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Cutting through the clutter of the art of persuasion
Tonight at 8 p.m., KCPT Channel 19 will broadcast a Frontline edition titled “The Persuaders,” exploring the frenzied competition among marketers for our eyeballs and dollars.
The catch phrase — cut through the clutter — is still appropriate. But a newer one now joins it — clutter fatigue.
What better place to start an exploration of the art of persuasion than nighttime in New York’s Times Square?
Cult mind control is not different in kind from these everyday varieties, but in its greater intensity, persistence, duration, and scope. One difference is in its greater efforts to block quitting the group, by imposing high exit costs, replete with induced phobias of harm, failure, and personal isolation.”
- Philip G. Zimbardo, Ph.D., What Messages Are Behind Today’s Cults?
“Welcome to the new American Metropolis,” media critic Douglas Rushkoff tells viewers. “Somewhere beneath all these ads is the city I grew up in. But over the last 20 years, it’s grown a second skin — a twinkling membrane of commercial messages.”
But even before that, Advertising Age ad critic Bob Garfield pretty well sums up clutter fatigue when he talks about the inability to walk down the street, ride an elevator, go to the bathroom, look at the sky or even play golf without being bombarded with messages, including reaching down to pluck your golf ball after a successful putt and finding an ad at the bottom of the cup.
The program moves on to a faux party being put on by Song, the new airline launched by Delta to compete with JetBlue and Ted.
There, Frontline finds Andy Spade, who in the Nov. 1 edition of Ad Age was named one of the brains behind 50 of the biggest marketing successes of the year, that honor being for the Kate Spade line of everything from purses, shoes, stationery, china and sunglasses. Now Andy Spade has been charged with creating Song’s debut TV ad campaign.
Ultimately, Spade waxes poetic about brands and branding: “I think it’s creating kind of, kind of something that communicates to people on, on another level, beyond a logical level,” he says.
In the end, Spade decides the way to cut through the clutter will be a campaign that shows no airplanes, no travelers, no talk of low fares. In short, no airline.
Jump ahead in the program, and it gets a little scary when ad strategist Douglas Atkin describes a moment that occurred as he was sitting in on a focus group where participants were talking about a particular sneaker.
“The terms they were using were evangelical,” he says. “I mean, they were converts. … If these people are expressing cultlike devotion, then why not study cults? Why not study the original, find out why people join cults and apply that knowledge to brands?”
And indeed, that’s just what Atkin did, studying groups ranging from Hare Krishna to Harley Davidson owners, from Falun Gong to Mac owners.
His conclusion: Whether joining a cult or becoming a brand devotee, it was all about a need for a sense of belonging, the need for the company of others.
Atkin uses the example of Saturn, pointing out that 45,000 people “turned up to spend their holiday vacation time at a factory in Tennessee instead of going to Disney World or the Grand Canyon. Now why would they do that? Because they wanted to meet other people who own Saturns, they want to meet the rest of the Saturn family … and Saturn knew that.”
What Messages Are Behind Today’s Cults?
And that, the program concludes, is the object of so-called emotional branding, “to fill the empty places where noncommercial institutions like schools and churches might have done the job.”
The program then takes viewers down many roads, including the marriage between Madison Avenue and Hollywood, termed “Madison and Vine”; the impact of digital video recorders on advertising; the Internet; and the challenge of reaching consumers in commercial-free television, such as HBO, which increasingly incorporates products into the storyline, such as the integration of Absolut vodka into a “Sex and the City” storyline.
Later the program delves into market research, including a fascinating interview with a person outside an office park in Boston about emotions stirred by eating white bread. Eating white bread didn’t make this person feel affectionate, curious, lonely, disappointed or afraid, but it did make the consumer a little apprehensive and uncertain.
In all this is a fascinating peek inside the heads of the persuaders and the lengths they’ll go to and the money they’ll spend to convince us, at any cost, just how much we need their stuff.
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