Distorting Demand (Part I)

Distorting Demand (Part I)

To state the obvious, advertisements are out to get you to buy things. They are a means employed by producers to modify consumer demand in their favour. Less obvious are the sacrifices entailed elsewhere. By its ubiquity advertising does a grand job convincing people of its innocence and even its economic and creative worth. Each of the following pieces challenges a different assumption regarding the supposed benign or beneficial aspects of advertising.

Advertising as a natural extension of market freedom

One common-sense defence of advertising is that it is something natural in a market economy. To some point this seems true enough. In a healthy economy producers need a means of promoting their products. Likewise consumers need information about products if they are to make informed choices.

It’s unavoidable. As long as people buy and sell there’ll always be some role for presentation and promotion. It’s only natural to buff the vase the day before auction, or shout, “Forty pence yer bananas!” in a louder or more charismatic manner than the next stall-holder. Every street-traders right. Advertising, the argument runs, is just a logical extension of this freedom.

All quite true. Promotion is bound to play some part in retail. But there are clear lines to be drawn. The sort of promotion that enhances producer and consumer freedom must at least be honest. Telling lies about products doesn’t benefit the consumer, and it’s also unfair competition. Similarly, the fact that some producers can afford colossal advertising budgets is no aid to market freedom. The ability to drown out the voices of other producers does the consumer no favour, and again it’s unfair competition.

Psychological abuse

I’ve a photograph of the forecourt of Kemptown railway station (long since an industrial estate.) Behind the Zephyrs and Corsairs, one wing of the stationhouse bears the sign:

LENS TEAS

And, just in case any drivers were confused:

PULL UP FOR TEA.

Undeniably this is advertising. It meets all the modern criteria and motives. Although I doubt he thought about it in such terms, Len definitely did paint the sign in an attempt to skew the market in his favour. Anyone who pulled up for tea upon seeing his sign was having their demand managed by his promotional scheme. If it worked, alternative transport cafes and teashops lost money in consequence. Perhaps some went bust.

However, while this certainly is advertising it’s a world away from the methods of the Saachis. It’s one thing to announce, “I have hot tea to sell” but quite another to associate your tea with Yorkshire firesides, or, God help us, sex. Such associations are patently false, deliberately out to mislead. Nothing to do with the reality of the product. Certainly not included with the product. That sort of advertising can’t be defended as a freedom. Lying and brainwashing are not the friend of a free market, they’re its enemy.

That difference, the difference between truth and falsehood, is one key test as to whether an advert can be considered just. After a lifetime’s exposure it can be hard to see the difference. This abuse crept up on us slowly, advertising industry included.

A glance at older ad campaigns brings us back to earth. Not so long ago adverts concentrated on the use value or quality of the product itself. Tellingly, there was a time when it was still deemed necessary to include a verb in an advert. “Smoke Regal”, “Take Courage” “Drink Coca-Cola”. Although all these campaigns were out to skew markets at least they remain close to the reality of the product. (Mind you, the illegitimate association of tobacco with royalty, and ale with bravery, hints where all this will lead.)

Since then some sort of sea change occurred. It no longer mattered what you did with the product, just that the name and some associated concepts entered you consciousness. Welcome to Marlboro country. Don’t think of petrol think of tigers. Don’t think of crumbly chocolate bars, think of blow-jobs. Don’t think of smoking and coughing and dying, think of prairies and jack-rabbits.

My father was loathing of advertising to the extent that he fixed our TV to only receive the BBC. Not a man to hold much of a theory of ideology, he claimed commercial television led to ‘Worms on the brain!’. Though the image fits, if anything it downplays the severity of what commercials do. Rather than writhing, maggot-like in our brains, adverts alter them, wholesale. When they succeed they make us feel differently about the world and all its contents, not just the one product.

Like all propaganda, adverts work by restructuring minds in a manner beneficial to those who sponsor them. This could just mean honest product information, but it can also mean extreme cynicism and abuse. At the moment the culture seems pretty much anything goes. Advertisers would have us think anything if they thought it would move more units.

When we finally did get ITV I was delighted and revelled in the commercials. Nothing difficult, just great jokes and jingles and special effects and animation, and all of lavish quality compared to the programmes. Me and my sister were so spellbound we’d shout, “Ads!!!” up the stairs to each other each time they came on (I think the old man would have smashed the damn thing up on the spot if he’d ever heard that!)

And what good did it do? Thanks to advertising a mass of the concepts that make up my consciousness are stupid lies about the world. To my shame, thirty years on I can still sing the Tetley tea-folk song, recite the punch-lines to PG Tips adverts (“Can you ride tandem?”) and the catch-phrase for Quick Brew (“It’s me little perforations!”). Junk memes nailed into my head firmer than Shakespeare or trigonometry ever will be.

Worse still, it’s never a neutral waste of brain-space. Invariably, adverts work by inducing anxiety in the consumer. In the long run the aim is to make money, but more often than not the means is by making people feel bad about themselves, envious of what others supposedly have. Amongst all the excitement I also remember a glum feeling of jealousy during jeans adverts. Levi’s and Wrangler and Lee Cooper, everybody strutting around cool and sexy. Didn’t look much like me and my friends, even with the jeans. Still bought a pair, of course, to be on the safe side.

Inducing consumer anxiety is a cruel but lucrative trade. Again it’s difficult to recognise how unpleasant it is when you’ve lived in it so long. It’s easier to see it when its being done to another culture for the first time. A few years back I saw a familiar looking advert on Moroccan TV. A beautiful brown mother twirling a beautiful brown baby overhead, all gurgles, blue skies, and impossibly white cotton. Handsome father smiles on from the veranda. It was the start of the big wind-up. Morocco’s first chance to share the delights of whiter than whites. Now they can learn to worry about all the important things we’ve been worrying about for the past fifty years. Worry that their neighbours might live more cleanly than their own family, might be more happy generally. All to shift more units of soap powder. Happy with your wash? What about deep down?

Love your enemy

Some campaigns are more subtle, but as often as not they serve to convince us of greater and more terrible falsehoods. Advertising is, after all, just a branch of PR. It’s the branch that deals with getting us to think more about shopping than we otherwise would. Whereas PR is about distorting public perception in general, advertising specifically distorts demand for goods. However, these boundaries are not set in stone. Advertising is frequently used as a medium for full-blown political PR, or propaganda as it used to be known.

For example, it is political benefit BP and Exxon gain from much of their advertising and sponsorship deals. Such campaigns are out to baffle our critical abilities, soften our hearts towards these titans, make it harder for us to be angry with them when we hear what they’ve been up to, again. If the brand name ‘Shell’ is generally encountered in the context of wildlife preservation or arts funding the company’s human rights record and its true impact on the environment is obscured. It’s harder to form a critical opinion of an environmental and social abuser when you’re bombarded with lavish exaggerations of their occasional charity work. These ads are still about selling oil, but indirectly. They’re about making the world seem different in such a way that it facilitates further plunder.

Rather than extolling the virtues of a product much of modern advertising aims to radically restructure consumer minds, i.e. people's minds. Here’s another that worked on me: A few years back Lloyds bank ran a campaign featuring huge lumbering Jim Henson-style trolls. Seemed very odd at the time. An international bank buying thirty seconds of prime time advertising to bring us cuddly monsters hitting each other with massive rubber clubs. What were they thinking of?

Although there was the pretence of a money-related narrative, (about how wise trolls invested their gold pieces, or some such) it’s clear that wasn’t the thrust of the campaign. The chief intention was to change peoples minds about banks, specifically this bank. The subliminal message was, ‘Everything you ever believed about banks, wooden panelling, stuffy time-served counter staff, “Capt. Mainwaring will see you now!”..…all that’s gone. Don’t take us so seriously. We’re really all about FUN!’

It was a clear case of brain-washing. Fight it though I might, my notion of banks changed forever. To this day they still seem less stuffy and intimidating. That strange campaign successfully modified my mind in Lloyds favour. (The Egg credit card, a front for the stuffy old Prudential, takes this approach to its ridiculous conclusion: Running up debt is so wacky!)

It’s quite a price pay. Advertising has us running in circles, worrying about nonsense, chasing rubbish. It paints corporate abusers as saviours and makes environmentalists seem like cranks. It encourages us to eat high-fat food then makes a fetish out of being thin. It goads children into pestering money out of parents, and leaves parents feeling guilty if they can’t provide. Instead of compassion towards others it promotes endless concern with the self. It turns neighbours and strangers and friends into people to compete with, people to worry about. It makes last year’s cool into this year’s joke. Better get the new one.

I won’t be offering any other prescriptions regarding adverts, but there is one: Stop watching them. Don’t engage with them. Turn over or just kill the sound. That’s the real liberating power of the remote control. Adverts are out to make you anxious. Logically then, avoiding them can make you less anxious, happier, something no soap-powder will ever do. Like any other rogue on the doorstep don’t let them in. Just watch the programs and let the sponsors pay.

Part Two now posted above.