The Persuaders: a Frontline PBS documentary

Persuaders (PBS)

Douglas Rushkoff's Frontline / PBS documentary "The Persuaders" offers a history of advertising and a critical exploration of the evolution of advertising in the twentieth century, along with techniques used in corporate marketing, concepts such as "brand loyalty," and the effects that advertising has on the public. The first portion of "The Persuaders" concentrates on the "clutter" that is caused by advertising, asking us to consider the way in which products are now no longer advertised by a description of their function or merits, but on the basis of image. This concludes with a long examination of the launch of a new "brand," a low-cost air carrier called "Song" which is a subsidiary of Delta Airlines. We watch as Delta identifies the female consumer as their target audience, and then attempts to construct an "identity" for Song which will invite women to purchase tickets to be part of that identity. The second portion goes on to explore political advertisement more closely, and to ask how the techniques of the first part are now being applied in politics. Overall the documentary makes a persuasive case that the ethical standards in advertising in America are in need of greater enforcement.

"The Persuaders" makes such disquieting viewing because the ordinary person is not likely to have considered themselves as illustrative simply of a demographic profile. Not only are we invited to see into this process, we also realize the fundamentally dehumanized way in which it regards the consumer. Kevin Roberts, the marketing expert interviewed in the film, has a long description of what he calls "lovemarks" -- these are corporate brands that inspire passionate devotion in consumers even when this devotion is not logically warranted. In other words, advertising seeks to create through imagery the same factor that (say) nicotine creates in tobacco: the impetus whereby a sense of dependent need is created between consumer and corporate product. In other words, we are being appealed to on an emotional level, even when economics presupposes that the consumer is making rational choices.

On the political level this becomes even more disquieting, as the American political system dates from the Enlightenment and presupposes the rationality of the electorate. In the second portion of the documentary, the corpulent Republican pollster Frank Luntz claims that "I am more interested in how you feel than how you think," claiming that "only 20%" of human motivation is rational and "80% is emotion." One of the sharpest points of critique of the contemporary culture of political advertising comes, though, with the documentary's revelation of imposed "truth in advertising" standards that apply to products and corporations, but not to political ads. As the film puts it: "politicans can legally say whatever they want." This now gets into the issue of whether or not political advertising can be calculated to play off of racist sentiments in the viewer, as with political ads used by George Bush Sr. (identifying Dukakis with black rapist Willie Horton) and Jesse Helms (playing off racism by showing an ad in which a pair of black hands is reading an employment letter, but the white hands are reading a letter of dismissal, alluding to public sentiments about affirmative action policy). Ethically speaking, it seems a very slippery slope from this sort of manipulation to the "big lie" of Hitler.