Living off Our Fear
/“Sex doesn't sell, it's fear. In the first episode of Mad Men (Smoke gets in your eyes) Don Draper outlines the appeal of fear as a tool for selling with chilling clarity. "Advertising is based on one thing: happiness," he calmly tells his clients. "And do you know what happiness is? … It's freedom from fear.”
I’ve been watching the addictive Jacques Peretti, Director, Producer and Presenter in his current offering of The Men Who Make Us Spend on ABC on Thursday evenings and it makes for some horrific viewing. Oh it’s not gory but it does make the hair stand up on the back of your head, and Casper does a quick shuffle across your grave.
I know we are manipulated by the media at every turn. I watch The Gruen Transfer and understand the premise of advertising and their raison d’ etra; it’s to make money for their clients. The ‘Mad Men’ of the sixties were so successful with Listerine that it went from a profit of $115,00 per annum to several million with the machinations of clever advertising.
Halitosis had never existed prior to that, at least not in the public consciousness. The Ad men introduced it to the population, played on their fears of NOT GETTING MARRIED and voila, J Walter Thompson made a pretty penny for Lambert Pharmaceutical and simultaneously invented public phobias. Suddenly a whole new world of sophisticated, science-based, psychology-driven advertising was born. The effectiveness of separating consumers from their dosh became an anthropological science of cunning exploitation that avidly occupied the generations’ intelligent young minds. Instead of solving world hunger or the common cold, money was to be made in the world of advertising and lots of it; stupendous amounts of it.
As someone who suffers from anxiety, I resent this. The world, life, is scary enough without fabricated fears inflicted on us in subtle but effective ways by people deliberately seeking to frighten us into parting with our hard earned cash so they can live on the Costa Brava through the months of January to March and beside an infinity pool overlooking the plebs in the Los Angeles valley while sipping butler prepared Mojitos the rest of the time.
Stanley Resor, head of J Walter Thompson, opened up a Pandora’s Box of human angst from which the advertising and marketing world could leisurely browse and graze upon. They began to hone the skills to put fear into the lives of the consumer where none previously existed.
Bird Flu heralded in the prolific use of anti-bacterial washes on every surface of the house including handwash, despite proof that simple soap does exactly the same thing. Suddenly the competence of mothers everywhere was called into question as dubious baby-killing bacteria resembling kitten-crushing aliens were shown to exist beneath microscopic swabs of the surface of unfit households. The very lives of the children living there were in danger. But luckily, to the rescue would come a spray or a convenient wipe or microfiber cloth that would save the day; the damsel in distress- hero rescue scenario. Always a popular and effective narrative.
Hummer sales skyrocketed in the US following 9/11 because suddenly (and understandably) no one felt safe ‘outside’. The crushingly robust, suburban tank offered the illusion of safety despite tests proving it to be more unstable in an accident than a sedan. We can rescue you from the fear of personal danger to you and your family with this CAR. The fact that if a plane flew into it, it would under no circumstances survive, was irrelevant. French anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille, spent more than 30 years advising such as General Motors, Kellogg's and Philip Morris how to capitalise on what he calls, the consumer's "reptilian brain". Rapaille said of the Hummer, "It's a weapon. The message is: 'Don't mess with me. If you want to bump into me I'm going to crush you and I'm going to kill you.'" It is the narrative of empowerment and revenge (the Die Hard primeval shout of “Yeah! I killed a helicopter.)
I was personally enlightened when Rapaille added that “…even the cup holders [in cars] are not really about holding cups: they reinforce a psychological signal of stability.” Fuck me. No wonder I’m a bit indecisive and erratic when I drive around; I don’t have any cupholders. I might get me a Hummer. But really? The art of manipulative advertising is deep and dark indeed.
Health is of course a major paradigm within the vast sea of writhing human fear. The exploitation of our health is all the more upsetting because often the medical profession, afforded great trust in caring for our wellbeing, are actually in cahoots with big business. It becomes a heinous betrayal when they merely enable the raping and pillaging of the vulnerable but lucrative marketplace of human misery and fear. In one example, a national health committee in the US decreed a lowering of the levels of cholesterol considered dangerous. This lead to the need to increase prescriptions for Lipital (which reduces cholesterol). Six of these committee members (of the seven) had financial ties to Pfizer – who made lipitor. Is it unethical? Can you be just a bit unethical? Are doctor’s sometimes hiding behind a wispy case of semantics?
The anti-aging industry is of course huge, particularly in the US and particularly in Hollywood where to lose your looks is to lose your income. Ronald Klatz and Bob Goldman of the Academy for Anti-Ageing Medicine Inc are the millionaires who’ve never sold a single anti-aging product; they merely put together the multi-billion dollar conferences and trade shows while acting as unashamed ambassadors for the industry. They wheel and deal celebrities to show up or at least endorse the ‘miracle’ products to wow the consumers into increased hand - wallet action. An attack on people’s fear of dying.
And what is gobsmackingly amazing- without a single instance or need for actual scientific proof of having any positive effects whatsoever or any medical approval following stringent trials. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Just hand over your money ‘cause I’m preying on your fear. Like a Dementor. Only in a professional looking suit and with a good haircut and mild, but seemingly earnestly honest manner. Or cleavage. Whatever’s more effective in increasing your company sales.
And don’t get me started on Peretti’s study of the food industry. The manipulation there is astounding.
“When you walk into a supermarket, what do you see? Walls of highly calorific, intensely processed food, tweaked by chemicals for maximum "mouth feel" and "repeat appeal" (addictiveness). This is what most people in Britain actually eat. Pure science on a plate. The food, in short, that is making the planet fat…”
And then cashing in on the ‘diet industry’.
“As Dr Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Centre for food policy and obesity at Yale University, explained, the analogy must now be [made] with smoking and lung cancer: "There's a very clear tobacco industry playbook, and if you put it next to what the food companies are doing now, it looks pretty similar. Distort the science, say that your products aren't causing harm when you know they are."”
I don’t believe in zombies despite the seeming veracity of Walking Dead and that lovely man I met from Haiti, but still there seems to be a modern version that swan around shopping malls and Ebay in a zoned out state of dopamine induced shopaholism; addicted to the high of purchase and ownership in the endless battle against the fear of missing out.
It seems the war to keep up with the Joneses that began with the shell and fur envy of Cro Magnon is alive and well in the ether wherein Apple and Hugo Boss dwell, they taking their millions and we receiving small stamped packages of this week’s treasure.
Peretti interviewed some young things waiting in line for days for the new Apple something or other and they couldn’t explain the difference between the new one and the one they had in their hand. It is the reptilian brain that Rapaille is referring to; the marketer’s wet dream is the consumer that doesn’t know why they buy, just that as Descartes might have said today; I buy, therefore I am.
It’s probably time we woke from our slumberous stupor to the fact that a few are making a whole lot out of our baseless fears and misunderstood needs. You don’t need a new Apple whatever; you need water. You might want it, but is it really worth buying into the endless cycle of angst?