How Advertising Conquered Democracy With This One Weird Trick
— Originally published in Life On Mars; subscribe now.
If you work in advertising, as I do, you’ve taken the red pill. You see that everything is an ad. Every subject line, headline and byline. Every book cover, button click and brag post. There is very little difference between the post that pitches how happy your kids are and the post that pitches how happy your kids will be if you take them to Disney World.
When everything is an ad, everything is equal. Uncle Joe has as much authority as CNN. Exploiting this, was Russia’s one weird trick. And Putin didn’t have to poison the fruit of our democracy in order to subvert our democracy, like some ironic Jiu Jitsu. It was already poisoned by two phenomena.
The first is what I call, Face-Value Projection. People on Facebook want to be taken at face value, so they fool themselves into taking everything at face value. It makes for less cognitive dissonance. And they’re usually posting to convince themselves of something as much as anyone else. People are getting high on their own supply.
The second phenomenon is what Upendra Shardanand calls, The Great Blurring. Very recently, news became social content, and social content became advertising, and advertising became news. Their form, their function and the process by which they are targeted are all the same. Everything is an ad, including your Aunt Betty.
It’s counterintuitive, but the antidote to reality distortion is to think like an ad person. For advertising creative directors and copywriters, critical thinking and a sense of irony are intuitive skills that develop over time. While most people watch the cave wall, we are casting the shadows.
You may ask, “Aren’t journalists better at seeing the truth than ad copywriters?” They’re often not, for two simple reasons. Journalists believe in objectivity and free will. Copywriters know these concepts to be an illusion. Copywriters aren’t just students of social science; they’re practitioners of it. Malcolm Gladwell knows this. It’s why he’s a better storyteller than journalist, and it explains why he has always wanted to write ads.
Teaching intuition isn’t easy, but here’s one method for getting to the mindset of an ad person. Question everything. The Five Ws may work for journalism. But you can decode any communication with three different interrogatives: Whose, Which and How.
Whose money are they playing with?
In other words: who’s behind it, and what’s their agenda? The person who pays the piper, picks the tune.
Which Fear of Loss is in play?
There are six fears of loss: Connection, Order, Status, Meaning, Influence, Control (COSMIC).
How are my biases being played?
We all have them. We have biases for what we think of others and how we think of ourselves. This requires some self awareness.
That’s it. You could try to identify all the rhetorical tricks and fallacies being employed, like straw men and false flags. But this is a lot easier and uses social thinking, not analytical thinking.
People in advertising aren’t bothered by the paradox of our craft being used by Putin and Disney. It’s all Fantasyland or Frontierland. The real difference is between knowing you’re in a theme park, and not knowing. In this pandemic of an election year — we need more people to see the theme park for what it is, all ads. But how?
Making media literacy just as important as plain old literacy is a good place to start. And don’t hate me for saying this, but a public-service ad campaign isn’t a bad idea either.
Ross Phernetton pays for his news and has the highest regard for journalists. They need our protection.
