"The truth isn't the the truth until people believe you.
- Advertising Icon, Bill Bernbach
"I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes.
- Advertising Legend, Phil Dusenberry, BBDO
Fifty years after Vance Packard's ground breaking "The Hidden Persuaders," Jeffrey Robinson puts this multi-billion pound industry under the microscope.
From the pioneering post-war boom years of the fifties to the present day, he describes the key players and ground-breaking campaigns that took advertising -- and manipulation -- to an art form.
He examines advertising's attempts to utilize science, from the early search for the industry's elusive Holy Grail, subliminal perception, to the advances in research and technique that have brought into play tools like psychographics and neuro-linguistic programming.
Showing how art and science combine to target individuals more precisely and make us complicit in our own seduction, Robinson argues that advertising has become the dominant cultural force, defining our very hopes and dreams.
As advertising adjusts to the almost unimaginable opportunities offered by the digital revolution, The Manipulators is an entertaining and timely look at the past, present and future of this global industry.
It wasn’t by chance that the 1960s became “The Swinging ‘60s.”
Nor was it by chance that what happened on Madison Avenue in the years leading up to “The Mad Men” Decade --- when Vance Packard wrote “The Hidden Persuaders” --- and what has happened as a result of those years, has changed the world.
This is a story about casting spells. About filling our heads with some catchy tune or a neat slogan that will throb gently in the hidden layers of our brain. About touching buttons; parceling intellect and emotion together; finding ways of saying one thing on the surface and something else beneath it; targeting our hopes; remolding our ambitions; allaying our fears; helping us mascara the face we put on to meet other faces. About selling us back ourselves; priming us for that singular moment when we spot their product somewhere and find ourselves reaching for it, almost uncontrollably, dropping it in our shopping basket, paying for it and bringing it home; then making that product an integral part of our lives, all of this without us ever wondering, why?
This is the unmasking of “The Hidden Persuaders” and how the real “Mad Men” get us to spend.
The Independent: "... thorough, well researched... continues to fascinate."