December 18, 2023 • 20 mins
Our discomfort with propaganda puts us on a quest for authenticity, but do we even know what that means anymore?
—
BRINK media group is re-imagining how brands, causes and artists compete in the oversaturated attention marketplace through original productions and branded entertainment.
Website: thisispropaganda.show
Instagram: instagram.com/thisispropagandashow
Email: propaganda@brink.com
—
Cohosts: Josh Belhumeur and Malcolm Critcher
Story Editor: Matt Decker
Producers: Jaclyn Hubersberger and Reed Chandler
Additional Audio Engineering: Paul Injeti
Original music: Josh Belhumeur
—
Dember, Greg. 2018. “Eleven Metamodern Methods in the Arts.” Medium. https://medium.com/what-is-metamodern/after-postmodernism-eleven-metamodern-methods-in-the-arts-767f7b646cae
Dreith, Ben. 2023. “Siegel+Gale creates "authentic" branding for US Army.” Dezeen. https://www.dezeen.com/2023/04/06/us-army-branding-siegelgale/
Flight, Thomas. 2023. “Why Do Movies Feel So Different Now?” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xEi8qg266g
McPherson, Steve. 2013. “Image Is Nothing: Grant Hill and His Amazing '90s Sprite Ads.” Grantland. https://grantland.com/the-triangle/image-is-nothing-grant-hill-and-his-amazing-90s-sprite-ads/
“OK Soda: The strange, nihilistic Nineties soda that only lasted seven months.” 2022. MeTV. https://www.metv.com/stories/ok-soda-the-strange-nihilistic-nineties-soda-that-only-lasted-seven-months
Resnick, Brian. 2017. “Trump supporters know Trump lies. They just don't care.” Vox. https://www.vox.com/2017/7/10/15928438/fact-checks-political-psychology
Salvanto, Anthony, Kabir Khanna, Jennifer De Pinto, and Fred Backus. 2023. “CBS News poll finds Trump's big lead grows, as GOP voters dismiss indictments.” CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-poll-indictments-2023-08-20/
Schulman, Michael. 2014. “Everything is Going to Be OK.” Believer Magazine. https://www.thebeliever.net/everything-is-going-to-be-ok/
Sorgatz, Rex. 2022. “25 Highest-Rated Shows of the '90s.” TV Insider. https://www.tvinsider.com/list/highest-rated-shows-of-the-90s/#show2
“Stress in America 2022: Concerned for the future, beset by inflation.” 2022. American Psychological Association. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2022/concerned-future-inflation
Wallace, David F. 2000. “David Foster Wallace on John McCain: ‘The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub.’” Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/david-foster-wallace-on-john-mccain-the-weasel-twelve-monkeys-and-the-shrub-194272/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
From the midtown studios of Bloomberg Television in New New York City.
This is Charlie Rose.
David Foster Wallace defies description in an age where the novel is constantly being threatened by the allure of technological advancement.
I am pleased to have him back on this broadcast author David Foster Wallace probably put it best.
(00:22):
We're stuck in a contradiction.
There's a very American um sort of confusion and interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that,
that the need to believe is bullshit that there's nothing left anywhere but um salesmen,
we aren't blind to how common propaganda is in our daily lives,
but we are bound to it as each generation grows up with new forms of media that are designed to capture and sell our attention.
(00:47):
Our sensibilities begin to evolve.
We become more savvy to the various techniques we see and far more skeptical of the institutions we once trusted.
If the Trump administration approves a vaccine before or after the election,
should Americans take it?
And would you take it if the doctors tell us that we should take it?
I'll be the first in line to take it.
But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it,
(01:08):
I'm not taking it.
You can call it a defense mechanism.
We put up barriers to protect ourselves against unwelcome manipulation.
Then we let our instincts guide when to lower those defenses.
We wanna feel like we're choosing our beliefs and not letting others choose for us.
My grandpa,
who I never met,
he died in the same hospital.
I was born in two weeks before I was born and he worked for the American oil company,
(01:31):
whatever you have that uncanny feeling that you're being sold to the pandering speech from the overly rehearsed politician,
buzzword salad on a corporate web page or the perfect family living a perfect life in a tight 32nd spot.
You're less likely to believe because your guard is up.
Nobody wants to actively be manipulated.
They were worried about it.
But that's the thing.
It only feels like manipulation when it fails at what it aims to do when it succeeds.
(01:59):
Lock them.
This is propaganda.
(02:21):
All propaganda is a story,
a story about the world as you wanna see it.
If that story fails,
the idea can't take hold and the propaganda fails too.
21 year old Kendall Jenner is the first model to get a big Pepsi ad since Cindy Crawford in 1992.
But that's being overshadowed online where many are calling the ad tasteless saying it takes advantage of serious issues and movements to sell soda setting aside the biggest sins of all being derivative or just straight up boring.
(02:48):
One of the biggest challenges of the contemporary storyteller is to overcome our built in bullshit detectors.
No,
I don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
Mm.
Yeah,
that sounds suspicious.
Or in other words,
to deliver something authentic.
I wanna talk about authenticity at the end of the day.
People just believe in authenticity and authenticity is the alignment of three things,
(03:09):
your thoughts,
your words and your actions.
If you go on amazon.com,
you can buy about 20,000 books on how to be more authentic.
Does your brand walk the talk brand?
Authenticity is a hot topic.
And for good reason,
as many as 63% of customers will choose an authentic brand over one that's less transparent.
Authenticity is the buzziest of buzzwords in marketing.
(03:31):
Every brand guide uses it even the army.
This is what we do.
This is what we do.
This is what we do.
We bring out the best in the people who serve because America calls for nothing less.
The textbook definition of brand authenticity is to align your marketing with the reality of your product's values and actions.
Now,
how much does reality really matter?
Does an audience's perception of authenticity have much to do with the real world consider one of the biggest and most polarizing brands of the past decade.
(03:58):
The brand of Donald Trump.
I love the old days.
You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this,
they'd be carried out on a stretcher.
Folks.
I have such respect for women.
I cherish women.
You've called women.
You don't like fat pigs,
dogs,
slobs and disgusting animals.
(04:21):
You brag that you have sexually assaulted women.
Do you understand that?
No,
get those lights off.
It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country because you'd be in jail.
Do you make the same commitment that you will absolutely accept the result of this election?
I will look at it at the time.
(04:45):
One of the reasons he's so adored by his supporters,
how he was able to demolish a crowded Republican in the field in 2016 and become one of the most unlikely world leaders in history is that he tapped into the true meaning of authenticity.
He buys and sells politicians of all stripes.
He's used to buying politicians.
Well,
I've given him plenty of money in a recent poll.
(05:06):
71% of Trump voters said they felt what he tells them is true.
We consider only 63% said they trust family and friends.
He's not fake.
You know what he's thinking.
He,
he tells the truth.
You know,
I like his,
I like his uh his honesty and transparency.
He was a little more honest than the rest of them.
Uh He,
he said things that uh that were true.
(05:28):
Trump lies all the time.
If he presses supporters with a well sourced fact check,
they might even concede the point.
An Ohio State University study of 8100 participants showed this,
but the same study also showed that it doesn't matter,
it's not gonna make them change their overall feelings about him.
How can so many people perceive someone as authentic when they're constantly lying?
(05:49):
I've got to be the cleanest sheriff.
I think I'm the most honest human being.
Perhaps that God ever created.
Perhaps they know Trump's a salesman and they understand the game salesmen play.
We all do,
but they don't see themselves as the ones getting played.
Instead,
they're on the same team,
whether he's lying to get what he wants or to protect himself.
His lies are also for their benefit because they're in on it with him.
(06:09):
I would vote for that man.
If I had to go to prison and pull the lever,
I would vote for him.
If he was in prison,
he has my vote and I won't vote for anybody but him.
And I think that is echoed all across this land.
This is not exclusive to the Trump voter nor to politics.
If the 21st century consumer navigates a world in which there is nothing left but salesmen.
(06:32):
We all have a heightened awareness of the propaganda game.
We can either reject it and be left bitter and alone or we can choose to participate and get to believe in something.
What other choice do we have when it comes to politicians?
We've seen every trick in the book,
just like we've seen every single story told every single type of way.
All we do is stare at screens sometimes three at a time,
we're bombarded with content and most of its propaganda,
(06:53):
this is built a media savvy and even the least cultured among us that you didn't see 50 years ago.
Because of this,
the way we engage with media has an added layer of constant self awareness.
It's increasingly rare to just give yourself over to a story.
I'm re-watching Seventh Heaven.
Please just listen to the plot.
This episode,
I just finished.
(07:13):
It starts with a dad who's also a past.
Instead we're analyzing and reacting and recontextualized every show,
every ad,
every post,
every speech,
every everything to the million other things we've seen before.
It.
How does a brand like Donald Trump get so many people to believe in such an unlikely way to answer that we need to retrace contemporary culture's steps.
(07:39):
Let's take it back to the nineties.
The year is 1993.
The Coca Cola company being the savvy propagandists that they are.
See what everyone else sees.
Culture is changing again.
We don't have a war,
we don't have a depression,
we don't have legalized discrimination.
We don't,
the economy is so much worse for young people today than it was when I was young.
(08:02):
We had the counterculture.
They have the counter commerce generation X.
The babies of the baby boomers watched their parents go from peace and love at Woodstock to quarter the earnings calls on Wall Street.
And it made them deeply skeptical of just about everything.
We're being approached as a segment of people to market to,
to advertise to.
(08:22):
And what we actually are is a group of people that are immune to advertising.
In a few words,
it became uncool to care,
but it's the advertiser's job to get you to care.
Therefore,
advertising also became deeply uncool by the time he or she has finished high school,
an average American kid has watched 350,000 television commercials.
A third of a million we speak and understand the language of media as natives rather than as immigrants start spending your dollars marketing and just start making good stuff.
(08:53):
Each new generation rejects the tools propaganda had previously used to imitate genuine cultural output and then propaganda has to rapidly shift to ensure it's still capable of speaking to the coveted demographic of 18 to 25 generation X.
There are lots of them and they are consumers.
They're smart and television savvy.
However,
they represent quite a challenge for Madison Avenue,
(09:15):
Coca Cola decided to hire Sergio Zyman,
the marketing consultant behind the incredibly successful relaunch of Diet Coke.
And the incredible failure that was new Coke objective.
Get the MTV generation to buy soda.
Step One,
identify what they care to express most.
Ironically,
it's that they don't care.
Step two,
make buying soda an act of rebellion against deeply caring the result.
(09:36):
OK.
Soda,
an entirely new brand unlike any other before,
a brand that would speak the gen X language of disillusionment.
Dear blank.
As you may have heard our television chain letter promoting OK.
Soda has yielded interesting results.
Steve s of Oakland California declined a can of OK.
At a party.
(09:57):
The next day,
his fiance announced her intention to marry his best friend,
an enthusiastic drinker of OK.
OK.
Soda subverts the false promises and superlatives of brand marketing.
The soda isn't the real thing like Coca Cola was,
it won't make you happy,
it won't make you sing.
It's just OK.
Are you familiar with our 10 point?
(10:17):
OK.
Manifesto,
here's a quick refresher just in case the whole tone of the brand was otherworldly among consumer packaged goods.
The packaging was detached from the paradigms of the time with monotone colors and surrealist,
artful hand drawn illustrations.
(10:37):
They were designed by Charles Burns and Daniel Klaus Klaus recounted in 2014 that he modeled one of the faces that appeared on the cans after notorious serial killer Charles Manson as a subtle way to stick it to the corporation that hired him and they made me sign all this non disclosure paperwork and stuff.
But nothing ever said.
Don't put a mass murderer on the can.
If the goal of the brand was cynicism,
(10:59):
it seems like they had the right guy for the job.
An important announcement regarding OK,
soda due to the controversial nature of this product,
a toll free number has been established to handle stories regarding its consumption.
That number is 1 800.
I feel OK.
Imagine these odd moments of subversion appearing inside of a block of the loud frenetic and colorful ads of the nineties.
Keep in mind this is the era of Dutch angles and rapid cuts.
(11:22):
And Michael Bay was the hottest commercial director around.
Hey,
you freeze bitch.
Now back up,
put the gun down and give me a pack of tropical fruit bubble licious if you haven't heard of OK?
Soda.
It's because it only stayed on the shelves in a few test markets for seven months.
Poor Sergia Ziman,
the guy whose Wikipedia entry says he's best known for the failure of New Coke and he had another failure on his hands.
(11:44):
His wiki page doesn't even mention this one.
Who knows why it failed.
Maybe it was ahead of its time,
maybe they weren't patient enough.
Maybe it just tasted bad.
What I do know is that it was truly visionary and it's a bellwether for how propaganda would need to evolve to handle a more sophisticated and skeptical audience.
Coca Cola might have given up on OK?
Soda,
but they didn't give up on the insight.
(12:05):
They tried again just a few years later with an existing brand Sprite.
But this time it worked objective,
get the MTV generation to buy soda and maybe this time we don't put Charles Manson on the can.
The result.
Grant Hill's self-aware celebrity endorsement of Sprite.
(12:28):
Hi,
I'm Grant Hill,
professional basketball player for the Detroit Pistons.
You know,
when I get thirsty,
I reach for Sprite,
you see,
Sprite refreshes me like nothing else because it's the only drink with that cool crisp refreshing taste.
The whole premise was about the phoniness of celebrity endorsements in this spot as he delivers the standard endorsement playbook straight,
(12:49):
the camera,
a caricature of him holding money bags,
pops into the corner of the screen with a loud kains while deconstructing and subverting tropes and advertising was nothing new.
This felt fresh.
It was calling itself bullshit before anybody else had a chance to,
it felt right at home against a postmodern cultural backdrop as sincerity had given way to irony.
(13:10):
So what have you two come up with?
I think I can sum up the show for you with one word.
Nothing.
What does that mean?
The show is about nothing when irony is used in art,
it ideally reveals a deeper truth when it's used in propaganda.
It can often feel like an attempt to obscure a deeper truth rather than reveal one.
(13:33):
It's still the Coca Cola corporation.
They're still trying to sell you soda and that interior war keeps raging on because you see,
when you really put everything on a bagel,
it becomes this the truth.
What it's the truth,
nothing matters.
(13:55):
Is there a way to both have your cake and ironically deconstructed too?
Author Raul Eshelman coined a phrase called the double frame to describe what he observed occurring within the art world in the late nineties and early aughts.
Big of the double frame is a storytelling device where you embed one type of story inside the container of another,
the outer frame or the container is a high concept that can either go meta drawing direct attention to the fact that you're engaged in a story.
(14:19):
My name is Lester Burnham.
I'm 42 years old in less than a year.
I'll be dead.
It can also just be so absurd that you couldn't possibly mistake it for reality.
You like scary movies.
What's your favorite scary movie?
This approach encourages you to buy into the story because if you don't,
then you can't engage with it in a meaningful way,
(14:41):
you're an active participant because you chose to accept the premise.
Now you feel in control.
That's when the inner frame can do its job.
There's the freedom to be sincere and deliver an unironic message to give you a reason to believe.
I know you're fighting because you're scared and confused.
I'm confused.
T I don't know what the heck is going on.
(15:02):
It's the only thing I do know is that we have to be kind,
especially if we don't know what's going on,
the more you begin to observe and articulate contemporary devices like the double frame,
the more you also begin to recognize the why behind it,
a symbiotic relationship between culture and propaganda,
culture often moves as an attempt to overcome our skepticism and reach for some new form of authenticity.
(15:26):
What we find to be good stories are those that we can believe in those that don't feel like the tools of a salesman.
The best propagandists are savvy enough and brave enough to move with it.
And when they do,
sometimes they shock the world and they change the way propaganda communicates.
But this also starts the cycle back over.
(15:48):
We needed tickets.
You can't get them,
you know who has the tickets for the I'm talking about to the television audience,
donors,
special interests,
the people that are putting up the money.
The reason they're not,
excuse me.
The reason they're not loving me is I don't want their money.
I'm gonna do the right thing for the American public.
I don't want their money.
(16:09):
I don't need their money.
And I'm the only one up here that can say that all propaganda is a story and the story Trump told that put him in the White House employed a double frame.
The Otter frame was subversive.
He frequently broke the fourth wall and mocked the whole thing as a charade,
he made absurd jokes and gave his opponents funny names.
Lying,
Ted,
lying.
Ted.
(16:29):
What's your name?
My name's lying,
Ted Cruz.
And while his detractors didn't understand how someone could break from the decorum,
they expected in a candidate,
his supporters were starting to feel like they were in on it with him.
You know what she said?
Shout it out because I don't want to.
Ok,
you're not allowed to say,
I never expect to hear that from you again.
She said he's a pussy.
(16:50):
That's Tara.
He lowered their defenses and said,
you think this is bullshit.
Well,
guess what?
You're right.
It is.
And once they bought into the premise,
he could deliver the inner frame and it had a much better chance of resonating and we will make America great.
Again,
(17:10):
many of the tactics Trump took that people argued,
made him unfit for office were the very tactics that made his propaganda so potent.
His story worked to resolve that interior war that David Foster Wallace spoke of because he gave voice to the deep belief that everything is bullshit and it gave his supporters a reason to believe.
There is nobody in my mind.
(17:31):
There is nobody that can help us more than Trump.
President Trump,
I believe was the best president of the 21st century in my household.
You got Martin Luther King,
you got Jesus and you got Donald Trump a toll.
Even internal ones if authenticity is mostly a farce.
Just another tactic of the propagandists.
(17:53):
Then we risk losing grasp on what's real you are being lied to.
I mean,
just ask yourself just on the merits of the facts.
We become conditioned to see sincerity as an instrument of manipulation.
I never thought I'd make a video like this but um,
I think there's an important conversation to be had and I just wanna be fully accountable,
honest and transparent.
What's the point of making an apology video for the best of your ability?
(18:14):
When 90% of people are just gonna shoot on you for it.
If we're sincere,
we risk being seen as salesmen ourselves.
So we often end up mista subversion for truth.
But like every time that came before,
when we realize authenticity has been co opted by propaganda,
we'll start to reject it.
Everyone here is seeing the the massive demonstrations for Hamas and what I see is people who care about looking good while doing evil.
(18:41):
They don't really care about LGBT Q or you,
the only pride.
A lot of these corporations seem to have is in their quarterly earnings report.
And the problem with the social media and trying to tiktok activism and trying to debate this on that is you can't speak the truth,
you can pretend to speak the truth when that happens and we're left with nothing to believe in.
(19:04):
This is propaganda.
(19:27):
This is propaganda is presented by Brink.
We're creative collective.
Dedicated to helping activist brands and causes shift behaviors and beliefs.
We do everything from branding and advertising campaigns all the way through to distributing feature films and a special thanks to cloud microphones for providing equipment and studio cloud microphones.
Award-winning ribbon microphones and accessories are used by artists,
(19:47):
studios and touring companies all over the world,
but they're made right here in the USA in Tucson,
Arizona.
Visit cloud microphones.com to learn more written and hosted by Josh Beller and Malcolm Critcher,
producing by Jacqueline Hubris Burger and Reid Chandler,
story editor,
Matt Decker.
Additional audio engineering provided by Paul Yanti in original music by Josh Belga.
(20:10):
This is a production of Brink.
Find More at brink.com.
Join the Slack community at this is propaganda.slack.com or find us on Reddit at this is propaganda.
Send any hate mail to propaganda at brink.com.
From the midtown studios of Bloomberg Television in New New York City.
This is Charlie Rose.
David Foster Wallace defies description in an age where the novel is constantly being threatened by the allure of technological advancement.
I am pleased to have him back on this broadcast author David Foster Wallace probably put it best.
(00:22):
We're stuck in a contradiction.
There's a very American um sort of confusion and interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that,
that the need to believe is bullshit that there's nothing left anywhere but um salesmen,
we aren't blind to how common propaganda is in our daily lives,
but we are bound to it as each generation grows up with new forms of media that are designed to capture and sell our attention.
(00:47):
Our sensibilities begin to evolve.
We become more savvy to the various techniques we see and far more skeptical of the institutions we once trusted.
If the Trump administration approves a vaccine before or after the election,
should Americans take it?
And would you take it if the doctors tell us that we should take it?
I'll be the first in line to take it.
But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it,
(01:08):
I'm not taking it.
You can call it a defense mechanism.
We put up barriers to protect ourselves against unwelcome manipulation.
Then we let our instincts guide when to lower those defenses.
We wanna feel like we're choosing our beliefs and not letting others choose for us.
My grandpa,
who I never met,
he died in the same hospital.
I was born in two weeks before I was born and he worked for the American oil company,
(01:31):
whatever you have that uncanny feeling that you're being sold to the pandering speech from the overly rehearsed politician,
buzzword salad on a corporate web page or the perfect family living a perfect life in a tight 32nd spot.
You're less likely to believe because your guard is up.
Nobody wants to actively be manipulated.
They were worried about it.
But that's the thing.
It only feels like manipulation when it fails at what it aims to do when it succeeds.
(01:59):
Lock them.
This is propaganda.
(02:21):
All propaganda is a story,
a story about the world as you wanna see it.
If that story fails,
the idea can't take hold and the propaganda fails too.
21 year old Kendall Jenner is the first model to get a big Pepsi ad since Cindy Crawford in 1992.
But that's being overshadowed online where many are calling the ad tasteless saying it takes advantage of serious issues and movements to sell soda setting aside the biggest sins of all being derivative or just straight up boring.
(02:48):
One of the biggest challenges of the contemporary storyteller is to overcome our built in bullshit detectors.
No,
I don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
I don't buy it.
Mm.
Yeah,
that sounds suspicious.
Or in other words,
to deliver something authentic.
I wanna talk about authenticity at the end of the day.
People just believe in authenticity and authenticity is the alignment of three things,
(03:09):
your thoughts,
your words and your actions.
If you go on amazon.com,
you can buy about 20,000 books on how to be more authentic.
Does your brand walk the talk brand?
Authenticity is a hot topic.
And for good reason,
as many as 63% of customers will choose an authentic brand over one that's less transparent.
Authenticity is the buzziest of buzzwords in marketing.
(03:31):
Every brand guide uses it even the army.
This is what we do.
This is what we do.
This is what we do.
We bring out the best in the people who serve because America calls for nothing less.
The textbook definition of brand authenticity is to align your marketing with the reality of your product's values and actions.
Now,
how much does reality really matter?
Does an audience's perception of authenticity have much to do with the real world consider one of the biggest and most polarizing brands of the past decade.
(03:58):
The brand of Donald Trump.
I love the old days.
You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this,
they'd be carried out on a stretcher.
Folks.
I have such respect for women.
I cherish women.
You've called women.
You don't like fat pigs,
dogs,
slobs and disgusting animals.
(04:21):
You brag that you have sexually assaulted women.
Do you understand that?
No,
get those lights off.
It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country because you'd be in jail.
Do you make the same commitment that you will absolutely accept the result of this election?
I will look at it at the time.
(04:45):
One of the reasons he's so adored by his supporters,
how he was able to demolish a crowded Republican in the field in 2016 and become one of the most unlikely world leaders in history is that he tapped into the true meaning of authenticity.
He buys and sells politicians of all stripes.
He's used to buying politicians.
Well,
I've given him plenty of money in a recent poll.
(05:06):
71% of Trump voters said they felt what he tells them is true.
We consider only 63% said they trust family and friends.
He's not fake.
You know what he's thinking.
He,
he tells the truth.
You know,
I like his,
I like his uh his honesty and transparency.
He was a little more honest than the rest of them.
Uh He,
he said things that uh that were true.
(05:28):
Trump lies all the time.
If he presses supporters with a well sourced fact check,
they might even concede the point.
An Ohio State University study of 8100 participants showed this,
but the same study also showed that it doesn't matter,
it's not gonna make them change their overall feelings about him.
How can so many people perceive someone as authentic when they're constantly lying?
(05:49):
I've got to be the cleanest sheriff.
I think I'm the most honest human being.
Perhaps that God ever created.
Perhaps they know Trump's a salesman and they understand the game salesmen play.
We all do,
but they don't see themselves as the ones getting played.
Instead,
they're on the same team,
whether he's lying to get what he wants or to protect himself.
His lies are also for their benefit because they're in on it with him.
(06:09):
I would vote for that man.
If I had to go to prison and pull the lever,
I would vote for him.
If he was in prison,
he has my vote and I won't vote for anybody but him.
And I think that is echoed all across this land.
This is not exclusive to the Trump voter nor to politics.
If the 21st century consumer navigates a world in which there is nothing left but salesmen.
(06:32):
We all have a heightened awareness of the propaganda game.
We can either reject it and be left bitter and alone or we can choose to participate and get to believe in something.
What other choice do we have when it comes to politicians?
We've seen every trick in the book,
just like we've seen every single story told every single type of way.
All we do is stare at screens sometimes three at a time,
we're bombarded with content and most of its propaganda,
(06:53):
this is built a media savvy and even the least cultured among us that you didn't see 50 years ago.
Because of this,
the way we engage with media has an added layer of constant self awareness.
It's increasingly rare to just give yourself over to a story.
I'm re-watching Seventh Heaven.
Please just listen to the plot.
This episode,
I just finished.
(07:13):
It starts with a dad who's also a past.
Instead we're analyzing and reacting and recontextualized every show,
every ad,
every post,
every speech,
every everything to the million other things we've seen before.
It.
How does a brand like Donald Trump get so many people to believe in such an unlikely way to answer that we need to retrace contemporary culture's steps.
(07:39):
Let's take it back to the nineties.
The year is 1993.
The Coca Cola company being the savvy propagandists that they are.
See what everyone else sees.
Culture is changing again.
We don't have a war,
we don't have a depression,
we don't have legalized discrimination.
We don't,
the economy is so much worse for young people today than it was when I was young.
(08:02):
We had the counterculture.
They have the counter commerce generation X.
The babies of the baby boomers watched their parents go from peace and love at Woodstock to quarter the earnings calls on Wall Street.
And it made them deeply skeptical of just about everything.
We're being approached as a segment of people to market to,
to advertise to.
(08:22):
And what we actually are is a group of people that are immune to advertising.
In a few words,
it became uncool to care,
but it's the advertiser's job to get you to care.
Therefore,
advertising also became deeply uncool by the time he or she has finished high school,
an average American kid has watched 350,000 television commercials.
A third of a million we speak and understand the language of media as natives rather than as immigrants start spending your dollars marketing and just start making good stuff.
(08:53):
Each new generation rejects the tools propaganda had previously used to imitate genuine cultural output and then propaganda has to rapidly shift to ensure it's still capable of speaking to the coveted demographic of 18 to 25 generation X.
There are lots of them and they are consumers.
They're smart and television savvy.
However,
they represent quite a challenge for Madison Avenue,
(09:15):
Coca Cola decided to hire Sergio Zyman,
the marketing consultant behind the incredibly successful relaunch of Diet Coke.
And the incredible failure that was new Coke objective.
Get the MTV generation to buy soda.
Step One,
identify what they care to express most.
Ironically,
it's that they don't care.
Step two,
make buying soda an act of rebellion against deeply caring the result.
(09:36):
OK.
Soda,
an entirely new brand unlike any other before,
a brand that would speak the gen X language of disillusionment.
Dear blank.
As you may have heard our television chain letter promoting OK.
Soda has yielded interesting results.
Steve s of Oakland California declined a can of OK.
At a party.
(09:57):
The next day,
his fiance announced her intention to marry his best friend,
an enthusiastic drinker of OK.
OK.
Soda subverts the false promises and superlatives of brand marketing.
The soda isn't the real thing like Coca Cola was,
it won't make you happy,
it won't make you sing.
It's just OK.
Are you familiar with our 10 point?
(10:17):
OK.
Manifesto,
here's a quick refresher just in case the whole tone of the brand was otherworldly among consumer packaged goods.
The packaging was detached from the paradigms of the time with monotone colors and surrealist,
artful hand drawn illustrations.
(10:37):
They were designed by Charles Burns and Daniel Klaus Klaus recounted in 2014 that he modeled one of the faces that appeared on the cans after notorious serial killer Charles Manson as a subtle way to stick it to the corporation that hired him and they made me sign all this non disclosure paperwork and stuff.
But nothing ever said.
Don't put a mass murderer on the can.
If the goal of the brand was cynicism,
(10:59):
it seems like they had the right guy for the job.
An important announcement regarding OK,
soda due to the controversial nature of this product,
a toll free number has been established to handle stories regarding its consumption.
That number is 1 800.
I feel OK.
Imagine these odd moments of subversion appearing inside of a block of the loud frenetic and colorful ads of the nineties.
Keep in mind this is the era of Dutch angles and rapid cuts.
(11:22):
And Michael Bay was the hottest commercial director around.
Hey,
you freeze bitch.
Now back up,
put the gun down and give me a pack of tropical fruit bubble licious if you haven't heard of OK?
Soda.
It's because it only stayed on the shelves in a few test markets for seven months.
Poor Sergia Ziman,
the guy whose Wikipedia entry says he's best known for the failure of New Coke and he had another failure on his hands.
(11:44):
His wiki page doesn't even mention this one.
Who knows why it failed.
Maybe it was ahead of its time,
maybe they weren't patient enough.
Maybe it just tasted bad.
What I do know is that it was truly visionary and it's a bellwether for how propaganda would need to evolve to handle a more sophisticated and skeptical audience.
Coca Cola might have given up on OK?
Soda,
but they didn't give up on the insight.
(12:05):
They tried again just a few years later with an existing brand Sprite.
But this time it worked objective,
get the MTV generation to buy soda and maybe this time we don't put Charles Manson on the can.
The result.
Grant Hill's self-aware celebrity endorsement of Sprite.
(12:28):
Hi,
I'm Grant Hill,
professional basketball player for the Detroit Pistons.
You know,
when I get thirsty,
I reach for Sprite,
you see,
Sprite refreshes me like nothing else because it's the only drink with that cool crisp refreshing taste.
The whole premise was about the phoniness of celebrity endorsements in this spot as he delivers the standard endorsement playbook straight,
(12:49):
the camera,
a caricature of him holding money bags,
pops into the corner of the screen with a loud kains while deconstructing and subverting tropes and advertising was nothing new.
This felt fresh.
It was calling itself bullshit before anybody else had a chance to,
it felt right at home against a postmodern cultural backdrop as sincerity had given way to irony.
(13:10):
So what have you two come up with?
I think I can sum up the show for you with one word.
Nothing.
What does that mean?
The show is about nothing when irony is used in art,
it ideally reveals a deeper truth when it's used in propaganda.
It can often feel like an attempt to obscure a deeper truth rather than reveal one.
(13:33):
It's still the Coca Cola corporation.
They're still trying to sell you soda and that interior war keeps raging on because you see,
when you really put everything on a bagel,
it becomes this the truth.
What it's the truth,
nothing matters.
(13:55):
Is there a way to both have your cake and ironically deconstructed too?
Author Raul Eshelman coined a phrase called the double frame to describe what he observed occurring within the art world in the late nineties and early aughts.
Big of the double frame is a storytelling device where you embed one type of story inside the container of another,
the outer frame or the container is a high concept that can either go meta drawing direct attention to the fact that you're engaged in a story.
(14:19):
My name is Lester Burnham.
I'm 42 years old in less than a year.
I'll be dead.
It can also just be so absurd that you couldn't possibly mistake it for reality.
You like scary movies.
What's your favorite scary movie?
This approach encourages you to buy into the story because if you don't,
then you can't engage with it in a meaningful way,
(14:41):
you're an active participant because you chose to accept the premise.
Now you feel in control.
That's when the inner frame can do its job.
There's the freedom to be sincere and deliver an unironic message to give you a reason to believe.
I know you're fighting because you're scared and confused.
I'm confused.
T I don't know what the heck is going on.
(15:02):
It's the only thing I do know is that we have to be kind,
especially if we don't know what's going on,
the more you begin to observe and articulate contemporary devices like the double frame,
the more you also begin to recognize the why behind it,
a symbiotic relationship between culture and propaganda,
culture often moves as an attempt to overcome our skepticism and reach for some new form of authenticity.
(15:26):
What we find to be good stories are those that we can believe in those that don't feel like the tools of a salesman.
The best propagandists are savvy enough and brave enough to move with it.
And when they do,
sometimes they shock the world and they change the way propaganda communicates.
But this also starts the cycle back over.
(15:48):
We needed tickets.
You can't get them,
you know who has the tickets for the I'm talking about to the television audience,
donors,
special interests,
the people that are putting up the money.
The reason they're not,
excuse me.
The reason they're not loving me is I don't want their money.
I'm gonna do the right thing for the American public.
I don't want their money.
(16:09):
I don't need their money.
And I'm the only one up here that can say that all propaganda is a story and the story Trump told that put him in the White House employed a double frame.
The Otter frame was subversive.
He frequently broke the fourth wall and mocked the whole thing as a charade,
he made absurd jokes and gave his opponents funny names.
Lying,
Ted,
lying.
Ted.
(16:29):
What's your name?
My name's lying,
Ted Cruz.
And while his detractors didn't understand how someone could break from the decorum,
they expected in a candidate,
his supporters were starting to feel like they were in on it with him.
You know what she said?
Shout it out because I don't want to.
Ok,
you're not allowed to say,
I never expect to hear that from you again.
She said he's a pussy.
(16:50):
That's Tara.
He lowered their defenses and said,
you think this is bullshit.
Well,
guess what?
You're right.
It is.
And once they bought into the premise,
he could deliver the inner frame and it had a much better chance of resonating and we will make America great.
Again,
(17:10):
many of the tactics Trump took that people argued,
made him unfit for office were the very tactics that made his propaganda so potent.
His story worked to resolve that interior war that David Foster Wallace spoke of because he gave voice to the deep belief that everything is bullshit and it gave his supporters a reason to believe.
There is nobody in my mind.
(17:31):
There is nobody that can help us more than Trump.
President Trump,
I believe was the best president of the 21st century in my household.
You got Martin Luther King,
you got Jesus and you got Donald Trump a toll.
Even internal ones if authenticity is mostly a farce.
Just another tactic of the propagandists.
(17:53):
Then we risk losing grasp on what's real you are being lied to.
I mean,
just ask yourself just on the merits of the facts.
We become conditioned to see sincerity as an instrument of manipulation.
I never thought I'd make a video like this but um,
I think there's an important conversation to be had and I just wanna be fully accountable,
honest and transparent.
What's the point of making an apology video for the best of your ability?
(18:14):
When 90% of people are just gonna shoot on you for it.
If we're sincere,
we risk being seen as salesmen ourselves.
So we often end up mista subversion for truth.
But like every time that came before,
when we realize authenticity has been co opted by propaganda,
we'll start to reject it.
Everyone here is seeing the the massive demonstrations for Hamas and what I see is people who care about looking good while doing evil.
(18:41):
They don't really care about LGBT Q or you,
the only pride.
A lot of these corporations seem to have is in their quarterly earnings report.
And the problem with the social media and trying to tiktok activism and trying to debate this on that is you can't speak the truth,
you can pretend to speak the truth when that happens and we're left with nothing to believe in.
(19:04):
This is propaganda.
(19:27):
This is propaganda is presented by Brink.
We're creative collective.
Dedicated to helping activist brands and causes shift behaviors and beliefs.
We do everything from branding and advertising campaigns all the way through to distributing feature films and a special thanks to cloud microphones for providing equipment and studio cloud microphones.
Award-winning ribbon microphones and accessories are used by artists,
(19:47):
studios and touring companies all over the world,
but they're made right here in the USA in Tucson,
Arizona.
Visit cloud microphones.com to learn more written and hosted by Josh Beller and Malcolm Critcher,
producing by Jacqueline Hubris Burger and Reid Chandler,
story editor,
Matt Decker.
Additional audio engineering provided by Paul Yanti in original music by Josh Belga.
(20:10):
This is a production of Brink.
Find More at brink.com.
Join the Slack community at this is propaganda.slack.com or find us on Reddit at this is propaganda.
Send any hate mail to propaganda at brink.com.
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