17

How to Spot Subconscious Seduction

“Ads are carefully designed by the Madison Avenue frog-men-of-the-mind for semiconscious exposure.”

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964: 203)

Spotting when advertising has seduced your subconscious is not easy. I've worked with advertising for 40 years, and even I miss many of the more subtle influences within advertising campaigns.

One way to detect when advertising is seducing your subconscious is to be vigilant. Watch out for when you unaccountably find yourself liking or favoring a brand, and then start looking for what might be influencing you. It's not an ideal solution, because the influence may well be something you don't recall, like some music in the background of an advertisement that your conscious mind didn't notice, but your subconscious did.

A great example from the past is the startlingly successful US advertising for the Volkswagen Beetle.

Volkswagen Case Study

Given that the Beetle (or Bug as it was known in the USA) was Hitler's “people's car,” and World War 2 had ended less than 25 years before, one might have expected the launch of this model in the USA to be less than a resounding success. Fortunately for VW they appointed DDB to handle the account.

DDB's initial print advertising campaign started in 1959, and was to do with the tiny size of the Beetle compared with the vast cars beloved of Americans at that time. One of the first ads to appear featured a tiny picture of the Beetle alone on a single page ad, with the headline “Think small” underneath. A later advertisement addressed the reliability of the revolutionary air-cooled three-cylinder car, showing a car with a huge clockwork winding key projecting from the rear. The headline read “It isn't so,” suggesting that although the car ran like clockwork it wasn't actually powered by clockwork. The clever thing about these ads was that they were one of the first examples of a company poking fun at itself. This sort of self-deprecation subconsciously suggests to us that the company has terrific confidence in its product, otherwise how would they dare to be rude about it?

Later in the 1960s VW went onto television. One of their first ads was about a snowplow. Nearly half of the minute-long ad featured a man getting into his car in heavy snow, starting it (first time), and then driving through the snow. After 25 seconds a quizzical, slightly laconic voice-over then asks very slowly, “Have you ever wondered how the man who drives a snowplow drives to the snowplow?” The man gets out of the car and trudges through the deep snow, as the voice continues “This one drives a Volkswagon. So you can stop wondering.” Finally, from the darkened shed the snowplow roars into life and drives slowly off, revealing as it passes the VW Beetle sitting there covered in snow.

Nothing wrong with that, you might say. Indeed, like many great ads, it doesn't at all appear to be seducing your subconscious. But consider this. Because nothing is said about the VW Beetle's reliability, there isn't anything you can counter-argue. No overt claim is made about how well it starts in the cold. Nothing is said about the fact that it is air-cooled, so doesn't have a cooling system that can freeze. No one mentions how the engine is in the back, over the driving wheels, which means it handles really well in slippery conditions. In fact nothing specific is claimed at all.

And another clever thing about the ad is that it is 1 minute long, even though what it says could easily have been squashed into 15 seconds. Can you guess what the effect of this is? Just this: the ad is boring. Nothing happens for half the ad, and then all that happens is a man gets out of a car and starts a snowplow. Recall what I said about resource-matching in Chapter 10, and you'll see that if there is nothing to analyze (and frankly there isn't anything much to analyze in this ad) we will reduce the level of cognitive resource we deploy and pay less attention. And by deploying less cognitive resource and paying less attention, we diminish our ability to counter-argue what claim the ad does actually imply about the car.

So by the end of the ad we have no factual ammunition which we can attack the Beetle with, and are in no real mood for counter-arguing anyway, so we just let the claim pass unchallenged. After a few exposures we will subconsciously feel convinced that the VW Beetle really is better in terrible weather conditions than other cars. And because this feeling is subconscious, there isn't any easy way to “un-feel” this conviction.

Snowplow is, in my opinion, a brilliant piece of subconscious seduction. And I suspect the judges at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival agreed with me, because they awarded Snowplow their gold medal. But if you're not convinced by the Snowplow ad, consider another VW ad which DDB made and ran in 1969. This time the subject was a funeral.

The Funeral ad opens with a shot of a cortège of large black traditional American cars driving towards and then past the camera. An organ strikes up with somber church music, and an elderly man's voice then starts to slowly read out what is obviously the text of his will. “I, Maxwell E. Stavely, being of sound mind and body, do hereby bequeath the following. To my wife, Rose, who spent money like there was no tomorrow, I leave one hundred dollars and a calendar.” As this is said we see the grieving widow mopping her eyes as she sits alone on the enormous back seat of one of the cars. The voice continues with only the briefest pause “To my sons’, Victor and Rodney, who spent every dime I gave them on fancy cars and fast women, I leave fifty dollars … in dimes.” As we hear this we pan from one son to the other, also sitting on an enormous car seat, one wearing shades and the other horn-rimmed glasses and both looking decidedly sleazy. The voice continues, now with the pitch rising indicating some anger and loss of patience: “To my business partner Jules, whose only motto was spend, spend, spend, I leave nothing, nothing, nothing.” As this is said we cut to Jules, smoking a huge cigar, sitting between and being consoled by two very blowzy women. And as we pan along the cortège of huge cars, the voice continues, calmly again: “And to all my other friends and relatives, who never knew the value of a dollar, I leave … a dollar.” Finally, following on right at the end of the cortège, we find there is a tiny black VW Beetle, and we see through the window an honest looking young man mopping his eyes as he drives. The voice says “Finally, to my nephew Harold, who oft-times said, ‘A penny earned is a penny saved,’ and who also oft-times said, ‘Gee, Uncle Max, it sure pays to own a Volkswagen,’ I leave my entire fortune of one hundred billion dollars.” And as this is said we finally see a satisfied smile cross the face of Harold.

What has this ad told us? Well, the only claim about the product is in the one line at the end, which says that “it sure pays to own a Volkswagen,” in other words it apparently saves you a lot of money. But of course it also suggests that buying a Volkswagen signifies that you are a smart and decent person, one who might be worthy of benefiting from the generosity of others. OK, that last bit is certainly rather an ambitious claim, but it's hardly what we would call subconscious seduction.

So where is the seductive element in this? I'd say it is this. Throughout the ad what is being shown is a succession of greedy, thoughtless, spendthrift, irresponsible people, and all these people are shown being driven in enormous cars. So although nothing is claimed overtly, what the ad does is create an association between large cars and greedy venal people. The effect of this over time is going to be that the cars eventually become conditioned with their greed and venality. We end up subconsciously feeling that anyone who buys a traditional big American car is thoughtless, spendthrift, and irresponsible.

You may or may not have realized that this is going on from my description of the ad. Certainly I'd say few people realized it at the time. The brilliantly understated way in which the ad was made, with a total absence of hard sell, and indeed virtually no overt reference to the car at all, meant all of these negative feelings about big American cars were processed subconsciously. If it had been evident that the ad was knocking US cars, suggesting all those who drove big cars were nasty people, this claim could easily have been counter-argued by pointing out that the vast majority of fine upstanding and generous Americans in 1969 did drive large cars like these. But because the thought wasn't conscious it wasn't counter-argued and no one complained.

What was the result of this subtle and brilliant advertising campaign? Despite its German origins the VW Beetle was a spectacular success. By 1965 VW had a 67% share of the US imported car market. Even in 1969, when this market was being flooded with new entries and the Beetle was over 10 years old, they still had a 51% share.

DDB's advertising is an example of how profitable seducing the subconscious can be. Another one is the Tesco case study.

Tesco Supermarkets Case Study

If you ask anyone in the UK what advertising Tesco was running when it became the biggest UK supermarket chain, they'll tell you it was Dotty, the shopper from hell, played by UK comic actress Prunella Scales. Dotty was created in 1995 to launch a sensational new service that Tesco had just introduced. This service allowed you to take back anything you had bought, for absolutely any reason, and they would either give you your money back or replace it with something else.

The minute-long launch ad starts with Dotty creeping up and shocking her daughter who is quietly working at her desk, by presenting her with a large trout. Dotty says, “I don't like the look of this fish.” The daughter asks what is wrong with it, observing that it looks perfectly fresh, and Dotty replies, “I know it's fresh, it just looks a bit … sullen.” In response to the daughter's astonishment she continues, “It's mouth goes down at the corners … look.” With this Dotty imitates someone pulling their mouth down, and we cut to the poor trout who mouth indeed does make it look very miserable. The daughter, attempting to patronize her evidently slightly mad mother says, “Mother, it's a trout, that's the way trout look, they were born like that,” at which the mother says, “I think we should take it back.” “Where to?” asks the harassed daughter sarcastically, “Lake Windermere?” “No, Tesco,” replies her mother. By now getting to the end of her tether the daughter says assertively, “You can't take a fish back just because it looks miserable. What do you expect them to say? ‘Have this cheerful sole instead, Madam’?” At which point we cut away to a calm and indulgent Tesco fishmonger, who parrots this exact phrase: “Have this cheerful sole instead, Madam!” whilst presenting Dotty with her replacement fish. The mother smiles happily: “Oh, yes, that's the one.” A kindly male voice-over then tells us that if you're not happy with any of their products for any reason, Tesco will give you an exchange or refund instantly. Finally, to her daughter's evident fury, Dotty walks off with the fish observing, “He looks like my first husband. I'll enjoy cooking him!” The ad ends with the voice-over saying the slogan “Tesco. Every little helps.”

There is no question that this was a brilliant promotion, and a brilliant ad to launch it with. The campaign continued for nearly 10 more years, advertising a succession of further Tesco initiatives in the same rather self-effacing way.

But this was not the campaign that helped Tesco achieve leadership in the UK. That was a different campaign, now lost in the mists of time. To understand how it worked we have to go back to the start of the Tesco story.

The Tesco brand apparently started in 1924 when the enterprising grocer Jack Cohen bought a shipment of tea from a Mr T.E. Stockwell and decided to combine his initials (TES) with the first two letters of his name (CO). It developed a reputation as a “pile it high and sell it cheap” sort of shop, and by the 1980s it had grown to be the biggest supermarket chain in Europe. However, in the UK it remained stubbornly in second place to Sainsbury’s, whose reputation for selling fresh foods dated back to the nineteenth century.

To try to rectify this, Tesco brought out a new campaign for their fresh meat in 1983. The ads featured TV celebrity restaurateur Robert Carrier, whose Islington restaurant Carrier's was one of the most highly rated in the world. The format was simple persuasion: Robert Carrier praised a piece of meat for its freshness and leanness, and then revealed it had been bought (of all places!) in Tesco.

The campaign was a total flop. One of the reasons that came out in research was that the ads just were not credible. Tesco stores at the time were mostly described by people as being old-fashioned and tawdry places, with boxes piled up in the aisles, unwashed floors, and sullen unhelpful staff. Not the sort of place that would be conducive to buying lovely fresh meat, no matter how persuasive Robert Carrier was.

To rectify this Tesco set about revolutionizing their outlets. Stores were rebuilt, aisles cleared of boxes, and everything was kept spotlessly clean. Staff were trained not only to answer any question you had about where something was, but to actually take you to the fixture and show it to you.

So how should they advertise their brand-new shops? Fresh food was still the main battleground, and having now refurbished their offering you might think Tesco would revert to the sort of smug self-satisfied creative style epitomized by Robert Carrier. Not a bit of it. Newly appointed agency Lowe Howard-Spink developed a campaign that was the categorical opposite. It featured the popular comedian Dudley Moore as a totally inept Tesco buyer sent on a quest for French, free range, corn-fed chickens. In the first ad run in 1990 the less-than-helpful French farmer has him wandering through the forest in search of them (calling “here, chicky chicky chicky”). Subsequent ads showed him hot-air ballooning and accidentally discovering 260-year-old Melton Mowbray Stilton, crashing his little van and coming across fine Italian grapes, and so on. Finally, he discovered the long sought-after chickens, but overcome with pity released them back to the woods.

Alongside Dudley Moore's antics, what this campaign did was cleverly showcase a whole range of new and different high quality products, all of which were regularly available in Tesco stores. I remember being a frequent purchaser of their excellent organic corn-fed French chickens, which were surprisingly good value and very delicious. But why adopt this strange self-deprecating advertising? Surely the message it gave to people was that their fine produce was only there by chance, and underneath their shiny new stores they were as shambolic and disorganized as their old stores made them seem?

The answer of course is that the Dudley Moore ads were a supreme example of advertising seducing our subconscious. What they did was to show that Tesco, far from being unbearably smug as they were in the Robert Carrier ads, were happy to poke fun at their own obsession with quality and originality in food. The result was that subconsciously everyone felt Tesco must be very successful and very good at what they were doing. After all, we know that only those who are extremely confident don't mind being the butt of people's jokes: people who lack confidence or have anything to hide are the ones who prefer to be told how wonderful they are.

The result was that over a period of 3 years Tesco's reputation grew in leaps and bounds. By 1992, the end of the Dudley Moore campaign, they achieved their aim of becoming the UK's biggest supermarket group. It was not for another 3 years that they launched the Dotty campaign. So it wasn't fussy Dotty who won them market leaderships, but shambolic Dudley Moore.

Stella Artois Case Study

Possibly the most famous campaign in the UK was another one by Lowe Howard-Spink, this time for Stella Artois.

I mentioned Stella Artois’ bitter taste in the last chapter, but I didn't explain how the advertising was able to make the brand so successful. The Stella advertising story started back in 1979, when it launched using a campaign with the slogan “reassuringly expensive.” The idea was that Stella spent so much money on its ingredients (the finest hops, barley, etc.) that the brewers had to charge an enormous premium for it. This was in part true, but not because the ingredients were really that much more expensive. It was because the beer had 5% alcohol, and so attracted more excise duty.

Either way, Lowe Howard-Spink cleverly turned the high price of Stella into an indicator of its quality. Of course it wasn't that expensive – only about 20% more than the ordinary 3.5% alcohol by volume “cooking” lagers – but it did make you drunk much more quickly. According to a head brewer I spoke to, the reason is that your body removes the equivalent of about 1.5% alcohol from what you drink, so a 3.5% lager is effectively 2%, and a 5% lager is effectively 3.5% – nearly twice as strong.

So the real reason Stella was successful probably had more to do with its potency than its taste. Of course, UK advertising regulations forbade anyone claiming their beer was stronger than others, but by cleverly saying the beer was more expensive the advertising implied that it had more alcohol, and so both tasted better and was more effective at getting you drunk.

By the early 1990s Stella was selling so well that the brewers wanted to run a TV advertising campaign. The problem they faced was that by then the UK beer market had switched to home consumption of bottled beers. There were countless bottled beer brands that were also 5% alcohol by volume, and in a lot of outlets Stella Artois was no more expensive than the other bottled brands. In fact, because it sold so well in supermarkets and off-licenses (liquor stores) it was often less expensive than others.

Lowe Howard-Spink decided they couldn't get rid of the very successful Reassuringly Expensive idea, because to do so would be to suggest that Stella wasn't as good quality as it used to be. I was working on the account at the time, and after I saw some work from an Italian creative group I came up with the idea that “Stella Artois tasted so good that people would give up anything for it.” The creative director Adrian Holmes gave that to the creative department and waited to see what came out.

The result was a piece of seductive genius, written by the copywriter Charles Inge and his art director wife Jane. Most people at the time thought Stella Artois was French, and coincidentally Provence had become the part of France most Brits aspired to visit and live in, mainly because of a very funny book by the journalist Peter Mayall entitled A Year in Provence. It also happened that an art-house film set in Provence, entitled Jean de Florette, had recently been a minor box-office hit, and this film had some very engaging music. So the creative team came up with the idea of a mini-playlet set in Provence, using the Jean de Florette music.

In this playlet the dialogue is entirely in French, with no subtitles (even though the ad was for the UK market), and the music plays in the background throughout. It features a French peasant farmer taking his carnations to market on a donkey cart. The weather is exceptionally hot, and the farmer stops at an inn to buy some food. The rather tubby and unsympathetic inn-keeper demands “dix francs” (10 francs) for a ham roll, but it turns out the farmer hasn't any money, so the inn-keeper accepts a couple of bunches of carnations as payment.

The farmer settles down to eat his roll, but spots out of the corner of his eye the inn-keeper pouring a glass of Stella Artois. We see the farmer enduring a few moments of indecision, then cut to him taking his first drink of his ice-cold Stella. As he does this he closes his eyes in what can only be described as sheer ecstasy. We then pull back to see that the entire inn is covered in carnations. The implication is, of course, that the Stella is so expensive that he has given away his entire cart-load in order to be able to afford it. The film ends with the caption “Stella Artois – Reassuringly Expensive.”

A year later a second ad was made. The location was similar, but this time the playlet featured an impoverished painter and another inn-keeper. Like the farmer, the painter has no money, and so trades his painting for a half-pint of Stella. When we pull back we see the walls of the inn are covered by priceless impressionist masterpieces that have presumably likewise been traded for Stella Artois.

The effect of these two ads, and others that followed, was to catapult Stella Artois to brand leadership of the entire lager market. So how did they do this? Rationally, the message in the ads was complete nonsense. Stella Artois wasn't expensive; it was about the same price as other beers, and in any case no sane person would risk their livelihood for a half-pint of beer. Clearly, something else must have been making people buy the brand. But when you asked people why they thought the ads were so brilliant (and they did think they were brilliant), all they could come up with was that they made Stella somehow seem “different” from all the other brands of lager.

I believe the reason people couldn't explain why the ads were so good was because drinkers were not aware of what going on. You see, all the other lager brands at the time were using humor, often quite silly and down-to-earth humor, in their advertising. This humor was designed to entertain drinkers and ingratiate them to with brand. By adopting a quite serious tone, Stella positioned itself being in a class of its own. And by mimicking Jean de Florette, and having the dialogue entirely in French, it subconsciously flattered the viewer into feeling that they were not only smart, but also “in tune” with sophisticated art-house entertainment. The net effect was that anyone who drank Stella Artois felt they were intellectual, intelligent, and in some way “a cut above” other beer drinkers. Of course, because this communication was subconscious, the drinker's feeling of superiority was covert, and therefore couldn't be identified and counter-argued.

But in what way was it subconscious? Surely it must have been obvious that the brand was trying to position itself as posh and upmarket? Well, no, it wasn’t, for the very good reason that the ads had another perfectly valid raison d’être: they were ostensibly all about how expensive Stella Artois was. By keeping the original slogan and high-quality message, the ad agency deluded viewers into thinking the ads were just about high price, when in fact they were all about aspiration and “classiness.” So the message of expense acted as a way of suppressing examination of the creativity, in exactly the same way that the message about the new club-class seats suppressed any examination of the background music in the British Airways advertising.

The Stella Artois TV campaign ran for 12 years, but in my opinion it never succeeded in improving on the two first ads. Charles Inge left to set up his own ad agency, and other creative teams in Lowe Howard-Spink started working on the account. The agency lost its understanding of how the gentle ads set in peaceful Provencal countryside worked, and the humor became darker and more extreme: a wartime inn-keeper pretended the beer had run out in order to deny the man who had saved the life of his son a Stella; a man drank the Stella his father had requested as his dying wish, and then blamed the priest; a good Samaritan found himself abandoned by those he had helped when it came to paying for the beer they had ordered for him; a prisoner on a Papillon-style convict ship got himself put into the unbearably harsh punishment cell just so he could enjoy his Stella undisturbed, and so on. These ads won creative awards, but perhaps as a result of its increasingly nasty humor, the potent brew became known as “wife-beater.” By 2007 the brand was losing share despite almost continuous price promotion, and the campaign was discontinued.1

But this sort of influence isn't restricted to subconsciously processed music and style imagery. Occasionally you can be subconsciously seduced by something that is literally staring you in the face. A good example is Nike advertising.

Nike Case Study

Nike has been advertising its sports shoes and trainers on TV since 1982. Its agency Weiden + Kennedy has achieved worldwide fame through its TV and cinema ads, many of which feature celebrity sportsman. The campaign is perhaps best known for its iconic slogan “Just do it,” rumored to have been coined by Dan Weiden at a meeting in 1988. My personal favorite is the 90-second football match ad first run in 2006, where a team of famous football players find themselves playing a team chosen by the Devil. They manage to win against all odds, the implication being that this is because they are wearing Nike boots.

At the end of this and every other Nike ad appears the famous “swoosh” logo. This was designed by a graphics student Carolyn Davidson in 1971 and the story is that she was paid just $35 for the rights to use it (although it is said that she has been further remunerated since).2

Nike are at pains to point out that their logo is a swoosh, loosely based upon the wing in the statue of the Greek Goddess of victory, Nike, who apparently was the source of inspiration for many great and courageous warriors.3 But here's an interesting fact: when I went on the internet and typed in Nike Swoosh I got around 3.3 million results, but when I typed in Nike Tick, I got around 2.9 million results.4

This suggests that quite a lot of people think the Nike logo is a tick. So what? Does it really matter if it is a tick or a swoosh? Possibly not; after all, it is only a logo. But let me remind you of what we discussed in Chapter 14. Remember that Wells and Petty found people could be influenced just by nodding or shaking their own heads. And Jonah Berger found they could be influenced just by filling in a questionnaire with a particular color of pen. It doesn't take much to make us buy things.

So consider this scenario. Imagine you are a teenager, and you need a new pair of trainers. You are well-acquainted with the Nike advertising, you know all the celebrities in it, and you know the slogan and the logo. The logo links to the concept of being right and pleasing people. It's a well-embedded somatic marker, because at school you see a tick many times, even if it isn't on your own work. But there are many other more important reasons for wanting a pair of Nike trainers: they are cool, they are expensive, all your friends want to wear them, and most of all your parents will not put up the money for them. And as we know, we all want something much more if we can't have it. So when a market researcher comes and asks you what trainers you want to buy, there are plenty of things to talk about and the Nike logo simply doesn't come into the conversation.

Now imagine you are the middle-aged mother or father of this teenager. Your desire for flashy trainers is long gone. You pay scant attention to the Nike ads, which are full of noisy action and have a story line you often find incomprehensible. You make little attempt to remember anything, because you are not interested. However, you perceive the slogan “Just do it” and you undoubtedly perceive the “swoosh” logo.

Your son is a nice kid but lazy. You keep telling him to get on with things but he doesn’t. Over and over again, you say “For Pete's sake, just do it.” Subconsciously you associate the phrase “just do it” with the concept of your son doing what you tell him to.

As with your son, the swoosh logo triggers the concept of being right and pleasing people. Markers embedded like this in one's youth are very powerful, and subconsciously we all want to be associated with ticks, not crosses.

When your son shows you his worn out trainers you take him down to the store to buy some new ones. He shows you a really expensive pair of Nike trainers. You know that Nike must be reliable because you see them advertised regularly. They are really too much for you to be able to afford, but for some reason your intuition tells you that perhaps if you do make an exception and find the extra money, this will be some sort of turning point in your son's behavior and he will start to flourish.

What you don't realize is that these feelings are being subconsciously generated by the conceptual values of the tick (doing the right thing) and the slogan (my son behaving the way I want him to). Finally, your son says “Aw, mom (dad), just do it!” and you do.

The important thing about this illustration is that if you are asked why you purchased Nike trainers for your son, you probably won't really know. You'll make up something about them being on offer, or being better quality. You'll swear blind that you haven't been influenced by any Nike advertising, and probably won't even be able to recall any if you are asked. And it won't occur to you to mention the tick logo, because the feelings they triggered were subconscious. But whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not, your subconscious mind has been very cleverly seduced.

1. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-494149/Where-did-wrong-beer-wife-beater.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoosh

3. http://www.logoblog.org/nike_logo.php

4. Test conducted October 2011.