-Caveat Lector-
> August 2, 1999
>
> The Pleasures of Persuasion
>
> By Virginia Postrel
>
> Obituaries for advertising pioneer David Ogilvy, who died last
> Wednesday, emphasized his respect for the consumer. "The consumer
> is not a moron. She is your wife," was a popular Ogilvy refrain.
> "His greatest legacy," declared the Associated Press, "was an
> approach to advertising that assumed the intelligence of the
> consumer."
>
> How, then, do we explain the lady in the bath�or our reaction to
> her?
>
> She appears in a classic Ogilvy ad, featured in his 1983 book
> Ogilvy on Advertising. Covered with suds, she holds a bar of Dove
> soap aloft with her right hand and a large, black telephone
> receiver with her left. And boy, does she gush on that phone.
> "Darling, I�m having the most extraordinary experience..." reads
> the headline, followed in slightly smaller italic type by "I�m
> head over heels in DOVE!" The 36 short sentences that follow
> include nine exclamation points, 20 words or phrases italicized
> for emphasis, and four repetitions of "darling." The soap, our
> heroine exclaims to her absent love, makes her feel like "the
> most pampered, most spoiled, girliest girl in the world." She can
> hardly wait to take another bath tomorrow.
>
> Read with today�s eyes, the ad is quite insulting, but it is also
> hilarious. It is so unabashedly over-the-top that only the most
> irony-deprived could find it truly offensive. The 1990s reaction
> is to puncture it, to make jokes at its expense. In the age of
> Monica, the story cries out for reinterpretation as soft-core
> phone sex ("Well, darling, I�m all over cream. Just imagine,
> cream tip to toe. Arms. Legs. All of me!" says the ad) or a
> desperate cry for attention. Anything but a rationally based,
> emotionally persuasive pitch for soap.
>
> Our cynical reaction may in fact be the greatest legacy of Ogilvy
> and his fellow mid-century "ad men." In their quest for perfect
> persuasion, they created a media dynamic that made consumers
> increasingly immune to the ad men�s favorite techniques. Yet that
> very learning process undermined the arguments of advertising�s
> most prominent critics.
>
> To Ogilvy, good advertising followed clear rules. The Dove ad had
> a big photo, a long headline, a picture of the product, and
> plenty of text, because those were the established formula for
> success. Amid her gushing, the bathing beauty articulates the
> soap�s practical benefits, because Ogilvy believed that ads
> should always tell consumers why they should buy the product. (No
> "just do it" for him.) He also believed in scientific research.
> "I used the word �darling� in the headline for this ad because a
> psychologist had tested hundreds of words for their emotional
> impact and �darling� had come out top," he wrote.
>
> This simple, static model fed criticism not only of advertising
> but of the market economy it served. If consumers are so
> predictable and so easily manipulated, where is their freedom of
> action? Exchange isn�t really voluntary under these
> circumstances. Persuasion has become a kind of force. The more
> the advertiser knows about what consumers want, and the more
> desires the product and packaging seek to fulfill, the more
> coercive the force.
>
> That was the basic premise of Vance Packard�s best-selling 1957
> book The Hidden Persuaders. It recounts in ominous detail how
> merchandisers use psychology and social science to probe
> "people�s subsurface desires, needs, and drives...to find their
> points of vulnerability." These "depth merchandisers," Packard
> warned, were invading our minds and destroying our wills. By
> discovering unarticulated wants, such as the desire for novelty
> or for warm human contact, these diabolical manipulators could
> sell things consumers didn�t really need, such as colorful phones
> or impulse long-distance calls. When a cocky ad agency executive
> claimed in 1942 that psychology offered the promise not only of
> understanding people but of "controlling their behavior," Packard
> believed him.
>
> Packard�s stories offer an intriguing peek into the mindset of
> mid-century advertising and social science. But even the 1980
> reissue of the book reads as anachronistically�and
> ridiculously�as the Dove ad. It envisions consumers as passive
> dupes who never catch on, even to the most obvious manipulations.
> It assumes that serving intangible desires is a kind of fraud. It
> imposes a standard of "rational" needs that exemplifies the worst
> sort of technocratic elitism.
>
> By treating emotional factors as suspect, Packard�s prescriptions
> would make consumers worse off. He worried, for instance, that
> the "depth probers" had found that consumers didn�t like dealing
> with intimidating institutions. Fear of the stern disapproval of
> traditional bankers was driving borrowers to more expensive loan
> companies. Young housewives were afraid of revealing their
> ignorance to butchers. When researchers discovered these fears,
> banks and supermarkets attracted business by promising a friendly
> atmosphere and training their employees to be nice. All of which
> struck Packard as ominous. The research, he said, exploited
> customers� fears.
>
> It�s hard for a contemporary observer to take Packard�s concerns
> seriously. Aren�t friendly bankers better than stern ones? What�s
> wrong with selling toothpaste to get rid of morning breath rather
> than just for dental hygiene? What sort of conspiratorial mind
> would find "Reach out and touch someone" a crime against
> individual autonomy?
>
> It is hard nowadays to understand how anyone could conceive of
> consumers as so powerless�or of advertising as so threatening. If
> we don�t like the ads, we turn the page or hit the remote
> control. The result is intense pressure for advertisers to make
> not just their products but their pitches appealing. Today�s
> consumers, and the people who study them, are more likely to
> emphasize the pleasures of persuasion.
>
> Consider the recent book, The 100 Best TV Commercials. It�s very
> existence assumes that consumers are not victimized by ads but
> intrigued by them; like other forms of persuasion, ads can also
> be entertainment. Author Bernice Kanner begins with an explicit
> swipe at Packard, recounting how she once volunteered as the
> subject of psychological research for a shampoo company. She let
> social scientists probe her innermost thoughts about her hair,
> and it didn�t bother her a bit.
>
> "Rather than seeing commercials or the research that shapes them
> as insidious, I confess, I see them as artful�a no-bones-about-it
> reflection of our times," writes Kanner. Advertising, in this
> contemporary assessment, is an interesting craft that we as savvy
> consumers can appreciate.
>
> Kanner isn�t alone. A lot of consumers actively enjoy
> advertising, especially fashion print ads and clever TV
> commercials. The nostalgic cable channel TVLand features not only
> vintage shows but also vintage commercials. Both Nike and Adidas
> delighted fans with their funny ads during the recent women�s
> soccer playoffs. Commercial parodies and satirical allusions are
> a staple of comedy from "Saturday Night Live" to "The Simpsons."
>
> This shift is partly generational. Americans born since World War
> II have grown up in a media-saturated environment. From
> childhood, we have developed a sort of advertising literacy,
> which combines appreciation for technique with skepticism about
> motives. We respond to ads with at least as much rhetorical
> intelligence as we apply to any other form of persuasion. We can
> enjoy ads, scorn them, or be moved by them. We can also accept
> "meaningless" product attributes�Budweiser�s silly frogs,
> Absolut�s playful graphics, Nike�s celebration of achievement,
> the iMac�s bright colors�as legitimate differentiators. We don�t
> demand the "rationality" of New Coke, which did great in taste
> tests but deprived consumers of the emotional resonances of the
> classic flavor.
>
> In our media-savvy age, consumers are neither morons nor
> puritans. We are active participants in the exchange with
> producers and persuaders. We decide not only which products but
> which meanings to adopt�and which to reject. The Packard model is
> largely dead.
>
> This widespread media literacy informs academic cultural studies.
> Although the discipline�s practitioners mostly see themselves as
> leftists, their approaches tend to overthrow the old story of
> exploitation and trickery. Instead, they emphasize audience
> "agency." Some scholars study how fan communities rearrange and
> add to the characters and stories offered by mass media. Others
> emphasize the way we define personal identities by selecting
> symbols to associate with, many of which are commercial.
>
> The result is a vision of consumers as informed, self-directed
> actors. We do not simply absorb media images passively. We
> examine them, rework them, and turn them to serve our own needs.
> This vision is deeply threatening to traditional leftist views of
> commerce.
>
> "It is a surprisingly short walk from the cult-studs�
> active-audience theorizing to the most undiluted sort of
> free-market orthodoxy," frets cultural critic Thomas Frank in his
> magazine The Baffler. With their reverence for the self-directed
> consumer, he argues, the cultural studies mavens have betrayed
> the leftist cause. They are lending support to the corporate
> enemy, and even training graduate students who wind up doing
> market research. Frank finds them contemptible, and dangerous. To
> believe in "active, intelligent audiences," he writes, "makes
> criticism of the market philosophically untenable."
>
> Unfortunately for Frank, that belief has decades of widespread
> experience behind it. Audiences have grown ever more
> sophisticated. Advertising that respects the consumer�s
> intelligence is no one man�s legacy. It�s what the market
> demands.
>
> Virginia Postrel Is the Editor of Reason Magazine and the Author
> of The Future and Its Enemies: the Growing Conflict Over
> Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress (The Free Press)
>
> A shorter version of this article appeared in The Wall Street
> Journal on August 2, 1999.
>From www.reason.com/opeds/vp080299.html
A<>E<>R
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