By: Noah Goldstein
Noticeably absent from this list is cigarettes, a product whose advertisements were banned from the airwaves by the Federal Government nearly thirty years ago. What seems most perplexing at first about the ban is that the executives of Big Tobacco enthusiastically endorsed the proposed regulation. Why would the chief officers of the tobacco industry agree not just to curb, but to completely eliminate, the promotion of their products from a medium which best facilitated efforts to gain and retain customers?
A few years earlier, the Federal Communications Commission had enacted the "fairness doctrine," which ordered radio stations and television networks that broadcasted controversial messages of public importance to also provide free air time to those with opposing views. Anti-tobacco groups capitalized on this ruling by initiating an ad campaign that provided viewers with effective counterarguments that refuted each purported benefit of cigarettes "demonstrated" in Big Tobacco's commercials. The anti-tobacco commercials' potency was further enhanced by the ads' inclusion of mnemonic links to easily recognizable characters, settings, themes, and narrations that were appearing in cigarette ads at the time. The counter-advertisements proved to be enormously successful; per capita cigarette consumption dropped almost 10 percent in the following three years, most of which has been attributed to the counter-ads (Simonich, 1991). It is not so surprising then, that the industry's leaders decided it would be more profitable to reallocate their advertising budgets to media to which the fairness doctrine did not apply, such as billboards and print ads.
In work that is not yet published, Robert Cialdini and colleagues (Cialdini, Petrova, Demaine, Barrett, Sagarin, Rhoads, & Maner, unpublished manuscript) conducted a series of studies to test the hypothesis that two-pronged counter-advertisements-those containing both counterarguments and mnemonic links to the original target ad-would be more effective in bolstering individuals' resistance to the persuasive appeals of the original ad than counter-ads with counterarguments alone. This strategy based on the implementation of these two-pronged counter-ads has been dubbed the "Poison Parasite Defense," because the effective counterarguments act as poison to the original arguments, while the parasitic mechanism ensures that the specific medium through which the original arguments are delivered will now also "host" these poisonous counterarguments, activating them each time the original ad is viewed. One example of the Poison Parasite at work in real life shows one Marlboro Man-type saying to another, "Bob, I've got emphysema." The next time individuals see a real life ad for Marlboros, they are more likely to automatically conjure up the counterargument and therefore become more resistant to the cigarette ad's message.
In one study, participants viewed a series of advertisements, one of which was for a chemical company called Zelotec. The same participants viewed an additional set of advertisements a week later, which included either a Poison Parasite ad, a "Counter-information Only" ad, or a Control ad. Specifically, Zelotec's original ad, featuring a pristine waterfall scene, asserted that the company was especially concerned for the environment. The Counter-information Only ad refuted Zelotec's with counterarguments that were superimposed onto a picture wholly different from that of the original ad's waterfalls (i.e., a photo of Zelotec's corporate headquarters). The Poison Parasite ad contained the same counterarguments, but they were superimposed onto the original Zelotec ad. Participants returned for a third and final session one week later and again viewed the original Zelotec ad among a number of other ads. The results were clear: As measured by participants' perceptions of Zelotec's honesty and their likelihood of supporting the company's planned move to the local area, those in the Poison Parasite condition were significantly less persuaded by Zelotec's advertisement than those in the Counter-information Only condition. In another study, similar results were found regarding advertisements for a political candidate.
These findings suggest that the sponsors of real-world ads would be locking themselves into a Chinese finger trap of sorts by attempting to overcome these types of counter-ads through an increase in the frequency with which their ads are run. In a world in which Goliath-sized companies have greater access to resources with which to reach their audiences, the Poison Parasite has the potential to arm the modern-day David with a powerful slingshot.
Source:
Cialdini, R.B., Petrova, P. K., Demaine, L. J., Barrett, D. W., Sagarin, B. J., Rhoads, K. L., & Maner, J. K. The poison parasite defense: a strategy for sapping a stronger opponent's persuasive strength.Unpublished manuscript.
Simonich, W. L. (1991). Government antismoking policies. New York, NY: P. Lang.
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