Last week, Jessica Davies wrote an interesting piece suggesting brands should consider themselves to be content commissioners; that if content creators are thinking more as marketers, marketers can behave more as content creators (Davies on TV, nma.co.uk 10 November 2011). So far, so convergence, but the accepted normality of this behaviour – of consumer brands controlling and creating entertainment media for mass ingestion – got me thinking about propaganda, and how we’re entering a new phase of social manipulation without obvious responsibility.
Before we go any further, let me state for the record that I am not crazy. I’m not big on conspiracy theories, I don’t think the government is out to get us and I have a healthy awareness that propaganda already exists in many forms. How could I not when I’ve spent so many years working on national newspapers?
Yet as ABCe figures for newspaper websites continue to rise, so too does the voice of the individual. When I launched article comments on the Mail Online, the idea was that readers’ opinions would compliment the editorial voice; they would add weight to the ideals being packaged as news. Today the comments are more mixed – with many fervently disagreeing with the Daily Mail’s position – and alongside this, a more vocal audience who think their blog posts, their tweets, their opinions are as authoritative as the newspaper’s. One lone voice may not be influential, but together they may provide a more balanced viewpoint.
Many retailers – especially fashion brands – have adopted similar practices as part of their converging marketing effort. No etail site is complete without magazine-style content, editorial fashion shots, customer opinions and beguiling content to rouse and sell. They’re not emulating newspapers perhaps, but they are masquerading as magazines. In the past few years we’ve seen a definite blurring of the editorial and retail line, but as this line becomes even more indistinct, where does entertainment begin and indoctrination to sell end?
By creating editorial products – and then commissioning/producing entertainment properties, such as TV shows, music labels, whatever – fashion retailers can mind wash in a way that traditional media conglomerates cannot. Retailers can create a psychological need for an item of clothing through entertainment media and then be the sole gatekeeper to the product. It’s not Nazi Germany perhaps, but in many ways there are similarities. It’s strategic, social manipulation for consumerism – marketing pretending to be something else, something more innocent.
Of course, while newspapers can face backlashes from the public, so can retailers – but will the content they create (which in its nature will never be offensive politically) ever face the same scrutiny? ASOS magazine is, of course, a brilliant publication, but there is no editorial balance, there is no impartiality. It is not a magazine in the traditional sense but a way to package and push products. It is a catalogue disguised as traditional media, and customers don’t care. They enjoy reading it.
When you consider that magazines produced by publishing companies are failing, and that the circulation of brand magazines such as ASOS are soaring, it doesn’t take a genius to see the future of magazines will be brand led, and that they’ll never be standalone – they’ll always complement other lifestyle products within the brand’s family. The danger lies, however, with this new dawn of marketers creating content. There’s power, there’s responsibility – but when the creation of this media was born out of a marketing budget, the underlying message is that which the marketer devises. And how can we regulate such emotional, psychological messages?
Noam Chomsky wrote, “There is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to […] consume.” As brands become content commissioners, this pressure becomes even greater. I don’t see how anyone can think this is a good thing.
This column originally appeared in New Media Age magazine.
