The marketers in their board rooms and drawing boards create everything that we see and have seen throughout our whole lives. They are there builders and shapers of all we strive for and shun others for not having. They have the power to make anything famous, popular or are instrumental in all fads and beliefs that we hold private and personal to our hearts. They bewilder us with constant wants, needs and are in complete power to spin a picture into something either arbitrary or fantastic; yet in actuality is just a picture. Marketers hold the key to the future trend and the past fad.
“I look out into the world from my lofty office building and watch people pass by and I picture a world where what I want them to think, wear and buy comes from my mind. Mentally I am no smarter than the next guy, but what sets me apart from the other guy is: I’m a marketer and I have a vision of a world to come. The first thing I must do is step into the minds of the people coming within the demographic of the age I need to manipulate. It is not a difficult task, all I have to do is think of that blank wall that in close to me. All the other walls have posters, pictures and degrees on them, but that one blank spot is where I get my inspiration. The second thing to do is think if I were those blank walls what would I want to be put into me? It is true that you could put a picture of anything there that would hold the space and make it less empty sure; but we are talking about people here, they need identity and thus they need a banner to wave. So then I brainstorm about the psychology of people between 18-49, breaking it down into three categories: 18-30, 31-40, 41-49; each one of them feeling somewhat different. Each group has their own needs perpetrated by yours truly, but they don’t know that. That is the first rule in marketing: let the masses think that their own identity and choices came from their heads, not ours. It’s a illusionist game that they play and oh, the people walk that line blindly.
Let’s take for instance a 18 year old boy right out of high school, he’s looking for a new identity to call his own; he’s going to “redefine himself”, so he ends up looking for new music and movies to see. By his age he has taken in countless hours of video games, violent movies, trite music, and animated comedies with not so subtle messages about pramatist political debates. Let’s take the animated show Family Guy for instance: the kids 18 and younger love the show, but when you ask them what it’s about what do they say? They say it’s “funny, wacky, and that it’s about a family” but how many of them realize that there’s episodes that include: gay agendas, race issues, and anti-establishment messages? Yet if they threw out the animation and these same “funny topics” were on CSPAN or Lou Dobbs was talking about it, how many of those laughing kids would say they would watch that? What’s the difference? Ah, it’s the animation that gets them. It’s catered to young people, for it gives them a throwback to their childhood growing up drinking of a juicebox in front of the old TV. Yet in contrast to watching those shows from the past the messages weren’t so blantant or even involved at all as they are today. What’s the difference? The difference is all a show has to do is market itself as a show of laughs and hilarity to bring in enough people that it stays on for many years. South Park another political animated show, the writers took it upon themselves to break Family Guy down and showed the masses that it was all hype and that the storylines are fruitless and arbitrary. The funny part is this is the same show that starred Terrence and Phillip that just farted for hilarity. Yet the people overlooked that and some people started to exit Family Guy and enter South Park instead. They had made a dividing line of what was “cool” and what wasn’t. Did they do it really?
The cult of “cool” has been written in the annals of marketing for decades. We helped shape every trend, fad and pop culture icon since the 1950′s. From Elvis the counter-culture blue collar hero, to Motown the Motor City black music trend, to the hippies putting flowers in their hair and shouting down the war. I remember in the 1960′s when the war was at its peak, I looked out my window from my office building and I saw protesters playing the music I made popular and the look that had been signed off on my drawing board just a few years previous. it made me quite happy to see those people with something that filled up their empty walls, yet as a young marketer I felt a bit of disillusion by it all and I wondered how did those young people get so empty that all I had to do was pitch an image that took up as righteously as if God himself had given to them. I didn’t understand how those people could be protesting something that they didn’t even understand, then I soon realized that the war was being chatised in the media for being an unjust war. I didn’t have any friends in the media at that time and I saw them as a different animal, yet I soon became aware that they were my right hand. As soon as I pitched an idea it would be on the TV and then it would be on the crowds below me; it didn’t matter how ridiculous or arbitrary it was. I took things out of the trash can that I thought were too stupid for the intellgent masses, yet the very next day someone was carrying, wearing, listening and/or watching. I started to see the masses as not people any longer, but empty shells that needed everything I could give them. If I wasn’t creating, satirizing and making so much money for it I would have felt sorry for them, I didn’t. It wasn’t and isn’t for the money so much, it’s just the hilarity I get by pitching an idea that I would not like or listen to and that I can use my psychology of the masses to submit to my thought building creativity.
The youth are incredibly absentminded and shallow, take that 18 year old boy that needs a lifestyle makeover I was theorizing from before, if it is either funny, sexy, exciting or aggressive I have a product for him. For him it’s more than just a movie or music, it’s an identity. He sees Transformers 2 and wants to get the merchandise, the music soundtrack, the video game, and above all he wants to get all his friends to get all those same things and more. What does it do for him? It gives him a shallow feeling state that he can be the center of something that is 2 1/2 hours and over. There is nothing in an action movie that can shape anything in a person’s life, besides going into the military. Yet for this 18 year old let’s call him Russ; wants to be a part of something and to also ridicule his friends for not having what he has. What does he have? After a month, nothing but a pile of outdated “played out” junk. Does he learn the lesson that the movie industry won’t give him what he needs to fill up his loneliness of soul? No, but he does look forward to when Sasha Baron Cohen’s pro-homosexuality vehicle, Bruno is in theaters. Does Russ and his friends like gays? Well they don’t hate them because if they hated them then they would have one less thing that all their conforming friends would have to compete and rally around.
Conformity is an important aspect of people even though governments fight wars for “freedom” overseas, while domestically if the masses don’t like the right music, have odd friends and aren’t patriotic in certain circles makes one a non-conformist. Yet what is a non-conformist? Do they really exist? I come to realize that no, they don’t. Conforming is what glues us to our ancient animal relatives: instinct conforms the animals to sing in the morning and hunt at dusk. Man believes himself to be better than beast by celebrating the notion of freewill. A doctrine makes believe that man doesn’t follow trends, but creates them. The average person creates nothing. We create everything. We give them an instinct of what is good fashion, perfect beauty, feelings behind race, who’s famous, who’s important, what’s cool, what’s a classic, what’s history and/or what’s a conspiracy. Why do people conform in circles that preach individualism, but what to give that up for some cause or band to follow? The people today are no different from primitive man, so much that they see a tribe in a sports team, musical group, TV show, mainstream political affiliation and opinion, style of clothes, and the overall worship of the famous people. Marketers like me cater to the primitive needs of the people and give them something to buy and believe in, we in turn help their lives get fuller. Strangely enough they don’t see it, but we are in charge of their perception bending reality. It isn’t our fault that they shallow, empty sacks that have to consume media spins and products to live, for we benefit in their gullibility. If they only stepped out of the way of the marketing, media train they would see every choice they decided upon for their identity was out of my head. To the many cliques I spin the appearance of a figure that they all want to be like, the Breakfast Club generations, a part for everyone.
Well that’s all the time I have for this. I have minds to shape and illusions to grow, Russ needs a new identity and I have the next one for him.
Farewell.”
