The Revolution Will Not Be Advertised

Alexis de Tocqueville in his seminal analysis of American Society, "Democracy in America", made the acute observation (in 1830) that in a society in which everyone wants to get ahead it is logically impossible for everyone to get ahead. Some will be left behind. If you define success in your society on others doing worse than you then you will, as a society, have set yourself up for failure.

People will take increasingly larger risks as they see others, who they consider less able, to be more successful through shear luck. Given de Tocqueville wrote this at the same time that Marx wrote "Das Kapital" I think we should talk about the new Alexism rather than Marxism.

Another Frenchman, Alain de Botton, wrote an equally insightful book "Status Anxiety" in 1998 in which he argued that most people are ultimately tied to defining their success in terms of other peoples' failure. It is a very weird world we live in the West that we do this when there are so many people who live on a pittance - several cents a day - and all we worry about is that the person next door has a nicer beach house.

Why is this about advertising? Because advertising has two paradigms. The first is that they are giving it away for free. To everyone. The second is that in buying their product you are one of the cool people who gets it and is getting ahead.

Update: A programme on advertising last week called "The Persuaders" said there are two sorts of advertising. The first is stuff given away for free and the second is where they flatter you by making you feel like you are in on the joke. This is what viral marketing is about as they want you to talk about what you saw and mention the brand at the same time hence increasing brand awareness which is the only metric for success that advertisers care about, well that and industry awards for creative campaigns that never happened. Increased client sales is a distant third. As I suspected.