Eat At Joe’s”), there is dissemination of memes, there is coercion, there is diplomacy, there is threat. There is war.
All of these are means of convincing someone of something. Some are always positive, some are always negative, and most fall within a range in between.
Around the house, passive-aggressive or push-me-pull-you convincing can be a common scenario, usually quite negative. (We ought to be taught as children never to use this method.) Let’s look in on Jane and Janet, partners who are discussing repairing the china cabinet.
JANE: Janet, I told you I’d get to it tomorrow or Thursday.
JANET: Look, Jane. Every time I open the door, the bottom half falls off the side. One time both hinges are going to go, and it’s going to hit the floor and break. Let me fix it now, please. I just need to borrow your bendable screwdriver.
JANE: I’m not lending you my tools. You don’t treat them right.
JANET: Then you fix it! We should fix it now, not two days from now. It might take all of five minutes!
JANE: I’m busy.
JANET: Then I’m ripping the door off the cabinet! I’ll put it into the basement until you are ready to fix it.
JANE: That will solve it for sure.
I already feel like we are eavesdropping too much. Let’s stop listening in; we can guess whether Jane will succumb or Janet will dismantle the door by force. The point is that Janet wants the cabinet fixed, Jane doesn’t care, and they are not agreeing on the course of action. Each was trying to convince the other of her point of view, but in an indirect way.
Some folks call this “messing with their mind.” I think that that is a good way to put it.
Advertising
Advertising was created as a means of convincing someone of something. People get degrees in advertising, they become experts. Some folks work as direct sales persons, some create ad campaigns for large entities on a large scale, and there are many professionals in between. All may be considered to be working in advanced convincing.
When I worked in advertising, I had a boss (in the days before political correctness was being pressed into our minds) who would say, “You can sell sand to the Arabs. You can sell snow to the Eskimos.” (Please forgive him.) We did not literally do that, and of course all of our clients (as far as I know) were top-notch companies and above this sort of thing, but his point was well taken. If you convince someone of the need or the desire, they will buy.
We are surrounded by advertising, and it has been effective. Think, for instance, how many commercial jingles you can sing with very little prompting. We had a local advertiser decades ago with a tune that said “No money you’ll be riskin’ when you call Joe Ziskind, so dial this number and do it quick!” It gave the number. Fifty years later, most folks who heard the ad can still recite the phone number. With the proper reach and frequency, an ad’s effects can last decades! Currently there is a prescription medication out with a musical production number for a commercial, and the song sticks in one’s mind.
Back when, political candidates used to have catchy slogans, and presidential campaigns even had songs specially written for them. They do not do that so much any more; nowadays they appropriate a popular tune and use it to work the crowds into a lather of emotion about the candidate. Sometimes they do not even get permission from the song’s producer to do so.
Our favorite radio and television programs have been “brought to you by” advertisers for nearly 100 years. Newspapers have sold and printed ads for much longer than that, and magazines also rely on advertising. The advertising paid for the content we were consuming in those vehicles: I Love Lucy and OMNI magazine and The Pittsburgh Press were all basically paid for by advertising. Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine is said to have printed the first American magazine ads.
We consumers did not pay for television back in the days of I Love Lucy, though we do now. We paid then and still pay for subscriptions or single-copy cover prices for magazines and newspapers, but those amounts do not fully support the content we are buying.
Those media – television, radio, magazines, newspapers – were the standard commercial and corporate advertising vehicles when I was working in the business. (When we worked in theatre, we used the less expensive media: posters in windows, table tents at restaurants, pencils with the show names engraved on them, t-shirts or even sandwich boards on actors walking about town, and so forth.)
Nowadays of course companies have websites, buy ads on and/or sell through others’ websites and platforms, and directly market by email and text. All along, of course – bridging the gap between the major media and the much less expensive – we also have received advertising in our postal mail.
And then there are billboards.
Billboards bring us little positive. The billboard companies don’t pay much in real estate taxes, and they generally don’t pay us to have advertising in our public sphere. They are not “bringing us” anything but their advertising. The advertisers pay the billboard companies for the space/time, but the public sees none of that money. Billboards generally lower property values in the neighborhoods around them. Unless they are on a highway distracting drivers, they may attract litter around their bases. And now there are electronic billboards, easily programmed, cheaply changed (no one has to go out and actually paste the sign onto the board), and multiple advertisers can share the same board.
How do we allow these billboards to happen? I guess they are convincing us to let them do it. They seem to be convincing those who write the zoning laws.
Meanwhile, we have not even thought about the content of the ads. Cigars! Cigarettes! Booze! Not to mention ads pushing some product as being “good for you” when there is scant proof that it is.
Pharmaceuticals are a good example of questionable substance flying through our airwaves. The drug makers would convince us that we have a physical problem that can only be addressed by using their high-priced concoction, and we must immediately demand it from our physicians. Side effects may be heart attack, detached limbs, or death, but we must have it!
Need we mention political ads? Since the Citizens United case in the US, we are subjected to ads produced by PACs, separate from the candidates, which display no common decency.
Our friend Mary Hughes is a candidate for City Dog Catcher. She has served as an assistant in Animal Care & Control for the city for twenty years, and would make an excellent Dog Catcher. Mary’s opponent, who has never held a job for more than nine months, learned that Mary herself has only a cat as a pet, so he made a commercial about Cat Lady Mary, with olive-green images of a photo of Mary after she was dunked in a Dunk-the-Boss-for-Charity event. Overlaid on those images is a large outline of a black cat. The voice-over says, in a snide and menacing tone, “Mary Hughes will kill all of our dogs. Mary is a Cat Lady. She is not for us.” Then the other candidate’s voice says, “I’m Billy Fell and I approve this message.”
After that commercial began to air, a PAC found out that Mary owned a rabbit fur coat in 1985, so they added dead rabbits to the Cat Lady theme in a new commercial and bought time on every local news program every day for three months leading up to election day.
Is this good for us?
I can remember two elderly friends, Gert and Ruth, both of Party X, discussing a coming election, and Ruth asked Gert who she would select for Senate. Gert named a candidate currently in office who was a radical member of Party Y, who was often in trouble with the law and whose office was often subjected to protests. “Why would you vote for that schmo?” asked Ruth. Without hesitation, Gert replied, “Well, his name is always in the news, I figured everyone likes him.” And that was without any commercials!
Again, advertising has been influencing our thoughts and behaviors for a very long time. We have subjected ourselves to the convincing because we wanted to consume the content that was brought to us. Think how many generations smoked tobacco after being influenced by the ads and by movie stars sponsoring the tobacco companies as they were smoking the products on screen.
We will speak more about sponsorships later, especially how they may prop up “social influencers” nowadays.
As I said, convincing falls along a spectrum. Convinced?
In Part 4 we will look at more positive forms of mind bending.
