Advertising
Would you buy a used car from this man?
Marshall McLuhan (August, 1967, age 56). We’re in the money!
Today I signed a deal with Eugene Schwartz. The Marshall McLuhan Dew-Line Newsletter is destined to make McLuhan Inc. a tidy sum of money. The newsletter according to our ad copy will be “a startling, shocking Early Warning System for our era of instant change!” Each month the newsletter will deliver “the most vital developments of our day – filled with both immense danger and previously undreamed-of potential.” What developments? “The Teen-age drop out,” “The Ghetto Rebellion,” “The super-urbs” replacing our cities. Here are some of the pressing questions of the day the newsletter will answer. “Why do Negro youngsters in Watts say ‘Why should I interrupt my education to go to school? Why did IBM spend thousands of dollars with Dr. McLuhan to devise a sensory profile of their executives? Why have advertising agencies become the most effective educational institutions in our society?” I can’t wait to hear my answers.
Me (August, 2010, age 58). They’re in something else!
The first edition of the monthly newsletter was mailed to roughly 4,000 subscribers in July 1968 and continued until sometime in 1970. The subscribers paid $50 a year for the newsletter and McLuhan was promised a minimum of $10,000 in the first year and $20,000 in the second, and his son Eric as editor of the newsletter was promised $15,000 a year and a top-floor office on Madison Avenue. [For more]
The newsletter had three problems. (See Marchand’s biography of McLuhan)
- Much of the content was vintage McLuhan, but it did not differ very much from what Mcluhan was saying elsewhere for free.
- The newsletter’s advice was general rather than specific and topical.
- The newsletter “did nothing but intensify suspicions that McLuhan was a charlatan and a man out to exploit his reputation as a media wizard for every penny he could get.” (p. 228.)
McLuhan made no money out of the venture. It is hard not to be disappointed in McLuhan. The harsh part of me says: The moral is, if you’re going to sell out get the money up front. The sensitive part of me says: The moral is, if you’re famous people will try to take advantage of you.
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading
Philip Marchand, Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, 1989, pp. 209, 210, 227-229.
More on the truth about advertising.
Marshall McLuhan (1977, age 66). What is advertising selling?
As I was saying yesterday, much of what people take for granted about advertising simply isn’t true. For example, a common assumption as I point out in the City as Classroom is that advertising is “intended to sell products.” To test this simply look at actual advertisements and ask yourself what the reader of the ad is actually being sold. My guess is that whatever it is most of the time it isn’t a product.
Me (June 2010, age 57) Let’s take a closer look
This is an appealing, counter-intuitive idea. But if advertising isn’t intended to sell a product what is it intended to do? Here are some possibilities. It can be intended to explain how a product works, who uses the product, why you should admire the firm that produces the product, why you should buy another product, why you should feel confident that you made a wise decision in buying a product you have already bought, or why you should buy that product sometime in the future.
But let’s put Marshall McLuhan’s idea to the test. Consider the ads from the opening pages of The New Yorker I talked about in last Friday’s blog. The 16 ads that appear in the opening pages (inside cover to The Talk of the Town) of the May 10, 2010 issue:
Vanguard investment fund
AT&T cell phone service
Novel by Isabel Allende
Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Continental airlines
New Yorker cartoon collection (The Graduation Collection)
Tiffanny & Co. jewelry
Oil and natural gas exploration
New Yorker cartoon bank
Hyatt hotels
New Yorker T shirts
New Yorker cover prints
Chamber music concert at Lincoln center
Vintage golf photos
The magazine industry
U.S. Trust asset management
Of these, none actually ask for the sale – buy now and you’ll get a second one for half price! But indirectly all but one are clearly trying to get someone, somewhere to buy a product or service. The exception would seem to be the ad promoting viability of “the magazine industry” which could be an indirect pitch on the part of the publishers of the New Yorker to its readers, not to cancel their subscriptions despite the access the internet allows to the content publications such as the new Yorker provide.
What do you think? Are ads intended to sell a product? Is Marshall McLuhan wrong on this one?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan, City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media, 1977, pp. 157.
The truth about advertising.
Marshall McLuhan (1977, age 66). What we know that isn’t true
Much of what people take for granted about advertising simply isn’t true. Common sense says people read advertisements and then buy the product. Yet as David Ogilvy says research shows people only read the advertisement after they’ve bought the product.
Me (May 2010, age 57) What is true?
In the City as Classroom Marshall McLuhan examines some of the false assumptions people commonly make about advertising. One of those assumptions, he says, is that advertising is designed to sell things to everybody. It can be easily seen this is not true, as McLuhan says, by imagining who any given advertisement is directed at. For example, consider this small advertisement from the New Yorker:
Don’t self-publish alone!
Publishing can be maddeningly complicated. At Vantage Press our experts have simplified the process for over 20,000 authors. Use our fulltime service approach to publish your best book now.
Who is the audience this simple, scare-tactic ad is directed at? Is it you?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan, City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media, 1977, pp. 158.
Advertising and culture.
Marshall McLuhan (1977, age 66). Try this experiment
Advertising (as figure) has much to instruct us about culture (as ground). This is something you can explore in a plug and play fashion by looking at advertisements. List as many different products as you can that are frequently advertised. What picture does this list form of our culture?
Me (May 2010, age 57). Let’s try it?
(This is another one of Marshall McLuhan’s exercises, which you can find in his book City as Classroom.) Let’s try a variation on this experiment by looking at the products advertised in a recent issue of the New Yorker. Here is a list of all of the products that appear in the ads that appear in the opening pages (inside cover to The Talk of the Town section) of the May 10, 2010 issue.
Vanguard investment fund
AT&T cell phone service
Novel by Isabel Allende
Novel by Marilynne Robinson
Continental airlines
New Yorker cartoon collection (The Graduation Collection)
Tiffany & Co. jewelry
Oil and natural gas exploration
New Yorker cartoon bank
Hyatt hotels
New Yorker T shirts
New Yorker cover prints
Chamber music concert at Lincoln center
Vintage golf photos
The magazine industry
U.S. Trust asset management
What’s your take on the culture described by these products? How does this culture fit with your picture of the ‘real’ US culture?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
Marshall McLuhan, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan, City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media , 1977, pp. 7.
Isn’t that amazing! (How it all began)
Marshall McLuhan (March 31, 1956, age 44). We’re in the money!
The deal is signed! Bill Hagon, Murray Paulin, and Marshall McLuhan are now, officially, a consulting partnership named Idea Consultants. We’ve got a letter head. And we’ve got ideas, boy do we have ideas. For instance: see-through diapers – no more sniff, pull, and peek; a hose you hook up to the exhaust of the family car to kill pesky front-lawn rodents while you eat your dinner; or, my personal favourite – how to sell beer to dentists – tell them it’s better for the teeth than soft drinks. All we need now is a client. And unless tight-fingered Toronto University gives me a raise, it’s clients we need. The last time I counted Corinne and I’ve had acquired six kids to feed. Poetry is fun, but it’s not paying the bills.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Pitching the impractically practical.
Idea Consultants was a business disaster. They unsuccessfully pitched lunch-sized beer cartons to the J.Walter Thompson advertizing agency. They advised a vice president of Colgate Palmolive that the company needed to develop products that in the age of conformism appeal to the individual. (The principle of reversal.) He may have been interested but now that they had told him the idea didn’t think he needed to pay them for it. Life and Holiday magazines both rejected Idea Consultants’ pitch of some kind of in-store display case to promote their magazines. Life just said no. Holiday added the idea was an old one, but not a good one.
As a business Idea Consultants is most remarkable for two things: (1) the number of remarkably creative ideas the partners generated; (2) their failure to sell any of them. The true mark of an Idea Consultants’ idea is its impractical practicality. For example, their notion that underwear should be dyed a delicate shade of urine yellow, the establishment of a summer holiday retreat for hay fever sufferers, head lights for lawn mowers, and a gasoline-motor powered pencil sharpener.
And yet ideas do emerge that anticipate products that would appear 20 to 30 years in the future: devices such as: the video-cassette and DVD, aluminum soft drink cans, and pre-recorded audio guided tours. Who knows, perhaps there is a future for urine-coloured underwear. Boomers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your dignity.
Which of these Idea Consultants ideas do you think is the best of the worst? Who else in business history was as creative and as unsuccessful as Marshall McLuhan was with Idea Consultants?
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for this post
W. Terrence Gordon. Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding, 1997, pp. 168-171.
What’s in the cards?
Marshall McLuhan (1969 age 58). The solution to life’s problems
My son Eric and Eugene Schwartz tell me that The Marshall McLuhan DEW-LINE Newsletter is selling like hot cakes. I send them stuff when I can and they send it on to my subscribers. Great idea that the Distant Early Warning (Card) Deck. Worked that one out several years ago. Eric put it together from my notes and Eugene came up with the cracking idea to charge the subscribers an extra $5 if they want to get the deck. The card deck is a technology for delivering creative solutions to life’s problems. I call it The Management Game. Actually Games. Here is how to play the simplest one: Take any card. On the card is an aphorism. Relate the aphorism to your current hang up. I drew the 5 of clubs. The aphorism reads: “since life is short our faces must be long.” My current hang up is my health. Nothing seems the same since that brain surgery in November of 67. Well, as Corinne says I must take each day as it comes. Is that my solution, or is that my problem?
Me (January 2010, age 57). Playing a different game
The distant early warning or DEW line was a 1950s cold-war radar alert system Canada and the United States built in Northern Canada in the 1950s. The system was designed to give Americans and Canadians a heads up if Russia attacked by sending planes or missiles over the Arctic circle. McLuhan liked to announce himself in speeches as a voice from the DEW-line. That is he had to come to warn of dangers ahead. But in naming his card deck – which if you live in Montreal you can see on display at the Canadian Center for Architecture until February 25th, 2010 – after this famous piece of cold-war technology, McLuhan misleads. The name doesn’t quite fit. The deck says you can find answers for your hang-ups or problems by contemplating the aphorisms on the cards. Yet the DEW line was not a system for finding solutions to a problem (say nuclear attack), but a system for knowing whether you have a problem (look there’s a bomber!).
Let’s play McLuhan’s Management Game differently. Instead of calling “to mind a private or corporate problem as you shuffle the cards,” as the game suggests, and then picking “a card and … [applying] its message,’ let’s shuffle, select a card, look at the aphorism, and only then decide whether in fact we have a problem.
The card I’ve drawn for us all is the 4 of spades: “When all is said and done more will have been said than done.” Sounds like a call for action. I know what I’m going to do. (Tell you about it on Tuesday.) What will you do?
(Look next week for the announcement of a winner to our classify Marshall McLuhan contest.)
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Readings for this post
Marshall and me, Reading Marshall McLuhan’s Cards, December 3, 2009
Marshall and me, What’s Marshall McLuhan’s Stuff Worth, December 4, 2009
Classify Marshall McLuhan: A contest
Marshall McLuhan (Summer 1968, age 57). I reject all attempts to classify me
As I might have mentioned earlier, talking with Norman Mailer on CBC’s “The Summer Way” the other day, was like wrestling with a dark angel. He kept trying to classify me, pin me down, put me in a Cartesian square. But that’s the nineteenth century speaking. I am not a square peg that fits happily in a just-large-enough square hole. They asked me you will recall am I an artist or a scientist? Artist I suppose, but in truth neither. I am an observer.
Me (January 2010, age 57). Let us try.
Marshall McLuhan disliked labels. But that didn’t and hasn’t stopped people from labeling him. Here are some of the labels people have given McLuhan:
Canadian communications theorist
Professor
Literary scholar
Genius
Intellectual messiah
Canada’s Aristotle
Gear stripper
Delphic oracle
Educator
Future salesman
Visionary educator
Oracle
Charlatan
Theoretical, cognitive psychologist
Writer
Scholar
Social reformer
Popular philosopher
Pop guru
Media prophet
Media/technology analyst
Media darling
Seminal thinker
What label, if any, do you think is most accurate? Pick one or make one up of your own. Next week we will announce the winner. Good luck!
Cordially, Marshall and Me
Reading for the post
McLuhan: Hot & Cool. Edited by Gerald Stern, New York: Signet Books, 1967.