The Persuaders episode on Frontline missed a crucial question. Advertising is filling the mindspace available, and crowding out everything else. It has taken over movies, TV, the internet, the mail, newspapers, every medium with which we interact. We are swimming in the stuff, allowed to pay attention to little else.
So, what does that mean for people and organizations that have messages that are not commercial in nature? Messages that need to be heard, information that the average person really does need to have.
They don't get heard, that's what happens.
There is so much competition for our attention that those who have rational, reasonable things to say get drowned out. In order to get heard, they have to resort to marketing, in one form or another. And thus is credibility lost. The message gets lost in its attempt to work within the medium.
Take a scientific discussion of global warming. A few studies are done, and published in scientific journals. The scientific community responds by calling for more study, and trying to make some people outside the community of the potential dangers. A fine start. But people don't pay a whole lot of attention to the scientific community. Have you ever read a physics journal?
And so, in an attempt to make people aware, more sensationalist message go out. And more. It gets picked up by people whose job it is to alarm people (aka The Media and The Government). They don't take time to develop a rational understanding of the issue, they just grab hold of dire predictions and magnify them. Real data, real information, valid warnings and predictions get set aside because the predictions are made to sound as bad as possible in order to sell airtime or get votes.
Imagine the frustration that scientists must feel. They are responding to the situation in what they feel are appropriate ways. But the message gets away from them. Things are said by media and political figures as if they were fact, and then the debate centers on those inaccurate statements as though they were the original message.
And all because there is so much clutter that the scientists had to yell more loudly than they should have to get any attention at all.
That is the ultimate loss we face from The Persuaders, the ability to communicate clearly and appropriately.
2 comments:
I agree with your statement that not everyone gets heard, particularly in the media. I suppose as a studying marketer I can say as you probably have considered already, that its what sells that gets noticed. I believe that scientific matters for the most part, while they are significant, don't sell to most consuming Americans.
I liked your comment about "in an attempt to make people aware, more sensationalist messages go out." It reminded me of all the radical things some people are doing just to be heard, for example the man who crashed his plane into an IRS building because he felt they were sucking him dry. I can see advertising becoming potentially dangerous if companies begin to think the only way they can truly capture our attention in the midst of a sea of advertisements is by doing something extreme.
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