FRACTIONAL INSTALLATION vs FREE THOUGHT
© by Rob Ager 2007
The natural human response to information overload is perceptual filtering. Our conscious minds can only process a limited number of stimuli at any one time and so decisions are constantly made unconsciously as to what is worth paying attention to. At any given moment your sensory channels are absorbing levels of detail that are far more complex than what your brain records as memory. In the following link look at the image contained for just three seconds and than click back to this page and write down what you saw.
You will be lucky if you can remember a tenth of the image content because your unconscious mind will have instantly processed the image and brought certain elements to your attention, while discarding the remaining parts of the picture as comparatively irrelevant. An interesting aspect of this is that some details will be universally noticed by almost everybody, while other aspects will be noticed by some viewers, but not others.
This establishes that some visual filters are personal choices based upon our own values and beliefs, some filters are socially conditioned according to specific cultural backgrounds and some filters would seem to be genetically predetermined for all humans. The study of genetically predetermined perceptual filters has been researched in the field of Biosemiotics. A good example is that the colours black and yellow, when seen together, are perceived as signals of danger not just by humans, but throughout the natural world.
In today’s world of high tech communication and competitive marketing, information overload has become so intense that people are naturally developing more complex perceptual filters. One example is that if an opinion is communicated without the immediate accompaniment of sensory based evidence or convincing logic then it is ignored. This form of modern cynicism is a perceptual filter for blocking out large portions of distracting information fed through the media.
This filtering also affects people’s buying habits. As we learn more and more about sales persuasion we learn to filter out many forms of advertising so that they no longer affect us. Marketing experts are consequently having to invent more and more sophisticated tactics to get us to part with our money.
This brings us to a modern day persuasion technique, which I call fractional installation. Consider the following two marketing campaigns for a new kind of soft drink, which is basically a fizzy milkshake.
Campaign one
A series of television and magazine ads are designed, which promote the contrasting soft/fizzy textural appeals of the drink. Curved and swirling colour designs are used to make up the visual backdrops. Bubbles are to be seen emerging from these liquidscapes, some of which are exploding into bursts of bright sparks and coloured fireworks. In the television ads music will also be used that combines warm ambience with sharp percussion instruments, again promoting the soft/fizzy appeals. The drink will be called SMOOZLE, which combines the words SMOOTH and FIZZLE. The main promotional taglines will be “THE SOFT DRINK EXPERIENCE WE’VE ALL BEEN WAITING FOR” and “SO SMOOZLE IT’LL BLOW YOUR MIND”, which will be whispered seductively by a female voice in the television ads. The latter tagline will get people’s attention in that the word smoozle will be jarring and demand public attention because people are not familiar with its meaning. The bottle in which the drink is sold will be roughly cylindrical, but will feature non-symmetrical curve features that twirl around the bottle. These curve features will roughly fit the shape of the human hand, as if the bottle has been shaped by the hand of the buyer, like a piece of putty. There will also be small bubble shaped protrusions in the plastic, reminding the consumer of the drinks fizzy qualities. The campaign will involve an advertising investment of roughly 7 million dollars in the first year, followed by a streamlined annual advertising investment of 1 million per annum to maintain public awareness of the product.
Campaign two
In this version of the campaign, the same tactics used in campaign one will be employed, but for a mere three month period, during which the advertising will be very prominent and hence will quickly embed a basic awareness of the product in the general public’s mind.
Prior to the actual advertising campaign and product release a six month campaign of public conditioning will take place through seemingly unrelated media channels. The word SMOOZLE will be registered and patented, but the media will not be informed of this until after the product release. The word will first be introduced to the public mind with a different and more sexually seductive meaning – it shall be used to describe a specifically erotic kind of kissing technique. This word and its attached “kissing” meaning will be communicated through product placement in four high budget feature films that are currently in production. These four films will be collectively viewed by an estimated 400 million people worldwide during the 6month build up to our product release, thus sexual associations to the word SMOOZLE will have been unconsciously embedded. These sexual associations will play on the collective public unconscious, while in every day conversation the actual advertising campaign will make the public consciously think of SMOOZLE as a cross between the words SMOOTH and FIZZLE. If the advertising campaign does not fully succeed in creating the necessary buzz about the product then a staged legal stand-off between the producers of the films in which the product placement occurred and the soft drink creators may well suffice. This legal stand-off will be concerning ownership of the word SMOOZLE. Negotiations have already been started with the film producers to potentially use this marketing method for mutual product promotion.
Featured articles in gossip magazines will also be used in the pre-advertising campaign, in which the word SMOOZLE and the type of kissing described will be debated by columnists. Some of the visual aesthetics of the actual soft drink advertising campaign will be subtly employed in these articles to create further unconscious associations between sexuality and the eventual soft drink release.
In this overall campaign 4 million dollars will be spent on the subliminal product placement and sexual association phase, followed by a 2 million dollar intense advertising campaign during the first 3 months of product release. Afterwards a sustained annual advertising expenditure of 1 million will be used to promote both traditional advertising and the occasional reinforcement of sexual associations through subliminal product placement.
A separate marketing campaign, which must be conducted with utmost secrecy to avoid legal implications, is that the soft drink bottle will feature as a prominent set prop in many online pornographic videos. This will create associations to hardcore male sexual fantasies. Some of these will be viewed through paid websites and some will be viral videos. The viral videos will be especially effective because it effectively amounts to free advertising and is not easily traceable back to the production source of the video.
Which of these two marketing campaigns do you think is more likely to succeed in selling the new soft drink to an advert-cynical public? Bare in mind that there is little difference of financial expenditure.
The second campaign will be far more successful because it is designed to completely bypass the average person’s perceptual filters. It does this by breaking up the campaign message into a series of sub-messages. These fractional messages will be communicated during seemingly unrelated activities, hence the individual will not suspect that he/she is being conditioned. Later these “fractional installations” will trigger each other within the consumers mind so that the erotic associations feel “natural” rather than having been directly imposed by advertising.
This form of persuasion is incredibly powerful and can be used in many different contexts from psychological domination of a spouse to preparing a nation for war. In many ways fractional installation is a natural psychological process that people engage in every day as they interact with others, although its application on a personal level is mainly unconscious both for the conditioner and the person being conditioned.
However, in marketing fractional installation has become a sophisticated and precise science, though it operates under different names (“fractional installation” is merely this writers label for it). It is continuously evolving and, just like Freud’s ideas in the early 20th century, has also been finding its way into political campaigns, education systems and virtually any context where covert manipulation of people is desired.
As with all previous techniques that have been attempted to render humans as directly programmable and obedient mice in wheels, fractional installation will fail and become redundant. The information revolution will once again ensure the general public catch on. They will adapt their perceptual filters accordingly and those who prefer power and control over free-thinking democracy will once again be forced to realise that they are members of society, not its masters or sole benefactors.