Download Advertising: The Engineers of Illusion

Advertising: The Engineers of Illusion
From the book Snap, Crackle, and Popular Taste: The Illusion of Free Choice in
America by Jeffrey Schrank
1. After viewing a thousand ads and commercials (equivalent to the number seen
by an average person in three days), two basic personality holes might be quite
evident -the lack of genuine pleasurable experiences and the absence of selfacceptance. It is these holes that advertisers have found most lucrative and
most exploitable.
2. Ads that illustrate and imply fun, excitement, adventure and pleasure are
among the most common precisely because these experiences are missing
from so many lives. Just as the well person does not constantly ask himself how
he feels, the society with a healthy amount of pleasurable experience would not
respond to such advertising. A truly pleasure-loving society would be
invulnerable to the illusory promises presented in ads for soft drinks, alcoholic
beverages, franchise food or hundreds of other products. There would be no
room for a communications system to tell citizens that a cigarette will help them
come "alive with pleasure" or a beer enable them to "reach for all the gusto you
can" or that a soft drink can "add life".
3. A national virtue of self-acceptance would send the ad world into turmoil. For
ads that promise to provide a measure of indirect self-acceptance are legion. A
most common kind of ad shows the owner or user of a product being accepted
by others. This need for approval, acceptance and even status is a sign of the
lack of self-acceptance. A self-accepting individual will still use soap, wear
clothes and drive an automobile, but his or her use of these items is not
prompted by the need to gain acceptance -there is no hole to fill. Advertising
that associates approval by neighbors and friends, members of the opposite
sex and society in general with products thrives only where self-acceptance is
lacking.
4. Ads not only reflect the national psychology, they also educate. H.G. Well's
fictional advertising man, Dickon Clissold, had the right idea:
Advertising: what is it? Education. Modern education, nothing more or less. The
airs schoolmasters and college dons give themselves are extraordinary. They
think they're the only people who teach. We teach ten times as much …
The only use I’ve got for schools now is to fit people to read advertisements.
After that, we take over. Yes, we –the advertisers.
5. From the sellers' viewpoint advertising is persuasion; from the buyer's viewpoint
it is education. No single group of people spends as much time or money per
lesson to educate the masses as do the creators of ads.
6. Ads participate in a feedback loop. They reflect a society they have helped to
educate, and part of the advertising reflection is the effect of the advertising
itself. Every ad that exploits a personality hole educates the audience toward
using a particular product to fill that hole. Just as drug ads teach a crude and
sometimes dangerous form of self-medication, psychosell ands teach a form of
self-analysis and cure for psychological problems.
7. An ad that stirs a hidden doubt, that causes a person to ask, "Why does no one
love me?"; "Why don't I have more friends?"; "Why am I lonely?" invariably goes
on to suggest a partial cure -use our product. If an announcer for Pepsi would
appear on screen and say:
Are you lonely? Do you feel left out? Do you sometimes feel that everybody
else has all the fun in life? Are you bored and isolated? Well, if you are, drink
Pepsi and find yourself instantly a part of all those energetic, joyful, young-atheart people who also drink Pepsi.
8. Such an ad would be greeted as either laughable or insulting by the viewing
audience. Yet the old "Pepsi generation" campaign used pictures and a jingle to
make exactly such a point.
9. The danger in psychosell techniques is not that people might switch from Coke
to Pepsi in soft-drink loyalties or abandon Scope for Listerine. The danger is
that millions learn (especially if the message is repeated often enough, as ads
are) that problems in self-acceptance and boredom can be alleviated by
corporate products. Which brand to buy is secondary to ads as education; the
primary lesson is that the product itself satisfies psychological needs.
10. This is a dangerous doctrine, for as long as masses of people believe that
personality holes can be filled by items bought in stories it matters little which
brands they buy. The failure of the gospel of advertising to solve problems
merely leads to people on to buy a reportedly more effective or prestigious
brand (be it a car, house or perfume) rather than to question their motives for
the original purchase. Psychosell ads educate us to look "out there" for
solutions instead of within. Advertising promotes and thrives on the neurosis
that passes for normality. Ads teach that personal failures can be avoided by
things almost as a witch doctor promises magic charms to cure illnesses. By so
doing they contribute to mass neurosis and alienation as well as pseudo-choice.
Our most effective means of education sell instant solutions instead of the
motivation needed to gain psychological maturity. The danger of the "hidden
persuaders" is not that they are seldom noticed, but that they help to keep
ourselves hidden.
11. If one pages through some old magazines rescued from the basement, a few
psychosell techniques stand out. An add for jeeps show a lone man in a red
jeep from a very low camera angle. The jeep seems almost to be flying against
the backdrop of blue sky with a few massive clouds. The ground looks more like
a wheat field with a crew cut, and the picture is obviously an artist's drawing
rather than a photograph. The headline pasted over the sky is "The Great
Escape." The ad is typical, neither especially creative nor unusually perceptive.
12. The promise of a "great escape" would hardly be worth the thousands of dollars
the magazine page costs unless there are a great many people who feel a need
to escape. The ad appeals to those who feel imprisoned. Its headline probes
that part of each of us feels trapped -perhaps by work or family responsibilities
or the problems of being human. The ad visually promises that a jeep will
provide freedom.
13. The picture evokes the dream of wide-open space and the freedom of the
frontier and a man alone on his trusted horse. The name of the jeep model, the
copy tells us, is "Renegade", carrying further both the wild West theme and the
escape from boredom -who ever heard of a bored renegade? The buyer of a
jeep can share the dream of the early Americans to escape to the uncivilized
lands of the wild West. The combination of a man and his machine acing the
wide-open spaces is often used in ads for snowmobiles, autos, motorcycles,
recreational vehicles and boats. In many of the ads the machine is presented as
a surrogate horse or woman (or both) and the promise of freedom and
excitement is at least implied.
The copy in the jeep ad reads:
Comin' at you -the famous Jeep CJ-5, the ultimate get-up-an’-go machine. Get
a hold of one of these babies, like this sporty Jeep Renegade and you're in for
the ride of your life.
She was born to run free far from the pavement. Built to take hard knocks in her
stride, the Renegade boasts a brawny suspension, heavy duty axles and a tight
32.9 ft. turning diameter. Roll bar, fender tip extensions and special aluminum
wheels come with this spirited beauty.
… '74 Jeep Renegade for a really great escape.
14. It would be quite easy to dismiss the copy as embarrassing writing by a
frustrated poet. But it would be more accurate to consider ad copy a form of
poetry -call it pecuniary poetry. Aldous Huxley recognized that, "The
advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary
forms. " Semanticist S.I. Hayakawa agrees that advertising is a from of poetry.
Both use strict economy of language, paying careful attention to the slightest
connotations and emotional effects of the words chosen. Both use intentional
ambiguity to add meaning on multiple levels. Both advertising and poetry strive
to give the objects of daily experience meanings beyond themselves. Ad
writers, like poets, must invest things with significance since man is a maker
and buyer of symbols more than things. The task of the copywriter is to
poeticize consumer goods.
15. The jeep copy is intentionally ambiguous. Much of the copy can be applied not
only to the product, but also to a woman. The jeep is "baby," "<i>she</i> was
born" and is a "spirited beauty" who will give you the "ride of your life" if you are
so lucky as to be able to "get a hold of one of these babies." And since the
woman thus categorized would hardly be a feminist, the reader notes she is
"built to take hard knocks in her stride." Of course, much of the copy could also
be applied with some accuracy to a horse.
16. Considering the ad as education, we find it teaches that escape is equivalent to
freedom. The jeep does not provide freedom, only its illusion. Freedom is not
the possession of a machine that enables one to ride in fields on weekends.
The ad teaches that freedom is the ability to afford occasional escape from
whatever is preventing freedom. Ads, such as the psychosexual one for jeep,
according to Erich Fromm is <i>Escape from Freedom</i>, "give … satisfaction
by their daydreaming qualities just as the movies do, but at the same time they
increase his feeling of smallness and powerlessness."
17. A few pages later in the magazine (which, by the way, contains more pages of
advertising than editorial content) the same theme is repeated in a Yamaha ad
with the headline "The great getaway machines." This ad shows romantic
couples rather than a man alone but promises that the cycles will help the rider
"leave behind the regimented week that was." The ad continues the theme of
using a machine to rediscover the delights of Eden.
18. Lane furniture has a small ad showing a couple in a New York high rise,
standing at the bedroom door admiring each other or the Lane bedroom set.
The headline asks, "Furniture or modern art?" and the copy answers, "It's both."
The ad cautions potential buyers not to "be surprised if your friends view it as a
work of art." The bedroom set is quite attractive but the illusion spun is that it
has something to do with art. The furniture is mass produced and the woodlike
carved surface is molded plastic. The pattern is given the out-West name of
"Pueblo." The ad is a bit of art education (and where else can a casual reader
obtain art education?) both denigrating the concept of art and strengthening the
hold of kitsch.
19. The illusions that the ads create are dangerous insofar as they are an education
system that teaches us to look out there, into the marketplace, to solve
problems and enhance our self-image. They are also dangerous because, as
Alfred Korzybski, the founder of general semantics, points out, "Human beings
are a symbolic class of life. Those who rule our symbols, rule us."