This is part 2 of The Pollution of Pango Peach Magic. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you give it a skim. We covered how magic is actually media because media is designed to change your perceptions of reality. Why it’s no surprise that many of the men and women who led the Creative Revolution, which shook the post-war advertising world, were trained propagandists during WWII.
An oft-repeated phrase is Arthur C. Clarke's line, “A technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.”
I no longer think this is entirely true. Instead, I propose an addendum:
A technology doesn’t have to be sufficiently advanced to be magical, it just needs to be sufficiently confusing to the uninitiated.
Why advertise?
When it comes to persuasion, there are the methods we are taught that work based on societal morality and conventional thinking. Methods like “be honest” and “construct rational arguments that build towards a logical conclusion.”
We are told to avoid “ad hominem attacks,” “appeals to authority,” or” specious analogies.” Unfortunately, these methods are to be avoided not because they are ineffective but because they work all too well.
They work so well that thick legal tomes exist for the sole purpose of regulating their use in advertising. Nonetheless, the self-delusion persists among nobler creative circles that this kind of “advertising black magic” doesn’t work.
“Every effective ad starts with a truth,” they say.
Or, “The best insights reveal something we know about ourselves, deep down.”
Many leap from this line of reasoning into believing that this alone makes what they do noble or worthwhile. As if any of us could make ads that were engaging, entertaining, insightful, emotionally resonant, educational, etc. if they didn’t also move product.
Sure, there are nice and not-so-nice ways to move products. There are methods for selling out today that will kill your brand tomorrow. But at the end of the day, every ad that runs is a calculated decision to ensure the thriving of the company that ran it.
The content in which the sales message is embedded may change public discourse. It might make millions laugh or cry. It may even uplift the human spirit, but let’s not pretend that’s why it got made. Ads exist for one purpose: to move products. And they employ the most powerful techniques to move you to action ever devised to do so.
Howard Gossage, Philosopher turned fighter pilot turned adman
Nobody recognized the chilling reality of what advertising people did—or was more critical of it—than Howard Gossage. An adventurer from another era, Gossage sailed to Cuba in his teens and served as a fighter pilot for the Navy during World War II. After the war ended, Gossage became an adman and one of its most successful creative directors because “there wasn’t anything else I knew how to do.”
Perhaps because he’d felt he’d been pressed into the advertising field harder and with less choice in the matter than he had with the draft, Gossage saw the industry for what it really was: the realm of ambitious young men (and a few women) who sought to combine the occult techniques of priests and shamans with the latest broadcast systems developed by the military… to sell toilet paper and sugar water. This “military industrialized magic,” while highly lucrative, remained for Gossage thoroughly unimpressive. Speaking to his fellow ad men:
Repetitive advertising is not indoctrination so much as brain washing. There is ample evidence that when this method works well it is like shooting fish in a barrel. This is ok outside of the petty objection that even if people are fish, it isn't sporting to shoot them in a barrel. Except the fish don't hold still the way they used to, they've developed thicker skins, it takes more ammunition all the time.
As his career evolved, Gossage grew less and less ok with shooting fish and more and more disillusioned with advertising. For himself and his compatriots, Gossage set a far higher bar for advertising than merely moving products or titillating shoppers. “Changing the world,” he remarked, “is the only fit work for a grown man.”
Combine such philosophical ambitions with a distinct genius for the medium, and it’s no small wonder that Gossage became known as “The Socrates of San Francisco.”
The residual effects of propaganda: even if you don’t buy, you might still think you’re a fish
A budding concept of psychology and persuasion, still emerging in Gossage’s time, was that of “framing.” Essentially a means of structuring the discussion with your target in such a way that no matter what they choose, it’s always to your advantage. Salesmen employ it by “assuming the sale.” It’s a trick that works like this: if I want you to do something, I come at you utterly convinced that you are already going to do it, and all that’s left is to discuss the details.
There’s a famous joke, apocryphally attributed to old world statesmen like Churchill, Bismarck, or Disraeli. During dinner, the elder politician asks an aristocratic woman whether she would sleep with him for an astronomical sum. When she agrees, he asks if she would sleep with him for a pittance. Shocked, the woman rears up as a lady of high bearing should.
“What sort of woman do you take me for?!?”
“Madam, we have already established what sort of woman you are,” replies the old rascal. “Now we are merely haggling over price.”
The disturbing psychological truth here is that if you indirectly call someone a whore or the general public an idiot enough times they gradually come to believe it. This is where we are today: the media rarely treats us as anything other than overgrown children who need to be told exactly what to think with as little nuance as possible. And it’s done, if not subtly, then ubiquitously through practically every screen, window display, billboard, PA system, and device in our vicinity. No wonder Madison Avenue legend George Lois once called advertising, “poison gas.”
As Gossage himself put it:
Magic, moreover, is the most adaptable of creatures; it moves in, makes itself at home, and fades into the wallpaper. It so thoroughly identifies with its surroundings as to be unnoticed by the inhabitants.
While the magic goes unnoticed, the side effects cannot be ignored. Those who survive Zyklon B are forever scarred by its ghastly propensity to bloat one’s flesh and turn one’s skin bright red. Likewise, those who don’t buy Colgate might still believe 4 out of 5 dentists recommend it. Those who don’t apply Revlon Pango Peach lipstick may continue to think their features unattractive and their lips colorlessly bland. But it gets much worse when the spells being cast aren’t to convince us to buy breath mints, but to pick presidents.
From neighborly disagreement to Nazis vs Commies
Gossage died of leukemia before the decade was out. In all likelihood, he would have been appalled by what has happened since. The successors of the admen who turned their wartime propaganda techniques into effective advertising further developed and re-weaponized them for the state.
And just like how the subtle shifts in reality they engendered don’t go away after the ads are off the air, the residual effects of every election campaign remains.
The cumulative effects of a century of such campaigns? What Adam Curtis calls, “the post-truth world” where nobody can say for certain what is or isn’t real. Curtis predicted this would create an apathetic and frightened populace.
Unfortunately, the truth alone cannot solve this problem. In order to set you free, the truth must first be believed. The magic spells cast by politicians and spin doctors are so strong that they linger long after the reasons they were cast are no longer relevant. Nobody bothers to lift these curses, letting them fill many on both ends of the political spectrum with a rage that won’t allow them to do anything with their convictions other than double down.
People today still believe that Trump colluded with the Russians even though the findings of his impeachment were that he had not (whether the Russians were guilty of buying ads and using social media to influence the election like the CIA does elsewhere in the world is another matter). Just as many Trump supporters still believe that Hillary Clinton imports Haitian babies to drink their blood.
Why “we” can’t let “them” win
So what’s wrong with a little exaggeration? Wouldn’t it be enough for all of us to retreat into ourselves and guard against all falsehood that passes by our doors? The traditional answer to all this media distortion has been to “do your own research” and “not believe everything you see on TV.” The problem, beyond the fact that these distortions are being planted on a subconscious level while you are effectively in a media-consuming trance state, is that decades of people who could have made a difference tuning out has led to the current state of affairs.
The old adage by Karl Kraus when asked, “How is the world ruled and why do wars start?” That “Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read” has been amplified. It isn’t just the diplomats who believe their lies, the journalists do too, which is the cause of the increasingly-apocalyptic rhetoric driving the lurch towards extremism everywhere we look.
The approach of going silent or retreating to private life and, as Voltaire wrote in Candide, “tending to one’s garden,” has not been enough. If we are to keep what’s left of this democracy, we must engage publicly. Not recklessly or emotionally, for people’s minds cannot be seized by force, but intelligently and with great humor.
Next: In the conclusion to this series, we look at the advertising techniques Howard Gossage pioneered, such as the now-ubiquitous “interactive advertising,” how he repurposed them to strike back at those in power for the public good, and how all of us will need to learn and employ these tactics if we are to have any chance of, if not changing the world then preventing our world from being changed against our wishes.
Apologies as I know some expected this to be the conclusion to the series. I even debated whether to continue delaying this post until it had everything it needed to complete what I’d started in part 1. But I think it’s better to publish this now than to go any longer without posting at all. Besides, I think part 2 is now self-contained enough as to stand alone rather than shift abruptly halfway through into a “How-to” (or a “How-he-did-it-and-how-you-can-too”) article, which is how I plan to tackle the last one.
Read on!