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Advertising

or

How many people does it take to sell a lightbulb?

According to Fifties industrial designer Brooks Stevens, advertising exists to give people ‘the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than necessary’.¹ Although it’s hard to imagine now, we are not naturally rampant consumers. Marketers had to pump this drug of desire into us.

Drawing on my decade working in advertising, this chapter will give you a peek behind the curtain to show you how the Wizards of Ads bamboozle us into spending money we may not have on things we may not really want.

BEHIND THE ADVERTISING CURTAIN

It was a bright day outside, but you’d never have known it. I was sitting on one of several black fake-leather couches in a vast dark warehouse. The only lights were at the back of the room where the car was waiting for its close-up.

Looking at the scores of stressed-out and scurrying people who had been working on this project for countless days, it suddenly hit me just how bonkers my job really was. If you’re not familiar with how the ad industry works, this is what happens. Brace yourselves.

The car company decides to advertise their car and hires an agency. The ‘planners’ at the agency then do exhaustive research into the aptly named ‘target market’, delving deep into the details of how we think, feel and behave.

Occasionally brands want to change their audience or how people feel about their product, so they change their advertising, which is cheaper and easier than changing the actual product. We might think that we’re too savvy to be swayed by ad strategies, but this is sadly not the case. For example, when my old agency started telling parents that a certain chocolate spread brand was not just a treat but could be a ‘part of a healthy breakfast’, sales doubled. (The morality of employing a strategy like this tends to be ignored.)

Once the planners have a strategy, they hand it over to the ‘creatives’. In the case of this car ad, that was me. The strategy was to get people to see the car as a fashion item – I guess like a snazzy handbag that you drive to your granny in. Together with my creative partner and creative director, I spent weeks coming up with dozens of ways to turn this strategy into a poster concept.

Then things got practical. I auditioned over fifty models, looking them up and down to decide whether they had the ‘right look’ to make people want to buy a three-door hatchback. Incidentally, having to judge someone else’s appearance isn’t a comfortable or life-affirming activity. It manages to make you feel disconnected from your humanity, creepy and fat all at the same time. Despite my final choice being a size 6 (US size 2), the client who sat beside me on the black sofas confided that she was worried the model might be ‘too chubby’.

Finalising the outfit for this not-at-all-chubby woman then took several weeks of deliberation, research into the target audience and late-night fittings. What did we end up with? Cropped trousers, plimsolls and a layered T-shirt. A simple enough look you might think, but every detail had been debated and signed off by multiple people.

Then it was up to the clothes stylists, hair and make-up stylists, lighting directors, photographers and all their many assistants to ensure that both car and model looked ab-sol-ute-ly perfect. We all had one last passionate debate with the client about the shoes the model was wearing and then the photographs began. They flashed up onto a big computer screen where we could examine them, and more minute adjustments were made. Several hours later, we wrapped, congratulated ourselves and went back to the office to pick our final picture.

Once there, however, none of the shots were considered ‘just right’, so we ended up expertly knitting three different photographs together in Photoshop. Later, the retouch artists began the work of making both the perfect-looking car and the perfect-looking person (who had already been rigorously perfected) look more perfect.

A month later, the poster was finished. It looked, unsurprisingly, rather perfect. It went up on billboards all over the UK and the whole campaign was considered a success.

Why am I telling you this? It’s not to relive my ‘glory days’ in advertising, I promise. It’s to show the strategising and conscious effort behind every tiny detail to create an advert that’s as seductive as possible.

Ads like this are designed to weave a fantasy world around the product and (at a subliminal level) make us want to be, or be with, the people in them. They seduce us by getting bits of our brain that we’re not even aware of to think, ‘I want to look like that. I want to feel like that. I want that life.’ But the truth is that it’s a very cleverly constructed lie. No one looks like that, not even the models in the ads. To look like that, you’d have to pay the 50 or so people at that shoot to construct every split-second of your life and somehow Photoshop you as you walked along the street.

That day, in that room, I had a moment of clarity. Of all the things to spend your life doing, rush around for, lose sleep over, spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on, why advertising? What even is this?

WHAT EVEN IS THIS? A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF ADVERTISING

At first advertising was simply a means of sharing information. One of the first written adverts we know of was created 5,500 years ago by a Babylonian chap who inscribed into a clay tablet what cattle and feed his master had for sale and what the prices were. It probably made for dull reading, with no catchy end-line or joke to make the buyers feel better about the prices.

Times moved on. Before the printing press was invented in the 1400s, town criers gave out the news, sometimes accompanied by a musician, so the first advertising jingle was probably played on a lute! During the 1700s and 1800s, paper ‘bill’ ads were plastered on every public wall available, including cathedrals. These ads became increasingly eye-catching, with varied graphics, fonts and etchings. They showed everything from elaborately dressed women keeping themselves clean with Pears Soap to boastful bulletins informing people of a recently arrived cargo ship full of ‘138 Remarkably Healthy Slaves’.

In 1941 the first television ad was shown, during a baseball game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Philadelphia Phillies. It presented a map of America with a Bulova-branded watch face superimposed over the top. A deep male voiceover announced proudly, ‘America runs on Bulova time.’ And that was it. Ad over.

If only all advertising breaks were that short. Now in America, of the five hours that the average person watches TV,² approximately 1.2 hours will be adverts.³

This has led me to the terrifying realisation that the average person is watching over three and half years of adverts over a lifetime! If a pal called you up and said, ‘Hey! Let’s spend the next three and half years watching commercials,’ you might well question their sanity. But this is what many people are choosing to do. To me, three and a half years sounds like a prison sentence, but in this case the prison constantly asks for your money and gets irritating songs stuck in your head.

Digital ads are now the new town criers, and they don’t even play the lute. We now see and hear an estimated 362 ads a day and over 5,000 ‘brand exposures’ from logos and other branding devices.⁴ It’s no wonder that this has massively affected our behaviour. Even if we claim, as many of us do, to ‘never pay attention to ads,’ the sheer number of them, coupled with the activity of our ever-curious brains, means their messages sink in somehow, shifting our ideas of what’s important and how we feel about things.

Mindful curation therefore can’t just be about being mindful of the objects we allow into our lives, but also has to be about being mindful of the messages and content as well. This needn’t mean a media blackout, rather that we should aim to identify the sources that nurture us and give us the information we need to make good choices. To everything else we can say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’

Rather creepily, there are thousands of people now working on ways of getting more ads in front of our eyes every day. In the future, who knows, there may be a way to beam adverts directly into our brain. With home appliances becoming part of the ‘internet of things’, don’t be surprised if in a few years’ time, your fridge starts giving you suggestions as to what you might like to fill it with.

If we want to stay mindful, we should be on the lookout for anything that sneaks ads into our homes or heads via the back door. Our homes need to be a sanctuary if we are to stay sane in the next millennia. So, in the words of one of my favourite Harry Potter characters, ‘Constant vigilance!’

THE SEDUCTION OF SYMBOLISM

The biggest change that I’ve seen in advertising, and something that particularly affects us when we’re trying to practise mindful curation, is the switch from useful detailed information to help with making choices to symbolism and manipulation. You may have noticed that in many ads today, you might not even see the product, just an idea with the brand’s logo on it.

For example, when Levi’s invented their jeans in the 1870s, some of their earliest adverts showed two horses trying to rip a pair of jeans apart. The line went ‘They never rip’ and the advertisement then went into detail on the quality and construction of the jeans.

In comparison, a Levi’s advert in 1998 showed a hamster called Kevin running on a wheel to heavy metal music. A little boy speaks over the top:

‘Kevin loved his wheel, but one day … it broke.’

The music stops and the hamster wheel stops working. The light fades in the room as night falls.

‘Kevin grew bored …’

We see the sun rise and Kevin standing still in the cage. Then a pencil pokes him through the bars and he falls over into his sawdust.

‘… and died.’

The ‘Levi’s Original’ logo then appears and the ad ends. ⁵

At the time, this ad caused quite a few complaints, but what I find interesting is just how far away the ad is from the product it is advertising. A depressed hamster has nothing to do with jeans and yet Levi’s wouldn’t have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to run this ad unless they thought it would increase sales, so what’s going on?

What this ad manages to do very well is create a powerful reaction of shocked laughter/disbelief at the same time as we see the Levi’s logo. This is classic subliminal messaging. When we next see the Levi’s logo, maybe in a shop or online, that feeling of heightened activity in our brain will return as an echo in our mind. We probably won’t remember the ad, but we will feel a slight thrill – a thrill that will make us far more likely to remember the brand, pay attention to the jeans and buy them.

The ad may also be saying that Levi’s are for people who love to move or who can’t bear to be still and bored. They’re for people who want to ‘live’. That is a sentiment that might resonate with many, and it might even make them feel a closeness to the Levi’s brand, but it has no basis in the reality of the product.

I believe that this shift from talking about the attributes and quality of a product to the symbolic qualities of a brand goes hand in hand with why the quality of products has fallen. At some point, companies realised they just needed to sell us an idea, and if we bought into the idea, we’d probably buy the product too. So they didn’t need to put their efforts into making the best products possible, just into making the best ads.

It is the same with customer service. It’s easy to see where brands’ priorities lie when companies spend $500 billion on marketing and advertising globally compared to just $9 billion on customer service.⁶ The average sales rep might make double the salary of the poor old customer service rep who is the one who has to deal with the irate and potentially sweary customers.

Many companies will charm you right up to the moment you’ve bought their product, and then you’ll be invisible to them until they can flog you something that’s ‘even better’. In the meantime, what is to be done with their product if it breaks is ‘not their problem’.

It is the companies who break this pattern that have the potential to become BuyMeOnce brands. These are the people who believe in their products and commit to their customers. They will make you feel like a valued customer before your purchase and for many years into the future. They may be hard to find, but I’m happy to report that they do exist.

BEYOND SELLING – HOW ADVERTISING IS AFFECTING HOW YOU THINK

What’s less obvious about advertising but important not to overlook is that it doesn’t just sell us things, it also sells us its own moral code. It has a significant amount of power to shape our beliefs by showing us what’s acceptable and what’s not. Currently, it mostly shows us a creepy, fun-house mirror version of our world, where almost everyone has over-white teeth, thigh gaps and immaculate houses, and people of colour are tolerated, so long as they aren’t ‘too black’.

That was a direct quote from one of my clients, by the way. A lot of progress towards equality has been made, but from my experience there’s still some way to go.

A couple of years ago I was writing a TV ad and was specifically asked to show lots of different types of people enjoying the product in different ways, so I wrote a gay couple into the script. They were going to be in dressing gowns in their kitchen stealing bits of each other’s breakfast, but the feedback from the client was that we could have two men in the scene ‘so long as they didn’t touch, flirt or look at each other too long’.

‘So they want flatmates,’ I said. ‘They can’t be gay because…?’

I never got an answer to that question, and my colleagues couldn’t understand why I was livid and throwing all my toys out of the pram.

‘I’m gay and I’m not offended, so how can you be?’ said my account manager.

‘Okay,’ I explained. ‘Imagine a 15-year-old gay person who’s anxious about coming out overhearing this conversation. They’d hear that a huge global company won’t have a gay couple in their ad because they’re worried sales of their product will go down. What kind of message does that kid get? That they’re not going to be accepted – that their mere existence can put people off their breakfast.’

The ad was eventually shelved, so the row never escalated, and a year later I managed to persuade the same client to put an interracial family into one of their ads. However, when I chose the actors, the client came back saying that they would not accept my casting because my choices were ‘too black’.

Feeling there must be some misunderstanding, I asked if there was any other reason why they didn’t like those actors. ‘No,’ came the reply. It was pure skin tone.

I tried everything I could think of, including threatening to quit, to persuade my bosses to insist on the hiring, but I was told, ‘We can’t afford to lose them as a client,’ and in the end, although my agency strongly voiced their objection to the stance, they gave in and the ad was recast with lighter-skinned people. It was this incident more than anything that spurred me to do something else with my life.

How can we who are horrified by the idea of prejudice counter these messages? The best defence I know against prejudice is empathy.

exercise

GENERATING EMPATHY

So much of the imagery we see, in ads and other areas of life, can divide us into ‘us and them’, ‘the haves and the have-nots’, and actively undermine our happiness by preventing us from connecting and empathising with others. In order to counteract this, here’s an exercise specifically to help you generate more empathy.

• Spend twenty minutes on the Humans of New York website (www.humansofnewyork.com). There are stories there from people of every background and walk of life. Some are funny and some are deeply moving.

• Pick a person you wouldn’t normally meet. Look into their eyes.

• Now take a deep breath, close your eyes and try to imagine yourself in their skin, seeing the world as they do. Imagine going about your day as that person.

• Imagine meeting yourself as that person. How do you react? Do you ignore yourself, or do you engage? Can you find common ground?

I believe my experiences in advertising shine a light on why we need to question the messages that we see and I hope that through this questioning we can override the subconscious messaging from companies who may not share our values. Only this will leave us free to make our own choices.

SHOULD WE BAN ALL ADS?

Having read this far, you may be thinking, ‘If advertising is so bad, why not ban it?’ If we could click our fingers and get rid of it all, would we? I might be tempted, but no.

At its heart, all advertising is a mass sharing of information, and it doesn’t even have to be for commercial gain. It’s often useful in telling us about things we might not otherwise have known about and services that are available to us. Plus sometimes there are puppies involved, so it’s not all bad.

However, I am one of the growing number of people who believes we should have a choice over whether we see ads in our daily life or not. They do, as we found out in Chapter 1, harm us by triggering materialism. We can choose to forgo certain TV channels and publications to avoid certain ads. However, it’s impossible for us to avoid all the posters and billboards plastered all over cities and I feel they should be phased out.

This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. In 2016 a group raised funds to replace all of the ads in one London underground station with pictures of cats. So for one glorious week the residents of Clapham Common got tabbies instead of tablet adverts.⁷ And in São Paulo, Brazil, the city council has banned all outdoor advertising. Fifteen thousand billboards have been taken down, which has completely changed the identity of the city. It has brought architecture to the forefront and also highlighted some of the social inequality of the housing usually hidden behind the vast ads.

There are now channels, apps and publications offering you the choice to pay if you don’t want to see advertisements. This could be seen as a step forward, but there is the danger that it could force poorer people to watch ads while the rich can afford to avoid them. This idea was taken to its extreme in an episode of Black Mirror that showed a dark future where everyone lived in tiny cubes, their walls entirely made out of TV screens.⁸ Ads blazed at them all day long, but if they wanted to close their eyes and shut it out, they had to pay. If they ran out of credit, they were forced to keep their eyes open and lap it up … shudder.

Advertising, like anything that can influence a huge number of people, is a powerful thing. This power can be harnessed for the dark side, the light, or all the myriad of greys, beiges and bubble-gum pinks in between.

What I’ve started to campaign for is an advertising industry with a conscience. I’ve met many people in ad land who want to have a positive impact on the world, but think that they can only advertise what people pay them to promote. They believe that the ad industry can’t afford to have a conscience, but that doesn’t have to be true.

I’ve moved away from talking about the products that I don’t feel are beneficial to humanity and chosen to put my effort into brands that I do feel can help. If advertising agencies started to seek out game-changing ethical businesses and spread the word about them, these companies might disrupt more complacent and damaging big businesses.

The people who work in advertising might feel that they’re just cogs in the machine that is commerce, but cogs can spin in both directions. Maybe, if the advertising industry empowered itself to change, it could spin its cog the other way, and take the rest of commerce with it.

If you’re one of the millions of people who work in marketing, PR or advertising, get in touch. There’s a lot we can do.