As alluded to in this Spearhead comment (3rd comment) I had a very interesting chat yesterday.
The person I had the chat with is a friend of the family, and very high up in the world of advertising.
When I say very high up I mean very high up, for a brand name that I absolutely guarantee you know.
As I said the in the spearhead comment, I happened to mention to this wimminz that I had noticed that on any given day you would suddenly see a rash of new or re-written profiles, all featuring the EXACT SAME PHRASE, amongst wimminz who could not possibly know each other, like some hive mind at work.
She laughed her ass off at me, asking exactly what it was I thought she did for a living…
Point made.
What I did not say on the Spearhead comment, is that the conversation continued, and the rabbit hole went a lot deeper than I had suspected.
It transpired that a few of the recent top 10 pop acts had songs especially written by marketing types, and there was me thinking the song came first, and THEN someone grabbed it for an advert…
Product placement in films and media of all sorts was also far larger than I had expected, as she said to me, “WTF do you think the Kardashians and all other celebutard crap is except walking billboards”
At that point a memory came back to me, the producer of the very first series of Big Brother, being interviewed and admitting that the SOLE purpose of the programme was to make you watch the adverts in between.
She went on to name a list of “reality” programmes of the sort where every week they build a customised dildo, complete with temper tantrums and suchlike, the sort of thing I hate, and related to me that they were all, 100%, totally, completely and utterly fake, everyone involved was an actor, none of them actually did any of the custom work, what you saw was always faked, with the real work being done in the background, and of course the weekly celebutard “customers” were in on the game getting some more cross pollinating free publicity for themselves too.
Yeah, now you mention it I have no problem at all believing you 100%, it fits with everything I have seen.
So she goes on, and starts talking about product placement in the news and media, which I was hip to anyway, stories of military actions in Mogadishu being timed to coincide with prime time viewing slot many time zones away back in the good ole USA.. started earlier than that she said, the man who taught her and took her under his wing was responsible for a lot of the Falklands / Malvinas War shit going down at GMT in time for the main evening news, contrary to military planning ideals.
Thatcher didn’t blink without consulting her advertising gurus, she said, hence the STILL persisting idea that Thatcher came from a small corner shop, little woman made good by her own talent and efforts.
And this was when the conversation went down the rabbit hole proper.
“So what shit that I have seen have YOU personally been responsible for marketing?” I asked.
She looked at me once again like I was 5 years old…
“You really don’t get it do you.” she said.
She went on to tell me that product placement and sales was what the juniors and department heads did, so the London office might take on the Conservative party election campaign, but up at HER level it was not at all about product placement and branding, but it was all about product DISplacement and concealment.
HER clients hired her to keep aspects of their lives, or certain associations, completely OFF the fucking radar…
From the very simple stuff, like keeping all Coca Cola product a million miles away from anything to do with drugs for example, to the more complex stuff like keeping certain conglomerates with a fluffy image a million miles away from any subsidiaries whose subsidiaries owned subsidiaries that made a nice little penny in land mine manufacture, for example.
THIS was what she meant about Thatcher and other politicians not blinking without first consulting her ilk.
For example no politician or party is going to be seen anywhere near anything that could even remotely be seen in a negative light with respect to single mums, or rape, or domestic violence, negative product placement, the thing you NEVER see associated with X.
To use a current topical subject, why is no ISP willing to go anywhere near porn filtering, but all ISP’s are quite willing to quietly open the back doors to state monitoring?
Can you imagine the furore if at some point in the future MegaNetISP was linked to the abduction and rape of a small child, because they put in net filters that were not 100% effective (which they cannot be) or MegaNetISP being linked to a terrorist explosion in a school killing hundreds and maiming more, because they stood in the way of the security services monitoring traffic?
So many of these clients and campaigns, whether they are for a product, or for obscurity, are long term things? I asked her.
Yes, she said, in some cases for decades… at which I raised my eyebrows.
OK, there is an 88% chance that you as an adult single male in the western world have shaved pubes, she said… OK got me there.
When you were a young man in the 70’s, did you shave your pubes? she asked… fuck no.
So you starting to shave your pubes coincided with the advent of the VHS cassette and easy access to porn, and pornstars with shaved pubes… umm, I guess, yeah….
Well guess who started that campaign by getting to the porn companies and financially supporting them if their models were hairless, minimal pubes, ideally all over…
A campaign that has now been running for 30 years.
Generations are growing up now who start depilating their pubes as soon as the first hair growth starts, all so a few companies can sell razors and creams and shit at a rate 100x higher than back in the day when men shaved their faces and that was it.
Fuck, she said, you KNOW all this shit, you KNOW all about Freud and Bernays and manufacturing consent, this shit was new in 1921, we have had nearly 100 years to perfect in, and ever more and more immediate and influential channels to pump it out.
Even the shit you are immune to because you are not the target market, and I’m not talking shaving your pubes here, but the shit you are IMMUNE to, because you can never get breast cancer, you are not immune to, because you share a society with people who are not immune, and whose choices can be influenced, and by so doing change your rights and freedoms.
“so” I said, “this is why men are marketed as the nasty scary rapists and paedophiles huh”
Yes, she said, because lets face it, in the western world we have slain all the other dragons, nobody is actually scared of dragons or witches or some guy in another country who they can actually friend on facebook, so we have to “give” people something immediate and close up and personal that they *can* be scared of, the environment, automobiles, NOT being important, and indeed men.
Statistics do not matter, she said, very earnestly, nobody is scared of pthalates or smoking or high fructose syrup or sedentary lifestyles, even though all those things individually are profoundly more likely to fuck you up than an environmental disaster, a defective car, being joe average, or being attacked by a man.
What matters is what you can ASSOCIATE with each of these, and what product you can then sell, or make invisible, as a result of that.
At that point we were interrupted by others at the gathering.
Some time later she left, and her parting shot was this.
“You know what SHOULD frighten you? Not that we have had a hundred years of practice at manipulating consent, but the fact that the manipulators themselves are at least as susceptible to their own products as joe public, there is a 92% chance that I as an adult single female in the western world have shaved pubes…..”
“Nobody is in control any more” I said
“Oh no, there are shifts of people taking turns at the wheel, the problem is we are driving in the dark in unknown territory with the lights out and tinted windows, we only care about what is going on inside the bus.”
