I orignally intended my last post to contain a list of examples of ‘who’ overriding ‘what’, but as always, I ran out of time and ended up only giving one case so redacted that it was just an abstract pattern. So I thought I’d make my list into a separate post, only to realize that my first item was big enough to stand on its own.
A recurring modern type of ‘who’-dominance in the modern world is celebrity endorsements. A message - a ‘what’ - that would be ignored if a nobody said it gets attention because a somebody says it. Why?
For their study, the researchers recruited dozens of participants to look at mock advertisements of snack foods
Why not use real advertisements?
with either celebrities or non-celebrities gazing at either the snack food or at the viewer.
How were those fake ads made? By staging them with randos and headswapping celebrities’ heads with less-than-convincing 2023 pre-AI software? Ideally the ads with randos and celebs should be identical except for the heads.
They tracked participants’ eye movements and pupil dilation,
How? In an intrusive way that skewed the results?
then used computational modeling to understand how gaze-cueing and celebrity endorsement affect participants’ product preference decisions.
A model is only as good as its modeller.
The study on marketing psychology yielded two significant findings about the impact of celebrity endorsements.
People are more likely to choose products that are endorsed by a celebrity rather than a non-celebrity, and they make that choice faster. [But how meaningful is a choice for a fictional product? Real product choices outside a lab are determined by many factors beyond celeb association: e.g., cost, availability, perceived quality, etc.] Viewers had less pupil dilation when choosing a product that was advertised with a celebrity, an indication that they were spending less time deliberating their choice and were more confident about their decision.
Gaze-cueing is stronger in non-celebrities. When non-celebrities look at a product, viewers more often follow their gaze toward that product and linger on the item [i.e., on the what rather than on the whom]. When a celebrity is featured in an ad, viewers tend to linger on the face of the famous person regardless of whether the star is gazing at the product or back at the viewer.
If headswaps were used to make fake celeb ads, might an uncanny valley effect have attracted the viewers’ eyes? Would a headswap with a rando have triggered the same lingering? My assumption is that computer graphics that aren’t entirely convincing make us pause in a way that seamless graphics wouldn’t - the ‘what am I looking at?’ effect. Maybe the key word is “I”. Maybe most people don’t care about photo fakery to the same degree.
“One of the key takeaways is that celebrity endorsement does work,” [researcher Zab] Johnson said, noting that tracking eye movement alone without pupil dilation and subsequent choice behavior would not have revealed how celebrities influence the speed of consumer decision-making. In fact, eye-tracking alone just proves that viewers look longer at the celebrity than the product.
A product that presumably wasn’t photoshopped. Are viewers just looking longer at altered parts of images?
That’s known in marketing as “the vampire effect,” which posits that celebrities can overshadow and steal consumer attention away from the brand.
“It turns out that even though viewers aren’t looking at the product as much, the celebrity is still building consumer confidence. These are where preferences are more swayable on purpose,” Johnson said.
The researchers believe the ability of celebrities to persuade is rooted in evolution and biology. Both humans and primates will follow the lead of high-status, high-prestige individuals in their group by aligning their gaze or copying their decisions.
Humans are primates. When I’m frustrated with humans’ command craving, I’m frustrated with an ancient thirst, that will continue in the future, long after I’m gone. I might as well be mad about having only ten fingers. Even I’ve felt the craving. Not with Hollyweirdos but with stars in my own universe … like (shudder) Ayn Read. I really did once believe a Jewish lady who died in 1982 had almost all the answers …
This behavior is seen in the wild, when monkeys turn to look at whatever a higher-status monkey is looking at in the trees, or in the office, when employees model their work after the top-rated employee.
Has anyone seen that kind of workplace emulation? I haven’t, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In a diverse workplace - and I’m not referring to race, gender, sexual preference, etc. - it doesn’t make sense for someone doing A to imitate someone doing B except perhaps in the most superficial way: e.g., coming in early, working overtime, etc.
When the leader is successful, others require less evidence to make the same choice.
Define “successful”.
“That doesn’t mean a celebrity can make you choose a product that you hate,” Johnson said. “Your strong preferences — if you absolutely love or hate something — don’t move, but there is a lot of wiggle room in there with products you might not yet have strong feelings about.”
That wiggle room may narrow over time, because …
Johnson said as the technology advances, scientists will get even more unfettered access to the brain’s decision-making mechanisms.
Hooray, The Science™ will find even more effective ways to scam the suckers. To achieve the ideal of Final Enslavement - what Jack Kirby called anti-life. Total control.
Are we enjoying - if that’s the right word - the last days of freedom?
I obviously has doubts about that study. The fact that it comes from Wharton™ is of no relevance to me. Never mind what Brave AI says about Wharton™:
The Wharton School is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philadelphia, and holds the distinction of being the world’s first collegiate business school, founded in 1881. It is a premier institution within the Ivy League, renowned for its rigorous academic programs, particularly in finance, and boasts the largest alumni network of any business school in the United States, with nearly 100,000 members.
Wharton consistently ranks among the top business schools globally, often placing in the top three for overall rankings and ranking #1 in several specific disciplines such as finance, accounting, management, and marketing. The school offers a comprehensive range of degrees, including undergraduate, MBA, Executive MBA, and doctoral programs, attracting top talent with a highly selective admissions process and producing graduates who lead major Fortune 500 companies and hold influential positions in global finance and business.
A brand name is a stand-in for a who.
A who is not a stand-in for a what that is true. But people are hung up over ‘who said it?’ rather than ‘is it true?’
Cavemen valued charisma over veracity. We don’t live in caves anymore, but our preferences haven’t changed. Our overlords’ ability to manipulate those preferences has changed. Celebrities are force-multipliers.
Where would the Psychic Friends Network have been without Dionne Warwick?
Slate: […T]he Psychic Friends infomercials had been among the most popular in history. Between 1993 and 1994, they aired more than 12,000 times, and at one point Inphomation was shelling out half a million dollars a week to buy air time on cable stations. It was money well spent: At its peak, Psychic Friends was bringing in as much as $125 million a year, most of it through infomercials.
Seems like the infomercials were the real product. No one, myself included, would remember them - the what - without the who. The singer of “Heartbreaker”.
How heartbroken were callers to ‘psychics’ when they saw their phone bills?
Former psychic hot line worker and author of “Psychic Blues,” Mark Edward, says he’s blowing the whistle on his former industry.
[…]
Edward says he was taught techniques to keep his conversations vague, flattering and drawn out. The goal was to make the callers feel good about themselves, and keep them talking. Edward once gave a two-and-a-half-hour reading. At $3.99 a minute, the caller paid more than $600.
[…]
In a 2007 study, conducted by the University of Auckland in New Zealand, Dr. Robin-Marie Shepherd found most users called for advice on “personal relationships.” Nearly all users describe their behavior as “addictive.”
And, at an average of $100 per reading, many went in to debt because of it.
How many went into debt because of Warwick?
How many learned not to trust a celebrity?
That antilife thing reminds me of the art in the subgenius books. Great stuff. But I'm annoys by comics constantly doing the really lame strawman version of arguments. It's really deeply insulting. Even if aimed at children. That irony is that it's supposed to lambast being simplistic and manipulative, but that's exactly what it's being itself in the very same move. As the man said be careful what you pretend to be.