EVERY OTHER BREATH YOU TAKE

I worked as Director of New Business at a small ad agency in Manhattan at the turn of the century.  The pair leading our agency were old school – our artistic director designed the Evian bottle while our creative director coined the phrase, “Meow Mix – tastes so good cats ask for it by name.” The client roster was loaded with internet and financial companies and we were getting crushed by the collapse of the first internet bubble. Al Qaeda then crashed an airliner into the office of our best client, Cantor Fitzgerald’s E-Speed, located at the top of the World Trade Center.

You learn a lot about how the system works from inside an ad agency.  You get all the basic financial, product and sales data from whatever company and industry the agency works in or pursues.  You learn how the sausage is made because you’re stitching the casing together with art and words.  Using the technology of the time, a good campaign that grabbed the consumer by the emotions would result in a 20 percent increase in sales whether the product was life insurance or beer.

At the turn of the century, Americans were absorbing about two thousand advertising messages per day. We are now battered with more than ten thousand advertising messages per day by technology aimed straight at us using our search history, purchases, demographic data, physical location (down to the specific aisle in the supermarket), psychological profile and even our personal conversations (Hi Alexa!).

Even if you choose not to use the internet, you’re still peppered with junk mail disguised to look like it might be from the government, phone calls from robots, and exposing young children to the nightmare-inducing billboards (the latest ultraviolent movie, TV show or videogame) which loom above our streets and shopping centers.

The end result of this constant attack on our minds is a profound warping of our society as we’re surrounded by ad fictions everywhere we look.  Let me state, for the record, that the more soft drinks you consume, the less you will look like the people in the ads, that buying a new pickup truck will not make you a man, it will make you a person who has an average monthly debt payment of $515, and that large oil companies are not trying to speed the transition off fossil fuels, they’re simply trying to keep us from hitting the political panic button on climate change.

The strange reality of modern life is that the advertising now watches us back with greater clarity and precision than we watch it.  We need spaces free of marketing other than the woods, which are currently on fire in much of the country.

The modern world is incredibly complex and it’d be nice to navigate it without an ad attempting to interrupt our focus more often than every other breath we take. Seriously, we take about sixteen thousand breaths while we’re awake and receive about ten thousand brand messages during that same time.  If you don’t think that is messing our heads up, turn on the TV and look at who our President is.

Every Breath You Take – The Police