A few more signal tricks rounded out the medicine advertising approach. Perhaps chief among these was the “secret ingredient.” Every patent medicine needed something to set it apart from all the others making similar claims, some kind of mysterious element that was not and perhaps could not be fully explained. It fired the imagination, feeding hope where reason offered thin gruel. Carbolic smoke; swamp root; baobab fruit; and in the case of Clark Stanley’s liniment, the secret was, of course, the magic of snake oil itself.
It is easy to ascribe the success of such hokum to the gullibility of another age, until we stop to reflect that the techniques successfully used to sell patent medicine are still routinely used today. The lotions and potions of our times inevitably promise youthfulness, health, or weight loss, thanks to exotic ingredients like antioxidants, amino acids, miracle fruits like the pomegranate and açaí berry, extracted ketones, or biofactors. There is scarcely a shampoo or lotion for sale that does not promise an extraordinary result owing to essence of coconut, or rosemary extracts, or another botanical. As devotees of technology we are, if anything, more susceptible to the supposed degree of difference afforded by some ingenious proprietary innovation, like the “air” in Nike’s sports shoes, triple reverse osmosis in some brands of water, or the gold-plating of audio component cables. For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.
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It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life’s immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels.
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Mainly, though, it was no single invention that marked the government’s effort so much as its massive scale and organization. In this, the British anticipated an insight that would be expressed by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul halfway through the twentieth century: to succeed, propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means and media available in his time—movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing in one century, social media in another, as the rise of ISIS attests. Where there is only sporadic or random effort—a planted newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, a few slogans sprayed on walls—this modern form of attention capture does not bear its once unimagined fruit.
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Halitosis—Makes you Unpopular” was the headline of Listerine’s campaign. Originally a disinfectant, invented for medical usage on the battlefield, the brown liquid had also been marketed as a floor cleaner. But in the 1920s, under new management, the manufacturer presented it as a cure for a devastating problem countless Americans were unwittingly afflicted with. “No matter how charming you may be or how fond of you your friends are, you cannot expect them to put up with halitosis (unpleasant breath) forever. They may be nice to you—but it is an effort.”
The ominously clinical-sounding “halitosis” was a largely unheard of word when Listerine introduced it. But they rightly gauged the human psyche and the tenor of the times by stirring fears about a problem everyone encounters in others from time to time without comment. Directing this kind of scrutiny to it can’t help but make one wonder about one’s own breath (as you yourself may now be doing). The campaign was a masterpiece of demand engineering, and between 1922 and 1929, the Listerine company’s annual earnings rose from $115,000 to over $8 million.
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In general, German war propaganda made the elementary error—common among clever people and experts, and familiar to the great ancient orators—of jumping into the complex merits of an issue before having engaged the listener. With their reductive messages and vivid imagery, the British and Americans handily avoided that blunder
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Small magazines like Verge, Vox, Quartz, and the Awl; even some efforts to reboot blogging, like the Medium.
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As Oxford ethicist James Williams put it :
Your goals are things like “spend more time with the kids,” “learn to play the zither,” “lose twenty pounds by summer,” “finish my degree,” etc. Your time is scarce, and you know it. Your technologies, on the other hand, are trying to maximize goals like “Time on Site,” “Number of Video Views,” “Number of Pageviews,” and so on. Hence clickbait, hence auto-playing videos, hence avalanches of notifications. Your time is scarce, and your technologies know it.
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It was William James, the fount of American Pragmatism, who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived. That, if nothing else, ought to compel a greater scrutiny of the countless bargains to which we routinely submit, and, even more important, lead us to consider the necessity, at times, of not dealing at all. If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have.