Brandwashed Page 29
Often we unwittingly give companies permission to share our personal information with other companies and advertisers by blindly agreeing to “terms of service” or “license agreements” on sites like the iTunes store. It’s no secret that companies bury all kinds of privacy waivers in pages and pages of writing so complex, tedious, and confusing only a member of Mensa using a microscope could decipher it. But take a guess how many people read these disclaimers, known in industry circles as “EULAs” (end-user license agreements)—before clicking “yes” or “I agree”? According to a 2009 study conducted by the New York University School of Law, of the 45,091 households tracked over a thirty-day period, only one or two per every thousand shoppers (that’s about 0.01 percent) spent longer than a single second reading a product’s EULA,45 and what’s more, the 2005 National Spyware Study by Ponemon Institute found that only 13 percent of people bother to read EULAs before they download free software.
Did you bother to read the latest Apple iTunes user agreement? Me neither—so let’s review what it says. Included are new terms and conditions in which Apple asks—or rather, requires—that iTunes users consent to let Apple know where their iPhone, iBook, or MacBook is at any time. In other words, if you want to use the Apple iTunes store (and it won’t let you in until you click “I accept”), you have to agree to let Apple track your computer in real time 24/7 and share that information with third parties. (Don’t forget that Apple knows a lot about you already, including all your past purchases and your credit card number, which it keeps on file.) No wonder Germany responded to Apple’s demands with the country’s federal justice commissioner insisting that Apple without delay “disclose the details of the location data it is collecting from handhelds,” and that in the United States the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus has demanded that Steve Jobs explain the sudden appearance of this new policy and how, precisely, he intends to guarantee users’ anonymity.46
A few years ago a neat little April Fool’s joke revealed just how little attention we pay to this kind of fine print. Gamestation, a British online video game retailer, playfully buried a clause in its terms and conditions that read, “By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant us a non transferable option to claim, now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should we wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from gamestation.co.uk or one of its duly authorized minions.” 47 How many souls did the company capture? Roughly 7,500, or 88 percent of all the people who bought stuff from the site on that April 1. April Fool’s!
A Postprivacy Society
Yes, it’s true that we as consumers are partly to blame for all that companies know about us. We place way too much information online. We blog. We chat. We tweet. We play Foursquare. We post our favorite YouTube videos. We enter our credit card numbers every time we want to buy a book, a T‑shirt, a plane ticket, and more. We announce to our Facebook friends where we’re going on vacation, that we like Pink Floyd, Cold Stone ice cream, Pixar, and House. And each time we do, we’re playing right into the hands of the data miners.
It’s no huge surprise, given how much of their lives the younger generation spends on Facebook and Twitter, that when I gathered groups of teenagers from across the country to talk about privacy (in conjunction with the recruitment firm Murray Hill Associates), the word “privacy” appeared to mean nothing to them; either they were completely indifferent to the subject or they’d completely given up on it. It was a little chilling.
It should also come as no surprise, given how much time today’s kids spend online, that data miners are collecting information about children as young as four or five. Some do this via online questionnaires that pop up on kid-friendly sites, asking kids their age, favorite toys and cartoon characters, and buying behavior, and sometimes even the buying behavior of their parents. Your kid wants to register for the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes kids’ Web site? Well, he’ll have to join first, by giving his first name, answering a security question, and offering up his parents’—i.e., your—e‑mail address. Once you’ve answered with a confirming e‑mail, Warner Bros. will ask for your child’s e‑mail address, followed by his zip code and year of birth, and then will require you to check a box agreeing to the terms of agreement on his behalf. What are those terms of agreement? According to the Web site, “We may ask them to provide us with their first name, hometown, and e‑mail address. On some pages of our sites, such as where children can send electronic postcards to their friends, we also may ask your child to provide personal information about other people.” 48
Then again, even if your kids don’t sign up for the Looney Tunes Web site, it’s not too difficult for marketers to mine data about them given the fact that, according to Internet security firm AVG, 92 percent of American children have a digital footprint before the age of two,49 7 percent of babies exit the womb to find they already have an existing e‑mail address, and 5 percent have a social network profile (and almost a quarter of all newborns already have a photographic presence online, too, as 23 percent of parents upload their sonogram photos online). And as social networking becomes even more ubiquitous, there’s no question in my mind that these numbers will continue to grow. Remarks J. R. Smith, the CEO of AVG, “It’s shocking to think that a 30-year-old has an online footprint stretching back 10–15 years at most, while the vast majority of children today will have online presence that will continue to build throughout their whole lives.” He also cautions parents to be mindful of the privacy settings on Web sites where parents “share” photos and information about their children, including YouTube and Flickr.50
Still, while many of us are fully aware that all these details about our likes, dislikes, habits, and personal lives are out there floating around in the ether, most of us are ignorant of the extent to which every movement we make, every step we take, every item we buy is being recorded and transcribed onto an indelible digital footprint that stays with us for the rest of our lives (and in fact will outlive us long after we’re gone). As the New York Times notes, all of us are members of “the post-privacy society, where we have lost track of how many entities are tracking us. Not to mention what they are doing with our personal information, how they are storing it, whom they might be selling our dossiers to and yes, how much money they are making off them.” 51
It’s true. We are living in a postprivacy society. Nothing drove this point home more for me than a poignant irony IBM boss Sam Palmisano noted in a recent speech: that today, some thirty-two closed-circuit cameras sit within two hundred yards of the London flat where author George Orwell wrote 1984, his dystopian book about the prying eyes of Big Brother.
So yes, we all know that every time we tweet our whereabouts on Twitter, update our Facebook profiles, buy something online with our credit card, or swipe our reward card at a drugstore, we’re letting information about ourselves out into the world. But we don’t fully realize that every time we do, we’re essentially giving companies and marketers permission to record, store, compile, and analyze every last bit of information we choose to share—and many pieces of information we don’t—and then turn around and use it to trick, manipulate, and seduce us into buying more stuff. The fact is, as our world becomes increasingly networked, digitized, and hyperconnected and we inevitably conduct even more of our lives online, it will become harder and harder to escape the prying gaze of the data miners. Sure, we could toss out our cell phones, deactivate our Facebook profiles, and cancel our credit cards, but let’s get real. We’re far too brandwashed to do anything as drastic as that.
CONCLUSION
It was close to midnight, Pacific Standard Time, as one truck after another crept down a quiet, gated village road in the heart of Laguna Beach, one of the most beautiful oceanside communities in Southern California (as well as one of the most affluent and most expensive: the m
edian income for a family is $146,562, and the average home price easily tops $1 million). Most of the ornate, sprawling stucco houses were in shadows, their owners asleep—with the exception of the very last house on the block. Considering the time of night, it was unusual to see one, let alone several, vehicles on the road. Yet five or six trucks stood silhouetted in the driveway and along the front curb, as workers silently unloaded camera equipment and cardboard boxes, then carried them inside the house.
What was about to take place over the next eight weeks was among the most risky and unconventional operations my team and I had ever concocted. If a single person in the neighborhood had found out what we were up to, the entire project (which we’d been planning and preparing over the past six months) would be jeopardized. Why? Because the families in this upscale neighborhood could have no idea they were about to become unwitting participants in a massive, $3 million social experiment whose results would reveal a side of consumer behavior few of them would have believed.
Inspired by the 2010 Hollywood movie The Joneses, about a family of stealth marketers who move into an upper-middle-class neighborhood to peddle their wares to their unsuspecting neighbors, my scheme was both simple and ambitious: to test the power of word-of-mouth marketing. I would create a real-life version of the film, taking a real-life California family, dropping them in a real-life California neighborhood, and then film them in every waking moment as they went about covertly persuading friends, colleagues, and loved ones to buy a number of carefully selected brands.
First step: I hired one of America’s top reality-show casting directors (Marcy Tishk, who has worked on shows ranging from Jersey Shore to Paris Hilton’s My New BFF) and producer Andy McEntee (whose credits include The Millionaire Matchmaker and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition) to narrow a large field of candidates to select our perfect all-American family. If our experiment was to succeed, the Morgenson family had to represent a perfect mix of ages, styles, interests, and aspirational values. After a lengthy search, Marcy and Andy found their ideal candidates in Eric and Gina Morgenson and their three sons, Jack, Sam, and Max—a successful, good-looking, picture-perfect Southern California family who agreed to make it their life’s mission (well, for at least a month) to discreetly persuade their neighbors to buy a broad array of products.
Let’s meet them.
Eric Morgenson: In his midforties, with a degree from an East Coast college, Eric is a successful, compassionate, funny, sports-obsessed, and involved father (with a latent party-hearty streak).
Gina Morgenson: Sophisticated, charming, and popular, Gina is politically and environmentally aware, as well as a fashion trendsetter among her friends.
Jack, Sam, and Max Morgenson: As sports-crazy and outdoorsy as their father, Jack, Sam, and Max are hip, handsome Justin Bieber–esque Southern California adolescents (ages sixteen, fourteen, and twelve), smitten with music, skateboarding, technology, and, like most teens and tweens, the latest brands and styles.
Now I want you to picture the scene that took place several days later.
In the Morgensons’ spacious yard (complete with heated in-ground swimming pool, Toro-mowed and impeccably landscaped lawn, and three-car garage housing a 2005 Ford Expedition Eddie Bauer edition, a 2008 BMW 750Li, and a 2008 Nissan Altima coupe), Eric Morgenson shows off his grilling techniques and new Frontgate and T.J. Maxx barbecue tools to a handful of male buddies. Two hundred feet away, Gina Morgenson is entertaining a group of female friends in her state-of-the-art kitchen (containing an array of top-of-the-line KitchenAid appliances, including a combination microwave-oven, induction cooktop, ice maker, trash compactor, toaster, immersion blender, and water filter), gushing about how hard she’s fallen for a beautiful new jewelry line. Upstairs, Jack, Sam, Max, and a few school friends play the newest game on Xbox while showing off the hip new Vans and etnie sneakers they’ve recently picked up on a family shopping spree.
The point of this multimillion-dollar experiment was to test the seductive power of word-of-mouth marketing. By filming a “real” family in spontaneous, unscripted situations and scenarios like these, from barbecues to champagne brunches to shopping expeditions, we would document how the Morgensons’ circle of friends responded to specific brands and products the Morgensons brought into their lives. When put face-to-face with another family’s “enviable” lifestyle—and the brands and products that sustain it—would they want all the things that family has? And more important, would this influence be so powerful as to make them actually go out and buy those things?
With the help of thirty-five video cameras (seventeen hidden from view) and twenty-five microphones tucked away inside the furniture and fixtures, providing us with a 360-degree view of every room in the house, so we could follow the Morgensons wherever they went, the results of this clandestine operation would ultimately reveal something shocking: that the most powerful hidden persuader of them all isn’t in your television set or on the shelves of your supermarket or even lurking in your smart phone. It’s a far more pervasive influence that’s around you virtually every waking moment, brandwashing you in ways you don’t even realize: your very own friends and neighbors.
You Run Your Mouth and I’ll Run My Business
Over these past pages, we’ve learned that few, if any, accidents take place in the marketing and advertising world. We’ve looked at many of the tricks, machinations, untruths, and manipulations that marketers and advertisers use to pressure, cajole, and entice us. We’ve seen how they use fear, sex, celebrity, New Age promises, insecurity, nostalgia, data mining, and more to prey on our most deeply rooted fears, dreams, and desires in the service of selling us their products. We’ve witnessed up close the alarmingly young age—often before we’ve even left our mothers’ wombs—at which they begin to target us and the sometimes surreal lengths they’ll go to in order to secure us as lifelong customers. We’ve even looked at the role peer pressure can play in shaping our buying habits. But this chapter goes well beyond that.
In a world where roughly 60 percent of all Americans are members of Facebook (and some 175 million people worldwide log in to Facebook each day) and Twitter has around 190 million users (who tweet approximately 65 million times during a twenty-four-hour period), I believe I’ve only just scratched the surface in exploring how vulnerable and susceptible we are to the advice, recommendations, and subconscious influence of our friends, neighbors, and peers.
The seed of the idea for the reality TV show we dubbed The Morgensons occurred to me almost eighteen months before I started writing this book, when I’d been unknowingly lured into a covert marketing ploy that prompted me to doubt my own ability to separate reality from advertising spin. As I pulled up to a gas station in Sydney, Australia, the guy across from me, who’d just finished filling up his own tank, approached me. “Hey, mate, love your car,” he said. “Oh, thanks,” I said politely. “But mate,” he went on (yes, Australian men do love to use this endearing term), “you really should consider using superoctane ninety-eight gas.” He proceeded to tell me he had the same model of car as mine at home in his garage, adding, “You can’t believe the difference in your car’s performance—it’s amazing.”
I thanked him, then promptly forgot his advice. Yet over the next few weeks, every time I needed to gas up my car, I couldn’t get his words out of my mind. Whenever I drove into a gas station, the same internal dialogue—Should I buy the octane or the superoctane 98?—rolled around in my brain. What the hell? I’d begun thinking. It couldn’t hurt, and it costs less than ten cents more. And sure enough, from then on, each time I needed gas, I’d fill up with the superoctane 98.
Then, a few months later, with the needle of my gas gauge close to empty, I pulled into the very same gas station. I was filling up when I heard an extremely familiar voice.
It was him, the superoctane 98 man! This time, though, he wasn’t addressing me but another car owner who was filling his tank with the cheapest brand of gas. “Hey, mate,” he called over, “
love your car.” “Thanks,” the guy replied in the same polite tone as I had. “But mate,” the man went on, “you really should consider using superoctane ninety-eight. Thing is, I have the same model of car at home, and once you’ve tried it, you won’t believe the difference—it’s amazing.”
I’d been completely punked. Either this guy owned every brand of car ever manufactured and knew only two sentences in the English language, or the gas station had planted him to ramp up sales of its higher-priced gas. At the same time, I couldn’t help wondering, Martin, how could you fall for it? You—who work day in and day out in the marketing industry—have been duped into changing your whole buying behavior thanks to five seconds of covert marketing?
But it wasn’t until a year later, when the film The Joneses hit the big screen, that I was inspired to hatch my own marketing experiment—to test the effects, over an eight-week period, of that same tactic I had succumbed to in the suburbs of Sydney.
A month later, after screening literally hundreds of hours of videotape, the results from The Morgensons came in. But anecdotal evidence like this, no matter how many hours of it, isn’t always the most scientific, which is why I decided to conduct an additional fMRI study to confirm our findings. The results proved beyond any doubt whatsoever that marketers, advertisers, and big businesses have nothing at all compared to the influence we consumers have on one another.
Mrs. Morgenson Goes Shopping
Picture this. Gina and a gaggle of friends are going shoe shopping at DSW, the giant retail chain. (DSW, for the uninducted, stands for Designer Shoe Warehouse.) En route to the giant shoe mecca, Gina ingenuously asks a carful of her friends, “Has anyone been to DSW before? I just love the whole concept. You’re just bound to find the shoe you want there.” Two hours later, she’s managed to “convince” (subtly, of course) five of her friends to buy multiple pairs; some, in fact, have walked out of the store armed with as many as five new pairs of boots, heels, and flats. Not only that, but I discovered later that following their trip, three of Gina’s friends visited DSW’s Web site, “liked” the store on Facebook, and, as of writing, had bought several more pairs of its shoes online.