Advertising—The Powerful Persuader
ADVERTISING fulfills a need that can be traced back for as long as men have bought and sold. It is an art that has developed over the years.
Modern advertising really took off after World War II. The industrial growth and boom of the 1950’s spilled over into the 1960’s. ‘You’ve never had it so good!’ said Harold Macmillan, Britain’s prime minister at the time. His observation seemed to prove true.
Affluence meant greater purchasing power, which led to more production and the need for increased sales. The circle of supply and demand was complete, all revolving around the hub—advertising.
Today, selling is an art caught up in the proliferation of credit cards—22.6 million are in daily use in Britain, the country with the largest number in Europe.
At the turn of the century, space in newspapers and magazines was sold to clients who simply filled it with the basic fact that they had a product to sell. “Cameras by Eastman Kodak” illustrates this. A hundred years ago, Kodak’s annual bill for magazine advertising in the United States came to $350! But now in the United States, more than this amount is spent on commercial advertising per person, per year!
The United States is the undisputed home of modern advertising. Since the second world war, most Western nations have followed its lead, and developing countries are now following suit. Multinational corporations help as they spread their influence.
Advertising is not only big business but also a high-powered industry—some even call it a science. In any event, it is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid its intrusions into our lives. Wherever we look, whatever we do, advertising is ahead of us, there to greet us. It cajoles, it implores, it reasons, it shouts. Whether consciously or subconsciously, all of us are affected, for better or for worse, by advertising.
Who owns and runs this powerful and persuasive commercial machine? How does it work?
How Do You Place an Advertisement?
If you want to insert an advertisement in your local newspaper, it is easy enough to telephone the newspaper office. But placing an advertisement on television or country-wide on billboards is another proposition. For that, you need the services of an advertising agency. Around the world there are now many from which to choose, but we should look first at New York’s Madison Avenue, Ad Alley as it is often called, where the first agencies sprang up.
Rosser Reeves revolutionized the advertising industry’s techniques in 1954, about ten years after he had helped to launch and develop Ted Bates & Company in Ad Alley. From a small beginning, he built a globe-encircling agency in 50 countries, worth $3 billion in 1984. Other entrepreneurs followed suit, to amass fortunes as the industry entered its postwar boom.
Until five years ago, most British advertising firms were United States subsidiaries, but that is no longer true. When Britain’s Saatchi & Saatchi purchased Ted Bates & Company in 1986, it became the world’s largest advertising agency. Even so, the United States still accounts for more than half the total amount of money the world spends annually on advertising.
What kind of figure are we talking about? No less than $150 billion a year, from which, according to The Economist, advertising-agency commissions come close to $23 billion.
But the real power of advertising does not lie with the money. As Bill Bernbach, one of Madison Avenue’s greatest innovators, put it: “All of us who use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can elevate it.” Therein lies advertising’s awesome power. Just how responsibly is it wielded?
The “Hard Sell”
“Hard sell,” according to Britain’s Advertising Association, is “punchy, persuasive, high-pressure advertising.” But the American definition, “aggressive high-pressure salesmanship,” may be more pointed. It is the complete antithesis of the “gentle persuasion” of the “soft sell.” What is involved, and how does it affect us?
When a market nears the saturation point, aggressive salesmanship takes over as manufacturers fight to keep or extend their share of it. In many Western countries, cars, television sets, and like commodities are now experiencing the hard sell in the face of overcapacity.
An interesting medical situation exists in the United States that illustrates the motive behind high-pressure advertising. “Hospitals Learn the Hard Sell,” headlined Time magazine. Faced as hospitals are with an increase in the number of empty beds and in competition between hospitals and clinics, aggressive advertising is taking over. One California medical center advertisement asks: “Kidney Stones? Who Ya Gotta Call . . . Stonebusters!”
One of the problems with the hard sell, however, is that it is often difficult to fight against it. The power of persuasion may become so great that we may be coerced into buying something we do not need or into doing something not in our best interests. Let us take two well-known examples.
Bottle-Feeding Versus Breast-Feeding
The World Health Organization’s code of practice now prohibits the distribution of free dried-milk samples to mothers. Its aim is to safeguard breast-feeding because breast milk contains antibodies that help to protect against disease. It also suppresses ovulation, acting as a form of contraception, and that is helpful in countries where other forms of birth control are not available.
The recent distribution of such samples in some of Britain’s National Health hospitals brought back a flood of memories and fears. The results of a five-year survey in Liverpool, England, revealed that “mothers don’t understand the instructions on the labels [of artificial milk feeds] and the bottles and teats are kept in unhygienic conditions.” Researcher Dr. A. J. H. Stephens added fairly: “Breast-milk substitutes are quite safe provided they are mixed correctly and hygienically.” [Italics ours.] But problems abound when they are not.
In 1983 a shocking report in Africa Now revealed that an estimated ten million cases of infectious disease and infant malnutrition each year were caused by bottle-feeding. Earlier, in 1974, the charity War on Want had claimed that in developing countries a million babies a year died as a result of powdered-milk sales. The reason? “Aggressive marketing and promotion of breast-milk substitutes,” reported Africa Now.
The Observer delineated the tragedy for those who lacked the ability to cope with the necessary hygienic requirements in preparing such feeds: “The weight of evidence from poor countries [is] that advertising was persuading poorly educated mothers that milk substitutes are as good as breast milk, and that babies were dying as a result of poor sterilisation of bottles.” In some cases, after receiving free samples, mothers could not afford to buy the product. By that time their breast milk had dried up. That hard sell had a tragic outcome.
The Tobacco Harvest
In the 1980’s, so successful is cigarette advertising to women in Britain that despite acknowledged health-risk factors, smoking among women has dropped by only a fifth in the past 15 years, compared with a drop of one third for men.a As a result, “lung cancer is now killing nearly as many women as breast cancer, and more and more women are suffering from ‘male’ diseases of the heart and chest,” reports London’s The Sunday Times.
Britain’s Health Education Council is greatly concerned, but what can it do on an advertising budget of £1.5 million compared with the tobacco industry’s £100 million?
One idea is to curb tobacco advertising. Some countries have already imposed a total ban—Norway in 1975, neighboring Finland three years later, and the Sudan in 1983, for example. In many other lands, such as West Germany, the United States, and the Republic of South Africa, pressure groups are persistently lobbying for additional restrictions on cigarette advertising.
But in Britain, where cigarette manufacturers trade in a “struggling market,” the hard sell continues in printed form, particularly in women’s magazines. Why there? Simply because “women form an extremely lucrative source of income,” observes The Sunday Times. When an advertiser is employed to sell a commodity, morality does not necessarily come into it.
Advertising’s Use of Sports
It is logical for manufacturers to sponsor sports with which they are connected—tires and petrol in motor racing, for instance. But how do tobacco companies get involved in such promotions, to the tune of £8.2 million in Britain in 1985? “Sport is supposed to make people healthy and smoking makes them ill,” observed one Member of Parliament, “so tobacco sponsorship is irreconcilable with the idea of promoting healthy living through sport.” Yet such promotions are profitable investments. Consider why.
First of all, there is the immediate association of a sporting event with an advertised brand name, but that is only the beginning. By means of large signs, skillfully put around the place where the events are being televised, cigarette advertisements can appear on millions of television screens, and the tobacco companies are not paying a penny for the privilege. In this way they also circumvent the 20-year-old ban placed on all television tobacco advertising in the United Kingdom.
In 1982 an estimated 350 million viewers in 90 countries saw Martina Navratilova win the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championship wearing an outfit of the same colors as a popular cigarette packet. “It’s got nothing to do with cigarettes. Who’s worrying anyway?” was the response of one of the promoters, in the face of BBC Television protests. More stringent restrictions have been imposed to meet this kind of sporting challenge, but it is not easy to keep ahead of such subtle persuasion.
Positive Persuasion
Advertising can generate work and stimulate an economy—welcome contributions to society. Advertising can even create a market where no market exists. Consider the impact of diamonds in Japan.
Unlike the Western world where a diamond engagement ring is the usual culmination of a successful courtship, Japanese society is built on different customs. In 1968 less than 5 percent of Japanese women received an engagement ring. But a campaign to promote diamonds started that year, and as a result, 60 percent of Japanese brides were wearing diamonds by 1981. “In a mere 13 years, the 1,500 year Japanese tradition was radically revised,” commented E. J. Epstein in his book The Diamond Invention. Such is advertising’s power of persuasion.
Advertising can also be employed to alert people to danger. In 1986 the British government appointed a London advertising agency to warn the country of the serious threat posed by AIDS. Every home in the country received a free leaflet, augmented by advertisements on radio and television, and in newspapers and magazines.
But the greatest record of effective publicity traces back nearly two thousand years, to those first intrepid followers of Jesus Christ. Do you know just how skilled those early Christians were at advertising? It is an intriguing story.
[Footnotes]
a There are 17 million cigarette smokers in Britain—32 percent of the female population and 36 percent of the male.
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What Sells the Ad?
MODERN advertising is expensive. Television commercials may cost tens of thousands of dollars, as may extensive newspaper and magazine spreads. Will people read them? Will they remember them? Will they act upon them? To ensure that they do, science now plays an increasingly important role in advertisement preparation. Eye-tracking equipment, monitoring viewers’ eyes by means of infrared beams, quickly reveals which part of the prepared layout is catching the most attention. But even then, sales must rest on stimulating the desire to buy. Psychophysiologists say they have the answer as they check the brain’s reaction. But the simple fact remains: “The more likable a TV commercial is, the more persuasive it will be,” reports the Ogilvy Center for Research & Development.
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Advertising made a huge difference in the sale of diamond rings in Japan