This was the strategy during older wars. No time for disagreement or dissent; there must be a unified response and effort; otherwise, we could lose.
We're all in this together means: fall in line.
If that's share and care and love, it's robot love.
Advertisers, despite their studies and their sophistication and their wall-to-wall profiling of consumers, still believe in the first principle of propaganda: repetition.
Get the name of your product and company out there and don't stop. Do it a thousand times, a million times. As long as you have money to pay for ads, do it.
Look at the insurance company commercials. Progressive, State Farm, Liberty, Geico. The little vignettes they lay on are really the occasion for pasting their company name on the screen. Make these 30-second stories friendly and funny and crazy, but the money shot is the company name.
Pandemic ads and messages follow the same rule. In this case, it's TOGETHERNESS. UNITY. Pounded on and on.
Why? If cooperation and love and togetherness are basic human impulses, why do people need to be reminded of that 24 hours a day, on television?
Does a husband who loves his wife need to see his face and his wife's face on a screen, on every channel, without let-up, along with a message urging him to adore her?
On the other hand, a person who's been thrown out of a job, who can't find work, who sees his government checks fading down to zero...he needs pacification. That's a tough sell. That sell-job requires a whole lot of repetition."
"In order to produce SHAME in him, if he feels cheated and exiled and screwed. The repetition of togetherness and fake love informs him that the collective citizenry isn't on his side. It tells him his righteous anger has no place in the relentlessly upbeat messaging of "unity." It keeps him feeling isolated.
Now we're getting down to it. Don't let the people who are economically devastated believe they can find each other. Shut them out. Pump them full of television public service ads that paint an "uplifting" picture from which they're excluded.
They may be devastated, but television tells them they aren't on the team if they give their own concerns first priority. If they do, they're non-persons.
After all, when they sit at home watching TV, do they see a cropped video of another unemployed worker sitting in a dark room saying, "THIS IS CRAZY. I WANT TO WORK. I NEED FOOD. MY BOSS CLOSED HIS COMPANY. HE'S BANKRUPT. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?"
Are they offered that kind of unity? Togetherness?
"Hi. I'm an NFL corner-back. I've made $30 million during my career. Here I am at home with my kids. We're playing games on the floor. I'm enjoying my family. We'll get through this. All of us. Stay safe. Use the time to bring your family closer together."
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