ADVENTURES IN ADVERTISING: The Art of Persuasion
February 20, 2012 by JoBe Cerny
I majored in Speech and Drama at Valparaiso University. Believe it or not, at first I was more interested in Speech than Drama because Valparaiso has a very strong and powerful law school. Valpo has always valued its orators and great focus was put on the eloquence of elocution to rabble-rouse an audience. So I have written many speeches for myself and others. In fact, I have had great success as a public speaker. For the past sixteen years, I have been the recommended speaker of the American Advertising Federation on the subject of Creativity. When the most successful Advertising Agencies pitch new accounts, the Advertising Agency’s final speaker needs to leave the client with very persuasive argument to seal the deal. That person is known as “The Closer”.
A client of mine asked me to be the keynote speaker for the Southeastern Advertising Conference in 1995. It was supposed to be a one time speech. But ever since that fateful day, I have crisscrossed the country giving that speech which has become to be known as The Nothing Speech. Since so many people have nothing these days, the speech has spread beyond advertising groups to include Universities, Museums, Corporations, and even religious groups. Most people overlook nothing, but I have found it to be an essential ingredient of advertising and creativity.
Each speech major at Valparaiso had to take a course in Persuasion to graduate. I always felt it was one of the most important courses I ever took. Advertising techniques were taught in the course. Bluntly put, advertising is the art of persuading people to buy the things you are selling. Persuasion is a gentle art that blends logic and psychology to appeal to the basest of survival instincts, desires of the flesh, and even greed. A good orator tells you what he intends to tell you; then he tells you exactly what you expect to hear; and then, to firmly implant the message in your head, he reminds you that he told you exactly what he told you he would tell you. Pretty soon, the message seems to be so organic to your thought process it is as if you created the thought all by yourself. The simplicity of this process of persuasion is that the listener has to do nothing to become persuaded to make a purchase. The logic of buying the product makes perfect sense.
In the graduate level course in persuasion, we learned that subliminal infarction was the most nefarious and deeply stimulating process of deeply imbedding a message in a totally undetectable way into a preoccupied audience. The exposure to advertising messages was faster than human senses could comprehend. As a result the potential buyer saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing, tasted nothing or smelled nothing. If the image was imbedded into a particularly entertaining and enjoyable experience, the transfer of the buying impulse would be especially strong. All that would transfer to the potential buyer was a vague sense that they had to buy whatever the advertiser was selling. So, the advertiser would reap record sales.
So, what is the value of nothing? It is actually something quite valuable. If one can identify a need that is unfulfilled, a place where nothing exists has been identified. That void creates a need. If a manufacturer can come up with a product that satisfies that need, they can make sales until that need is filled. Ergo, they make something out of nothing. So the real point of advertising is convincing manufacturers to invent things that don’t exist to sell to people who want to be the first on their block to have something no one else has. Once everyone has that thing, then no one wants it any longer. They want “the next thing” and the process begins anew. So persuasion is the sure path to the future of advertising.