BleakSpeak

ILL INTENT

2009-02-28T11:56:00.000-08:00

Throughout my childhood, like most other children who weren't either born in a cave or raised by Luddites, I was immersed by my parents, grandparents, and distant relatives stuck for gift ideas, in Disney. To this day I am reminded of those happy magic days of innocence by the music, the toys, sometimes even the smell of incense, which would waft through my friend's house as we played Disney's Aladdin on his Mega-Drive and his parents gave puja to Ganesha in the next room.

In the highly formative six-year gap between two and eight, I filled several toyboxes with Disney merchandise, slept for a while with a three-foot Mickey Mouse, went on a family holiday to Disneyworld in Florida, and amassed a personal collection of around twenty-five of the corporation’s feature-length, animated buena vistas.

In conjunction with the associated toys (which allowed me to re-enact the films precisely) these hi-vis, full-fat versions of Grimm fables and Victoriana therefore had a near-monopoly not only over my imaginary world, as Justin Lewis of Cardiff University points out, but also over my burgeoning understanding of the real world, of social roles, gender and race, Disney's version of which is deeply askew. As a number of critics have pointed out, the 'real world' put forward by Disney is one in which female characters have impossibly sexualised figures and subservient roles, and white children are encouraged to relate to human characters (Mowgli, Tarzan) by way of their accent or skin colour, while black children find that they share more in common with cartoon gorillas. All of this is slipped below the parental radar by means of Disney’s wholesome, U-rated brand image - a slap of paint that still hasn’t started to peel despite their apparent shift from cartoons to live action; Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana and the Jonas Brothers, for example, their current poster children, are all paraded before the media as devoted Christians, despite their heavily sexualised image.

Of course, Mickey Mouse and co are not alone in aggressively targeting children with their gargantuan marketing budget and politico-legal sway; Ronald McDonald and his weird entourage have done the same since 1963. But as far as my parents were concerned, furnishing me with the seemingly harmless spoils of Disney was as far as they would conscionably give in to my increasing albeit cultivated demands, and the fact that I could only play Aladdin at my friend's house was testament to the increasing suspicion with which they treated hyper-Commercialism.

I enviously attended friends’ birthday parties at McDonalds because I wasn't allowed one of my own; I drank Coca-Cola only at my grandparents’ house because my decidedly not so grand actual parents refused to buy it; years later I felt euphoric when I got to wear Adidas tracksuit bottoms to a party because other kids had been wearing them as a free-time uniform for ages; and on 25th December 1999 I got my very own Sega Mega-Drive. My parents were semi-Luddite - the Mega-Drive was actually released nine years earlier and accordingly, I cried when they told me that I could have had the much more recently released PlayStation I'd asked for if only Woolworths hadn't sold out. Having left the omnipotent Disney cradle, I found myself always one step behind other children, and this at a time when, according to general consensus between child psychologists, sociability is just developing. Advertisers actively exploit this stage of child development, according to Stephen Frith in his book ‘Innocent Advertising?’, to instil in children models of the adult world consistent with their own economic interests. In fact, children are not children, one CEO is quoted as saying, they are now more appropriately termed “evolving consumers”.

When the micro-economy of Pokemon cards flashed around the globe in a yellow storm of forced childhood Capitalism circa 1999, with their ubiquitous "gotta catch 'em all!" slogan, I found myself almost immediately at the bottom of the pile. I came by a few of my own, holding on to the ones I liked the look of rather than the ones that were particularly valuable, whilst my friends managed to stockpile vast quantities. One present friend, for example, had so many that he required a briefcase and bodyguards, while another hosted an exchange at his house.

I started to realise that the world of stuff and craze was moving on faster than I could accumulate my share of it. I began to develop an inferiority complex, a feeling of detachment from others, punctuated when a fat kid punched me in the head for pretending to steal his artificially scarce Mew Two Pokemon card that I had been granted the momentary privilege of holding. I was naive enough to think that as children we could approach these things light-heartedly.

Needless to say, my despondency was fertile ground for advertisers, who prey on children's insecurities no less than they prey on their parents’. Children on television who had Pokemon cards, like the children who had them at school, looked happy and well-adjusted. I was not. So I continued to buy the damn things, even though I didn't want them, and was among the last to have any, which after the micro-market ‘crashed’ became worthless. Like one of Pavlov’s salivating dogs, however, my central nervous system putty in the hands of greater minds, I’d at least learned what it takes to be happy in this world, what it takes to maintain self-esteem and the esteem of others:

Consumption.

And taken literally, therein lies a more serious problem. Around 17% of children aged between 2 and 15 in the UK have been diagnosed with obesity, as have a further 1 in 3 children in the US, where diabetes is also a major issue. These statistics have been steadily increasing and show little sign of stopping, but why would they? It’s only logical that disease should be correlated with the irresponsibility of advertising, and that has increased drastically. In an article published by The Independent in 2005, the anti-McDonalds filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, describes one particularly ironic example of irresponsible advertising: a McDonalds in a Texan paediatric hospital where obese children have their stomachs stapled. At the time, children dying of cancer refused to eat anything but burgers and fries, washed down with chicken fat milkshakes. The message being sent out to children by McDonalds, and indeed the hospital that issued the lease, was that junk food is healthy, and far from being an isolated, backwater case, Spurlock writes, there are fast food chains in hospitals across the US, including a McDonalds in the Hospital of Philadelphia, the most respected of its kind in the entire country.

Advertisers don’t just target children because they’re easy. Nor are kids such a wise investment merely because they’re worth an approximate £1.2 billion annually in the UK and £6.3 billion in the US. No, the main reason why so much care and attention is given to our precious little evolving consumers is that children, once loyal to a particular brand, tend to stay that way for the rest of their lives.

Obviously, the answer is regulation, and a handful of countries, mostly in mainland Europe, legislate in one way or another against advertising to children under the age of 12. In Greece, for example, products aimed at children are not allowed to be advertised on television between the hours of 7am and 10pm, thereby circumventing the target consumer base by a wide margin.

Likewise a court in Canada has illegalised advertising to anyone under 13 years of age, noting the unfairness that “such advertising aims to promote products by convincing those who will always believe”, and concurring with Stephen Frith’s finding that children do not even understand the persuasive intent of advertising until they are eight or nine years old.

But such paternal measures are rare; in America, regulation is virtually non-existent, and in Britain there is no blanket ban exactly, only retrospective evaluation and censorship where enough complaints have been logged. Why? Because as the economist A. C. Pigou has explained, advertising is central to Capitalism, and advertising to children specifically is central to lifelong brand loyalty. As long as there is Capitalism, there must also be advertising, which in turn necessitates the cultivation of insecurity, superficial discontentment, and the nagging pangs of inferiority. Such feelings are the driving force behind Capitalism’s divide and conquer system of socioeconomic rule.

Perfectly secure and content children do not need “Happy Meals” or Pokemon cards; they don’t need Adidas tracksuit bottoms or a giant Mickey Mouse in their bed. Children in Westernised and consumerist cultures, on the other hand, have a very real, pathological need for these things, cultivated and enforced by advertisers and evolved consumers, and the extent to which this need is fulfilled largely dictates the development of their self-esteem and habits of interaction that stay with them for the rest of their lives.

LIKE SHOOTING SHEEP IN A BARREL

2009-02-16T13:07:00.001-08:00

What did you dream about last night?

Whatever it was (if Terry Tipado had anything to do with it) you probably woke up with a strange craving for pizza or a particular brand of twin-diesel something-or-other.

This would be the result of what some people are beginning to refer to as Oneirological Advertising (OA), which although not yet fully realised and fleshed out as a viable marketing strategy, involves the subliminal seeding during wakefulness of brand imagery and corporate slogans to manifest later in dreams, and ultimately in your behaviour as a consumer the next day. Very enterprising indeed! After all, they’ve got everybody talking about the same things during waking hours (“Have you seen the new Cadbury’s advert with the trucks on the runway? What did it mean!?”) so why not homogenise the sleeping state as well? In an advertising sense, it’s the final frontier.

In practice, OA might involve any number of tactics, but the examples given on Tipado’s website include scenting the exhaust pipes of pizza vans with a freshly baked pizza odour, or strategically clipping the leaves of trees so that when sunlight shines through them their shadow on the pavement below resembles the logo of a specific brand. Going about their usual business, subjects won’t be aware of having seen the logo, owing to the way in which human memory naturally filters perception, but that doesn’t mean it hasn‘t registered. The deliberately inconspicuous logo will simply bypass conscious awareness and be retained in the subconscious, that part of the mind which influences our conscious thought and behaviour - the same place that houses our deepest impulses, repressed memories and hidden fears. In other words OA does not target us, but our resident puppet-masters.

To his credit Tipado notes, like a retrospective Einstein, that any new technologies can be devastating if used with ill-intent. However, what Tipado finds to be ethical about his marketing equivalent to the Manhattan Project is not exactly clear; whatever it is, it certainly isn’t in accordance with the code of the American Psychiatric Association, which he claims to have a working knowledge of. To knowingly coerce someone into unnatural behaviour without their permission is fundamentally unethical.

But that breach of trust sounds familiar. Aside from the obvious parallels with the sleep-learning classrooms of ‘Brave New World’, is OA really that novel? Tipado’s discussion of its possible applications seems to betray a naivety regarding the sophistication and underhandedness of modern advertising in general. Smells, for example, have been utilised, in ways far more imaginative and far more subliminal than those which he suggests, in the supermarkets and shopping malls of the Mighty Western World for decades. Media commentator Douglas Rushkoff, author of ‘Coercion: Why we Listen to What They Say’, lists a few: baking odours have been used to coax people into Cinnabon (a US cake franchise - visit their website for cake porn); sensual smells to coax people into Victoria‘s Secret (a bra shop); scents proven to induce a sense of dread have even been used in one Japanese complaints department to increase the likelihood that customers will be happy to leave without a refund!

As for the patently absurd trick with the tree leaves, visual subliminal advertising has been around since the 1950s and was used on television to political effect by the US Fox News network in 2008, when they flashed an image of Republican Senator John McCain and his wife during the opening credits.

What Tipado calls ‘ambient’ and ‘globular’ oneirological advertising, and what two thirds of his online readers consider to be an outrageous invasion of their sacred space, already provides the living (and then some) of advertisers the developed world over.

Of course, this doesn’t make tipado.com any less disturbing. It is a cache of militant marketing strategies and concentration camp science, desperately clawing for the most devious means possible to the end of getting us to play our part. But at least he’s honest. His methods are laid out clearly, if a little absurdly at times, and his intentions, however despicable, are open.

Writing for Die Zeit of Germany, Hanno Rauterberg notes the similarities between advertising and a dictatorship, the main two being that they are both all-pervasive, and they are both inescapable. Listening to the radio, reading magazines, watching sports events, walking around cities or driving past billboards, even talking to friends, we come across often unconscious pressure to buy things. Turning on the television appears to be a total self-immersion in consumerism. In reality, what percentage of TV programming is intended primarily as entertainment? Are we being misled into believing that all of it is made for our entertainment? Product placement often acts subliminally, and that is necessarily everywhere. Perhaps our concept of what constitutes entertainment has been modified, whether deliberately or not, to accommodate television’s reliance on corporate interests and hyper commercialism. What we call entertainment in the form of heavily edited MTV reality shows would probably not be entertaining to someone from the renaissance or the paleolithic age. Tastes change with culture, and as our current culture is saturated with the sick syrup of consumerism, it follows that tastes have changed to welcome it. In that case, will the children or children’s children of this generation actively seek advertising?

The third potential application of OA suggested on tipado.com is referred to as the ‘contiguous’ method, and would involve just that. In this scenario, the subject would need to be wearing a sleep mask designed to emit sounds, scents, vibrations, lights, or waves that mimic brainwaves. It is one of the most ridiculous ideas I have ever heard, and I can't imagine anyone volunteering to wear one. But then again, given our often unconscious participation with the advertising that we actively welcome into our mindspace by turning on the television - as immensely stupid as it sounds - maybe the time for voluntary contiguous oneirological advertising has come. Say that ten times fast.