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Spin Cycle
Marketing the private sector
© Bryan Zepp Jamieson
2/26/07
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
For the past six weeks, I’ve been tuning into the Canadian
Broadcasting Radio One Sundays at 11 AM local time to catch an excellent series
called “Spin Cycle.”
The entire
audio of the series is available. The series is described by CBC as “a
series about spin, the spinners and the spun by Ira Basen for CBC Radio's The
Sunday Edition.”
It starts with the history of what is now called “spin,” the innocuous efforts
to deal with reporters not by avoiding them, but by making certain that your
side of the story gets out there. The series follows the developing nature of
spin into both a science and a pervasive factor in western society, to the point
where nearly all politicians utter nothing but prefabricated platitudes – spin –
when they deal with the media at all, and even try to supplant the media with
their own information machines.
The Basen series revolves around the question, “How did we get from there to
here?” Spin started out as encouraging public disclosure, in order to ensure
that one’s own side of a major story, such as a train wreck or a mine disaster,
got told. Prior to that, corporations simply tried to conceal such stories from
the media, and the public. Now companies would seek out the press, and say,
“Yes, this happened, this is how we think it happened, and here’s what we’re
doing about it.” It was good public relations, and served the public interest.
Now it has turned malignant; not only is it pervasive, but it has gone from
exposition to disinformation campaigns and even flat-out lying. Much of it is
designed to counter the public interest, and its objective is not to inform the
press, but rather to nullify the press.
The series points at two confluences that brought us to this juncture. The first
was the developing science of marketing. Much of the first hour is devoted to
studying Edward Bernays and Ivy Lee, the men who basically took advertising and
turned it into the half-science, half-art of marketing. Marketing took public
relations from what the public needed to hear to what they thought the public
wanted to hear, soothing words that would entice people to buy their products.
Stories, particularly of the brilliant Bernays, are widespread. He began a
marketing campaign to glamorize the color green among women in order to foster
the sales of menthol cigarettes. Women in the 1930s, you see, were keen on
matching ensembles, and Bernays figured it would be cheaper to change their
taste in color than it would be to change the color of the cigarette packs.
Events showed he was right. From Bernays (who came to be appalled by the monster
he had created before his death in 1995 at the age of 103) came mergers of
social psychology, the use of focus groups, and the science of polling.
Marketing is a “soft science” and as a result it technically can’t be called a
science at all. There are factors that cannot be measured, and it’s those
indeterminate variables that make marketing somewhat unreliable and inexact, and
it’s why we see colossal flops at the box office or on the roll-out of
much-heralded new products (“New Coke”, anyone?). But marketeers sold THEMSELVES
as being effective and largely infallible to anxious corporations, and
eventually to even more anxious politicians. Nixon’s performance in the debate
with Kennedy (a debate, incidently, that he actually won) caused marketers to
point out what could happen to a man who didn’t have a good PR firm looking out
for him. Had Nixon had a PR man to give him a closer shave and apply a little
base around the eyes, American history might have been different. Now we’re in a
crazed spiral in which marketers charge more and more for their services, and
corporations, celebrities, and politicians see the escalating costs of such as
proof that they must be terribly important to the success of companies and
office-seekers. It’s expected that the presidential campaigns this cycle will
exceed one billion dollars, or four days in Iraq, and most of that cost will be
in marketing – advertising, selecting just the right campaign colors and
ensembles for the candidates. Obviously, not much of that is going to go toward
telling the voters just what the individuals will actually be like as presidents
if elected.
The other element that Basen identifies in the darkening of marketing he summed
up in two words: Margaret Thatcher. This will come as a surprise to most
American conservatives and right wingers, but Ronald Reagan wasn’t the first
private-market advocate: Maggie the Iron Hen was. Thatcher set out to privatize
everything she could in Britain, which is why you read about terrible and often
deadly train service these days, and why Britain’s economy had the blind
staggers all through the nineties.
One reason government, both in the UK and here, was such an easy target for the
free marketeers is that it didn’t market itself. Had British Rail run lots of
adverts saying “99% on-time schedule and we haven’t pancaked into any lorries in
a donkey’s age!” they wouldn’t have been such a juicy target for marketeers who
extolled their own unproven reliability and falsely claimed that an on-time
train service in Britain was as rare as a nice day in the Shetlands.
So private-sector types took over both governments, and started turning
government into a marketing enterprise. But one of the nasty little secrets
about the capitalistic system is that it isn’t really suited for taking social
services and putting them on a for-profit basis. Given that private companies
aren’t much more efficient than the government to begin with (and studies show
that most major corporations are worse, due to fraud, incompetence and
bureaucratic inertia), you can’t provide the same deal with a 30% markup for the
same service without it costing more. Therefore private sector is often less
efficient and always more expensive.
Another factor is that marketing costs money. People are gasping at the thought
of a billion dollar presidentical-type campaign, but the fact is that it is a
drop in the bucket compared to what the nation as a whole spends on marketing
already. Soft drink companies will cheerfully shell out that much just to have a
panel of experts advise them on what color cans are likely to most augment soda
sales. And, as with the candidates, they won’t give a thought as to whether the
contents make the purchase worthwhile.
Having a government market itself isn’t new, of course. Germany modernized the
process in the 1930s, and the Soviet Union learned to adapt it to mass media. We
used to sneer at what was called propaganda (which it was) and thus “propaganda”
is a word government marketers turn themselves inside out trying to avoid.
However, It IS propaganda, and the only difference between it and the propaganda
of Goebbels is that we’ve since learned how to market the concept of propaganda
as well as the propaganda itself.
Where the real malignancy came in was when the tobacco industry started forming
pseudo-scientific groups to “take an even-handed analysis of the health factors
of smoking.” That is where the malicious practice of deliberate disinformation
in order to muddy public opinion began, and that’s why you have groups committed
to lying to the public, such as Fox News, The Greening Earth Society, and the
Swift Boat Veterans for Freedom. They exist to raise doubts about factual
information if they can, and to flat-out lie to the public if they can’t. Fox
even went to court to win the right to lie to the public as they saw fit. (Note:
If you haven’t seen “Thank You For Smoking” run out and rent a copy right now.)
But there is hope. Basen, in his final installment, interviews George Pitcher, a
PR man turned Anglican Priest, who has written a book called “The Death of
Spin.” Pitcher believes that as PR is employed by more and more fringe groups
for more and more lunatic purposes, the “spin culture” will run its course.
My own take is that we are seeing the innermost dirty little secret of
marketing, the thing that, for many purposes, makes it a colossal waste of money
and sometimes even a con job. If the product is utter crap, no amount of
marketing in the world can save it. And privatization, shallow prepackaged
politicians, and government propaganda are all crap products.
The public is beginning to notice. They are also fed up with the ceaseless
barrage of advertising and the endless euphemisms of politicians and PR flaks
“managing” the public.
So I think Pitcher is right, if only for slightly different reasons. The Spin
Cycle is nearly finished.
Now we can take the PR flaks and hang them out to dry.