Scientists are finally coming around to what has been well known in the advertising business for more than half a century. Some of the most effective promotions happen without the knowledge of consumers. It’s called stealth marketing.
Last week, The Lancet published a scientific paper suggesting that 10- to 14-year-old kids’ behaviour is influenced by tobacco use in movies.
“The study provides the strongest evidence to date that smoking in movies encourages adolescents to start smoking,” Madeline Dalton of the Dartmouth Medical School, the lead author on the study, told the Washington Post.
The researchers followed more than 2,000 American ’tweens for two years, and found that the amount of smoking in the movies they watched had a strong correlation to the likelihood that they would try cigarettes. It was even more predictive than peer smoking.
In the ad industry, this power to influence has been known and exploited for decades.
The best example came to light in 1982. It dates back to 1938 when the De Beers diamond company hired a New York ad agency, N.W. Ayer, to figure out ways to effectively market diamonds.
(As the only real diamond supplier, De Beers was not concerned about promoting their “brand,” only increasing diamond consumption.)
One of N.W. Ayer’s initiatives was to prominently place diamonds in glamorous films. They wrote to De Beers that “it would be our plan to contact scenario writers and directors and arrange for such scenes in suitable productions.”
An investigative journalist named Edward Jay Epstein published a book in 1982, The Diamond Invention, that exposed the backroom dealings. In his research, Epstein discovered documents relating to antitrust investigations against De Beers and its affiliates in the United States. One part dealt with De Beers’ ambitions in the media industry.
One report Epstein found, dated 1940, is from N.W. Ayer representatives to De Beers executives. It says that meetings and “efforts” with certain movie studio executives had persuaded, for example, the film-makers to insert a new scene into the movie Skylark. The added scene basically involved shopping for a diamond clip and bracelet for Claudette Colbert, the star. How the diamond company and its agency persuaded the film-makers to insert the promotional scene is not explicitly stated. That same report mentions that De Beers and N.W. Ayer had convinced Paramount to change the name of a film from Diamonds are Dangerous to Adventures in Diamonds.
The report has some chilling conclusions: The meetings went so well that efforts to manipulate the content of Hollywood movies should continue, and even expand to other media, it said. Here is a quote: “It is the responsibility of the publicity effort to gain access to the editorial and news columns of magazines and newspapers . . . In this manner, (the campaign) carries the authority of a disinterested source and consequently creates interest among readers.”
Being a monopoly back in the 1940s, De Beers had, and still has, the money and power to influence people in the media. Only self-restraint and ethical discipline on the part of media executives and reporters (and columnists) could have stopped this kind of deceptive, stealthy influence from tainting supposedly “disinterested” content.
Sadly, shortsightedness was in short supply then, and I think it still is today.
Almost every week, it seems another executive is going to jail or facing charges for a corrupt practice. Media are not exempt. An alarming amount of plagiarism and pure fiction is finding its way into news pages of such esteemed institutions as the New York Times. The result: the whole media industry has been hurt.
Judging by the number of diamond-centred plots in the movies today, I would be surprised to learn that De Beers’ behind-the-scenes influence has waned. That’s not to say it’s overt or purely financial. But the public’s cynical suspicion is the price the studios will pay for their dalliances in the 1940s.
Armed with the knowledge of past deceptions, consumers are becoming wary of every film, radio and TV program, magazine and newspaper.
With every new James Bond film with a diamond-centred plot, such as the recent Die Another Day, the indirect ties that Ian Fleming, James Bond’s creator, had to the De Beers empire (again, see Epstein’s book) look suspicious. Fleming wrote three books with diamonds in the title, one being a blatant variation on the recognizable De Beers ad slogan of 1948: “A diamond is forever,” that being, Diamonds are Forever (published in 1956). It later became a movie and hit song.
The diamond industry gains to the extent that weak-minded people get the erroneous notion that diamonds are rare or particularly valuable, assuming that because they are fawned over in the fictitious world Hollywood creates, it must be true. But the informed among us now audibly moan during diamond scenes, deciding we hate diamonds and Hollywood movies with diamonds in them.
Which brings me back to cigarettes. Today’s kids are being suckered by the rampant smoking in Hollywood pictures. According to one survey, smoking in films has actually increased since paid-product placement of cigarettes was outlawed (in 1998, in the U.S.).
The marriage between Hollywood and tobacco will eventually hurt the film industry. As the science gets up to speed with reality, I predict that movies with smoking will be deemed restricted adult.
These consequences will arise whether or not there are any real out-of-sight “arrangements” being made between big tobacco and big stars. We know such arrangements have happened and can happen again. That is enough.
So if you didn’t know before, you now know that stealth marketing does sell product. But it eventually hurts the medium that carries it.
