FEBRUARY 2004 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
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As any historian will tell you, to understand a message, you have to understand the motivations and perspectives of its author. But who is the author of a television commercial? The paid commercial messages that you see on television do not have an author in the usual sense. There is no one person whose point of view is expressed in a commercial. Instead, a commercial is made by the collective work of, often, hundreds of people, all of them paid to put forth a point of view other than their own. The message comes out of this collective, or corporate, point of view. The commercial message is a corporate message. And indeed, the vast majority of commercials are paid for by enormous business corporations. Thus, the message in a commercial probably does not come from a person at all. It is not the message of a person, but of a corporation.
In conventional thought, there are objections to the whole idea of a corporate point of view, even to the notion of a corporation as an active entity. Classical economic theorists suggest that a corporation is nothing more than the combined effort of the individuals who make it up, and therefore, its point of view is just the combined points of view of its people. Similarly, some who follow the traditional thinking of the entrepreneurial school of business management imagine that the point of view of a business enterprise simply reflects the priorities of the man in charge — a view echoed by some populist politicians when they complain about how much ordinary people have to do for “the man.”
On examination, either theory fails to adequately explain how it is that corporations do some of the things they do. As sociological theory explains, the dynamics of a group often lead it to take on a point of view and carry out actions that not even one member of the group completely agrees with. The point of view and motivations of a group differ from those of its members more often than they agree. A large business corporation is so complex and powerful that this inevitably is so. Meanwhile, if “the man” is supposed to be the CEO, the chief executive officer of the corporation, there is ample anecdotal evidence that these executive leaders are frequently so focused on the process of getting their managers and key suppliers and customers to work together effectively that they have no time to understand the details of what their companies do, let alone entertain a point of view about those details.
There is another way to understand this distinction. Everyone who has worked for any large organization has commented on how mysterious, misguided, or even crazy some of its objectives and policies are. Entry-level workers find the organization mystifying; executives find it perplexing and frustrating. If every employee is arguing against the corporation’s ideas, then corporation’s ideas could not be those of its employees. Rather, the employees set aside their own opinions and ideas in order to advance the corporation’s objectives. They do so because their corporate roles and positions depend on it.
What are a corporation’s objectives? The primal objective of any corporation is its own continued existence. A corporation will do essentially anything it can toward this result. As recent stories such as Parmalat and Enron illustrate, a failed corporation may suffer enormous losses and risk financial catastrophe just to postpone its unavoidable collapse by a mere three years. There are innumerable corporations whose debt exceeds $100,000 per employee. This is a financial condition that makes no rational economic sense — rationally, a corporation should choose to dissolve instead of allowing it to happen — but the primal nature of the corporation, not its rational nature, leads it in this direction.
The purpose behind the actions of business corporations is often described with the phrase profit motive, and this is partly right. In order to continue its existence, a corporation continually looks for ways to expand its revenue, to have people pay it more money. The search for revenue is especially urgent when a corporation needs money to continue to pay its debts, and the large business corporation that is not troubled by debt is the rare exception. Revenue and profit, of course, tend to go together, so it is fair to explain a corporation’s behavior in terms of either profit or revenue. To increase its revenue, a corporation seeks ways to change people’s behavior. This is the purpose and motivation behind commercials, and it is the yardstick by which corporations measure the success of a commercial. If a commercial changes people’s behavior in a way that may result in more revenue for the corporation, then it is successful, and the message is repeated. If it does not, then it has failed, and a different message is tried.
It is sobering to consider that this is all there is in a commercial. It is an expression of a corporate desire for revenue. That is all. Truth or falsehood is relevant only if it interferes with the message. The priorities that matter to you are a consideration only when they can be used to manipulate you. Even your death may not matter if an advertiser can extract sufficient money from you beforehand.
If this sounds heartless, you are getting the point. Corporations are not people and do not have hearts.
The fundamental note of every commercial message, then, boils down to a single assertion, with endless variations: You must change your behavior. There is an action you must take. You must do something different or do something you have not done before.
And because people’s actions tend to come out dissatisfaction or a sense of opportunity, commercials tend to take one or both of these angles. There is something wrong with you, your life, or your world. You can make your life better, or you can make a difference. There is a problem, and you can solve it. How often do you hear a message that implies something along these lines? I doubt you could count the number of such messages you have heard just today. Now, consider this: Most of what you have heard on this subject is false. It is false! There are, perhaps, things wrong with you, your life, and your world, but those things are mostly not what you have been told. You can indeed take action and make a big difference in your life and the world around you, but most of what you have been told to do will not make that difference.
It is not just that commercial messages are false. Even when you consciously disagree with them, commercials can affect you by getting you to pay attention to things that don’t matter to you. Which tastes better, beer 1 or beer 2? Except in the phenomenally unlikely event that you were in the middle of making this choice when the question came up, it’s a question that doesn’t matter to you. But if an advertiser can get you to focus on their question, they might get you to drink beer when, on your own, you might have chosen something else to drink or something else to do. The commercial agenda is even more troubling than the misleading information in commercials. Centuries ago, Socrates taught us all how to arrive at the truth by thinking systematically. You can examine assertions and determine whether they are true or not, assuming it occurs to you to do so. But if you have lost track of your priorities, thinking systematically will not help you get them back. Worse, if you squander the moments of your life by focusing on things that don’t matter, you can’t get those moments back at all.
There is a better question you can ask yourself: How can I build on my success? You might find it strange to think of yourself as successful after the commercial agenda has told you about so many things wrong with you and your life — both the things that commercials have told you and the ideas that people have repeated to you after they’ve heard them in commercials. But the fact is, anything you’ve been able to do, whether it’s a recent accomplishment or an ability you’ve demonstrated over any period of time in the past, is a sign that you’re doing something right. Whatever success you have had, however large or small it might be, is a signpost that points you in the direction of more success.
Commercials try to persuade you that you can look for success by focusing on shortcomings you have, judgements other people are making about you, and areas of life that you somehow have failed to notice. In reality, focusing on failure is a very ineffective way to find success, and it is even less likely to work when the failures are found in an advertiser’s imagination.
Simply accepting your success and thinking of ways to expand it is all it takes to undercut the angles commercials use to try to get you off balance. The next time you hear a commercial that says, “There’s something wrong with you,” you’ll be able to say, "They must be talking about someone else.”
Next: Commercial Clutter
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