George Parker is a man who loves profanity* almost as much as he hates the corporate fucktards and douchenozzles that stifle creativity in the advertising industry (Parker’s preferred pronominal profanities, not my own). In his popular “piss and vinegar” blog AdScam and his three books –
Madscam,
The Ubiquitous Persuaders, and his latest,
Confessions of a Mad Man – the renowned British-born adman rails against the Big Dumb Agencies (BDAs) and the shareholder-serving corporations that consolidated, own, and suck the life out of them.
Self-described as “the last surviving Mad Man,” Parker landed at Cunard’s Pier 96 in New York to pursue his Madison Avenue dreams in an era when the cheapest way to cross the Atlantic was still by steamship. Having spent five debaucherous days of “non-stop drinking and shagging” aboard the Queen Mary, he arrived armed with a degree from the Manchester School of Art, a postgraduate scholarship from London’s Royal College of Art, a masters in bullshit from the University of Life, and a few hundred bucks. In the ensuing five decades, he rose through the ranks and has worked on countless major accounts both as a freelancer and in-house for some of the most prestigious agencies in the world including Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, Chiat Day, and J. Walter Thompson.
As the recipient of Lions, CLIOs, EFFIES, and the David Ogilvy Award, and with a career that spans five decades and multiple continents, Parker has more perspective than most when it comes to what’s wrong in today’s ad world. He’s repelled by the kind of suits that use jargon like “resonate” instead of “appeal” and who “interface” instead of
“meet.” But, according to Parker, their crimes against humanity only begin with their choice of vocabulary. He hates the way many admen choose to treat the American public like it has a collective IQ somewhere south of Jessica Simpson's and their clients with the kind of contempt that should be reserved for the likes of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.
Talking of which, Parker also takes issue with the kind of one percenters who think it’s OK to treat themselves to Russian MiG 15 fighters (Larry Ellison of Oracle) and Boeing 767s (Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin) at their shareholders’ expense. To say Parker is moderately left wing is an understatement, since he never does anything – including Boddingtons – by halves. As such, he’s a rare beast in the advertising world, one that has lived life to the full yet has sense of decency, and a conscience.
Having been kind enough to call SuicideGirls “one of the best examples of a community based social networking site” in his excellent 2006 state-of-the-industry bible The Ubiquitous Persuaders (a book that serves as an update to Vance Packard’s 1957 classic The Hidden Persuaders), we were long overdue for a quality conversation with Parker. With the freshly minted Confessions of a Mad Man – a literary (and often times literal) romp through the industry as experienced by Parker – serving as an excuse, we called him up for a chat over drinks. In the interests of verisimilitude, ours was a glass of Sauvignon Blanc (cause we’re lightweights) and Parker’s was "a case of Pinot Noir" (because he’s not). During the course of our lengthy chinwag we discussed the decay of the American Dream, the not uncoincidental rise of political advertising, and how Occupy might best market itself and its efforts to stop the rot.
Nicole Powers: In your book you talk about how a lot of advertising is expensive and ineffective. But, ironically enough, one of the most successful areas seems to be political advertising. You include some great examples of advertising that’s worked politically, especially on the negative side, where it’s completely destroyed people’s careers.
George Parker: It’s a sad reflection on advertising in general, but political advertising in particular, that the shit that works is really shit, I mean it’s outrageously negative. The classic original negative ad of all time wasn’t the one against [Michael] Dukakis, which was about a guy that he’d pardoned that got released from jail that went out and killed again. He was a murderer, but he got time off for good behavior or some shit, and then he came out and killed 20 more people or something. It just happened when Dukakis was the Governor of Massachusetts. That was really bad, but the one that’s the classic is the one that was done when Lyndon Johnson ran for re-election. It’s the
little girl pulling the pedals off a flower, and at the end there’s a nuclear explosion. Basically it was like, ‘Would you trust somebody like Goldwater to have the finger on the nuclear button.’ That was first really in your face negative ad politically, certainly on television, and that’s the one that most people remember.
NP: You cover the political action committees in
The Ubiquitous Persuaders, but we didn’t have super PACs then, because that book was written pre-Citizens United. This time around there’s going to be negative advertising like we’ve never seen before, because there’s going to be a deluge of this super PAC money pouring into politics like we’ve seen before. Are you getting a sense from your friends on Madison Avenue of the shit storm that’s to come?
GP: Oh yes. Actually I’ve been writing about it on my blog
AdScam, preparing people. Before the shit storm is going to happen politically, we’ve got the Olympics, which is another favorite of corporate America. There’s going to be banks and car companies and everything “going for the gold.” And Team USA, “You say jump, we say how high,” – every cliché you can possibly imagine. For months we’re going to have that, and then as soon as that’s over, in fact probably while it’s still on, the political shit is going to start happening.
The election isn’t until November, so we’re definitely going to have August, September, October and then whatever is left of November. The sheer volume of it is going to be so heavy this year, and, also it’s going to be extremely negative. You’re going to see shit certainly from the Tea Party, religious right, born again fucktards as I call them. I always find it amusing that they describe Barrack Obama as a communist. First off, I don’t if there is a communist in America as far as I know.
NP: There’s no truly left wing party in America. You and I are both British and in the UK we do have more of a left and a right wing. Here you have the extreme right and a center, but there’s no left wing party in America.
GP: The Democrats here I would consider the equivalent of the Conservatives in Britain.
NP: One of the reasons we don’t have a left wing in America is because to get elected you have to get corporations to donate oodles of campaign cash for things like television advertising. And the moment that you do that, you have to be pro-capitalism in a pro-corporate welfare, completely skewed way, so a truly left wing candidate is unelectable here. Obviously we both come from the UK where that’s not so much of an issue because we have strict campaign finance rules, and we have the party political broadcast system which assigns equal and limited television time for all of the major parties, which has to be donated by the terrestrial TV channels there.
GP: Right, and don’t forget you can only advertise the party, you can’t advertise individuals…Sometimes I despair of America. I love living here and I’ll be here until I die, but sometimes I look around and I’m stunned, the vast number of people in America who vote against their best interests, particularly working class people. Well, of course, there are no more working class people anymore. In political advertising, and in politics in general, all they talk about is the middle class. There is no working class. There isn’t now anyway because most of them are unemployed. They talk about raising taxes on rich people as class warfare. The whole thing about this mythology in America, which maybe 100 years ago was true, that you could go from paperboy to president. Well unless you’re a paperboy with 50 million dollars in the bank you can’t do it these days.
NP: That’s the American Dream, at this point it’s marketing over substance. We’re actually one of the least mobile societies in the world. You’re not going to be able to break out of your socio-economic class here in America. The statistics back up the fact that the American dream, for the most part, no longer exists.
GP: Yes, you used to be able to. It’s easier in Britain now. And Britain was very much a class-ridden society up until maybe the ‘60s. But over here they still believe in this myth that you can go from rags to riches, which isn’t true.
But back to the advertising thing, you’ll have a situation particularly by about October where virtually I would say at least 80% of the inventory on television for sure will be political advertising, particularly in key states.
I mean I live in Idaho now, which I always describe as the Fourth Reich. It’s like a Nazi paradise. It used to be the headquarters of the American Arian Nation, they got kicked out a few years ago, but it’s extremely right wing. Boise is a college town so it’s a bit more liberal, but once you get out into the sticks it’s like fucking going back 100 years. There will still be advertising here, but the Republicans are a lock-in, 80% of the state legislature are Republicans. There’s about 10 Democrats and they all come from Boise. There’s one lesbian senator whose rich, she’s my local senator and she’s great. She’s retiring this year because she said it’s like banging your head against a brick wall. So you won’t get as much advertising here, but in key states like Florida for instance, oh my God, it’s just going to be 24/7 nonstop, just all the fucking time. They’ll be billboards and the radio will be hammered to shit, and they’ll be a lot of stuff in the newspapers, but television is just going to be awful. And they will cut down on the actual broadcast time. In an hour show on television, you normally have up 12 minutes of advertising, depending on whether it’s prime time or dinnertime or whatever, but they will find ways of stretching that out into close to 20 minutes. A third of all the television you see will be primarily political advertising.
NP: I was chatting with investigative journalist
Greg Palast, and he was talking about how one of the reasons that you will never see the mainstream media covering Citizens United with the gravitas that it deserves is because it’s the very piece of legislation that’s responsible for this massive bonanza of advertising income. In a climate where marketing budgets have been slashed, political advertising is like manna from heaven. So the TV companies are not going to allow their news networks to explain to the masses why Citizens United has subverted the political system in the way it has.
GP: No. I mean Citizens United, what is happening and is about to happen in spades with political advertising, this already happened with pharmaceutical and medical advertising. No other country in the world advertises prescription drugs. Actually, up until about 10 years ago New Zealand of all places did, but they pulled it because it was just so awful. If you look at particularly network news, it’s just full of pharmaceutical ads. NBC, which is owned by General Electric, if you watch the evening news with Brian Williams, there’s always a medical piece in it. They call it world news and there’s like ten seconds of world, ten minutes of America, and 20 minutes of medical shit.
There was one segment, which I think I may have written about in the book. Two or three years ago they did a piece on the Brian Williams Global World News Tonight, it was about how certain X-rays weren’t effective for certain things and you were better off having an MRI scan. Well MRI scans are very expensive, so unless you’re covered by insurance, too bad in this country. But it turns out, I checked into this, they were pushing these MRI scans and General Electric, which is a parent company of NBC, is the world’s biggest manufacturer of MRI scanners. They were pimping their own fucking product.
If they do that blatantly with pharmaceuticals and medical shit, they’re certainly going to do it with political stuff. This is like the goose that laid the golden egg for these guys, they’re going to make more money in the next three months than they will make in the rest of the year combined. That includes local people as well. It’s going be a bonanza for local stations, and particularly for radio, especially Clear Channel, which is the one that pumps out Rush Limbaugh, and people like that. They’re going to make a killing on this.
NP: I’m glad you actually brought up the pharmaceutical industry, because that comes back around to politics. They were only allowed to advertise in the first place because of lobbying money and pharmaceutical advertising remains very unregulated, again because of the industries political spending clout. One of the eye-opening things you bring up in your book is how drug companies always justify the exorbitant cost of drugs in America versus the rest of the world by claiming they need to keep prices high to fun research & development. But one of the statistics you come up with shows that these companies actually spend more on advertising and lobbying than they do on R&D. [
The Ubiquitous Persuaders cites statistics from 2004, a year in which US drug companies spent 57.5 billion dollars on advertising and promotion compared to just 31.5 billion dollars on R&D.]
GP: Oh yes, yes, definitely. And what the pharmaceutical companies are very good at is having conferences for doctors. They’re always in Hawaii or Florida or somewhere exotic. The conference is half a day while they pedal whatever the newest drug is, and then three days of golf. I know doctors who say it’s a vacation, that’s all it is, but...
NP: One of the reasons I wanted to do the interview today is because tomorrow I’m
heading out to Chicago to go the Occupy convergence there. Ironically for an anti-corporate movement, some of the biggest conversations within it are about messaging, because Occupy is having huge problems selling itself to the general public whose interests it’s there to promote. How would you sell it?
GP: Ah, well, you would think you would have to appeal to their intelligence, but unfortunately, if Occupy is to make a real impression, then it has to address a very broad audience. The people who show up at Occupy down on Wall Street or in Chicago or wherever it happens to be, those are already committed. The problem with most political advertising is that you are talking to people whose minds are basically made up. The percentage of people that are on the fence, it’s always less than 10%.
You can’t compete with the money, okay, because there’s no way Occupy is ever going to come up with the funds that would match the Koch brothers and people like that, so you have to come at it from another way. Are you familiar with the name
Howard Gossage? He was a famous ad guy of the ‘60s. He is one of the very few ad guys that said if you got the message right, you don’t have to spend a fortune. Because most agencies, the more you spend, the more they make. It’s in their interest to get you to spend as much money as possible, whereas Gossage believed in the opposite.
A lot of the stuff that he did was public interest advertising. He sold gasoline as well, but he did a very famous campaign to save the redwoods in California, and he did another to save an island in the South Pacific that was disappearing under the waves, and things like that. [Reading about his work] will give you an inkling of how you can approach the art of persuasion without having to spend a fortune. One of the things you have to do, which is always a problem, is produce some messaging that the general press,
Newsweek or whatever, will pick up and run. The odds are they won’t, because they’re in the corporate environment’s back pocket.
NP: Right. Messaging is something the right is really good at, which is why their sound bites get everywhere.
GP: Yes. Occupy has to be even better at messaging, which is tough to do. The problem is, from what I understand of Occupy, that because it’s so democratic, so many people have a say in what should go, that your messaging is just getting to beat to shit. The messaging has to be produced basically by one person or a very small group of people, no more than three or four, otherwise it just gets watered down.
NP: It’s like what you say about focus groups, once you get anything done by committee it goes to shit.
GP: Yes, the best example of that is Steve Jobs, who was a fucking genius. I worked on Apple for a number of years and I’ve met Jobs quite a few times. He was the most obnoxious guy, but he’s brilliant, well he was brilliant. He never engaged one fucking focus group or single piece of research, it was all what he thought would be right. [An example of this being the
Ridley Scott directed “1984” Super Bowl commercial which launched the Macintosh and “succeeded in spite of research!”]
One of the things that I always go on about in my writing is how branding is the biggest fucking con job of all time. You can say “we increase the brand perception” and “brand reach activity” but it’s shit that you can’t measure. What Jobs did, if you look at Apple’s advertising, their advertising was and still is all about products. It wasn’t buy Apple because Apple is a great company, it was buy an iPhone because you can do this, that, and the other; buy an iPad because it does this, that and the other. It’s the same thing with messaging, I would say for Occupy, somebody has to sit down and boil down the essence of what it is you’re trying to do.
[You have to ask] Who are we talking to? What do we want to say to them? And what’s the best way to say it? That’s all. It’s just logic. Good advertising, good communication is logic. It’s very, very simple. It’s hard when you actually get down and start to do it, but that’s the basic principle of advertising.
The guy that I mentioned before, Howard Gossage – I love to quote famous dead ad guys because one day I’ll be one – he had a great line which was, “People don’t read advertising, they read what they’re interested in, and sometimes that’s advertising.” That sums it up for me.
I did an ad for cigars a few years ago – do you remember when the cigar craze was on about ten years ago? I did this ad which was a double page spread. The headline was “Everything you need to know when buying a fine cigar.” There was 3,000 words of copy, and it was all about what you should look for when you’re buying a good cigar. It was a guide to smoking cigars, and it had whatever the fuck the brand was at the end. It was hugely successful, and they had reprints in all the cigar bars…Everybody else, it was image shit, you know.
NP: Right, I’m always weary of branding over substance. For example, if you have a cigar that actually tastes great, people will smoke it. I guess a big example of that is brand loyalty when it comes to cars. Yes, people trust Ford and Chevy, but when Toyota came out with the Prius, which was the right car at the right time, people let their brand loyalty go by the wayside. I guess, coming back the political advertising, when your message is your product, it’s all the more important to get your message right.
GP: Yes, with the Occupy thing, the trick is to come up with messaging or an encapsulation of what Occupy is all about that will appeal to people other than the ones who are already interested and believe in what Occupy does. You don’t need those, you’ve got those. You’re not going to persuade the right wing freaktoids, but you need just that fringe element in the middle. It will be less than 10% of the population, it would probably be more like 2%. Through a process of logic, as I say, know who you’re talking to, what you want to say, how you want to say it, and figure out the best way to say it.
Through a process of logic, people will hopefully go, “Oh, that’s interesting. Maybe I should look into that.” Not, “I’m going to march down Wall Street,” you won’t do that. But the thing is to just get them to start thinking and maybe get more interest in it, and maybe follow up and get more information. Then, eventually, they’ll go down to Wall Street or wherever. You’re still only going to get a small fraction of people to do that, because you’re also asking about something that is contrary to the average American’s comfort. Demonstrating – you must be fucking joking. They’ll demonstrate for a pop group or a football team or some shit like that, but for politics – no.
l tell you what’s interesting though…The reason I became an American was so I could vote for Obama. He’s been a bit of a disappointment ever since, but I was telling you about Idaho…It’s to the right of fucking Genghis Kahn, it’s truly, truly conservative. Obama came here when he was running last time. He came to Boise in the middle of winter, and he spoke in the local university football stadium. He was here early in the morning, the snow was 10 feet deep, it was freezing cold, and there was people queuing for hours and hours and hours. There were so many people here they couldn’t all get in. They had screens outside. It was brilliant. Everybody went apeshit. This is in Boise, a place which any self-respecting political advisor would have said you’re wasting your time. They’re never going to vote for you there. But they did, he got the majority in Boise, but then the rest of the state voted for whatever his face, the old fart. But that’s the kind of thinking they have to do with Occupy. Maybe there’s a twist there in the messaging – it’s what I call the old light bulb effect.
NP: But I think Obama was another Prius. He was of the right product at the right time. People needed change and he promised it. Plus he was a rock star and we have a culture of celebrity. They loved his story, they loved that he came out of nowhere, he was the underdog, and he had the exact right message, people were ready for change.
GP: And he was smart. He had a fucking intellect.
NP: Well, that was a minus wasn’t it? People complained about that and called him an elitist.
GP: Don’t forget the other thing that was amazing, he was the first black president, and there’s still a lot of people in America that don’t like that. They won’t admit to it, but you know it as well as I do. It’s there. It’s under the surface, especially if you go further south obviously. I hope he gets re-elected because the alternative isn’t worth thinking about. My hope is that he gets re-elected and then he does the shit that he promised he’d do.
NP: Right, because in the second term he has nothing to lose. Since he can’t run for reelection again, he could potentially do all the shit that he couldn’t in his first term.
GP: The question for the Democratic Party will be, yes, but you’re going to fuck it up for the next Democratic candidate. Hopefully he’ll close Guantanamo and do all the other shit that he promised to do. I think anybody who runs for the presidency, and in politics in general, they must be fucking insane. It’s got to be just an awful life. There are quite a few people who go into politics with the best of intentions, but once they’re in it, they’re fucked, because, especially here, you spend so much time raising money.
NP: You literally can’t afford to have good intentions.
GP: I read somewhere, this was years ago, if you get elected the US Senate, which is a six year term – this was 10, 12 years ago – you had to raise an average of $200,000 to $300,000 a week, every week for the next six years to get reelected. God knows what it is now. So how much time do they spend doing what they were elected to do?
NP: Also how can they do what they were elected to when the people that are paying them that money are paying them to not to do what they were elected to do.
GP: I know, I know.
NP: One of the other things that you say in your book is that, unlike Occupy which actually has to change minds, since the majority of Americans don’t vote, all the Republicans and Democrats have to do is appeal to their base and motivate them. The Republicans are very good at the politics of fear. That’s what their attack ads do. They’re all about mobilizing people through fear, appealing to their innate racism, homophobia and whatever else, to get people to the polls.
GP: Like I said, the majority of people have their minds fixed. You could drive six inch nails into their skulls and you would never change their minds. You just have to wash your hands of people like that. It’s that middle fringe element that is persuadable that you have to go after if you’re a member of Occupy.
NP: That works for Occupy, but Obama has to mobilize his base, and unfortunately he has uniquely screwed himself, because his message last time around was change. That’s not going to work this time because he is the status quo. The very message that brought him into power, ironically, could be his undoing.
GP: Now that should be: “Change, but I really mean it.”
NP: Isn’t that essentially what you did for the Mayor of New York?
GP: Yes, I was just going to say that. What we did for John Lindsay…He was the Mayor of New York for four years, fucked up, not all his fault, there was garbage strikes and all kinds of shit went on, but he was clueless. The whole premise of our campaign was “I fucked up, but I’ve learned from my lessons and I won’t fuck up again.” They gave him another chance and he fucked up even worse.
NP: But he got reelected.
GP: Yes, that’s it. That’s what I’d do if I was Obama.
NP: Change, but I really mean it this time.
GP: I would also say, “You know all that shit I promised to do last time like closing Guantanamo, I’m going to fucking do it.” And then he gets elected, and he goes, “Oh, maybe not yet.” Because that’s the other thing, if you’re going to be successful in politics, you have to be a hypocrite. You have to lie through your teeth, because you’ll never get elected…
I love the way they always try and dumb everything down, the messaging is so basic and just awful. They never give anybody any credit for actually having intelligence and thinking shit through. You know Romney is actually saying things like, “You don’t want Obama because he’s a Harvard educated elitist.” Well fucking Romney went to Harvard, and then he went from Harvard to Yale.
Oooh, and you’ll love this; I got a robo call a few nights ago for Romney. I thought that’s fucking stupid, because why you would waste your money on robo calls in Idaho, because he’s going to sweep it anyway. But I wanted to listen. They wanted you to contribute money because Romney was “absolutely committed to fight against Obama’s war on women.” I thought wait a minute? Obama’s war on women? But somebody will have heard that and go, “Oh, right, fuck yeah, Obama is screwing women. We’ve got to change that.”
NP: Right. They’ve heard the buzz phrase “war on women,” they don’t know where it’s from, and now they’ve managed to blame Obama for it.
GP: Don’t forget Joseph Goebbel’s classic line: If you’re going to tell a lie, make it really big lie and tell it a lot. Keep repeating it and people will believe it. It’s fucking true.
* In order to recapture the true essence of our conversation, please imagine there’s a “fucking” before every other adjective, verb, and noun. These were deleted during the editing process, not for decencies sake (this is SG after all), but in a desperate attempt to reduce our word count, which we did by 27.6%** once these profanities were removed.
**This statistic is accurate in the Republican sense of the word. (ie. We pulled it out of our arse to illustrate a point.)
For more from George Parker read his AdScam blog and follow AdScamGeorge on Twitter. 
