THE AGE OF PERSUASION

By Terry O’Riely and Mike Tenant. Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2009.

Clutter: I knew ad clutter was bad, but I had no idea it extended to TV screens showing ads in elevators and on the back of the front seats of cabs.

Breaking The Contract: Even if a product seemed like it might be good, I wouldn’t buy it simply because it was being advertised to me in the back of a cab.

The Rise And Fall And Rise Of Branded Entertainment: Are webisodes like Seinfeld and Superman really as entertaining as the branded entertainment of years gone buy? At least with The Jack Benny Show, their was plenty of entertainment apart from the commercials. With these webisodes, it seems like it’s less entertaining because you know most of the focus is on getting you to buy the product.

Persuading Youths: Farber is a Jewish name. Only a Jew would think of selling ads on his test sheets.

Guerrillas In Our Midst: Death should never be used to sell a product, unless of course the ad is for a funeral home or something. I went to a convention for my company once. The company had brought in this bucking guy from their headquarters in the States. The theme of the weekend had to do with desiring success and having a good attitude. One of the analogies this guy used to illustrate his point, in other words, to sell us on his ideas, was a story about a little boy who wants to be successful. He knows his father isn’t successful, so he goes next door to his elderly neighbour, who is a success. The little boy asks the old man how to be successful. The old man doesn’t respond. The little boy again asks the old man how to be successful. Still no response. The boy poses the question a third time. The old man gets up from his lawn chair, grabs the boy around the neck, drags him down to the pond, and plunges the boy below the surface of the water. The old man holds the boy under the water for a long time and then finally lets him up. He then says to the boy, “When you want success as much as you wanted that next breath, that’s how to be successful.”

This story was really beyond the bucking pale if you ask me.

The other story was about a family of chickens. The mother hen died, and the two “boy chickens” as this guy referred to them (they’re called roosters, city slicker), were left to fend for themselves. They got severely picked on by the other chickens, until one day they decided to contemplate suicide (although I could have been just making that last part up.) One morning, the two roosters looked up in the sky and saw a bird that looked like them. One of the ROOSTERS asked, “How come you can fly when you’re a chicken? We’re chickens and we can’t fly.” The bird in the sky replied, “You’re not chickens. You’re eagles.”

The point I’m trying to make is that this speaker was trying to get us, in the audience, to buy the ideas about success and a positive attitude he was trying to present. However, if you’re going to try to get me to bucking buy your ideas, you better use a lot better tactics than talking about dead chickens and bucking old men drowning little boys. This rule applies to all of advertising and copy writing. Negative imagery, unless directly related to the kind of product you’re trying to sell, will turn me off from making a purchase.

Though the Time Warner and Dr Pepper incidents were foolish, crass and horrible examples of marketing, they give me a pretense to make this joke. Boston once banned a mathbook because it had two improper fractions.

It is worth asking a couple questions about the execution of Timothy McVeigh. How did he get executed so fast? There’re guys on death row who’ve been their for thirty years. Also, there are those who say McVeigh was never put to death at all.

The Lesson Of Clark Gable’s Undershirt: Ringo Starr is a living joke, truly.

Tom Waites is in the business of selling records. He knew that if listeners heard one of his songs in a commercial, they would not like it and stop buying his records.

The Language Of Persuasion: Actually, if you go into a Starbucks and ask for a small, medium or large coffee, they’ll understand what you’re saying.

Wall Of Cynicism: Orson Wells “War Of The Worlds” broadcast proved that radio could be used to manipulate people. I would not be surprised if that particular broadcast was not a government-backed operation.

The 1957 theatre experiment either worked or didn’t work, depending on whom you believe.

I would heartily disagree that there aren’t subliminal messages in advertising. For example, I think of a commercial for Johnson’s Baby Shampoo that aired in the nineties. This woman tells the story of her and her teenage daughter Becky giving Becky’s brother Sam a bath “when suddenly Becky dropped the bottle and splashed Sam’s face. I got upset.” The way she said it made it sound like getting upset was the worst thing in the world. This ad was designed to communicate said message to the viewer.

There are also examples of Coke ads featuring noses that look like penises and bottles featuring tiny pictures of a woman’s face between a man’s legs.

I don’t shop on Amazon, but I do use it to look up information about books. One day, I clicked on the HISTORY link, just for fun. Even though I had never purchased anything on Amazon’s website, they had a list of books I had looked at when I’d clicked on the site from Google.

In the future, conventional advertising won’t exist. Permission marketing will largely be the way products are sold. Companies will have people who work for them in the field of one to one marketing. These employees will call up their friends or send them messages via some other means. Only friends whom the employee thinks will be interested in the product will be contacted. In this way, companies will be better able to reach their target audience and increase revenue.