THE PERSUADERS

THE PERSUADERS

The Persuaders brings to light the results of the millions of dollars that companies spend in marketing products and even ideas to the public and the often unsettling tactics the advertising industry uses in doing so.  It touches on how advertisers are looking for more and more paths to reaching us as consumers in an ad-packed world where many of the multitude of advertisements that surround us simply blend into our surroundings.  The result of this is an ever ending battle with more than bright lights and big images, but also data collecting on consumers, targeting audiences, and attempting to create emotional connections to brands and products--all so that we will buy what is being sold.  However, it is not just companies looking to engage us but also politicians who sell ideas in an uneasily similar way to the way in which we are sold products.  Political campaigns use the tactic of "narrow-casting" to perfectly tailor advertisements to people of certain backgrounds enabling them to interpret the values and desires that the voter that the candidate should posses or simply preach to gain votes.

To me, the scariest part of this film was that it was from 2004, a time where we were far less advanced in our ability to keep data on what people like and dislike.  Yet already in this early year these tactics were being used to a great extent, one can only image how much more advanced the methods of advertising are today in 2018.  In a world in which people care so much for themselves and what they have instead of people as a collective, it is not hard to trace some of this behavior back to the large presence of ads. It is the advertising world that tells us exactly how we can become better, healthier, prettier, smarter, and overall happier and the answer they provide to all of these desires is simply buying.  This same philosophy can also be seen in our current political state in which people only care about their problems and needs to the point where they associate themselves only with people of the same wants and needs they have. This is why people focus only on the idea that they are either conservative or liberal instead of realizing that we are all Americans before any other label.