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Magazine > The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders” href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/05/magazine/05BUZZ.html?ex=1259989200&en=db87e6e46659a643&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt”>The New York Times > Magazine > The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders

Marketers bicker among themselves about how these approaches differ, but to those of us on the receiving end, the distinctions might seem a little academic. They are all attempts, in one way or another, to break the fourth wall that used to separate the theater of commerce, persuasion and salesmanship from our actual day-to-day life. To take what may be the most infamous example, Sony Ericsson in 2002 hired 60 actors in 10 cities to accost strangers and ask them: Would you mind taking my picture? Those who obliged were handed, of course, a Sony Ericsson camera-phone to take the shot, at which point the actor would remark on what a cool gadget it was. And thus an act of civility was converted into a branding event.

This idea — the commercialization of chitchat — resembles a scenario from a paranoid science-fiction novel about a future in which corporations have become so powerful that they can bribe whole armies of flunkies to infiltrate the family barbecue. That level of corporate influence sounds sure to spark outrage — another episode in the long history of mainstream distrust of commercial coercion and marketing trickery. Fear of unchecked corporate reach is what made people believe in the power of subliminal advertising and turn Vance Packard’s book ”The Hidden Persuaders” into a best seller in the 1950’s; it is what gave birth to the consumer-rights movement of the 1970’s; and it is what alarms people about neuroscientists supposedly locating the ”buy button” in our brains today. Quite naturally, many of us are wary of being manipulated by a big, scary, Orwellian ”them.’