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- [00:04]
Jane Marie
I'm Jane Marie, and this is the Dream. I want to introduce you to someone who thinks about cults in a way that we haven't considered before on the program. Dr. Mara Einstein is the author of How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults. And she would know. She used to be a marketer.
- [00:25]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Started my career as an actress, then worked my way into the advertising business where I worked on Atari International. So that tells you how long ago that was.
- [00:36]
Jane Marie
That's thrilling.
- [00:37]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Yeah, that was kind of fun. I worked on Miller Beer. I was the only woman who was working on the Miller Lite account when I worked on that. You know, I'd sit in on the casting sessions and the guys would be, you know, ogling the women. And I was just like, ugh, just call me when you're done and I'll come back, you know? And I worked as a casting agent in there somewhere. And then I worked at VH1 in the early 90s, and then I moved from there to NBC. And then I became a professor. And now I criticize everything that I used to do. Part of me was like, my job is to get people to watch more television. And I just said, that can't be the best use of my energy on the planet. I mean, it just can't. And I just remember one time there was a big brouhaha. Cause we weren't sure whether or not Seinfeld was going to be on the air again, whether or not he was gonna re sign his contract. And like, I just. Can I say I didn't give a fuck. I just didn't care. And I went, okay, if I'm at the point that I don't care whether or not the biggest star on the network is showing up, it's probably time to get out of Dodge.
- [02:03]
Jane Marie
And thank God she did, because her insights are just delicious. I'm going to read you some of the chapter titles from Hoodwinked. MLMs are pyramid schemes, aka cults, culty brands and branded cults. From skincare to coaching to cryptocurrency. Yes, we love all of this. So let's start where MLMs and cults start. Recruitment.
- [02:28]
Dr. Mara Einstein
What marketers talk about is the marketing funnel. And the top of the marketing funnel is very, very wide. And that's where marketers want to create awareness for their product. And so they advertise as much as possible. They get the word out as much as they can. And then the second step in the process is consideration. How can we get people to consider a product now that they know it exists. How can we get them to want to buy it? And so then the most successful advertiser is problem solution advertising. You have bad breath, right? Halitosis, which was created by Listerine and Listerine can get rid of it for you. Halitosis is not a real thing.
- [03:14]
Jane Marie
Wait, what do you mean it's not a real thing?
- [03:15]
Dr. Mara Einstein
I mean bad breath is a real thing, but halitosis, the word halitosis was created by Listerine.
- [03:22]
Jane Marie
I love it. I'm sorry, I hate it and I love it.
- [03:26]
Dr. Mara Einstein
So, yeah, it's very easy for them to solve the problem for you. Then they start to maybe if they've gotten your email, send you more emails, provide promotions, whatever it is that can entice you to buy. Then the next step in the process, which I love so much, cause I always talk about the intersection of marketing and religion or marketing and cults now is conversion. Once you've bought something, you have been converted, and then the last step in the process is loyalty, is how committed are you to this brand? And in the digital space, we call those people marketing evangelists. Because what the brand wants you to do is then go out and tell everybody else about how wonderful the product.
- [04:14]
Jane Marie
Is, which is what cults do and which is what multi level markets.
- [04:18]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Dr. Absolutely.
- [04:19]
Jane Marie
Yeah. And then how do advertisers get you stuck the way that cults and MLMs do?
- [04:26]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Well, what's interesting about the marketing funnel, in a traditional buying space, what would have happened is you would have heard about a brand, maybe you saw a commercial when you were sitting on your couch, you think about it some more. You say, oh, you know what, I'm going to the mall this Saturday, maybe I'll go look. And then you go look. And maybe it's to buy a pair of boots or whatever. And you're standing in front of the boots and you say, you know what? 150 bucks is more than I can afford right now. And then you walk away and you don't necessarily buy it. The issue in the digital space is that the funnel has been collapsed. So the time from awareness to purchase could be seconds. Can be absolutely seconds. And so you don't have that time to think, which is also part of the digital technology, right? This idea of Daniel Kahneman's idea of thinking fast and slow. If you're thinking slowly, you're thinking intellectually, you're, you're pondering as to whether or not this is something that you want to do. If you're thinking quickly, you're thinking with your emotions, which Again, ties into creating the anxiety which then would lead you to buy. So it becomes a situation of constantly anxiety release, anxiety release. So you get on that kind of hamster wheel of buying, and buying becomes kind of the default thing to do. And this is why we've gotten caught in all this consumerist purchase ideas and watching people do shein hauls and thinking that's an okay thing to do. It's not. Because if you then ask people, oh, do you care about the environment? They'll say yes. It's like, well, why did you buy something that still has a tag on it and sitting in your closet that you're then going to throw away and end up in a landfill? In the book, I have what I call the cult marketing continuum. And it starts with brand cults. It goes to influencers that I call cult light. Because there are some influencers that aren't necessarily trying to do anything untoward. And then there's influencers as conspiracy theorists. And the end of the continuum is multi level marketing, because multi level marketing is a cult. Period.
- [06:53]
Jane Marie
Right?
- [06:54]
Dr. Mara Einstein
End of sentence. And so as you go from one part of the continuum to the end, you have an increased amount of extremism and an increased amount of anxiety. And one of the things that I argue in the book is that while economists will say that we live in an intention economy, I say we live in an anxiety economy. And that goes to all the things that we've been talking about before. But when we talk about brand cults, this started in the early 2000s, and people in the industry talked about brand communities. And brand communities were groups of people that coalesced around a brand. You know, it was Apple, it was Harley Davidson, it was Jeep, you know, some of these things. But people were really committed to the brands, and some of it was sort of goosed on by the marketers, but not necessarily. And, you know, an example of more culty like tactics is something like Jeep. Because what Jeep would do is have these weekends where they would invite people to learn how to drive the car off road. Because that was really the. That's. That's the defining.
- [08:14]
Jane Marie
Factory. That's fun.
- [08:14]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Yeah, yeah. It's a thing to do.
- [08:17]
Jane Marie
It's the differentiator between a Jeep and your giant Town Car.
- [08:22]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Exactly. And you don't go by yourself. You bring a friend, and then you meet all these other people who are really into Jeep. And so you create community. Right. Cause that's all part of this. And then you engage each other with each other afterwards, and then you meet each other Again next year when it happens. All of that kind of good stuff. So that. So that was brand community. That was kind of cool. But only five years later, about 2005, we started to have books coming out about brand cults. And these were a bit more extreme, and there are a lot more of.
- [08:55]
Jane Marie
Them which were the extreme ones.
- [08:59]
Dr. Mara Einstein
You know, Apple's a good example. You know, whenever I get asked this question, you know, what is a brand called? You know, apple's a brand cult. And, you know, some would argue, yeah, it's not a terrible thing to be part of the Apple cult.
- [09:14]
Jane Marie
Oh, I'm trapped. I am trapped. Once I made a decision, I am trapped. Like, I have tried. So a lot of the apps I use to make podcasting are Apple native. Like, they don't work really on PCs.
- [09:26]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Yep.
- [09:27]
Jane Marie
Also, all of my electronics sync up with one another because they're all Apple products.
- [09:33]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Right.
- [09:35]
Jane Marie
I am in the cult of Apple inadvertently, just because I can't. My life would be really difficult if I wasn't. I don't even know if that's true. Listen to what I just said.
- [09:47]
Dr. Mara Einstein
But that's the thing. If I make this comment on social media somewhere, oh, no, it's really easy to move your music over. It's like, no, I tried it. It's not. You know, but there's other sort of culty aspects of Apple in that. You know, one thing that's kind of emblematic of a cult is the charismatic cult leader. And so even though Steve Jobs is long gone, it's like the specter of the. Of Steve Jobs still hovers over that company, and people still think about him as sort of the God of technology and all of that sort of stuff. And also the forums that exist for people to help people. Right. So there's that sort of it. And it's not that everybody who buys the product is necessarily part of the cult either, you know, but there are certainly cult members around that product. Now, there's certain sort of culty products that are kind of. An example would be something like Nutella. People who like Nutella, like Nutella at Columbia, that one year they spent half a million dollars just on Nutella because people kept stealing the jars of Nutella. But it was consumers who created World Nutella Day. It wasn't the brand that did it. And so it was people who came together because they loved the brand so much that did it. Them. If you have something like Brandy Melville, and this is if people have seen the documentary Brandy Hellville, it is really a cult. And in so much as they have created a product that has one size. And if you haven't looked at their website recently, I recommend that if you do go, be ready to see highly sort of anorexic, like, bodies on that site. A lot of it with the heads cut off of the people that you're seeing. So you're seeing, you know, it's. The people that are on the website are very white. The people who are working in the back room are not. The owner of the company makes the people who work in the store have their pictures taken and then are sent to him and he decides whether or not they are appropriately dressed. Now, that level of control is cult activity.
- [12:19]
Jane Marie
One thing I wanted to ask you about is I think we, you and I, we lived during a time where editorial and advertising were separate, right? Can you just talk about how things might have been before or were.
- [12:33]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Yeah, and I'm really glad you asked this question because I think it's important for people to understand that it's oftentimes hard to get that it didn't always used to be this way and that there was. There were gatekeepers so that we get information that's correct. Like, let's start with that. If you're on social media right now, you know, it's upon you. Are you engaging with a bot? If you're not engaging with a bot, are you engaging with somebody who has actually verified the information that they're sending? I mean, how many times do people just forward something, an article that a friend has sent to them without reading it, without going beyond the headline, and then repost it? Like a great example? And this is kind of a silly gatekeeper thing, but. But I think it's an example of what people probably don't know and couldn't imagine existed before. When I worked on Miller Beer, we wanted to use Tone Loke as the spokesperson for a Halloween ad.
- [13:41]
Jane Marie
Who wouldn't?
- [13:42]
Dr. Mara Einstein
I know, right? It was wonderful. But before we could do that at that time, there was basically the three broadcast networks, right? Abc, NBC, cbs. And we had to bring the script to the networks to make sure they would air the commercial. And two of the networks said, sure, yeah, no problem, we'll put it on. And one of them said, no, if you use him as the talent, then you are catering to underage drinkers. And so that network acting as a gatekeeper was trying to protect people who would see that ad. And so we then had to say, okay, we need to change. Changed the talent we're using in the ad because we couldn't afford for that ad not to be on one of the three major networks. But to get to the journalism part, I mean, where we saw that breakdown is sort of early 2000s. And that gets into my previous book, which is called Black Ops Advertising, which is all the ways that we're marketed to that we don't know that we're being marketed to. And what I looked at was this rise of native advertising. And native advertising are ads that are indigenous to the space within which they exist. So if you're scrolling on Facebook and you see a post and it looks exactly like something a friend of yours would send to you, but it turns out it's an ad and it has just like a little ghosted gray type sponsored. But if you're scrolling really quickly on your phone, you'd be hard pressed to realize that you're engaging with advertising. And so we approach content differently when we know there's a sponsor behind it than we do when we engage with editorial content. Because we come to it saying, oh, I know this person is trying to sell me something.
- [15:42]
Jane Marie
Right? We used to call those advertorials. Those were the early blog days.
- [15:46]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Yeah, same thing. But then what you started to have was branded journalism. And then what branded journalism is, is when. And everybody does it now. New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. You know, pick a publication. But the issue with branded journalism is that more and more journalists went over to the branded journalism side of the industry because there wasn't any money in writing for newspapers anymore. And that was also because more and more newspapers, particularly local newspapers, folded. And so who better to write content that looks like journalism than people who are former journalists? And so all of these publications have this branded journalism arm. And it becomes more and more difficult, again, to tell the difference between something that is legitimate editorial content and something that's an ad. Now, some of it's innocuous. So the first New York Times branded journalism major, or they call it custom native advertising, was a piece about women in prisons. And it was sponsored by Netflix because Netflix was doing Orange is the New Black, and it was like the new season. And it was fine. It was really interesting information. It was very well written. But the examples that are, you know, not so great, or when the Discover Card does a piece that says it's worth it to go to college, you know, kind of no matter what the price. But the issue is, is that it's because Discover Card will then provide a loan to students at a higher interest rate than the ones that they would get from the government. And they're saying, okay, we can help you sort of fill the gap because most students don't get enough loans to pay for everything. And then Discover Card is saying, oh, don't worry about it. You know, no matter how much college costs you, we can help you pay for it. Yeah, we can help you pay for it. But it's going to cost you through the nose because we're going to charge you this really, really high interest rate to do that. Or if you have a gas company doing an article about sustainability. And that's happened too.
- [18:11]
Jane Marie
So the articles are published as if they're not being funded by.
- [18:15]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Correct.
- [18:15]
Jane Marie
Bp, Correct. Or whatever.
- [18:17]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Yeah, it is there, but it is done in such a way as to not be. You know, they're not putting bells and whistles so that people say, oh, you know, this gas company is paying for the sustainability ad. Right.
- [18:30]
Jane Marie
And when did that just become the way things were done?
- [18:33]
Dr. Mara Einstein
This started, you know, in like 2010ish. But, you know, who started all of this or who really perpetuated it more than anyone else was buzzfeed. And buzzfeed was sort of the king of native advertising. And what's really fascinating about buzzfeed is if you look them up on Hoovers, which is the website that Wall street and other people, other investors look at, to see what a company is, how much money they make, who runs the company, so on and so forth. If you look at what the company is, it's an advertising agency, it's not a publication. And when I found that out, it blew my mind. It's like, they're not. They don't exist to create information, they exist to create ads, and all the other stuff is around it. But then you get to the point where you have this fundamental shift of advertising dollars moving away from legacy media like newspapers and television into digital. And this is where you start to see this really shift in terms of how advertising is going to be presented to consumers. Because in the traditional setting, which is where we started off, right, if you were watching a television show, you would know that at certain points during the show, a commercial would come on. And there's certain ways that commercials work that we've learned over time is, oh, I know I'm engaging with a commercial, and all of that was fine. But what begins to happen is the money starts getting pulled out of those older forms of media that we used and moves over to digital. And when we're talking about digital, we're really talking about two to three companies that are making most of the Money, and that is now meta Google. And coming up from behind is Amazon. And so you're talking about companies that don't create content. What begins to happen is that the old media has to find new ways to make money. And so because they're not going to get it from traditional advertising dollars. So what you begin to see is more and more product placement in television because they're not making money from the advertisers in a traditional way. So if you watch say the Today show and who does anymore? But if you watch the Today show, so much of the content on there is just some form of advertising or somebody hawking something. And the most recent example I can think of is Serena Williams and Ro. They did a five, six minute piece, which is basically a six minute ad for her to talk about how she's using this product, not mentioning that her husband owns the company. Right.
- [21:52]
Jane Marie
Which you should have had to divulge in the past. But not anymore.
- [21:55]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Not anymore. Not anymore. And so what happens in terms of the advertising in the digital space is one, it becomes incumbent upon the creators to constantly be producing stuff. Right. Because the way that they're making money is by increasing their engagement. And the increase in the engagement primarily comes from inducing very high emotional states. Awe, sometimes definitely anger. So rage baiting is what becomes the thing that is going to create engagement. And so that's why we have this spaces where just people getting angrier and angrier and angrier at each other because that's the way that the influencers know that they're gonna make money.
- [22:45]
Jane Marie
It's why Joe Rogan has Nazis on his show.
- [22:48]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Exactly. Exactly.
- [22:51]
Jane Marie
We'll be right back. Welcome back to our chat with Dr. Mara Einstein, marketing critic. Dr. Einstein says not all popular viral campaigns are successes. We know that, but let's take a look at one from some decades ago, before social media.
- [23:09]
Dr. Mara Einstein
You want to talk about advertising fails, One of the famous ones was Take.
- [23:15]
United Airlines Ad Singer
Me along if you love me Take me, take me along if you love me Take me along with you I won't be a little cutie but the office is my duty My heart will rise with glorious I Above a throng if you will take me along with you.
- [23:37]
United Airlines Ad Announcer
If you take your wife along on United, we'll give you up to one third off her fare, Let you charge it with our credit card and, and in most cities, you can even get reduced hotel rates on the weekend.
- [23:47]
Dr. Mara Einstein
And so what they did is they were saying to guys who would travel for business, oh, take your wife along with you. And like half price or she gets to come for free or whatever it is. And then, of course, and they're like.
- [23:59]
Jane Marie
That'S not why I have a job that travels well.
- [24:02]
Dr. Mara Einstein
They sent letters home and said, thank you, Mrs. So and so, for joining your husband on his business trip. And then Mrs. So and so said, I didn't join my husband on that business trip.
- [24:15]
Jane Marie
Oh, my God.
- [24:16]
United Airlines Ad Singer
If you will take me along with you. Fly the friendly skies of United.
- [24:29]
Jane Marie
What are more. I guess you mentioned the credit cards for college students. But let's talk about how this creeps into education again.
- [24:37]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Let's go back to, to vulnerable. Who is more vulnerable than high school students who have started being tested, at least in New York, from the time that they're in third grade? And when I was talking to my daughter's pediatrician at the time, she said she sees anxiety starting in kids in third grade because that's when they start being tested. Crazy, right? And so then once they take the psat, right. The practice SAT test, their scores go out to all of the different colleges because that's one of the ways that the College Board makes money.
- [25:17]
Jane Marie
Wait, what's the College Board?
- [25:19]
Dr. Mara Einstein
So the College Board is a, quote, unquote, nonprofit.
- [25:23]
Jane Marie
Let's unquote it.
- [25:26]
Dr. Mara Einstein
Actually, that is a nonprofit that the last time I looked, made $90 million in profit one year. And they, they're the ones behind the SAT and the PSAT and a bunch of the other websites and stuff. And you can look and see where the College Board has its fingers and all of this kind of stuff. But they're providing information to students and they're doing it in ways that behoove them, that are ways that help them make.
- [26:03]
Jane Marie
Okay, we're gonna pause our conversation here and bring Dr. Einstein back as part of our upcoming series on education in America from Cradle to the Grave. All the scammy weirdness that gets in the way of us just learning from people who are smarter than us. That's coming up in the new year. The Dream is a production of Little Everywhere. If you want to get this show with no ads, go to TheDream. You can call us at 323-248-1488 if you have a tip. And our email is helloitaleverywhere.com Bye. Hey, Dream listeners, it's finally here, the Dream plus, where you can get every single episode of our show with no ads. It's $5 a month. It's the only tier. No commercials, plus bonus content. This helps keep us independent, and your contribution will help change the way every listener hears the dream. We'll be able to take out the ads that we don't even know are getting put into this show, which is annoying to both you and us. We're also going to have an amazing discussion board. The interface has it cataloged under ama. Ask me anything, but I don't love rules. So what I did is started a bunch of threads like Ask Dan and I Questions, General Chitchat just to make friends and stuff. And every time I've been in charge of a discussion board, I've made a tab called Women Be Shoppin. And it's there. And we're just gonna talk about what we bought.
- [27:32]
Dr. Mara Einstein
It'll be fun.
- [27:35]
Jane Marie
That's thedream.s U-P-E-R c a s t.com super cast. Please, please go. Subscribe. It's five bucks. It's less than a latte if you live in Los Angeles. See you there.