It’s happened to most of us before – we’re commuting to work, listening to the radio and the sound of our stomaches grumbling, when we hear a commercial. Maybe it’s for a candy bar, a breakfast sandwich, or the newest latte – but suddenly we start craving whatever it is being advertised.

Or maybe that doesn’t describe you at all. Maybe you’re savvy to the way advertising works, and you just say to yourself, “Meh, I can have a (free) cup of coffee when I get to the office and some oatmeal.” You drive on, smug in how you avoided the trap that millions of others fall prey to.

Most advertising, though, is more insidious than this; it preys on emotion more than base needs. I work selling colleges to high school students and their parents, and I know that what we aim for is not to sell facts – 13:1 student:faculty ratio, hands-on learning experience, study abroad opportunities – but the idea that a student will fit in there; that it will feel like home.

Advertising fills your mind and heart and displaces your values. That may sound extreme, but hear me out:

Fills Your Mind: I was on the cusp of buying my current house, and I needed to hire a home inspector. Did I ask my realtor? Did I look in the phonebook? No, not at first – at first I thought of a jingle I had heard on the radio for a local home inspection company. I can still call it up in my head, too – this is because rhyming words are easier to remember than unrhymed words. (Heck, I can even remember an advertising jingle from when I was 7 or 8 for a cereal that no longer exists.)

This technique works, in particular, for services you don’t frequently need or don’t get a lot of advertising already. It’s the only home inspection firm I’ve ever seen or heard an advertisement for. If the pool is shallow, you’re going to draw the water from the only place you can.

Fills Your Heart: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – advertising works by telling us not what we want, but who we want to be. The job of advertising is thus simply to sell intangibles. I’ve talked before about a particular line of clothing and its marketing; but the example that’s on my mind right now is a magazine – Real Simple. It appeals, I suspect, to a certain group of people who think they can buy simplicity. Of course, they’re really the ones paying in the end, because this magazine, like most, is more advertising than substance; and its tips tend to be “buy these million cleaning products and cleaning will be a breeze!” Telling someone to throw their cleaning products away and use vinegar and baking soda for everything isn’t sexy, now is it? We might have to buy generics, and buying generics makes us feel poor, right?

It’s a simple formula: advertising = mind control. Given, you can look at LOTS of things as a form of mind control – your friend trying to get you to read a book they like; my favorite blogger giving out tips on productivity, even. But your friend’s goal isn’t to profit from you, and it is only tangentially the goal of the blogger.

Even as I write this I hear my friend Django – always the skeptic – saying to me, “But what if you need and want those products?” The problem is, you never stop wanting. I took a business trip where I drove a brand-new Ford Focus with a navigation system. I came home to my thirteen-year-old Toyota Tercel with the rusted doors and its all-devouring oil pan and manual locks and windows and felt lacking. The best thing to do is just to avoid that kind of stimulation – it’s harder to undo a thought than avoid it.

These days I strictly control my advertising intake. As soon as I hear the merest suggestion of a commercial on the radio, I turn it off. I don’t watch live TV–everything I watch, which is relatively little, I watch on a home-built PVR, so I can skip past the commercials in one or two clicks. I never buy magazines; my mother has a subscription to Money which she turns over to me when she’s done. It’s the only magazine I read.

We are cursed – or blessed, if you prefer – as humans to only be able to concentrate on a few things at a time. What’s it going to be: advertising, or the things that really matter to you?

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