Wall Street Journal - August 2, 1999
Manager's Journal The Pleasures of Persuasion
By Virginia Postrel, editor of Reason magazine and author of "The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress" (Free Press, 1998).
Obituaries for advertising pioneer David Ogilvy, who died last month, emphasized his respect for consumers. "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? She appears in a classic Ogilvy ad, featured in his 1983 book "Ogilvy on Advertising." Covered with suds, she holds a bar of Dove in her right hand and a telephone receiver in her left. "Darling, I'm having the most extraordinary experience . . ." reads the headline, followed by "I'm head over heels in DOVE!" The soap, our heroine exclaims to her absent love, makes her feel like "the most pampered, most spoiled, girliest girl in the world."
The ad is so over-the-top that only the most irony-impaired could find it offensive. Our reaction today is to puncture it, to make jokes at its expense. This cynical response may be the greatest legacy of Ogilvy and his fellow midcentury admen. In their quest for perfect persuasion, they created a media dynamic that made consumers increasingly immune to the admen's favorite techniques. That dynamic, in turn, has undermined the arguments of advertising's most prominent critics.
Commercials keep going -- but no one's afraid of the hidden persuaders anymore. 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 elements 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. If consumers are so predictable and so easily manipulated, where is their freedom of action? In this view, persuasion becomes 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 chilling 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 playing on consumers' unarticulated wants, these manipulators could sell them things they didn't really need, like snazzy cars 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 midcentury advertising and social science. But 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. Packard worried, for instance, about what happened when the "depth probers" found that fear of stern bankers was driving borrowers to more expensive loan companies. Banks began training their employees to be nice so as to attract more business. This struck Packard as ominous, an example of exploiting customers' fears.
It is hard nowadays to understand how Packard and his fellow critics 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." Its very existence assumes that consumers are not victimized by ads but intrigued and entertained by them. 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."
Kanner isn't alone; lots of consumers actively enjoy advertising, especially fashion print ads and clever TV commercials. The nostalgic cable channel TV Land 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, the iMac's bright colors--as legitimate differentiators. We don't demand the "rationality" of new Coke, which did great in taste tests but lacked the emotional resonance 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.
This widespread media literacy informs academic cultural studies. Although its practitioners almost all see themselves as leftists, they largely reject the old story of exploitation and trickery and instead emphasize audience "agency." Some scholars study how 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. Consumers are informed, self-directed actors.
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. The cultural-studies mavens are betraying the leftist cause, lending support to the corporate enemy and even training graduate students who wind up doing market research.
To believe in "active, intelligent audiences," Mr. Frank writes, "makes criticism of the market philosophically untenable." Unfortunately for him, that belief has decades of experience behind it. Today advertising that respects the consumer's intelligence is what the market demands.