Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
Page 20
Then, in 1974, a nationwide oil shortage caused many people to wonder if we might run out of resources. Energy companies responded as they still do today, by calling for more drilling. “Rather than foster conservation,” writes historian Gary Cross, “President Gerald Ford supported business demands for more nuclear power plants, offshore oil drilling, gas leases and drilling on federal lands,” as well as “the relaxation of clean air standards.”15
CARTER’S LAST STAND
But Ford’s successor, Jimmy Carter, disagreed, promoting conservation and alternative energy sources. Carter went so far as to question the American dream in his famous “national malaise” speech of 1979. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” Carter declared. It was the last courageous stand any American president ever made against the spread of affluenza.
And it helped bring about Carter’s defeat a year later. “Part of Jimmy Carter’s failure,” says historian David Shi, “was his lack of recognition of how deeply seated the high, wide, and handsome notion of economic growth and capital development had become in the modern American psyche.”16
The Age of Affluenza had begun.
CHAPTER 19
The Age of Affluenza.
Advertising separates our era from all earlier ones
as little else does.
—CONSERVATIVE ECONOMIST
WILHELM ROPKE
Any space you take in visually, anything you
hear, in the future will be branded.
—REGINA KELLY,
DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC PLANNING,
SAATCHI AND SAATCHI ADVERTISING
It’s morning in America,” announced the 1984 TV commercials for Ronald Reagan, whose message that Americans could have their cake and eat it too had overwhelmed the cautious conservationist Jimmy Carter four years earlier. And indeed, it was morning, the dawning, you might say, of the Age of Affluenza. Despite economic ups and downs, the last twenty years of the twentieth century would witness a commercial expansion unparalleled in history. Those Reagan commercials, small towns and smiling people in golden light, seem quaint now, more like the sunset of an old era than the morning of a new one. For one thing, there are no ads to be seen anywhere in the America pictured in those political commercials, no billboards, no product being sold except Reagan. That’s not America anymore.
Reagan’s decade may have been that of supply-side economics, but it was also the decade of demand creation. Yuppies were made, not born. “Greed is good,” chirruped Wall Street’s Ivan Boesky. The message of Reagan’s first inaugural ball and Nancy’s $15,000 dress was clear: It’s cool to consume and flaunt it. The tone of ’80s advertising echoed the sentiment: “Treat Yourself. You Deserve a Break Today. You’re Worth It.” Look out for number one.
Since 1980, few industries have grown as fast as advertising. Its importance is underscored by a little-known fact: Madison Avenue real estate is the priciest on the planet. A mere ten square feet of space there—smaller than the size of a single bed—now rents for an astonishing $6,500 a year!
ADFLUENZA
That advertising’s prime purpose is to promote affluenza is hardly a secret, as even its prime proponents have frequently stated that in different words. As Pierre Martineau, marketing director for the Chicago Tribune, put it back in 1957, “Advertising’s most important social function is to integrate the individual into our present-day American high-speed consumption economy.”1 “The average individual doesn’t make anything,” wrote Martineau in his classic text Motivation in Advertising. “He buys everything, and our economy is geared to the faster and faster tempo of his buying, based on wants which are created by advertising in large degree” (emphasis in original). This was no critic of advertising expressing himself, but one of its most prominent practitioners.
“Our American level of living is the highest of any people in the world,” Martineau went on to say, “because our standard of living is the highest, meaning that our wants are the highest. In spite of those intellectuals who deplore the restlessness and the dissatisfaction in the wake of those new wants created by advertising and who actually therefore propose to restrict the process, it must be clear that the well-being of our entire system depends on how much motivation is supplied the consumer to make him continue wanting.” Were Pierre Martineau still alive, he would doubtless be proud to see how much motivation is now supplied to keep consumers “wanting.”
If, as the old saying goes, “a man’s home is his castle,” then Madison Avenue has battering rams galore. Two-thirds of the space in our newspapers is devoted to advertising. Nearly half the mail we receive is selling something.
THE HIGH COST OF MOTIVATION
You could call it Couch Potato Blight. The average American will spend nearly two years watching TV commercials over a lifetime.2 A child may see a million of them before reaching the age of twenty. More time is devoted to them now—the average half hour of commercial TV has ten minutes of commercials, up from six minutes two decades ago. And there are more of them—faster editing (to beat the remote-control clicker) and the increasing cost of commercial time has shortened the length of the average ad.
Ads are phenomenally expensive: a typical thirty-second national TV commercial costs nearly $300,000 to produce—that’s $10,000 per second! By contrast, production costs for an entire hour of prime-time public television are about the same — $300,000, or $83 a second. Commercial network programming is somewhat more expensive but can’t hold a candle to the cost of the ads. Is it any wonder that some people say they’re the best thing on TV?
Moreover, it costs a company hundreds of thousands of dollars every time its ads are broadcast during national prime-time programming. In fact, thirty-second slots during the Super Bowl have sold for as much as $1.6 million each. Advertising, the prime carrier of the affluenza virus, is a $217-billion-a-year industry, and it is growing at a rate more than twice the average rate of the economy as a whole.3
It’s paying off. In 1997, when NPR’s Scott Simon asked teenagers at a Maryland mall what they were buying, they ran off a list of brand names: Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, American Eagle. A recent study showed that the average American can identify fewer than ten types of plants but recognizes hundreds of corporate logos.
WELCOME TO LOGOTOPIA
In the effort to create demand, marketers seek to place commercial messages everywhere. Today, outdoor advertising is a $5-billion-a-year industry (and it’s growing at a rate of 10 percent a year), with more than a billion spent on billboards alone. “Outdoor advertising is red-hot right now,” says Brad Johnson in Advertising Age. “There’s a shortage of space available.”4
Thirty-five years after Lady Bird Johnson’s Beautify America campaign, our landscape is filled with more billboards than ever. Ad critic Laurie Mazur calls them “litter on a stick.” “From a marketer’s perspective, billboards are perfect,” she says. “You can’t turn them off. You can’t click them with remote control.”5
Mazur points out that marketers themselves say the ad environment has become “cluttered,” so smart sellers look for ever-newer places to put ads. Schools, as discussed in chapter 7, “Dilated Pupils,” are one target, reached in a myriad of ways, including corporate logos in math text books: “If Joe has thirty OreoTM cookies and eats fifteen, how many does he have left?” Of course there’s a big picture of Oreo cookies on the page. The publisher might want to add another question: How many cavities does Joe have?
Hollywood films offer sliding scales for product placements, as Mazur points out: “$10,000 to have the product appear in the film, $30,000 to have a character hold the product. In Other People’s Money, Danny DeVito holds a box of doughnuts, looks into the camera, and says, ‘If I can’t depend on Dunkin’ Donuts, who can I depend on?’”6
“Advertising is just permeating every corner of our society,” says Michael Jacobson, coauthor with Mazur of Marketing Madness. “When you’re watching a sports event, you see a
ds in the stadium. You see athletes wearing logos. You see ads in public restrooms. Some police cars have ads. There are ads in holes on golf courses. And there are thousands of people who are trying to think of one more place to put an ad where nobody has yet put the ad.”7
Daniel Schifrin has found such a place. He started a Silicon Valley company called Autowraps. Drivers make their cars available as rolling billboards, sporting advertising logos. Schifrin pays their owners $400 a month but tracks them by satellite to make sure they drive to the sorts of places where target audiences will see the ads. They are required to drive at least a thousand miles a month. Hucksters, start your engines.8
THE MARKETER’S MOON
The extreme idea for advertising placement, says Michael Jacobson, “is the billboard that was proposed for outer space that would project logos about the size of the moon that would be visible to practically everyone on earth.”9
When the moon fills the sky like a big pizza pie, it’s—Domino’s! Imagine a romantic walk at night in the light of the full. . . logo.
For now, the idea of logos in outer space is still a marketer’s pipe dream, but, says Jacobson, “what is the limit? Maybe outer space. But down here on earth we’re willing to accept just about everything.”
Perhaps the biggest expansion of commercialism in the Age of Affluenza is occurring on the Internet. Ads are popping up like mushrooms on the information highway. While still small compared to total advertising dollars, spending on Internet ads rose 43 percent from the second quarter of 2003 to the second quarter of 2004, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. And of course, this doesn’t even consider the phenomenal increase in e-mail spam that all of us tear our hair out over. What was hailed as an educator’s Eden has become a seller’s paradise instead, as e-commerce attracts billions of investment and advertising dollars.
There is, admittedly, a bright spot in this grim scenario. We don’t know about you, but since President George W. Bush signed the Do Not Call legislation in 2003, and we signed on, we’ve stopped getting those irritating dinnertime calls from people who want to clean our carpets or sell us something we don’t need. For this, Mr. President, we thank you! Apparently, even market-worshipping legislators were tired of having their dinners interrupted. Now, if they could only ban Internet spam!
HYPERCOMMERCIALISM
Our hypercommercial era is one in which images are everywhere and “image,” as tennis star Andre Agassi says in the sunglasses commercial, “is everything.” The daily bombardment of advertising images leaves us forever dissatisfied with our own appearance and that of our real-life partners. “Advertising encourages us to meet nonmaterial needs through material ends,” Mazur says. “It tells us to buy their product because we’ll be loved, we’ll be accepted. And also it tells us that we are not lovable and acceptable without buying their product.”10 To be lovable and acceptable is to have the right image. Authenticity be damned.
We live in what Susan Faludi calls an ornamental culture, which “encourages people to play almost no functional public roles, only decorative and consumer ones.”
The Consumption Spike
“Constructed around celebrity and image, glamour and entertainment, marketing and consumerism,” writes Faludi, ornamental culture “is a ceremonial gateway to nowhere. Its essence is not just the selling act but the selling of self, and in this quest every man is essentially on his own, a lone sales rep marketing his own image.”11
Back in 1958, a prominent conservative economist and staunch defender of the free enterprise system warned that the twentieth century might well end up being known as “the Age of Advertising.” Wilhelm Ropke feared that if commercialism were “allowed to predominate and to sway society in all its spheres,” the results would be disastrous in many ways. As the cult of selling grows in importance, Ropke wrote, “every gesture of courtesy, kindness and neighborliness is degraded into a move behind which we suspect ulterior motives.”12 A culture of mutual distrust arises.
“The curse of commercialization is that it results in the standards of the market spreading into regions which should remain beyond supply and demand,” Ropke added. “This vitiates the true purposes, dignity and savor of life and thereby makes it unbearably ugly, undignified and dull. Think of Mother’s Day. The most tender and sacred human relationship is turned into a means of sales promotion by advertising experts and made to turn the wheels of business.”
Only by limiting the scope of its reach, claimed Ropke, could the free market system be expected to continue to serve the greater good. Extreme commercialization, the very sine qua non of our era, would, if not kept in check, “destroy the free economy by the blind exaggeration of its principle.”
CHAPTER 20
Is there a (real) doctor in the house?
We have transformed information into a form
of garbage.
—NEIL POSTMAN
In the public relations industry, the idea is
to manage the outrage, not the hazard.
—SHARON BEDER, GLOBAL SPIN
What happens when we ignore the symptoms of a disease? It usually gets worse. That’s why affluenza is steadily spreading around the planet. Although symptoms like the stress of excess, resource exhaustion, and social scars are right in our faces, we tend to look the other way— told over and over again that the market will provide. But will it?
Author and “adbuster” Kalle Lasn tells a tale about a large wedding party that takes place in a spacious suburban backyard. The party oozes affluence and “the good life”: the live music is great, and everyone dances with abandon. The problem is that they’re dancing on top of an old septic system, which causes the pipes to burst. “Raw sewage rises up through the grass,” writes Lasn, “and begins to cover everyone’s shoes. If anyone notices, they don’t say anything. The champagne flows, the music continues, until finally a little boy says, ‘It smells like shit!’ And suddenly everyone realizes they’re ankle deep in it.”1
How many million Americans are wheezing with affluenza, yet remain stubbornly in denial? “Those who have clued in apparently figure it’s best to ignore the shit and just keep dancing,” Lasn concludes. Meanwhile, the companies liable for the damages admit the pipes have cracked but try to convince us there’s nothing to worry about.
According to some trend watchers, at least forty million Americans are ready for recovery programs to beat affluenza. But where can we turn for the advice we’ll need? There seem to be as many quacks and spin doctors out there as real doctors. With a strict policy of concealing their funding sources (as well as their planets of origin), the quack scientists do their best to make the world “safe from democracy.” The first step is to encourage us to do nothing, to just keep ignoring the symptoms. They tell us in voices that sound self-assured, “Go back to sleep, the facts are still uncertain, everything’s fine. Technology will provide. Just relax and enjoy yourself.”
‘TOXIC SLUDGE IS GOOD FOR YOU’
We all know how pervasive advertising is. But in fact, we pick up the tab for advertising in the products we buy—at least $600 a year per capita. Yet as John Stauber, the coauthor of Toxic Sludge Is Good for You, comments, “Few people really understand the other dimension of marketing—an undercover public relations industry that creates and perpetuates our commercial culture.”2 (In other words, our affluenza.) What is PR, exactly? According to Stauber, it’s covert culture shaping and opinion spinning. Not only do PR professionals alter our perceptions, but they also finesse the political and cultural influence that ushers those perceptions into the mainstream. Unreported by the blindfolded eyes of the media, PR-managed initiatives are often signed into law and adopted as standard operating procedures while the public’s civic attention is diverted by the most current scandal, crime, or catastrophe.
“The best PR is never noticed” is an unwritten slogan of an industry whose arsenal includes backroom politics, fake grassroots activism, organized censorship, an
d imitation news. The weapon of choice is a kind of stun gun that fires invisible bullets of disinformation. You can’t remember how you formed a certain opinion or belief, but you find yourself willing to fight for it. For example, a popular corporate strategy staged by contracted PR firms is to form citizen advisory panels. This technique makes people feel included rather than polluted. Citizens are carefully chosen to attend catered lunches around the corporate conference table to discuss community issues.
Predictably, familiarity can breed content. One community advisory panel was content to approve a new waste incinerator and defend it vocally at a local hearing. “You can’t buy that kind of help at any price,” comments Joel Makower, editor of the Green Business Letter.3
Similarly, on the advice of contracted PR experts, many corporations fund and sponsor the very environmental groups that have dogged them for years. This “absorb the enemy” tactic accomplishes several things at once. It gives the company a buffed-up, green-washed image, and it distracts the environmental opponent/partner. Said one corporate partner, “We keep them so busy they don’t have time to sue us.”
“Another basic tactic is what I call book burning,” Stauber says. “PR firms are hired to cast dark shadows on certain books. They often obtain book tour itineraries from inside sources and use a variety of tactics to sabotage the tours.” For example, Jeremy Rifkin’s tour for Beyond Beef, a critique of the meat industry, was derailed by fake phone calls, allegedly from the author’s publicist, canceling each speaking appearance.
Conversely, sometimes PR firms are hired to infiltrate the ranks of everyday life and “talk up” products in casual conversation. A classic case is the campaign orchestrated by camera-phone pioneers at Sony Ericsson, which hired sixty actors in ten cities to appear in public places and ask strangers, “Would you mind taking my picture?” Then, of course, the actors pointed out the various features of the camera phone that made their new gadget so special, and so hip—converting a “chance” meeting into guerrilla marketing.4