The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture

by Terry O'Reilly, Mike Tennant

Overview

Stop to consider the culture of the 21st century: Each morning, you might hear a half–dozen ads on the radio before your feet touch the floor. Staggering out of bed, you'll pass brand logos on your clothing and in your bathroom. By the end of the day, hundreds — perhaps thousands — of marketing messages have targeted you. And yet so little is understood about how marketing affects our lives, our society, and our world.

Enter Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant, the ad men behind The Age of Persuasion, the popular radio show broadcast on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Sirius Radio. They have made it their mission to share the back–room story of modern marketing, entertaining asides and all.

"Think of advertisers as millions of ants in a colony, each working hard and each with its own objective. Except that in this colony, every single ant is competing against the others. That's the ad business. Almost every ad you see, hear, and otherwise experience is competing for a piece of your imagination. And like any cross–section of humanity, the vast, worldwide advertising community is diverse: composed of geniuses and idiots, saints and buffoons, and everything in between."

From the early players to the Mad Men of the 1960s and beyond, O'Reilly and Tennant offer insights into a rapidly evolving industry. Smart and funny, The Age of Persuasion provides an entertaining — and eye–opening — look at a world driven by marketing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781582437248
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	05/01/2011
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	1,037,626
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Terry O'Reilly began his career in radio and then went on to become an award-winning copywriter for a number of Toronto advertising agencies. He created campaigns for many of the top brands in the country, including Labatt, Molson, Bell and The Hudson's Bay Company. In 1990, Terry co-founded Pirate Radio & Television with a staff of 50, with 8 recording studios in Toronto and New York City. When Terry's not creating advertising, he's talking about it as the host of the award-winning CBC Radio One/Sirius Satellite/WBEZ Chicago radio show, "Under The Influence," which was the follow-up to the hit series, "The Age of Persuasion."

Read an Excerpt

THE AGE OF PERSUASION

HOW MARKETING ATE OUR CULTURE

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By TERRY O'REILLY MIKE TENNANT

COUNTERPOINT PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58243-580-0

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Chapter One

One bracing December day in 1872, just west of the Strait of Gibraltar, a ship set out to intercept the Mary Celeste, a two-mast vessel bound for Genoa from New York with a cargo of industrial alcohol. The Dei Gratia had spotted the Mary Celeste a short time earlier, drifting aimlessly under partial sail. A boarding party was dispatched. A thorough search revealed no trace of its ten passengers or crew, just signs of weather damage and a metre of water in its hold. There were no notes or writings, no signs of struggle or violence, and no indications of distress. To this day, the demise of the Mary Celeste remains a popular puzzle for historians and mystery buffs, who pore over accounts left by the crew of the Dei Gratia and the intriguing, infuriating handful of clues left behind.

Now, suppose you could look at the earth with fresh eyes, like those of the Dei Gratia's crew as they boarded the Mary Celeste. While passing from a nearby galaxy, you might notice this planet drifting erratically and drop by to investigate. You'd find everything on earth exactly as it is now-as you read this-but without a single human being to be found. What would you deduce about this world, its people, and their culture? Would you marvel at a species that produced the sonnets of Shakespeare, the prophecies of Muhammad, the solos of Miles Davis, the musings of Lao Tzu, and the engineering genius of the Robertson screwdriver?

Maybe. But not before being overwhelmed by the most conspicuous, ubiquitous force in modern culture: advertising.

You would see ads on billboards and posters, in bus shelters, covering the sides of six-storey buildings, infused into radio and television programming, and streamed to personal communications devices. Monitoring the airwaves, you'd hear a loud mashing of messages transmitted for radio, TV, and satellite. You'd find ads projected onto the floors of shopping malls, broadcast on screens in elevators and over gas pumps, wrapped around buses, and planted in roadside flower beds. You'd see ads posted in washroom stalls, in golf holes, on taxi hubcaps, and stuffed into envelopes with utility bills.

Had you stumbled upon this planet in any other era, you might have concluded that we lived in an age of stone or bronze, an ice age, an age of reason, or an age of enlightenment. But today? You couldn't help but conclude that we live in an age of persuasion, where people's wants, wishes, whims, pleas, brands, offers, enticements, truths, petitions, and propaganda swirl in a ceaseless, growing multimedia fire storm of sales messages.

When prompted to cite the greatest influences on modern culture, most people would probably name new technologies, dominant personalities, the economy, climate change, or tribal differences. Strangely, few think to name advertising, which has insinuated itself into virtually every aspect of twenty- first- century life. The age of persuasion reveals itself in us each time we flirt, date, apply for a job, buy a car, sell a home, fight a speeding ticket, heckle a referee, write to Santa Claus, pop a breath mint, or simply dress for effect. It's a cultural force we're just beginning to understand and whose language we speak better than we realize.

Way back in 1917, novelist Norman Douglas wrote: "You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements." But still, more than a century later, despite the many clues, we tend to underrate the role of advertising in daily life. It's a forgivable oversight: it's not easy to take seriously the marketing neverland where cartoon bears pitch toilet paper, where the Ty-D-Bol man patrols your toilet tank in a tiny rowboat, and where a tin of Folgers coffee can heal a marriage. Yet the influence of marketing can't be ignored: worldwide, advertisers now spend upwards of $600 billion a year trying to influence what you think, do, and buy. It took the United States four years to spend that much on its post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a given day, at least three hundred, and as many as six thousand, marketing messages are lobbed your way. Statistics suggest that people spend more time exposed to advertising than they spend eating, reading, cooking, praying, cleaning, and making love combined. Marketing has transformed childhood games into multibillion- dollar sports empires, manufacturing heroes and sculpting our history. Does great advertising win elections? No one can say, though few doubt that bad advertising can certainly lose them.

SO ... WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MARKETING AND ADVERTISING? Marketing (possibly from the Latin word mercari, meaning "to buy") refers to all or part of the process of conceiving, promoting, distributing, and selling a product or service. Advertising (from the Latin word advertere, meaning "to turn toward") is one subset of marketing. It's the act of bringing that product or service to the public's attention, often through paid announcements or commercials.

The better you understand the ad messages you receive every day, the better you'll comprehend exactly how advertising has come to drive art, culture, and communication. A striking example is the soap opera, popularized in the early 1930s because soap makers needed a way to reach a vast audience of housewives with their sales messages. In 1966 The Monkees TV show and its accompanying band were launched as a marketing vehicle to cash in on the rock 'n' roll craze and the eyebrow-raising merchandise machine the Beatles had become. Since the 1980s Hollywood has offered a steady diet of blast-smash-shoot-'n'-slash summer movies to attract the lucrative thirteen- to twenty-four-year-old male demographic. There may have been a time when art, music, film, broadcast, and-yes-books began with an idea and then sought an audience. But in the age of persuasion, art is market driven: a desired audience is identified, then art and entertainment are conceived-not just to reach them but to connect with them as consumers.

The age of persuasion began more than a century and a half ago, with events that, once set in motion quickly accelerated and extended beyond commerce into everyday life. This is not the story of advertising-which dates back at least as far as the ancient Babylonians-but of the living, growing, all-encompassing and relatively modern culture of persuasion. Its rise is marked by a series of what screenwriters call beats: key events that move a story forward. And unlike so many of humankind's pivotal moments, its beginnings can be traced to a precise time and place-to an inventor from Charlestown, Massachusetts, who tapped out a portentous, four-word message.

(WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT)

Samuel Finley Breese (yes, Breese) Morse was a painter, inventor, professor, unsuccessful politician, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. In 1832, as he sailed home to America from Europe, he occupied himself with the idea of a device that could communicate over great distances by sending electrical signals through wires. A bit more than a decade later, by 1844, he had a design, and he then coaxed the U.S. Congress to bankroll his invention. On Friday, May 24, of that year, Morse gathered with assorted Washington muckety-mucks in the U.S. Supreme Court chamber to show how his contraption worked. Using his homemade code of dots and dashes, he transmitted a sentence, which was miraculously received by his colleague Alfred Vail in Baltimore, more than sixty kilometres away. A friend's young daughter, Miss Annie Ellsworth, had been given the honour of composing the historic message, and she had opted for the fashionably biblical "What hath God wrought?" From the Book of Numbers, it describes God's blessing of the Israelites. In the context of Morse's invention, however, it might be taken with a whiff of irony. It's as if the words meant "Yikes! What have we gotten ourselves into?" Morse's telegraph machine is rightly hailed for helping shrink the world, for enabling instant communication across entire continents, and a few decades later, for allowing messages to be transmitted around the world by transoceanic cable.

It also revolutionized marketing. The telegraph followed on the heels of the European industrial revolution, and in North America, manufacturing had mechanized and expanded. Rural families had gravitated to cities to work in the fast-growing factories, which in turn churned out products for burgeoning urban populations. With the rise of railways through the nineteenth century, goods could be transported overland, en masse, to distant markets, resulting in more product choices in stores. And how did the telegraph fit into the picture? It allowed manufacturers to communicate instantly with newspapers in distant cities and towns, buying advertisements to attract thousands of potential new customers.

DOT ... DASH ... DOT ... AN AGENCY IS BORN Barely a year after Morse dotted, dashed, and dotted his way into history, Philadelphia businessman Volney Palmer opined, quite rightly, that many manufacturers had neither the time nor the inclination to place ads in dozens-even hundreds-of newspapers on a regular basis. Palmer offered his services as a sort of middleman, buying large amounts of advertising space in several newspapers and then parcelling and selling it to businesses, who would have to create their own messages. And so ... the advertising agency was born. The explosive potential of this sexy new venture didn't prevent Palmer from hedging his bets: initially, he kept his advertising business as a sideline as he continued to sell bonds, mortgages, real estate, and coal. Inspired by Palmer's success, like-minded advertising agencies sprouted up like daisies, buying and selling vast amounts of advertising space in distant markets to expansion-minded manufacturers. Big business and "mass" advertising had come together in a union whose rumblings would be felt throughout the nineteenth century. Outfits like Procter & Gamble and, later, Coca-Cola were pioneers in early mass advertising and rapidly grew to become international icons. Morse's gizmo did more than shrink the world; it set in motion a new era of big-league consumerism and allowed marketing to blossom into a full-blown industry.

JOHN E. KENNEDY'S THREE LITTLE WORDS

The creative side of advertising, as you see it around you right now, took root on a fine spring day in 1904 in the Chicago offices of the ad agency Lord & Thomas. Throughout the marketing industry, the legend of what transpired is still sung in ballads and told around campfires. There are many versions of what happened. Here's mine:

Ambrose Thomas was at work in his office that morning when a messenger brought him a slip of paper. It read:

I am in the saloon downstairs. I can tell you what advertising is. I know you don't know. It will mean much to me to have you know what it is, and it will mean much to you. If you wish to know what advertising is, send the word "yes" down by the bellboy. [signed] John E. Kennedy.

Ambrose Thomas wasn't inclined to glean wisdom from some yahoo in the saloon downstairs, but the note intrigued his junior partner, twenty-four-year-old Albert Lasker. Six years earlier, Lasker had begun at Lord & Thomas as a $10-a-week office boy. Now he was commanding a princely $52,000 a year; thirteen times the average American salary at the time and more than a million dollars in today's money. One of Lasker's many remarkable and all-too-rare traits was his awareness that he didn't know everything about advertising. But he may have sensed something about Kennedy's gift for salesmanship simply by the pluck the stranger downstairs had shown, scrawling such a cocky note to the head of a major ad firm.

Lasker scribbled "yes" on the note and returned it to the messenger. A few minutes later, Canadian ex-Mountie John Ernest Kennedy, a vast, muscular giant of a man, presented himself. Lasker would later describe him as "one of the handsomest men I ever saw in my life." Kennedy introduced himself: he had recently arrived from Racine, Wisconsin, where he had written ad copy for The Shoop Family Medicine Company, who sold-of all things-a popular snake oil.

Lasker invited Kennedy to share his definition. While already impressed by the man, Lasker was utterly unprepared for the epiphany that Kennedy packed into his magical, three-word answer:

salesmanship on paper.

Today Kennedy might rework the phrase, first to neutralize gender and then to include all manner of advertising media, beginning with broadcast and Internet, but his core idea remains.

All these years later, it sounds ridiculously simple; it's now a given that advertising is about salesmanship. But in 1904 the idea was downright revolutionary. Until then the pioneers of advertising had simply invited or implored readers to visit their shops and buy their products. Hence, when Kennedy asked Lasker what he thought advertising was about, Lasker answered "news." "No," said Kennedy, "news is a technique of presentation, but advertising is a very different thing." In Kennedy's view, it was about giving people a "reason why" they should purchase a product. Lasker would take those words to heart, and under him, Lord & Thomas would go on to transform the advertising industry, becoming the champions of "reason why" advertising, a phrase still commonly used in the marketing world.

At a time when no Lord & Thomas copywriter made more than $30 a week, Lasker bought out Kennedy's $28,000 per year contract with Shoop Family medicines and made him a sort of personal mentor-in-residence. Within two years Kennedy' s salary climbed to $75,000 a year (something north of $1.7 million in today's dollars). In theory, Kennedy was hired as a copywriter. In practice, Lasker spent months tapping Kennedy's advertising insights, which ran much deeper than his deceptively simple three-word manifesto implied. By the time he retired in 1938, Albert Lasker had done very well by these lessons: a noted philanthropist (through his Lasker Foundation) and former owner of the Chicago Cubs, he's widely regarded as the richest ad executive in history.

Kennedy left Lord & Thomas suddenly-in some fit of temper-in 1906. A genius of the moody, temperamental variety, he was seen by co-workers as crude, vain, and unable to take criticism. After his abrupt departure, he drifted first to New York, where he ran his own agency and then, after the First World War, to California, to take advantage of the land boom of the 1920s. He died of pancreatic cancer in a Michigan sanitorium in 1928, by then all but forgotten in the ad world. Even today, few in my industry know of the peculiar genius of this father of modern advertising.

By introducing salesmanship into the equation, Kennedy helped make vocations of advertising strategy, copywriting, and design. No longer was it enough for an ad simply to appear in print; the content of an ad, the imagery it presented, the feeling it stirred, the argument it made, the unique product attributes it professed were now recognized as vital components of success. Following Kennedy's teachings, Albert Lasker would carry advertising beyond the confines of simple, bald product statements and into the limitless frontiers of emotion, effectively appealing to the right brain (considered to be the headquarters of our emotions). In the decades that followed that fateful meeting with the man in the saloon below, Lasker ruled Lord & Thomas from high atop the mountain of money it generated. Almost all the advertising you see, hear, and experience today, every enticement that causes you-consciously or otherwise-to reach for one brand over another, is rooted in the creative revolution John E. Kennedy launched with those three little words.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE AGE OF PERSUASION by TERRY O'REILLY MIKE TENNANT Copyright © 2009 by Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

I, Me, We ix

What Hath God Wrought xi

1 Clutter 1

2 Breaking the Contract 27

3 The Rise and Fall and Rise of Branded Entertainment 49

4 Persuading Yoots 73

5 The Youtube Revolution 97

6 Guerrillas in our Midst 119

7 The Lesson of Clark Gable's Undershirt 139

8 The Language of Persuasion 163

9 A Sense of Persuasion 185

10 The Human Face of Persuasion 205

11 The Long and Short of It 229

12 The Wall of Cynicism 255

Furthermore 269

Acknowledgments 277

Notes 281

Bibliography 301

Permissions 305

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Age of Persuasion

"O'Reilly and Tennant, the ad men team behind the Canadian radio series The Age of Persuasion, offer a witty and insightful look at the perpetually evolving advertising industry. With an eye–catching page design, featuring interchanging text formats, dictionary entries, and full–page shaded myth debunkers, the authors keep readers engaged through technical passages with servings of fun factoids on what Clark Gable's lack of an undershirt, Star Wars, John Mellencamp, and John McCain have to teach us about advertising. The authors are gifted communicators, and their conversational narrative covers successful advertising tactics, such as how to effectively market to "Yoots" (anyone in that Holy Grail demographic of under age 20), the impact of YouTube, the power of song, and multisensory experience. Appealing and informative, this ragbag of pop culture references, jokes, anecdotes, solid research, and advice will be indispensable to marketers or anyone curious about the power and ubiquity of advertising in modern culture." —Publishers Weekly

"An easy–to–read and often subversive primer on marketing." —The Globe and Mail

"I loved this book. I thought I had a pretty good idea of everything that's happened in the history of American advertising, but I didn't. I do now. The book is thorough without being heavy–handed, fun without being flippant, full of fascinating facts that fill in some voids that needed to be filled in. The only thing that might make it better would have been to include a few more quotes from me. Keep it by your bed."—Bob Levenson, chairman and international creative director, DDB International; vice chairman, Saatchi & Saatchi, New York and Scali, McCabe, Sloves, New York

"The Age of Persuasion provides a wonderful romp through the history and inner workings of advertising. I am not sure what I enjoyed more, the insight and wisdom about the ad business or the wit and charm of the storytelling; either way it's a great read for all of us living in the Age of Persuasion."—Doug Checkeris, chief executive officer, North America MediaCom

"Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant blend history, stories, wisdom, hundreds of facts, and just plain fun into an original, compelling, entertaining, and insightful perspective on the impact of creative communication on our culture and on our everyday lives. It is a terrific book!"—Bob Schmetterer, author of Leap: A Revolution in Creative Business Strategy

"If there's one brand that advertising has failed miserably at making people understand, it's advertising itself. This book goes a long way in correcting that—now if they could only do the same for car dealers."—Bob Kuperman, former president and chief executive, DDB New York

"As a public broadcaster, I'm contractually obligated to despise advertising, and by extension to despise those who create it. Somehow two ad men—Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant—slipped through my defenses. The Age of Persuasion will be enjoyed by those inside the ad world, but it's more than an insider's guide. It's a funny and fascinating window into a part of our culture that's too little considered by outsiders like me."—Jesse Thorn, host and producer, PRI's The Sound of Young America

"Language is art. Advertising is art. Terry O'Reilly and Mike Tennant really deliver on that in this book. The Age of Persuasion made me stop, think, and realize that everything we do as marketers (day in and day out) can matter . . . and should be better. Because, in the end, advertising is not just about persuasion. It's about the stories we tell and how they connect with real people and what those real people do with those stories. The Age of Persuasion is one of those great stories."—Mitch Joel, president of Twist Image and author of Six Pixels of Separation

"The Age of Persuasion must be read by anyone in the business of marketing goods and services, creating or placing advertising, and by those who aspire to such noble things. This book is a fun read and a wonderful combination of historical and contemporary context."—John P. Hayes, Jr., chief executive officer, Third Avenue Media

"A terrific look into how advertising, marketing, and culture are all inexorably intertwined. A great read for anyone interested in branding . . . a must–read for any student of advertising."8212;Rick Boyko, director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Brandcenter, former chief creative officer, Ogilvy North America

"Just when I thought I heard all of the cool stories about the grand old world of advertising, Terry and Mike have created an intriguing read that will fascinate both everyday people absorbed with the ad game as well as dyed in the wool ‘mad men' and women."—Ignacio Oreamuno, president IHAVEANIDEA and Portfolio Night

"As an overworked copywriter for many years I was thrilled to be reminded of what it took for us to persuade."—Joy Golden, founder of Joy Radio and humor persuader

"On fire with ideas, bursting with insights, this wildly entertaining insiders' history of persuasion takes us from the dawn of the telegraph to the future of the Internet. It's a riveting read, crammed with the very human stories of the anonymous alchemists who shape our lives and our world. Henry Ford once said, ‘Nothing happens until somebody sells something.' There's never been a better exploration of that premise."—Steve Hayden, vice chairman, chief creative officer, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide

From the Publisher

…a lively, anecdotal primer that chronicles how advertising became, depending on whom you ask, a culture-shaping or culture-destroying $450 billion-a-year industry. O'Reilly and Tennant are advertising veterans…and their book is filled with smart and breezy tales told from an insider's perspective.
—The Washington Post

James P. Othmer

O'Reilly and Tennant, the ad men team behind the Canadian radio series The Age of Persuasion, offer a witty and insightful look at the perpetually evolving advertising industry. With an eye-catching page design, featuring interchanging text formats, dictionary entries, and full-page shaded myth debunkers, the authors keep readers engaged through technical passages with servings of fun factoids on what Clark Gable's lack of an undershirt, Star Wars, John Mellencamp, and John McCain have to teach us about advertising. The authors are gifted communicators, and their conversational narrative covers successful advertising tactics, such as how to effectively market to “Yoots” (anyone in that Holy Grail demographic of under age 20), the impact of YouTube, the power of song, and multisensory experience. Appealing and informative, this ragbag of pop culture references, jokes, anecdotes, solid research, and advice will be indispensable to marketers or anyone curious about the power and ubiquity of advertising in modern culture. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly