The Hidden Persuaders

The Hidden Persuaders and its two sequels seem to have been published prematurely, as they apparently belong not to the Fifties but the Sixties—the decade of Silent Spring, The Other America, Unsafe at Any Speed and other great analyses of major ills that too few affluent Americans had even noticed

“With these three books,” writes David Horowitz, “Packard achieved what few if any other American nonfiction authors had done before or since—had three different books in the number one position on the best-seller list within four years.”6

Many in the advertising industry also regarded their profession as a giant rip-off. Hence the definitive self-contempt of such literary heroes as Mr. Blandings, who, as one of many “hard-working, highly competent, deeply miserable men who wrote advertising copy,” Hodgins writes, “loathed his calling with a deep, passionate intensity.”

“Remember, two things make good advertising,” counsels Evan Evans, the monstrous hand-soap magnate in The Hucksters, Frederic Wakeman’s best-selling novel of 1946 (and the basis of a Clark Gable vehicle released by MGM in 1947)

“One, a good simple idea. Two, repetition. And by repetition, by God, I mean until the public is so irritated with it, they’ll buy your brand because they bloody well can’t forget it. All you professional advertising men are scared the death of raping the public; I say the public likes it, if you got the know-how to make ’em relax and enjoy it.

­licitation: easy to perceive and, therefore, easy to resist, if you just keep your wits about you and deploy your common sense. Anyone thus armed will not be moved by the false promises of advertising, nor led into temptation by its other blatant stimuli, however expertly concocted they may be: the motto that you can’t forget, the jingle that won’t leave your head, or the endless hints that you’re too fat or scrawny, pale or pimply, vulgar, flakey-headed, dull or stinky, or just ludicrously “out-of-date.” As advertising is, in short, a vast unwanted overture, those who always try to see it coming will see through it every time, because its many faults—its triviality, its foolishness, its wild hyperbole, and even its incessant bald-faced lies—are all explicit evils, plain as day to anyone with open eyes.

Meanwhile, advertising has, since Packard’s day, continued to deploy “the depth approach,” albeit not just with the quasi-Freudian methods noted in these pages. For the past half-century, the industry has been refining and augmenting its machinery for tracking, stalking, driving all the rest of us—a long, hard push necessitated not just by the advertisers’ ever-growing need to sell us even more (and more, and more), but also by our ever-growing unresponsiveness to all that subtle “motivation” by the corporate juggernaut; for we are only human after all, and there is only so much suasion we can take.