Party Business
The best advertising isn’t just lies, it’s a specific kind of lie.
We all know what it feels like to be sold something. Exaggeration, obfuscation, a low awareness the whole truth is being withheld. What’s often less clear, what I find more surprising, is that in most cases a good advert sells you something not just on generally spurious grounds, but as specifically being exactly the thing that it isn’t.
If adverts tell you anything it’s what the product’s worst at. That might sound contradictory but let’s face it, you don’t need to sell strengths - strengths are obvious. Once you’re past the initial task of letting people know a thing exists, your real job is to sell them on its weaknesses. Turn your weaknesses into the main driver of sales and clearly you’re onto a winner.
Car adverts love to show how wild and immersive the experience of driving is, twisting round mountains and splashing through water. The truth is not just that most drivers either crawl through city traffic or mindlessly hurtle down faceless motorways, it’s that even if you were to drive up a mountain, the car would keep you almost entirely insulated from the experience, cushioned even from the bumps in the road.
Sweets are not hallucinogens. Facial surgery makes you look older. Hair is dead and cannot take on nutrients. Beer makes you sad and angry and Stella is one of the cheaper beers available in the UK. Your parents didn’t take you to McDonalds because they loved you, it was just a day where you’d been too stressful to cook for. The irony of our so called materialist society is that we don’t actually care much for the material we fill our lives with. The physical stuff of our existence is largely irrelevant beside the ideas and concepts that these objects come to embody. You don’t buy shoes, you buy perceived style, class, culture. What you buy is the opposite of objects. In this way capitalism is truly immaterialism, every item in your shopping cart a tiny idol.
To be clear I’m not saying that we’re idiots. Or at least as well as saying that, my point is also that it is not accidental that things sell not for the reality of what they are but the fantasy they aren’t. This is an example of John Yorke’s observation that all stories describe change and that the most dramatic change is the transition from one state to its opposite. Life to death. Hate to love. Hero to villain. Rags to riches. The most compelling version of your story is when we end up exactly opposite from where we began. As in Cinderella, as in advertising. The most powerful story is where your product becomes what it isn’t.
My favourite example of this is in politics. When was the Labour Party last succesful? Back in the 90’s once it severed its links with the labour movement. Making “New” mean “Not” is a classic sales move, enabling you to talk both to the people who didn’t like the original and to those who did.
When was the last time the Conservative party conserved anything? In policy terms, the party Johnson inherited was still transfixed by the Thatcherite agenda of absolute free trade. Thatcher was Conservative in appearance only, in action she was a Victorian Liberal, the heir to Gladstone not Disraeli. Who better to sell the ideas that there is no society and that everything is for sale than some monstrous Nanny with a voice like reassuringly nasty medicine?
Of course this inversion of ideologies isn’t entirely advertising, even if it is always salesmanship. The defenders of American democracy may be aptly named the Democrats but only by blind chance and sweet irony. Originally the “Southern Democrats”, or the Dixiecrats, the party was formed to protect the interests of the southern states’ white slave owning minority. Following the Civil War, changes to the franchise and waves of immigration saw the electorate swell with voters who weren’t white or protestant enough to feel welcomed by the WASPs of the GOP. Consequently the Democratic Party became a progressive force through the cynical electoral economics of needing to become whatever big numbers of people would vote for. It didn’t lead but was lead.
Much the same happened in the UK with Johnson and Brexit, a policy which though couched in terms of more-liberalism, freer-trade and a Global Britain, is in practice the Victorian Corn Laws replayed as bitter farce. It is the perfume ad of policy making. An insubstantial mist of ideas amounting only to a series of negations. Of course it was popular, it was the oldest trick in advertising, nothing sold as everything.
Here we see how flat footed progressive parties are, forever mistaking truth for a story. “But it doesn’t add up!” cried the Remainers. “But Democracy!” cry the Democrats. “But the environment!!” cry the Greens, as if Ronseal has ever outsold Chanel. But progressives, after decades of being derided as dreamers have become stuck in the painful realities they cannot change without a better story. If the Green Party really wanted to gain power and radically overhaul our economic relationship to our limited material resources like the sea and the air, then they should relaunch themselves as The Business Party. Surely that’s something we could all vote for…
I realised the other day that the United Kingdom was formed in 1801 and so for the majority of its existence the sovereign has been a woman. Surely it should be the United Queendom.