How Ads Target Your Desires (And Turn Them Into Profit)

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Is anyone else sick to death of the manipulative ads that are encroaching on our lives and preying on our weaknesses? In the pursuit of targeting the relevant audience, betting companies are honing in on gambling addicts and alcoholic products teased to alcoholics. In this desire-targeting world, no one’s excluded from manipulation, even children are targeted with randomly generated packs and loot boxes for their favourite games being dangled over them.

As we carry experiences from our childhood, when we grow up surrounded by gambling it carries over to adulthood and becomes normalised. When I was a kid, FIFA was at its peak and I remember begging my dad for FIFA points so I could smugly show off my team to my school mates the next day. The reality was I’d pack someone I already had and I’d go back to my dad for my next fix like he was some sort of virtual drug dealer.    

If these companies went knocking on addicts doors with their new products it would seem predatory but for some reason through a screen it’s permissible. How did we get to this point that the ads we see and the services we use prey on our unhealthy inner desires? And how can we go about pulling the plug of their influence?

How Did We Get Here?

Before I get to the solutions, let me take you back to the early to mid 20th century to learn how we got into this mess.

The breadcrumbs all lead back to this man, Edward Bernays, known as the master of propaganda in America within the realm of public relations. Interestingly, his mother was Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s sister who, like her brother, was obsessed with psychoanalysis, the study of unconscious processes and their influence on our behaviour. And the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, with Bernays finishing what they started but on arguably a grander scale.

His first success that put him on the map was when he convinced American women that cigarettes were a symbol of equality and power, piggy backing on the feminist movement back in 1929. With his Torches of Freedom Campaign, Bernays flipped the perception that smoking was considered unfeminine and singlehandedly broke the taboo of women smoking in public, making cigarettes sales skyrocket.

This success was a Eureka moment for Bernays who realised the power of connecting a product with the public’s unconscious feelings and flipping their perception by representing the inverse. Recognising the importance of knowledge of their target market, he then employed a group of psychoanalysts and founded the institute for motivational research to learn more about the consumers behaviour.

Together they realised, that, just as the adverts we see now, the reasons we buy products is intrinsically tied to our unconscious desires, i.e. the secret side of ourselves. There’s a recent Amazon Prime advert that acknowledged this directly with no awareness of how dystopian it actually sounded, at least to me. To quickly set the scene, a couple is on the sofa, flicking through the Amazon prime recommended and the guy says “It’s like they know what we want to watch before we do”.

Anyway, aside from that example that’s now living in my head rent free, let me clarify what the ultimate aim of an advert is. The goal of any advert is to disarm the consumers unconscious barriers that caused embarrassment or guilt that was stopping them from buying the product.

I’ll now talk about the best example of a product that broke through the consumers guilt barrier, covered in the documentary ‘The Century of the Self’.

The Power of the Focus Group

In the 1950’s, the psychologist Ernest Dichter came up with the Focus Group or more accurately called, a group therapy session. The use of the focus group now is widespread, even the Barbie doll was thought up from a children’s focus group. Before then advertising companies underappreciated the importance of understanding the consumers basic needs.

The major success came when Dichter invited a group of housewives to find out what was stopping them from buying Betty Crocker products. Speaking to the housewives, they learnt that they felt it was too easy pouring a packet and mixing it together compared to baking from scratch. So what did they do? They removed the egg from the mixture so the housewives had to add it in themselves. If they mixed their own egg, this would give them a greater sense of participation, removing the barrier of guilt from the equation. As soon as Betty Crocker implemented this, sales soared and to this day we still have to add an egg ourselves to almost any cake mix.

This success story ramped up exploitative advertising and fast forward to the present and these tactics have only got more refined. With the abundance of personal data at the fingertips of companies, they don’t even need a focus group to know our unconscious desires before we do and their target audience becomes the ones who are most susceptible to being influenced to buy their product.

The technique that was originally named ‘The Strategy of Desire’ by Ernest Dichter is now a quantifiable science that understands and preys on all of our deep desires, often when we’re at our lowest point.

How To Pull the Plug of Their Influence?

Well, I’m not just going to suggest blocking all ads as who knows if a Black Mirror world is on the horizon where adverts will fill our entire room and stop if we look away and avert our eyes. What we need to get better at is rejecting their influence. Drop the ‘d’, call them ‘avertisements’. No more looking at sponsored ads on Facebook that are tailored to you. Make them as irrelevant as possible, turn off targeted ads so it’s as if you were dragged into a store by your girlfriend with no intention of buying anything yourself.

It’s also important to find out your own unconscious desires so that you can have a handle on them. If you’re one of the unlucky ones who’s susceptible to gambling, start laying out the reasons why you think it’s unhealthy so that you can’t be tempted into opening another account with one of those tantalising welcome offers. If you choose to keep your unhealthy tendencies unconscious, the more likely you’ll be controlled, misled to a path that’s not in your best interests by an advert or a service. So it might be best to lay out what’s in your best interests. And finally, avoid being chronically online and experience things in the real world so you can have a grasp on what’s real.

Thanks for reading,

Brandon

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