DECEMBER 2004 IN
RICK ASTER’S WORLD
I recently got to do something most people only dream of. I took an axe to my television and smashed it to bits.
Mind you, this wasn’t an emotional outburst of any sort, but a calculated way to dispose of a CRT television that had suddently burned out. Rather than going to the trouble and expense of disposing of it whole, I had decided to break it into pieces that would fit in the garbage. If you try this yourself, I hope you will take all the obvious safety precautions I took to protect myself from electrical charges and broken glass.
But even if my assault on my television went just the way I planned it, it still was enough to change my perspective on television. I can’t really claim I learned anything new by seeing the details of the metal frame inside the glass tube. It was just that I was relating to it in a new way. After years of sitting and watching this tube, I was now demolishing it, and that made it mean something different.
I didn’t know what I would think when I saw the inside of the cathode ray tube. As it turned out, I thought about the design of the tube and the physics involved in its operation. It was made to throw electrons in my direction (cathode is a word for anything that puts out electrons). It didn’t seem quite so harmless from the inside. Perhaps the impressive efficiency of the design made it seem a bit more menacing, though of course, the bare electrical connectors and chunks of broken glass had much to do with the feeling of danger I was experiencing. Meanwhile, the fact that I had carried it into the house when it was new and out again after it died told me that it was within my sphere of influence, something that was ultimately under my control.
Of course, you don’t have to smash or even move your television to get a different perspective. Anything you do that’s different can give you a new perspective. Just standing up when you watch television gives you different perspective than you get sitting down. On top of that, anything you can do to add drama, humor, or energy to a situation can reinforce whatever perspective or meaning you draw from the situation. That’s why almost every television commercial tries to attach a combination of drama, humor, and energy to its subject.
Most people just passively accept the meaning of things in their world that they get from other people, particularly from television commercials, but you can use the same techniques actively in any area of your life where you could benefit from a change in perspective or meaning. Anthony Robbins has spoken and written throughout his career on how you can use these techniques strategically to take charge of your life. I would like to get you started with something simpler, but still powerful enough to change your life. My suggestion to you is for you to use advertising techniques to neutralize the advertising messages you’ve been receiving.
This is easier than it sounds. All you have to do is introduce something new, something that doesn’t fit, into the picture the advertising creates for you. Pick the focal point of a commercial, such as the slogan or tag line, and mess it up in any way at all. You can do this in your imagination, say it out loud, write it down, maybe e-mail it to your friends if it’s funny enough — it doesn’t matter Do this in a way that’s funny enough, or with enough energy, or just repeat it enough times, and you can completely neutralize any advertising message at all. I call this approach anti-advertising, because you’re using advertising techniques to eliminate an advertising message from your mind.
How does this work? The television I destroyed happened to be made by Mitsubishi, so let’s take them as an example. Their slogan is “Changes for the Better,” but what does that mean? In their advertising, they try to associate the phrase “Changes for the Better” with the idea of you using their technology products to improve your lifestyle. That makes sense, of course, but you can make “Changes for the Better” mean anything you want it to mean. You can even make it mean the opposite of what Mitsubishi has in mind. It could mean freeing yourself from the technology habit, so that your lifestyle is no longer built around technology, but is built around your own actions and uses technology only when it serves you. This might not be the meaning you would choose, but use it as an exercise for the moment. Think for a moment about the idea of freeing yourself from the technology habit.
Now picture the slogan “Changes for the Better” in your mind, or repeat it to yourself a few times. Keep that slogan in mind for the next minute, and at the same time, imagine the scene in which I pick up an axe and smash my Mitsubishi television. Better yet, if you prefer, imagine doing this yourself. Since you’re just imagining this, you might as well make it a dramatic scene, in which you smash the television again and again, making sure to obliterate the Mitsubishi logo that was once at the bottom left corner of the set. Keep this up for a minute, if you can, and at the end, add the tag line, like in a television commercial, “Mitsubishi. Changes for the better.”
With this simple exercise, you might already have obliterated the advertising value of this particular slogan in your mind. It depends on how many times Mitsubishi had showed you their slogan and how much of an impression it had made. It also depends on how much energy, humor, and drama you put into the visualization. If you did it strongly enough, the next time you see or hear, “Changes for the Better,” you will picture someone smashing a television set to bits because they’re free of the technology habit.
But if not, all you have to do is repeat the visuatlization several times. Even if you’ve seen the Mitsubishi advertising message thousands of times, you can obliterate it with just a few repetitions of your anti-advertising message. You have advantages that advertisers can’t match. You can use your own physical energy and movement to add intensity to the experience you’re creating. That’s a resource a television commercial or print advertisement can’t tap into at all. You can use your own voice if you choose. You can appeal to your own personality and your own sense of humor; a commercial message has to appeal to a much broader audience, so it can’t target you as well as you can.
So what did this accomplish? It didn’t make you hate Mitsubishi. It won’t make you stop using their products. It won’t even keep you from buying a Mitsubishi product if that’s the conclusion you come to when you’re shopping for something. All you’ve done is to take this particular advertising message out of your head and eliminated the conditioned responses or associations that had been adding to the noise of your thoughts.
I don’t mean to pick on Mitsubishi. The television I bought from them lasted for 13 years — not as long as the industry average, but still, a good long time. Do the same thing with any advertising you’ve seen that has made an impression on you. The idea is only that the space inside your head should belong to you, not to just any corporation that happens to have enough money to buy advertising time during the shows you watch.
Advertisers talk of buying “mind share,” as if they could just buy some of the cells in your brain, and actually, if you allow it, this is not far from the truth. An advertiser might say they have a 14 percent mind share, and they think their new advertising campaign will bump that up to 16 percent. But the best thing for you is if you own a 100 percent share of your own mind. This way, your mind is completely occupied with solving your own problems and improving your life. It stands to reason that you’ll solve problems faster and live a better life that way. That, in the end, is what the commercial-free is really about.
There are a million approaches you can take in anti-advertising. One of the easiest things to do is mess up a slogan by changing a few of the words. Most slogans of six words or more are practically begging to be turned into jokes.
I learned this from Anthony Robbins. One of his examples, to demonstrate how strong the conditioning of advertising can be, was the decades-old slogan “Winston tastes good, like a . . .” I knew the original conclusion of this slogan, but persuaded I could change it something different, I changed the wording to “Winston tastes good, like a cow.” I laughed when I thought of this, because it didn’t rhyme or make sense, but after I had repeated the revised phrase in my mind 20 or 30 times, that’s what the phrase became. To this day, if I hear, “Winston tastes good,” I automatically think, “like a cow. And now that I’ve neutralized the original slogan, I realize that it didn’t make any sense either. There isn’t any truth in the original slogan, in my opinion, because I don’t believe it’s good for anyone to taste a Winston. The important thing to notice is that I noticed this fallacy in the advertising slogan only after I had gone through this process to neutralize the slogan.
It doesn’t take much to mess up the meaning of a slogan. Just one dumb change can undercut the meaning of almost any phrase. For example:
Don’t worry if the altered slogans don’t seem to make much sense. The original slogans don’t mean much either! And a nonsensical approach can be an advantage if it makes you laugh. Just pick any slogan that’s made an impression and alter the woding just enough that the phrase loses all its meaning. Repeat the altered slogan 20 to 50 times, which doesn’t take long at all, and you’ll have neutralized an advertising slogan.
Advertisers put words to music to make them easier for you to remember, but then they’re also easier for you to change. You can take their melodies and substitutes words that say almost anything you can imagine. McDonald’s current tag line says, “I’m lovin’ it,” but you can take that melody and sing “I’m gettin’ fat,” or worse, if McDonald’s is getting on your nerves. Personally, I think it’s great fun to make up parody lyrics, so I do it without a second thought, but it still works to interfere with an advertising message.
The most insistent jingles are the ones with the most insistent melodies, but by writing parody lyrics, you can take the meaning away from those melodies. If you can remember the Oscar Mayer weiner jingle, try singing that melody with these nonsense lyrics:
Oh, first there was a Communist from Sweden
Then this spotted zebra hit the scene
Gazillions of macaws without a reason
Landed at the bar in blue and green
It’s nonsense, and that’s part of the reason it works. Imagine the melody now, and you don’t know if it’s about the weiners or the macaws. You’ve introduced uncertainty into the musical cue, and uncertainty is the first step toward removing previous conditioning.
Advertisers probably shouldn’t be promoting initials of any kind as brands. It’s just too easy to imagine unflattering things that those initials might stand for. Does DKNY mean Don’t Know New York? Is CNN the Chicken Noodle Network? I probably shouldn’t mention the various theories about what KFC stands for. Years ago, I heard that BMW stands for Buy My Wagon, and even though I know that’s not true, I still think of it every time I hear anything about BMW. I like to think I would never have bought a BMW anyway, but if they somehow made a car that had everything I wanted, they would have to change the meaning of their name in my mind before they could get me to take a serious look at it.
Many commercial messages make their points with stories. The stories in these commercials are always fundamentally flawed, but they try to dress up the commercials so you don’t notice the flaws in the story. However, it doesn’t take much to uncover the flaws. Rewrite or recast the story in any way at all, and you can be certain that any semblance of logic of the story will completely escape. I wrote this example as a paraphrase of a commercial I saw this year.
#1: Oh no! We’ve run out of beer!
#2: What will we do? We’ll have to come up with some amazingly clever way to get more that doesn’t involve getting up off the sofa!
#1: I know just what to do . . .
When you see the commercial, it looks like people doing something interesting, but deconstruct it this way, and you see the flaw in the characters, which is that they lack the initiative to do anything of significance.
Of course, once you take hold of a story, you can twist it around to make it anything you want. To make an advertising story into an anti-advertising story, just change the focus from the product to the characters’ own actions. Here’s a revision of the beer story:
#1: It looks like we drank all the beer.
#2: I guess I’d better get the empty beer bottles out of the way.
#1: Here, I’ll help you.
Changing the story lets you change the conditioning you got from the story. The purpose of the beer commercial is to create an association in your mind, one that says that what comes after drinking beer is getting more beer. Of course, this is a pattern of gluttony, a pattern you wouldn’t want to follow to its logical conclusion. You can undo this conditioning by replacing it with a different pattern, one that says that drinking beer is followed by cleaning up, or any other constructive personal action you might choose.
An anti-advertising message doesn’t have to start with a specific advertising message. Whole series and genres of commercials start with the same perceived gaps or problems in life. You can start at the same place, but go in a different direction, one that leads to a more responsible conclusion. With this approach, you can counter hundreds of commercials at once.
Each of the following messages starts out like a commercial, but ends up being more about taking action than about buying something.
I used to get such terrible headaches. I tried aspirin, acetaminophen . . . nothing seemed to work! Finally, I found out about meditation and water. That’s right! You see, headaches don’t just come out the blue. Most headaches are caused by stress and dehydration. Meditating took away some of my stress, and I drink water to keep myself fully hydrated. Now I don’t get those headaches anymore! Maybe you should try meditation and water too!
I always wondered about my financial future. Could I send my kids to college? Would I have enough for my retirement? Finally, I decided I’d better look into it and find out exactly what my situation was and what my options were. Sure, lots of companies say they’ll look after your money, but who’s going to care more about your financial life than you will yourself? It feels good knowing what I have and what I need to do — really knowing, because I took care of it myself!
Coming up at 7:30 . . . tennis! You get up off the sofa, go outside, and whack a ball around for half an hour. Let’s face it, it’s more interesting than anything on television . . . because it involves you. Tennis! Don’t miss all the exciting action!
Messages like these are effective because they interrupt the conditioned pattern of commercials right at the beginning, at the problems, real or imagined, that advertisers will try to get you to solve. Advertisers try to condition you to respond to these problems with the actions they suggest — actions that will benefit them. After you own your own problems, advertisers can no longer use those problems to hook you.
The most effective anti-advertising messages are not ones that argue against an advertising message or a specific product. Remember, advertisers are trying to get you in a position where buying their product becomes a yes or no decision because that’s a position that puts you at a disadvantage. You are most powerful when you are in a position of choosing among all the possible actions that the universe has to offer, and an effective anti-advertising message will take you in that direction.
The anti-smoking messages on television have had some effect in deterring adults from smoking, but that effect pales when you look at singers who don’t smoke because they want their voices to sound good, or soccer players who don’t smoke because they want to play as well as they can and give themselves the best chance of winning. Whenever people’s actions lead them away from a product, that’s far more powerful than any argument can be. Anti-advertising that works will lead people toward their own effective action.
Now is a particularly good time for people to be freeing their minds from the effects of advertising. The new flat-screen LCD and plasma televisions don’t deliver advertising messages with the same hypnotic effect as the old CRT technology did. A CRT is hard to ignore, but anyone can learn to ignore an LCD. I know I am not the only one who replaced a CRT television with a flat-screen television this year. After my television broke and I went to buy a replacement, the store did not have a single CRT on display! Industry studies say that, as of the end of 2004, most of the televisions in use are still CRTs, but one by one, these are being replaced with up-to-date technology. As the CRTs go away, the hold that commercial culture has on the culture at large is weakening, and it is easier than ever for an individual to break loose from commercial influences.
No one can completely avoid advertising and the messages of commercial culture, but it is possible to have a commercial-free mind. Take a skeptical attitude about commercial messages and the commercial culture they represent, and add techniques to control your focus and neutralize the messages from commercials, and you can eliminate most of the effect that advertising has on you. In doing so, you’ll be less likely to waste your money on dubious products and services, but there are bigger benefits than this. You’ll take away the largest part of the yamayama, the useless thoughts that clutter your mind. With fewer stray thoughts, you’ll find yourself thinking more clearly and living a less stressful, more effective life.
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