How Sigmund Freud’s Ideas Gave Rise to the Modern Advertising Industry
The industry still employs Freud’s theories to conjure new desires from the depths of our subconscious.
This is the story of how the advertising industry became one of the most profitable industries in the world by using theories and techniques of psychoanalysis — an art and science that emerged at about the same time as the modern ad industry itself — techniques that still drive the industry’s fundamental task and raison d’etre: the creation of new desires.
This will be a visual journey through 19th and 20th century advertising, but to keep us focused, I’m going to stick with ads for one kind of product that was sold and marketed everywhere, bought by everyone, both then and today: soap.
THE EARLIEST AMERICAN PRINT ADS
So let’s start with the earliest American print ads of the 1800s. They worked in a way that would perhaps seem too blunt today; they were totally unsubtle. Just look at this ad for Simpson Iodine Soap.
These earliest ads took this straight-forwardly rational approach of using — or at least seeming to use — simple information to persuade people to make a conscious, reasoned choice to buy a product, and they did this by convincing the viewer that the product would meet some specific need they had, and that it was a good value for the money. This Lifebuoy ad is a prime example:
At the time, the print advertisement wouldn’t have even been a genre of media that the public recognized. And since “advertisement” wasn’t yet a category of media that most people had in their heads, the ads probably seemed to readers like another piece of writing in whatever pamphlet or publication they appeared in. Now, looking at them, they’re pretty similar to a recent advertising trend — the the faux-journalistic “native advertisements”, “sponsored content”, and “advertorials” that crop up in print today. (Like this New York Times “article”, which is actually a paid advertisement for Orange Is The New Black.)
Ads at the time often looked more like public service announcements:
Or like profiles of a company written by the publication:
Or like expert testimonials, like this Trefosa soap ad featuring a doctor figure lauding the health and hygienic benefits of the product:
THE IDEOLOGY OF A NEW PROFESSION
Since there was not yet an advertising industry, there weren’t any professional ad designers, and so the early ones were drafted by corporate managers, people who had no special training in the principles or methods of consumer persuasion, since no one had at that point ever really studied those topics. The basic philosophy that guided those early manager-advertisers was rooted in the “common sense” conception of how the market and human psychology worked. That is, the belief was that consumers were just regular ol’ rational people with practical needs, and every purchase was motivated by the same two conditions:
- The thing being purchased clearly satisfied some practical need.
- The benefit buying the product outweighed the cost of paying for it.
Advertising was simple. Businesses simply needed to convince consumers that their product would do something useful for a fair price, and they would buy it. It would be irrational for them not to buy such a product as long as they could afford it. Because it was such simple business, even the largest companies budgeted very little for advertising, and the work of designing and placing ads was just left to lower level business managers.
This success of this straight-forward, commonsense advertising strategy is hard to gauge, given the lack of solid data about ad circulation and product performances. But if the growth rate of the ad industry is any indication, companies generally found ads to be a good investment, and soon the initial handful of New York “ad men” multiplied and divided. And soon they began creating a totally new kind of company, whose product was the ad itself. Marketing had become its own industry.
The early days of the marketing industry were a kind of wild west, with companies competing with one another and experimenting wildly with different approaches to making advertising imagery.
SHATTERING THE IMAGE OF MAN AND THE IDEOLOGY OF THE MARKET
This was a period marked by massive, and totally unanticipated political, ideological, and economic shifts that were taking place all over the world. No one’s beliefs were shaken more than the economists and businessmen. For, evidence was continually mounting against the ideological foundation of Western capitalism: the belief that humans were predictably rational, and that people’s choices — to spend money, or vote, or do anything else — were the product of their consciously weighing costs and benefits, and then choosing reasonably. Events like First World War, the collapse of the American economy, and the ensuing Great Depression were the products of a kind of mass irrationality so powerful and catastrophic that were impossible to explain as the results of collective behavior of rational individuals, and so this image of man was shattered.
It was becoming clear that there were other motivating forces — forces that operate beneath our conscious, rational thoughts — that were responsible for driving humans by the millions to behave so contrary to economists’ idea of the “rational consumer”.
And so, just as economists and philosophers and social scientists had begun to suspect there were forces driving human action that their disciplines simply could not explain, another very different discipline was being born — one that could describe and explain the non-rational forces that drive human action.
This discipline was being developed by a young Austrian doctor named Sigmund Freud, who called his method “Psychoanalysis”.
PSYCHOANALYSIS, HUMAN NATURE, & CAPITALISM
Psychoanalysis recognized that we are driven not only by reason, but just as often by swarms of desires, emotions, fantasies, and insecurities that operate behind the veil of conscious rationality.
As the ideas of psychoanalysis spread beyond the medical and academic communities, the concept of unconscious, irrational (or a-rational) drives soon gained the interest of corporations, who were eager to find ways to harness them to promote products.
Just as this new corporate interest was gaining momentum, its reigns were grasped by a cunning young New York consultant named Eddie Bernays. Bernays, who would eventually become known as a father of modern advertising, had a keen awareness of our non-rational drives. And so he should, for that interest had been nurtured in him during youth spent in Europe near his uncle, Sigmund Freud.
Bernays’ client list is a roster of the most profitable ventures in American history, among them the American Tobacco Company, Proctor and Gamble, Cartier, as well as political clients like Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.
His campaigns convinced American women to adopt the then exclusively-masculine habit of smoking, prompted the CIA overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, and made bacon and eggs the signature American breakfast.
SELLING TO THE SUBCONSCIOUS
Bernays clearly knew how to sway the public. He and the advertisers who quickly adopted his approach completely quit talking about practical value in their adverts.
Instead, they started portraying products as symbols of satisfaction for our unconscious desires and fantasies.
Car advertisements ignored facts about excellent gas mileage and reliability to focus on artfully presenting the car as a symbol of sexual virility, or freedom from the slavery of work and family life. Coke was no longer a tasty beverage good for quenching thirst, but became The Real Thing that we have been longing for, the satisfaction to our need to experience authenticity.
This new advertising strategy was given even more momentum because it seemed like the perfect solution to a growing fear that had gripped economists and businessmen, and it was the supreme capitalist nightmare: If human needs were stable, well-defined, and satiable, it seemed inevitable that an efficient market was headed toward a day when, at least in the case of many products, everyone would have bought all that they needed, and production would simply stop.
The burden of finding a way of fending off this capitalist nightmare lay on the shoulders of advertisers, who would use their newly acquired psychoanalytic skills to cleverly manipulate the public’s desires so that even if the day came when we had bought all we needed, we would still go on buying other things simply because we wanted them.
This strategy is perfectly summarized by Lehman Brothers executive Paul Mazur, in a 1927 piece he wrote for the Harvard Business Review. In it, Mazur counsels his fellow marketers and ad men:
“We must shift America from a needs, to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old had been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” (emphasis mine)
In order for the market to keep churning out goods that would satisfy public desires, Mazur says, the market must not only create new products, it must generate in the public new desires as well.
Mazur struck a similar tone a year later when he reflected that “Human nature very conveniently presents a variety of strings upon which an appreciative sales manager can play fortissimo”. What might these strings be? Mazur identifies a few: “threats, beauty, sparkle” and “fear…”.
THE NEW ADVERTISEMENTS
The advertising industry proved a faithful disciple of both Bernays and Mazur. Advertisements grew more imaginative and psychoanalytically sophisticated in the way they pulled the strings of our sub-conscious to generate desires that outstripped our needs.
So now consider the clear difference in tone, style, substance, and message between the soap ads below. The first pair are pre-Bernays advertisements, while the second pair reflect the new ideology of the industry. Both pairs are from the same two companies.
The first pair lauds the soap’s objective qualities (e.g. it floats, or has antiseptic properties, or it is modestly priced), and implies that we should purchase their product because it will satisfy a clear need we have (to wash our hands and bodies).
This second pair is much different, a product of the new philosophy championed by the ideological influence of people like Bernays and Mazur. Notice how they avoid mentioning the product’s actual qualities altogether, and instead present the product — soap! — as a symbol of sexual fulfillment, or a solution to one’s insecurity or longing for love.
Advertisers were becoming adept at identifying and exploiting our deepest desires and fears, the ones we hide and suppress in our everyday lives, the ones we push below the threshold of conscious thought.
MINING THE INEXHAUSTIBLE WELL OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
What this all meant is that our sub-conscious desires and fears were an inexhaustible machine for generating consumption, if only the advertiser could find a way to present the product as a symbol of our fulfillment. It didn’t matter how unrelated the product was to the actual concern, because the ads worked below the level of conscious reason.
Advertisers honed in on a deep emotional concern — in this case, the female viewer’s fear of spousal abandonment — and simply presented their product as a means of fending off that fear. Never mind that a mere moment of rational thought made it clear how preposterous the basic suggestion was — that switching soap brands could save a marriage. It simply did not matter. If advertisers could understand an unconscious desire or fear, they could exploit it. And the better they understood it, the more effectively they could leverage it to generate sales.
It’s not clear how common this fear of abandonment was among wives who would have viewed these ads, but in her book Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, sociologist Stephanie Coontz offers five significant reasons why many women of the time would have feared abandonment:
- Losing her marriage meant losing all economic stability.
- Until as late as the 1950s, four-fifths of Americans felt that singleness was a sign that a person was “sick, neurotic, or immoral”, an attitude that intensified the stigma borne by the divorcee.
- A divorced woman had generally poor prospects of remarriage.
- The ability to dissolve a marriage lay almost entirely with the husband up to the early to mid 19th century, and a woman’s power to resist being divorced was very weak, making marital abandonment a uniquely female fear.
- The popular attitudes toward male and female infidelity were generally forgiving toward the man, yet tended to demonize the woman.
Consider how someone in the position Coontz describes would have experienced ads like these:
Warning — to careless youth — to discouraged age — to women fo all ages who know…but too often forget, the lure of a soft, seductive skin.
Don’t ignore it! Never forget it! Remember — there is a simple, easy way to guard the inviting skin of youth…to win back the charm that you may think you are losing as you grow older.
WHY YOU WEAR DEODORANT
This style of predatory psychoanalytic advertisement preyed upon the viewer’s deep, irrational insecurities by conjuring paranoid images of what others might actually be thinking, or even saying about her behind her back.
This eventually crystallized into a distinct genre called “Whisper Copy” — ads whose “copy “ (i.e. text) advertised products through images of whispered gossip about the viewer.
No doubt, there were ads crafted to exploit every conceivable insecurity, in a process of trial and error to discover which of the public’s insecurities leveraged most profit. As it turns out, women’s fear that others were offended by their body odor was a gold mine — albeit one that took some initial digging to develop. The result though was a conclusion obvious to the viewer: If you want to keep a man, you’d better not smell.
And this is a perfect example of how marketer’s achieves Mazur’s goal of creating entirely new desires that would drive use to consume beyond our needs.
There is little evidence that body odor was a serious social concern for many prior to its exploitation through whisper copy. The first mass market deodorant, Odorono, was an abject market failure until it was rebranded as a curative for “excessive perspiration” rather than body odor, and a 1919 survey found that while nearly every woman knew effective deodorants were widely available, about 70% of them simply “felt they had no need” for the product.
Body odor was a small realization of the economic nightmare mentioned above — a point at which the public overwhelmingly felt that their needs had been fully satisfied, and so the market had nothing left to offer them.
But advertisers saved the day, achieving Mazur’s goal of creating new desires by using Bernays’ method of exploiting consumers’ sub-conscious feelings, in this case, by preying again on a woman’s fear of being alone. Here is the text from an ad from the period, for Mum deodorant:
Wake up, Mary! It’s a grand old world, and you’re missing it!
You’re a pretty girl, Mary, and you’re smart about most things. But you’re just a bit stupid about yourself.
You love a good time — but you seldom have one. Evening after evening you sit at home alone…
There are so many pretty Marys in the world who never seem to sense the real reason for their aloneness.
In this smart modern age, it’s against the code for a girl (or a man, either) to carry the repellent odor of underarm perspiration on clothing and person.
It’s a fault which never fails to carry its own punishment — unpopularity. And justly. For it is a fault which can be corrected in just half a minute — with Mum!
It is tempting to conclude that campaigns like this one are what transformed deodorant from a product the vast majority of the public felt they had no need for, into a product that most of us use every single day.
The truth, however, is that the ads did not change the product at all. They changed the public — from one that felt just fine without the product, to one that feared going a day without it. And they did this by exploiting individuals’ fear of rejection, and framing the product as the means of avoiding humiliation, rejection, and loneliness — all of the contents of our mind that lay below a surface first penetrated by Sigmund Freud, the Jacques Cousteau of the mind.
A NEW ALCHEMY: REMAKING REALITY IN THE IMAGE OF THE AD
The human unconscious remains to this day the advertiser’s most powerful tool, for it fulfill’s Mazur’s command: that the market cultivate entirely new desires and attitudes in the public, attitudes that may not even have existed in the first place.
This has a bizarre effect though. Advertisements can create a kind of feedback loop through which social attitudes and feelings that are represented as reality in the advert can actually become real.
For example, by presenting a scene where body odor is a topic of gossip, viewers are invited to reproduce the scene itself, and they’re invited to adopt the attitudes of those pictured. This circle of influence by which something depicted as real actually breaks through and becomes real is a process philosopher René Girard calls mimesis.
Just look at how another deodorant advertisement of the time pivots from the female consumer to the male viewer, not to convince him to buy, but to invite him to feel disgust toward the odor of a woman’s body:
“Remember, men avoid girls who offend!…”
“Never again for me, Tom! Janet’s a peach of a girl and a swell dancer, but some things get a man down. Too bad somebody doesn’t tip her off. Other girls know how to avoid underarm odor.”
This is the supreme danger presented by an advertising industry that operates in this way. And it is my fundamental criticism of the industry.
Corporations will undoubtedly choose to run ads that invite us to adopt new attitudes, beliefs, and values because they will generate consumption and profit, regardless of whether these new attitudes align with our best interests. It is not merely a matter of whether corporations will choose to be ethical or not. This is a matter of survival, because corporations depends on their ability to continuously mold the psychology of the public, to keep our desires and attitudes shifting so that we keep consuming, to make sure we feel perpetual need, and to make us believe that products — in reality totally mundane things — are what will satisfy deep desires, or protect us from deep fears, but these fears and desires are very often created by ad media to sell the product in the first place.
CONCLUSION: READING ADVERTISEMENTS AS PROPAGANDA IN THE WAR TO CONTROL OUR UNCONSCIOUS
It is this power, to shape the consumer, that fueled the growth from a handful of hapless ad-writers into an industry that can spend half a trillion dollars a year manipulating the public’s psychology, very often against our own interests. And while I’ve focused here on the ads produced by the adolescent ad industry, it’s not hard to see how this same strategy has been refined to produce many of the advertisements we encounter today. I leave it to you, for now, to see beyond their surface of the thousand or so ads you see every day. Perhaps a sequel to this article will appear at some point, focusing on modern ad imagery.
In any case, I don’t mean to suggest we should dismantle the industry. There is no hope of toppling the trillion-dollar behemoth today, and perhaps there are good reasons we would not want to. What I want is to encourage us all to take a very critical stance toward advertising images, to pay attention to the values and attitudes they present, and they way they use those to pry into the deeper parts of our selves, where they can play upon our fears and fantasies. Because the fact is that, right now, advertisers are seeking out even more effective ways to exploit our deepest psychological vulnerabilities (what are called “pain points” in modern marketing lingo).
The benefit of shaping our view of the world and ourselves, for the corporations, is clear: monetary profit. But, to see the world through the lenses advertisers push on us, the cost to us is not merely monetary. We don’t just end up spending money on things we never needed and only want because we’ve been manipulated. We often pay an even greater cost, because in shifting our view of ourselves and our world, we often give up valuable or intimate pieces of our own unique way of experiencing the world.
Like, for instance, the belief that body odor can be kind of sexy.
Thanks for reading!
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