Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [72]
Plus, again, I’m forty-eight. I’d like to think of myself as a young, media-savvy forty-eight, but the fact is I didn’t grow up with video games and the Internet. I don’t text, don’t have a BlackBerry-like device, and rarely use my cell phone. I opened up Dinotopia: Journey to Chanelara, but my son spoke before I could begin.
There was a toy he desperately wanted to get for his birthday next month. Some new piece of Power Rangers gear. He saw it on a commercial that afternoon on Nickelodeon. As I began to read, I decided that secondhand commercial messages should indeed count (399).
When I was still making ads, the assignments would stick in my head long after I left the office. As much as I’d try to decompress, I’d still think of them on the train, while making a fire in the woodstove, while watching TV. Sometimes I’d get up from the dinner table and scramble for a pen and paper. In my car I would call myself on my cell phone and leave a message: an insight, a headline, the hint of a tagline, the premise for a campaign.
Sometimes I dreamed about the ads I had to make.
Sometimes I dreamed about making ads I didn’t have to make, for products that didn’t exist.
Often, while consumed by an assignment, I would get up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and madly write out an entire TV commercial, replete with stage directions, and sell it the next day.
However, more often than not, the thoughts made no sense, sucking at best and at worst revealing aspects of my dream mind that should never have seen the light of reality.
Thankfully, I don’t dream about ads anymore. But if I did, I wonder, would they count?
Maybe I should ask my doctor.
The Opposite of Subliminal
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.
—Marshall McLuhan
What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.
—Don Draper, character on the AMC series Mad Men
This Episode of the Apocalypse Is Made Possible by the Men and Women of the American Advertising Industry, and Viewers Like You
I’m embarrassed to admit that the first time I’d heard of The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard’s seminal 1957 book about the insidious ways in which advertising “depth researchers” used manipulative psychological methods to corrupt our minds and empty our wallets, was in Mark Greif’s smart 2007 essay in the New York Times Book Review. The essay, which was written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication, alternately fascinated, intrigued, and shamed me.
According to Greif’s essay, “Packard had tried to warn Americans of a new mutation in advertising. Powerful admen [in the 1950s] were working to tap the irrational in the consumer mind, using the applied psychology and sociology supported by the government in World War II.”
The Hidden Persuaders topped the New York Times best-seller list in August 1957 and remained a best seller for more than a year. By 1975 there were more than three million copies in print, and with the subsequent publication of two other best-selling books, The Status Seekers (1959) and The Waste Makers (1960), Packard had become the very thing that he seemingly held in such contempt: a household brand name.
How come I’d never heard of The Hidden Persuaders? How come I’d never heard of a best-selling book about my industry that, among other things, contended that “the most serious offense many of the depth manipulators commit… is that they try to invade the privacy of our minds. It is this right to privacy in our minds—privacy to be either rational or irrational—that I believe we must strive to protect.”
I’d certainly heard of and read David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man (1963), which apparently was an answer to Packard’s indictment, and Ogilvy on Advertising (1983) and a number of other supposedly inspiring books about the craft and legends of advertising. Why not this? Did the Man take measures to suppress it? Had Packard’s hypotheses