The Persuaders Frontline Summary

Stephen O’Neill
The Persuaders
“The Persuaders” by Frontline is about how advertising has affected Americans. It starts out by stating the problem of attaining and keeping the attention of potential customers. Balancing the rational and emotional side of an advertisement is a battle that all advertisers have trouble with. Human history has now gone past the information age and transcended into the idea age. People now look for an emotional connection with what they are affiliated with. The purpose of an emotional connection is to help create a social identity, a kind of cult like aroma. Because of this realization, companies have figured out that break through ideas are more important than anything else now. But there are only so many big

ideas that can be used. Advertisers now try to promote their own brand more than their own products using these new big ideas. The ultimate goal for companies is to create customers that will use their products beyond reason.
In recent years, consumers have been obtaining products that now allow them to skip over commercials in all sorts of media.

TiVo was one of the very first products that allowed people to do this. Advertisers were now worried about their industry. How were they supposed to advertise to people if the people refused to watch them and you could no longer force them to? Their solution was to put the advertisements within the products themselves. They could pay producers to put their products in their stories. Then they found out that their advertisements would be more effective when they put them in the product, even more powerful when the advertisement evolves and turns into a character themselves.
Another new strategy is using specific words and emotions to make customers more interested and retain information. Frank Luntz believes that 80% life is emotion and only 20% is intellect. He says we should focus on selling an emotion with the product, and to do this you use very specific words. Words provide us a way to understand emotion. Specific words trigger specific emotions which are able to change our outlooks on certain products or

ideas.
This video is a great introduction to the new age of advertising and how much more complex the world of sales is getting. This video would be a lot different though if it was made within this decade. Instead of talking about television and TiVo it would be talking about social media and AdBlock programs. Persuasion is evolving from a math formula into an art form throughout these years.

The Source of Economic Value
With more goods and more services means that the price will also go up. This is a basic lesson in the economy. But it is perhaps evolving. The Dean of Business and Economics uses Starbucks as an example. Starbucks has turned their product more than serving you coffee. Starbucks is selling you an emotional experience. From the moment you enter the store you are transported into a different type of culture and experience. The air smells like fresh brewed coffee, there is a group of people there that forms a new community, you can get breakfast there, and you can buy a newspaper. All these experiences make you feel emotionally invested into your time at Starbucks.
Starbucks’ main goal is not to sell coffee, but to sell you an experience that makes you happy when you leave.

Starbucks and other companies have found a new way to add economic value, and what they are selling is emotion and a feeling of belonging. Companies have now stopped trying to sell just their products, they are now making you feel good about buying their product. Bill Silver uses the example of the blueberry muffin. If you buy the blueberry muffin, then you get to eat a tasty pastry. But if you don’t buy a muffin, you still feel good about yourself because you resisted urge of buying that blueberry that would have costed you money and make you not as

healthy.
Bill Silver than talks about his experience as a soda jerk. Back when he was doing his job, the owners would treat the customers as part of their family. Sometimes customers would go into pharmacies or liquor stores, and they had no intention of buying anything. But that is okay, being a friend of someone to talk to, was the past’s way of selling an emotion or a sense of belonging. So when you sell a product, don’t work on just selling a product, but a feeling that goes with it.
This Ted Talk hits on point on what the current philosophy of economics is. Everything Bill Silver talked about was correct. Starbucks’ coffee isn’t the greatest, and most of the coffee you could consider a soda. But Starbucks has created a culture for us, as consumers, to be a part of.

Inside the Secret Shipping Industry
The shipping industry is mainly done in the ocean. 90% of all shipping is done on boats. If we didn’t have shipping on the water our entire trade economy would be completely different. We are completely dependent on this industry but not much is known about it. We have what is known as ‘sea blindness’, as in we don’t think about the sea as an industry or anything. We just think of it as ‘there’. But the sea has a lot going on it, business and crime. Somalian pirates have realized how dependent we are on shipping and used this to their advantage. Shipping boats have very few people, around 25, and therefore very easy to takeover. Because the ships are extremely accessible to takeover, pirates can basically come and go as they please. When ships go through pirate waters, people aren’t allowed to go on deck, pirate watch doubled, and hundreds of hostages were held.
Shipping is the greenest method of transport. It is much greener than aviation and little better than auto transport. But because we heavily rely on boating for transportation, it still creates a huge amount of pollution. About 15 ships creates as much pollution as all the cars in the world. Shipping also destroys some of the eco habitat in the oceans. The shipping vessels creates a lot of sound, and most aquatic creatures uses sounds to communicate. So shipping vessels destroy some of their habitats acoustically.
Rose George makes several interesting points on the shipping industry. I didn’t realize that 90% of our trades are brought by ships. I also liked how pirates are so easily able to take over ships. Her relationship between terrorists in airports also made me think about how little Americans care about what happens around the world. Pirates are essentially terrorists but in water, yet most Americans don’t care or have any idea about how much pirates are ruling that part of the world.