One of my favorite radio shows has been turned into a book. The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture is now available in book stores across Canada!

Authors Mike Tennant and Terry O’Reilly have known each other for about 20 years; they began their career together making radio shows in 1995 with O’Reilly on Advertising. They’ve followed that up with “The Age of Persuasion” and a book based on that show which hits bookstores today.

Last Tuesday I took advantage of an opportunity to talk on the phone with Terry and Mike about the show and their new book “The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture”. My questions are in bold text.

1. How would you compare the ideas and presentation of the book with the show?

Terry: It’s certainly got the same tone of the show in the book, in a humorous way.

Mike: It’s the same speaking tone but we got to add an awful lot of stuff that we couldn’t fit in 27 minutes.

Terry: It gave us a chance to explore some material that we always wanted to explore. If you flip through the book, it has all kinds of pullouts and asides, it’s just as fun and kooky as the show.

2. In your show, I think the most consistent argument you make is that “this industry has become inseparable from modern culture”. Explain this for my readers, those who aren’t familiar with your work.

Terry: We are at a point where on a given day a person is exposed to hundreds or thousands of advertisements. There are ads on gas pumps, hockey boards, baseball bases, sidewalks, lawns, and even beach sand. There is absolutely no aspect in 21st century life where you can separate life from modern advertisements.

Mike: When you turn this out to consumers, kids learn to speak the language fluently. That’s why people dress and talk a certain way. It’s the way people present themselves, they have grown up in a world of marketing.

Terry: Even our language has been influenced by marketing. For example with real estate: You live a home not a house, a country kitchen means a certain thing and a chiefs kitchen another. It’s all marketing-ease that we use in common place language.

Years ago a size 10 changed to a size 8. Each year the numbers get smaller, pretty soon they’re going to go into negative number. The idea is, if you find yourself in a size zero dress you feel slimmer.

3. Your argument that modern culture is tied to the marketing industry is quite unequivocal, is there room for nuance there? Can you escape it?

Terry: In the book, we present a hypothetical, what would happen if you hopped in a cab and tried to run away from advertising. It’s pretty hard, ads are everywhere, you could drive around all day and trying to avoid it but it’s everywhere, and at the end of the day when you arrive at the beach even the sand on the shore has advertisements. Ads are everywhere. They even have ads on condoms now.

Mike: We don’t how long the ads are… (after a dramatic pause he adds), how wordy.

Terry: I don’t know if you can avoid it—maybe in a rainforrest.

Mike: But we don’t think of advertising as the big bad specter. We know how much power we do or do not have. An educated consumer can pick and choose which are worthwhile and which are skaliwags.

Terry: We have a very selfish motive, we want to teach people to calibrate themselves to respond. Our hope is that people will understand the difference between great ads and the not so great ads. It’s selfish in the sense that when that starts to happen, people will come to us for better advertisements.

4. According to the publishers of the book, “The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture” is for those who say “advertising doesn’t work on me”. How does advertising affect even those who make such claims?

Terry: Our assumption is that people look at advertising as manipulation. Advertising is said to affect the brain in ways that people can’t control. In reality it’s a nudge at people to have them look at things in a positive light. Over 20 or 30 years they’ve developed a relationship with a particular brand and that means something.

Mike: Before every chapter, there is a myth that we address. People think all advertising is in collusion that “They” meet and are working together. The truth is, there is no “They”.

Terry: Some will say, “This ad doesn’t work because I don’t remember the name of the product.” What happens there is you love the ad and 3 months later when you’re buying the product, you’ll look at the wall of dish washing soap and you will probably have some feelings toward the product if you liked the ad.

You talk about subliminal messages in ads not working, is that what you’re talking about here?

Terry: Subliminal suggests some kind of trick. That really truly doesn’t exist. Nobody puts that kind of message in the ad, what I’m suggesting is that if you have a message in the ad the people like, they’ll have some affinity to the product.

Mike: Advertising is never a science but rather an art. From our mistakes we’ve learned many directions not to go. It’s an intuitive process. There are no solid set in stone rules, or paint by number. There is no diabolical witchcraft at work, just people tyring to wrap the best message around a product.

Terry: Batting .300 is huge in baseball, sometimes you are so right and sometimes you are so wrong. An advertiser might think his ad is so flawed because it got changed so much during the approval process, but you don’t know. It can turn around and be so successful they can’t keep product on the shelf.

An advertiser might not know how successful a specific ad will be, but at the end of the day, the advertising agencies that have the highest average, will be the ones that everyone wants to work on their project.

5. The advertising “interruption” grows louder to compete against other ads and the environment, counter-productively working against advertising as a whole. In “The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can’t Be Jammed,” the authors (Potter and Heath) recommend ending tax deductions for corporations for their advertising costs. They claim this is a simple, sort of top-down solution to the problem of clutter. Do approaches like that work, and do you think it’s enough?

Terry: It is an ironic part of our business—we create so much clutter and then spend all of our waking hours working through the problem that we create. I don’t know that people would do less advertising if there were tax regulations. People’s need for marketing would not be reduced because of the expense. There is a sense that you’ve simply got to get your message out.

Guerrilla marketing, can be, creative clutter — it adds to clutter, it eats up another couple meters on the sidewalk with advertising, but if the idea is awesome I’ll admire the hell out of it.

Mike: If people suddenly found they didn’t have tax reductions, you’d see more guerrilla marketing, less tv, radio, or traditional advertising. The amount of clutter wouldn’t go down. Guerrilla marketing levels the playing field but it has to be good, that gets us into “Breaking the Contract”.

6. Albert Lasker, the father of modern advertising, understood that in exchange for entertainment, viewers/consumers would tolerate advertisements. Breaking the contract, is what advertisers do when they place ads on posters, gas pumps, hockey boards, baseball bases, sidewalks, lawns, and beach sand. At the conclusion of your piece, “Breaking the Contract”, you say that advertisers abandon the contract at their peril.

   Looking at this broken contract from the point of the consumer, what can citizens do to keep marketing from eating the culture when advertisers throw away the contract?

Mike: Don’t buy from them. Really. If someone is breaking the contract, the most powerful response is with their wallet. Don’t patronize the company. Telemarketers interupt your meal and offer only a sales pitch in return. The easiest way to put a stop to it is taking your patronage away.

7. You’ve talked about the idea that in some places, advertisers are “a necessary part of the landscape, a symbol of the dominance.” Why is that so in New York City and not, for example, in downtown Calgary?

Terry: Times Square which is so filled with advertising, it’s a symbolic representation of New York’s financial and entertainment status in the world. They’ve actually created a law that every building in Times Square has to have a sign.

Mike: Yonge-Dundas Square in downtown Toronto transformed itself to be a mini Times square. They’ve reworked that intersection, it’s trying to say the same thing as New York about it’s dominance as an entertainment centre.

Terry: Too many ads without a symbolic relationship doesn’t work, it just seems like clutter. Certain places just have that symbolism. Consider the attacks in New York City and the symbolic nature of the World Trade Centre. They were trying to destroy a brand.

8. Truth of fiction, signing up for the National Do Not Call List will create more telemarketers from outside Canadian jurisdiction calling?

Terry: I sure as hell hope not. I don’t know how effective [the Do Not Call List] is, I know that there are so many loopholes. Any merchant that has your personal information, any pollster, any politcal party, there are so many exemptions it’s like a peice of swiss cheese.

The international question is interesting because there really is nothing to stop off shore businesses from calling. Then the telemarketers can turn around and say they’re losing business to oversea markets.

9. I, like many others, am disappointed at the theatre going experience when I see made for TV ads showing up on the big screen. There is a new kind of theatre advertisements that you called cinematic advertising (ads in surround sound, low sell, no voiceover, and in the end the viewer is pleased by the entertainment factor) which makes advertisements more bearable. Can these ads transfer back to other smaller mediums such as TV and the internet?

Terry: Once they’ve been made cinematic, if you are truly creating work for cinima it’s like a small film, there is much less voiceover on a cinematic ad than a TV, I think you could probably reconstitute it on TV, but it might not fit. Usually we’ll mix it in both surround and stereo, but depending on the application somehow it might not seem right.

Mike: It’s like a print ad on radio. The message needs to match the medium.

Terry: Matching the ad with format says a lot about the brand, how willing are they to do it right shows what kind of a company they are and how they feel about their customers.

10. How does one apply the lessons of big marketing campaigns to personal use, such as selling a car, renting a house, etc?

Terry: One theme we talk about in the book, is how big marketers understand nuance, the personal touch. The really smart big marketers personalize and humanize, when selling a car some companies forget that and let their message become dehumanized. There is a great lesson when the regular guy doesn’t want to be the big marketing guy. It’s easier when you are a small shop — it’s easy to give personalized attention than if you are IBM.

A big thing is if you have a live person answer the phone. How many CEO’s have called their own company and listened to what everyone else goes through when they call. Every touchpoint should be creative. When you put them on hold, what’s the message? Rather than just muzak, every aspect should be creative. The company that does that deserves to succeed.

11. Sliding into the direction of pop culture for a moment, the TV show Mad Men has received critical acclaim, particularly for its historical authenticity and visual style, and has won multiple awards. As far as the advertising ideas and approaches that the characters take, how authentic is the representation in this show?

Terry: I love that show, by the way. It’s a great moment in time in the history of advertising. 1963 — Dual Dane Burnback is about to alter the way advertising is considered. Even at the ad firm on Mad Men there is only one art director and five copy writers. When Dual Dane and Burnback came on the scene, they changed everything.

But as for how they treat women, I don’t know, I’ve talked with Bob Levinson about that. He was a functioning creative director at the time and he doesn’t think it is accurate at all, but his work environment might have been different. He worked at Dual Dane Burnback not at Sterling Cooper.

One of biggest parts of the business is to be able to sell an idea in the boardroom and Draper is great at that. They’ve done their homework. Mad men, I feel is pretty roughly accurate on the dynamics of it.

Mike: And the drinking and smoking. (laughing) It’s very rare for Terry to be 2 or 3 drinks to the wind by the end of the morning.

12. Mike and Terry, how did you two meet and start working together?

Terry: I went out looking for the best and found Mike. He won’t admit it but he’s one of the great radio writers in this country.

Mike: I was the ad columnist on Definitely Not the Opera. The long story short, Terry and I and two other radio writers, would get together for lunch. Terry was giving great seminars on advertising, and we thought it would be great as a radio broadcast. I had the connection with CBC which lead to the show and eventually led to the book.

Terry: The CBC show is interesting. It’s kind of an advertising free sanctuary to the general public. When we first started the show, we braced ourselves for a blow back from the public but instead people were really kind. They were interested in learning about advertising. Who knew? (they laugh) They’ve stayed with us and every season we’ve had more and more listeners. It’s been quite a remarkable ride for us.

Terry will be in Calgary this weekend on the book tour. You can find him at the bookstore Pages for a reading / signing of the book on Sunday, November 1st from 11:00am to 1:00pm. More details here.

If you’re in the Toronto area, Both Terry and Mike will be at the Metro Toronto Reference Library for a reading on Thursday November 5th, at 7pm and stay for book signings. Copies will be available for sale.

I like the self deprecating nature of this ad for banjo lessons.

(via)

Vince Shlomi, the phenomenally successful television pitchman for products like the ShamWow and Slap Chop, was arrested at a swank Miami hotel last March after a violent confrontation with a prostitute.

From The Smoking Gun:

MARCH 27–Meet Vince Shlomi. He’s probably better known to you as the ShamWow Guy, the ubiquitous television pitchman who has been phenomenally successful peddling absorbent towels and food choppers. Shlomi, 44, was arrested last month on a felony battery charge following a violent confrontation with a prostitute in his South Beach hotel room. According to an arrest affidavit, Shlomi met Sasha Harris, 26, at a Miami Beach nightclub on February 7 and subsequently retired with her to his $750 room at the lavish Setai hotel. Shlomi told cops he paid Harris about $1000 in cash after she “propositioned him for straight sex.” Shlomi said that when he kissed Harris, she suddenly “bit his tongue and would not let go.” Shlomi then punched Harris several times until she released his tongue.

For those of you that are not familiar with Vince:

[Vince with Slap Chop - YouTube]

Here he is peddling the ShamWow:

[ShamWow - YouTube]

I’ve saved the best for last. Guess what he’s doing now that he’s in prison?

[Shamwow Guy in Prison - CollegeHumor]

Uncle Eddie’s Theory Corner! on the brilliance of direct marketing commercials: Best Commercials. You may not be a fan of the slick Billy Mays yelling information about his product, but you have to admire the calculated tweaking these commercials went through to inspire the largest number of consumers to order now!

Here’s another one of those Tab Cola commercials from the 70’s early 80’s (previously). Same premise—

1. hot bikini girl walks on the beach
2. a man wants to drink Tab Cola
3. girlfriend pours ice water on the man
4. the man laughs because he realizes his girlfriend thought he was attracted to the bikini girl and wasn’t just craving a nice cool drink of Tab Cola
5. Then everything is ok

Genius!

Hit play or watch Tab Cola at YouTube.

“Great taste for beautiful people.” Check out this crazy Tab Cola ad from 1982. These were simpler times.

Hit play or watch TaB cola ad 1982 at YouTube.

Greenpeace has launched a tongue-in-cheek website touting the tourism potential of the Alberta oil sands. The Greenpeace-produced site, travellingalberta.com, has an address similar to Alberta’s official tourism page, travelalberta.com, and is the conservation group’s response to the province’s $25-million campaign to improve the environmental image of Alberta’s energy industry.

[Explore Alberta - YouTube]

Minister of Tourism, Parks and Recreation Cindy Ady was not impressed with the website.

“I’m a bit disappointed mostly on behalf of those who work so hard in this industry, but I also would say it’s not an accurate representation of this province.”

In his radio show, O’Reilly and the Age of Persuasion, Terry O’Reilly explores the countless ways marketers permeate your life—from art, media, and language, to politics, religion, and fashion—and he does it in a way that makes you crave episode after episode. You’ll never think about advertising the same way again.

I highly recommend you subscribe to the unofficial O’Reilly and the Age of Persuasion podcast.

Update: Check out my interview with Terry and Mike.

Something to brighten your day.

[Discovery Channel: I Love the World - YouTube]

It’s a shame the program planners don’t put more science based shows on the Discovery Channel (TLC). I mean, the house renovation/tattoo parlour/chop shop shows might get high ratings, but they don’t come close to making me sing.

(via)

I usually don’t like to send on viral marketing links, it feels like I’m doing someone else’s job for them, but I liked the creativity used in this online store (not sure what language it’s written in). I think they actually sell everything you see. Here’s the link, and just to warn you, there is a bit of audio.

(via)

Last week I received an email touting the great benefits of a new kind of web advertising for eBay auctions, called “Auction Ads”. The email stated that just for signing up I’d get a bonus of $5 put into my account within two business days. Well four days passed with nothing, so I emailed them. They responded by saying it takes a week for the money to show up on my account. It has now been about a week and two days. I’ve given them over 24,000 ad views and they’ve given me nothing.

My advice… don’t waste your time with auction ads.

Wired has an intriguing article on the state of online advertising and the use of click spam to defraud advertisers.

Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau. Last year, Yahoo! alone ran more than 250 million individual listings, according to Michael Egan, the company’s search-marketing director of content strategy. Yahoo! doesn’t break out PPC earnings separately in its financial statements, but Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto believes that keyword advertising accounted for about half of the company’s estimated $3.7 billion in revenue for 2005. PPC is even more lucrative for Google. According to Noto, Google will end 2005 with $6.1 billion in revenue. About 99 percent of that revenue comes from keyword ads (over 56 percent from AdWords, according to the company’s most recent quarterly financial statement, and 43 percent from AdSense), making Google a bigger recipient of ad dollars than any television network or newspaper chain. All of which is to say that little blue text links, a type of advertising that barely existed five years ago, are poised to become the single most important form of marketing in the US – unless click fraud ruins it.

How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet

Last week Slate’s Seth Stevenson published an article about Spike Jonze’s “Pardon Our Dust” Gap ad. There are two versions of this ad—the much cooler Jonze-approved version that I found on the internet and which never played on TV, and the totally gutless Gap-marketing-execs approved version, (linked in the Slate article) which uses a musical cut called “Don’t Stand Still” instead of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” the mischievous scoring from Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” that Jonze used.

Stevenson explains that a Gap spokesperson claimed to have “tried several variations” of the ad, settling on the one they thought worked best. But it causes me to wonder, did The Gap not use Jonze’s version because they thought it was too much on its own wavelength? Perhaps it just plain scared them.

Admittedly, Jonze’s version doesn’t really deal with, much less convey excitement about, the idea of a forthcoming renovation of the Gap stores. What it does is comically express a fierce loathing of the Gap brand and, as some have suggested, a distain for all corporate chain stores everywhere.

However, Stevenson feels that “what the company needs is a piece of marketing that suggests radical changes are afoot—that the Gap brand is about to tear itself down to its foundations and be reborn” He boldly wonders, “Did Gap not see the possibilities? Were they too scared to go for broke?” The answer is that Gap executives saw exactly what the ad portrayed and consequently squashed it’s distribution. They aren’t ready for a complete brand restructuring—which this ad would have been perfect for. With that in mind please enjoy the internet leaked and Spike Jonze approved, Director’s cut Gap Ad.

Recently Ponyboy at Glassdog.com gave a fairly scathing rant about BoingBoing’s slippery slope decent from sans ads to (depending on what you consider an ad) “between nine and nineteen ad slots”. He complains that BoingBoing has sold out while at the same time it continues to pretend nothing has changed.

I can’t really compare myself with BoingBoing in influence or blog credibility (if there is such a thing) but I feel like I can totally relate. For years I’ve had a pretty big draw in my Stairway to Heaven Backwards site, but I’ve always resisted putting ads on it. I felt that it would be selling out. But the thought persisted. Perhaps I even used BoingBoing as my role model. If they can do it, I justified, then so can I. It didn’t take long until I convinced myself that a few context sensitive ads wouldn’t actually hurt that much anyway. Besides I would only be collecting money to help pay for the site.

And that’s great for the time being. Right now I can justify the ads by telling myself they are here for the greater good of keeping the site alive. However when I finally raise enough money to pay for hosting and DNS costs, I have to admit that I won’t want to take the ads down. It’s just too easy not to.

I think BoingBoing is in the same boat. They started out with the best of intentions; they really believed that their ads were only there to cover costs; they really believed that they were a necessary evil in their fight for survival. But once the ads were up they realized that hey, tasteful advertisments on a site are not the worst thing in the world. In fact maybe they are even setting an example of how the websites can survive and even generate money after dot com bubble burst.

Put yourself in the publishers place. Money is tight and yet you must find away to make ends meet. After some agonizing you realize that ads on your site are the best route to take but you feel like you have to sell your soul in the process. You close your eyes and take the plunge but then when the dust settles you realize advertising is not so bad. You still have that strong justification that “it’s all for the greater good” running through you head. Then the day comes that everything is paid for, the site has become self sufficient and you can rest easy knowing your baby is safe. But the money continues to roll in. It’s at this point that something inside you changes. Your very soul turns around and says, “Hey this extra cash will allow me to finally get that BowFlex (TM) I’ve seen on late night TV.”

I have to agree with Ponyboy that BoingBoing probably should admit to themselves the real reason the ads are there to stay. It has caused me to reevaluate my thoughts on the subject and I’ve realized that the writers of BoingBoing, like me, know that when all is said and done – after 90 days on our new excisise equipment will mean bodies that are sculpted to perfection.