How to be a terrible person working for an ad agency.

Security expert Bruce Schneier is very fond of saying that humans are terribly bad at risk assessment.
We fear strangers harming us or our children, when statistically more than 80% of crimes against children are committed by people well known to the family, 60% by relatives.
We fear air crashes and freak out about them – but we drive without a worry, despite car crashes being far more common and killing far more people every day. We put ourselves through ridiculous rituals at airports hoping they will make us safer (they don’t) – while we happily have “one for the road” without realizing the threat to ourselves and innocent bystanders.

Now Bruce mostly talks about this to point out it’s impact on causing us to make bad security decisions – we try to protect ourselves against unrealistic threats, while ignoring the obvious, but I want to focus on another aspect of it, and a bad exploitation thereof.

Humans being so bad at risk assessment has the direct impact of imbuing us with a huge load of completely irrational fears. This fear is directly responsible for more harm and suffering than practically any other single cause. We do more harm to others out of fear, than we do out of greed, jealousy and hatred combined – and more often than not, we justify greed, jealousy and hatred with fear.
Everything from homophobia to racism comes down, when you really think about it – to fear, irrational, misplaced fear of nothing. Fear lets us give up our vital civil liberties to governments, while we ignore the risk that a life without those liberties represents (who is more likely to put you in a small cell for the rest of your life for no reason – your own government with too much power, or kidnapper-terrorists from far, far away ?)

Which all, is just the prelude to what this post is actually about: marketing.
Marketing at it’s most evil. You see advertisers study human responses and look for traits that are wide enough to be able to cash in on and sell. If you listen to the radio or watch television you will see that the vast majority of advertisements follow one of the following few recipes:

1) Promisses: this is the oldest type of advertisement, it just basically tells you what the product can do – and why that’s good. Assuming the promisses are not exagerated too much, it’s basically harmless. It is also, rapidly, becoming the rarest kind of ad, and is usually the most boring and badly written, it’s the recipe used by companies that in fifty years of advertising haven’t changed their recipe – ever. Washing powder manufacturers, I’m talking to you.

2) Humor: this kind of ad actually says very little about the product or company, except maybe to mention some pricing or something, it makes a (hopefully funny) joke. It attempts to entertain you, cheer you up and mention the advertising info along the way. I kind of like this style, it acknowledges that advertising is irritating and boring – and makes up for it by masking it with something fun and entertaining. We tend to like companies that have such adds, and the more they push the envelope the more we like them. Nandos are masters at this kind of advertising.

3) Fear: And this is most of the rest of the advertising world. These guys have learned that if you try to sell what a product can do… you need to deliver… so you can’t oversell too much, makes it hard to be compelling – but there is an easier way – rather than promise what will happen, promise what won’t. If you buy the product, you will be safe from threat X. Since there is no way of knowing whether threat X would have happened anyway, nobody can really say how likely it was in the first place so nobody knows how well your product does or does not work. If the threat happens anyway, you blame it easily on misuse of the product, or circumstances beyond your control. After all, you can only reduce the threat – not remove it. This is the kind I want to write about.

Practically every toothpaste ad is in this category, they don’t say “our toothpaste is good because it does X, Y and Z” (much) most of the add is filled with the very subtle but clear message: “If you have bad teeth, you won’t get laid”. Car companies use the same line “if you don’t drive a Porsche, you won’t get laid”. It’s hard to promise that you will get laid if you do – but easy to promise that you won’t if you don’t. If sex sells, threatening to take it away sells twice as much.
Pimple creams use the exact same tack (and they never even work). It’s not limited to sex either, the television is filled with ads offering some or other new anti-germ protection. If we bought them all, we’d live in a world more sterile than a good hospital !
It makes sense to keep a hospital sterile, the area is filled with people already infected with bad diseases. But any doctor will tell you that keeping a home sterile is a very bad idea. It removes the small amount of contact we need to maintain and develop our immune systems, and what’s worse: it kills of the good germs that we need to be healthy in the first place ! “You may not see germs… but they are everywhere” intones one ad for an antibacterial soap… never does it mention “and most of them are completely benign, and of the small bit that’s left, all but a tiny minority is actually vital to your survival, but there’s one or two that can make you sick.”

Fear… uncertainty… pumped into us with every advertisement, fueling our fear of the dark people we are convinced want to rob and murder us then cashing in on our panic stricken states to make us buy stuff that, if anything, is harmful to protect ourselves against bullshit threats that never existed in the first place. And we never feel safe enough. No matter how many of these products we buy – there will always be another manufactured, irrational threat. They keep us scared, because while we are scared we keep buying – and they never care for the price that society is paying.

A society full of really scared people, becomes a violent, impoverished society. Each new irrational fear feeds on an strengthens the others, and we make the wrong choices in trying to defend ourselves. We avoid people who look different, people who love different, people who listen to different music.

And when horrible things happen anyway (and that’s pretty rare, if it was common, it wouldn’t be news) we don’t ever blame the person who did it. It never occurs to us that maybe, this person was just a horrible person who did a horrible thing – if we admit that, we’d have to face the greatest fear of all: that anybody can do something horrible.
We have to make it a stranger, somebody far away or at least different looking, who does the horrible things. That way, we have something to fight against. If we admit the truth, that our own sons and daughters, our own parents and cousins and nephews and neighbors are no less threatening, then we have to deal with a threat that has no face. It cannot be recognized or guarded against… and we are way too scared to deal with that – even though, it really does happen, almost never.

When we have no choice but to acknowledge it – we find something “other” to blame it on – so we can maintain our illusion of having identified the threat. When a normal Afrikaans kid in a normal Afrikaans school sliced his friend up with a sword a few months ago – nobody asked why a 16-year-old kid was allowed to own a war-weapon without having been trained in it’s use. Nobody asked if he was a sociopath.

The kid just said “slipknot made me do it” – and everybody believed him… in fact, everybody gave a sigh of relief. Music we don’t understand, with demonic theatrics we don’t get – ugly masks, blame that- because if we do, we got a threat we can recognize and defend against.

Humans are capable of being rational, but it’s probably the trait we exhibit the least. We don’t really think about things, we jump to rash conclusions and act, and that’s at the best of times. When we are shocked, angry and or scared, this trait gets amplified a thousand times over. Our ancient fight-or-flight instincts take over. That’s great if you are in a life-or-death combat situation with a predator – right then, those are you options, run away, or fight – and the only decision to make is which one is most likely to work, and you have to make it as fast as possible. But when dealing with the complex world we live in now… more often than not, neither of those are the right option. What’s worse, going into survival-mode is only sensible if there is something to be afraid of.

When we’re irrationally afraid of nothing, all it does is ruin our social harmony – putting everyone at odds with everyone else – make us act with hatred toward innocent and harmless people (seriously who can be more harmless than the average gay guy ? Yet the vast majority of straight men are still deadly scared of them)…

And then advertisers cash in on those fears ? Make us more afraid so we will go into that irrational flight-or-fight mode and buy stuff without thinking because it makes us feel safer ? In this world, where fear does so much harm – they dare to use it as a selling aid ? Sorry, there is nothing condonable about that. That kind of marketing, is one of the worst scourges in our society, and it’s about time we started to realize that.