Black Ops Advertising. Mara Einstein

methods used have gone through several iterations over the decades. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, for example, there were two competing schools of thought about how best to get consumers to buy: the rational, or hard sell, versus the heart, or soft sell. The hard sell was based on differentiating products from their competitors by devising a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)—a simple phrase or tagline that would establish a brand as better than that of their competitors—a concept created by adman Rosser Reeves of the Ted Bates Agency. “M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hands” differentiated the candy as something that kids could eat without making a mess, and the line was used for decades. Key to this concept was to repeat the idea over and over and over until consumers could parrot the phrase back to the marketer, or more importantly, remember the sales message when they were standing in the aisle of their local store. USPs are still part of modern advertising, and we see this in taglines like “Expect More, Pay Less” for Target or “15 Minutes Could Save You 15 Percent or More on Car Insurance” for Geico. You might even be envisioning the little green gecko.

      Alternatively, the soft sell, which was advocated by famous admen David Ogilvy and Chicago’s Leo Burnett, sold products through emotional appeals. David Ogilvy is famous for Dove (“1/4 cleansing cream”), “Schweppervescence,” and “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt,” among many others. Leo Burnett is well known for his use of characters, like the Marlboro Man, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, and Charlie the Tuna. Burnett understood that people connect with a person—even a fictitious one—more than they do with a string bean or a can of tuna fish, and that this connection would lead to product sales. We see this idea continue today in products like Virgin, which built their brand around CEO Richard Branson, a character if there ever was one! Online, where engaging with the customer is a personalized one-on-one experience, brands-as-people and people-as-brands have multiplied. Think here of Steven Jobs and Apple, or Progressive Insurance and Flo, or Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, or Beyonce. The difference in the early days of TV, however, was that whether the method used involved USP or cartoonish spokespeople, the appeal was designed to attract everyone: young, old; male, female; rich and not-so-rich.

      The late 1960s and early 1970s brought the Creative Revolution in advertising. Commercials and print ads became more sophisticated, more tongue-in-cheek in order to appeal to an increasingly educated baby boomer audience. Rather than banging consumers over the head with the repetitious messages of the USP or seeing the Marlboro Man on yet another prairie, consumers were presented with ads like “Lemon” for Volkswagen and “You Don’t Have to be Jewish to Love Levy’s” for Levy’s Rye Bread. At this time, psychologists became integrated into industry practices so that marketers could learn what emotional buttons to push in order to get us to buy. Focus groups, surveys, and personal interviews were used to ascertain the motivations behind consumer purchases. Today these methods have expanded to include ethnography, a technique whereby researchers trail consumers in their “natural habitat,” often following them with video cameras to record every nuance. Researchers for Nickelodeon, for example, will move into a child’s home for a few days and look in their closets to see what they actually buy and watch what media they interact with. Similarly, there are firms that specialize in marketing ethnography, such as ReD Associates, whose observers attend parties to learn consumers’ vodka drinking behaviors or spend a day with consumers on behalf of sneaker brand Adidas, trying to understand the obstacles that keep them from working out.²² This type of anthropological work is supported and expanded online through data analytics, which we will discuss later in the book.²³

      Understanding what motivates consumers to buy is useless, however, unless advertisers can connect that learning to their product and unless that product provides a corresponding emotional benefit. This is where branding comes in. Branding, quite simply, is the use of a recognizable logo, a tagline (though not always), and a mythology.²⁴ A sneaker isn’t a running shoe; it is a Nike and the athletic excellence that embodies. Disney isn’t a theme park; it is magic. Coca-Cola isn’t a sugary carbonated beverage; it is happiness. For example, while in the past Coca-Cola would create a commercial and teach the world to sing in “perfect har-mon-y,” today they convey the same essence through the “Happiness Machine,” a video that shows college students being delighted and surprised by receiving not one but several bottles of Coke from a vending machine. As the video progresses, hands appear out of the machine to deliver first a bouquet of flowers, then balloon animals, and then a several-foot-long hero sandwich. One student even says about the vending machine, “I want to give it a hug,” and “Thank you, Coke.” Just like the earlier commercial, millions of people saw this video.

      The connection of a commodity product to a story or an idea that will evoke emotion—“I want to give it a hug”—is what marketing is all about. These emotional connections become attached to a visual image that you immediately recognize—the swoosh, Cinderella’s castle, a red and white logo—and as soon as you see the symbol, it instantly conjures up memories of your interactions with these products. This is particularly important in a media environment that has become overwhelmed with competing product messages. Estimates are that we see upwards of 5,000 marketing messages per day.²⁵ We are not conscious of all of these, for sure, but the ones that do make it through the mental clutter are those that have the most emotional and psychological relevance. I may remember Banana Republic and Fage and Chipotle, but Abercrombie and Dannon and McDonald’s, not so much. You likely have a different experience. This is incredibly important for marketers because research has shown that as the media fragment and products proliferate, consumers reduce the number of brands they consider when buying a product. We are too busy to find something new, so we stay with what we know.²⁶

      As marketers moved toward a psychological understanding of consumer purchase behavior, the introduction of cable television into American homes in the 1980s pushed marketing still further away from talking to a large homogeneous audience toward more divided and differentiated niches. Three broadcast networks morphed into dozens, and within a decade there were hundreds of television networks. Today the average American home has 189 channels to choose from, and each of us typically watches 17 different channels—more than five times what we watched in the 1980s.²⁷ Each of these cable networks appeals to discrete viewing tastes and lifestyles. There is MTV for teenagers and young adults, ESPN for men, and CNN for the news junky who was also likely a reader of Time or Newsweek. There are channels that appeal to women and ones that are devoted to kids. As time progressed and digital technology enabled cable systems to expand, there were channels not just for sports, but for single sports like tennis or golf, and even for individual sports teams like the Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.

      These target audiences correspond to groups that advertisers are interested in reaching based on demographic characteristics (such as age, gender, income, education, and so on) or based on psychographics, which define people in terms of values, lifestyles, and personalities. For instance, a psychographic group called “Movers & Shakers” are adults between forty-five and sixty-four who shop at Nordstrom, play tennis, and drive a Land Rover while “Shotguns & Pickups” are adults between twenty-five and forty-four who order from Mary Kay, own their own horses, and drive a Dodge Ram Diesel.²⁸ Sorting the population in this way is known as segmentation, and it is used to fragment the marketplace into groups that will be most interested in a company’s product. Once an advertiser has identified the audience segments that will be interested in their products, they become “the target audience” for the brand. So iPads might appeal to moms who want to use the tablet to find new twenty-minute recipes or to read books to their kids or to find apps that will help juggle their busy schedules. These tablets are also popular with businesspeople who want a streamlined piece of technology, particularly when they are traveling. They might also be of interest to older adults who want to connect with their grandchildren via Skype or FaceTime, or even to use the tablet to play virtual games with them. Moms and businesspeople and grandparents are different market segments. As a group, they (and many others, in the case of iPads) make up the target audience. Once the target audience is determined, marketers pick the appropriate media to reach these groups with their message. So if Apple wants to reach moms, they might put commercials on Nickelodeon, Grey’s Anatomy, and A Baby Story, as well as print ads in Parents magazine and Good Housekeeping; if they want to reach grandparents, they might put ads on the evening news or