Persuaders

• What in "The Persuaders" surprised you (or not)? Name one new thing you learned about marketing or politics from watching the film. Name one new thing you learned about yourself from watching the film, or one thing that the film reiterated about yourself.

When it comes to advertising, nothing really surprises me. I say this as an Advertising major and as an incredibly cynical person. The public, especially the American public, is indulged everyday with advertisements. Our TV shows have advertisements. Our movies have advertisements. We see advertisements when we do research on the internet. We even see it on other people's bodies, in forms of t-shirts and tattoos. The notion that we are oversaturated and numbed to ads isn't exactly a stunning development. 50 years ago, people wore suits and nice pants. Today we wear t-shirts with logos promoting all sorts of things, from music to movies to food. When you walk around campus, you can run into a student passing out flyers for a bar, or a poster for a club. 99% of the time, you also never see anybody taking a good, hard look at any of the ads. With so much clutter, there really is no one thing to focus on.

One thing I learned about advertising in the documentary is that product placement is not simply a company going to a network and asking to be in the show. Rather, it is the other way around, with the networks pitching shows to companies. I'm not sure if I learned anything about myself from this, as I knew most of the things they talked about. Advertising is really no different than any other industry. It's full of sociopaths who only care about the bottom line and themselves, which leads to terrible "outside of the box" things like the Song campaign that tried way too hard, and that nut who used his wacko psychology to explain that people like certain things. Despite the fact I find his results to be repugnant, I have a modicum of respect for Frank Luntz. The way he played with language was startling. The first key that anyone in advertising or marketing needs to realize is that the masses are not nearly as smart as they think they are, and easily manipulated, something Luntz realized immediately.

• "The Persuaders" begins by questioning the increase in the amount of advertising we typically encounter in our daily lives. How would you assess the amount of advertising you see? Too much? Too little? Just right? In your view, what difference does it make to know that people today see much more advertising in their daily lives than people 20 or 30 years ago?

The answer to this is very simple. Yes. Yes yes yes. We are absolutely overloaded with advertising. As mentioned, it's absolutely everywhere. On clothing, on cars, on the things we carry, on the walls, in the skies. Everywhere. And the problem for advertisers is that everyone is trying to stand out. But when everyone tries to standout, nobody stands out. And it gets especially annoying when advertisers are specifically targeting one demographic very hard. For example, during last year's MLB playoffs, they cycled about 5 different commercials nonstop, and most of them targeted older men. A particularly annoying Viagra commercial repeated over and over, and being a person who doesn't need Viagra, I found it unnecessary.

I think comparing it to ads from 20-30 years ago is too short a distance. There was product placement and t-shirts and billboards and all that jazz 20-30 years ago. It wasn't that much different. Looking back about 40-50 years ago is where it gets interesting, because the problem in advertising wasn't the amount, but rather the presentation. Take this incredibly offensive Jell-O commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCKxWQCs3f0. It's full of racism and stereotyping. While people wore nice, logoless clothing, and there was less advertising overall, advertising was more malcious. Cartoons like The Flintstones pushed cigarettes. Advertisements as a whole were incredibly racist and misogynistic, treating women like objects whose only purpose in life was to serve man. It's quality vs. quantity, and I think that was much more damaging to society than the gigantic amount of advertising we are served up everyday.