This is the unofficial podcast for CBC's Age of Persuasion. I have simply used the mp3 files available on the official CBC site to create a feed you can subscribe to in iTunes or any other podcast application.
How did General Isaac Brock and the great chief Tecumseh capture Fort Detroit in 1812- though outnumbered nearly two-to-one? The same way today’s brands nestle themselves in your brain: strategy. This week, Terry O’Reilly examines one of the most vital- and least understood- facets of the world’s $600 billion marketing industry.
He’ll explain the strategy that changed the fortunes of the Paris Metro, how the strategy of changing one word ignited one of the continent’s fastest-growing industries; and he’ll explain why “second place” in your mind can be the best place for some brands to reside.
This week, Terry O’Reilly explores the evolving relationship between marketers and audiences, and how modern media have made audiences the product, and advertisers the buyer. While all art craves an audience: in the age of persuasion, ad-driven media exist for the purpose of procuring an audience, and delivering it to advertisers. Terry examines the business of audience research, and explains how studies of “demographics” and “psychographics”, are giving way to a new classification: social “tribes”.
Try Googling the phrase “Award-Winning”. Go on; we’ll wait. See? 71 million hits. Join Terry O’Reilly – wait- the “award winning” Terry O’Reilly – as he explores the persuasive power of those two little words in our culture. He’ll play- yes- award-winning ads, and examine the self-congratulatory side of our culture.
According to author C. Edwin Baker, “Advertisers, not governments, are the primary censors of media content… today.” Terry O’Reilly respectfully disagrees – and this week he’ll explain why. He’ll review the long relationship between sponsorship and censorship – from early Radio, to Hitchcock’s Psycho, through the more recent woes of radio jock Don Imus. Do advertisers really decide what you should see, hear, or think? And if they don’t – who does?
We’ll review the decision of Lowe’s Home Building Centres to pull their sponsorship of “Big Brother 9″ after a remark about “retards” by one of the contestants. We’ll talk about Ed Sullivan refusing to televise Elvis’s hips, his curbing of the Stones’ lyrics for “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, and his attempt to soften the Doors’ “Light My Fire”.
In the Age of Persuasion, as in all things, some are more equal than others. This week, Terry O’Reilly looks at a handful of gifted individuals- and singular ad agencies- who have done more than change advertising- they’ve changed popular culture. They are the savants, the gifted, the elect- those with ‘royal jelly’. And they cause a $600 billion industry to un-learn everything it had learned about the craft of persuasion.
In our grandparent’s time, “big” was a good thing. “Biggest” was what every brand wanted to be when it grew up; the biggest corporations were benevolent captains of industry. Today, “big” is a curse. The biggest brands become the targets of critical books and documentaries, anti-globalization protests and YouTube ridicule. This week, Terry O’Reilly examines the growing hostility directed at the world’s top brands, and how some are finding ingenious ways to be both big and lovable.
Broadcast Date: March 8, 2008 (Originally aired April 14, 2007)
This week Terry O’Reilly explores ways marketers breathe new life into dying brands. He’ll show you how brands such as Special ‘K’ have hiked sales- not by changing their product, but by changing the ‘idea’ of their product. Then he’ll show you how Hollywood celebrities have used the same principle to re-invent- and resurrect- their careers.
This week, on The Age of Persuasion, Terry O’Reilly shares 23- ‘count ‘em- things he’s like to change about advertising. Maybe his new shoes are too tight. Or he needs a little more fibre in his diet. Perhaps a switch to decaf would do the trick. Whatever the reason, Terry shares a few long-harboured gripes about advertising, from telemarketers, to purveyors of junk mail, to hard-sell screamers, to anyone who’s ever inflicted a customer with the recorded words: “your call is important to us”.
Broadcast Date February 23, 2008 (Originally aired February 15, 2007)
The Prime Minister has one. So do Microsoft, the CBC, and the Pope. They’ve all got a form of logo: a visual symbol, trademark or emblem that distinguishes who they are. Join Terry as he tells the stories behind some of the great logos and trademarks, and shows how today’s brand innovators are “translating” them into sound and even attitude.
It’s among the greatest, most inspired, most creative, most spectacular work done in marketing… yet few ever see it. Every year, Ad agencies pull out all the stops to ‘pitch’ their services to prospective clients. This week, Terry O’Reilly takes you inside the boardrooms to share some of the Ad industry’s best, most remarkable, and most disastrous ‘pitch’ stories, and gleans from them a surprisingly handy set of life-lessons.
