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.
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