Years ago, I was in Cuba. On a weathered little wall, painted in red letters, were the words: sin propaganda no hay movimiento de masas. Without propaganda, there is no mass movement. Propaganda for propaganda. Advertising for advertising. But it made me think: if you have to advertise propaganda, does it actually work?
After the speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney last week in Davos, I thought of it again. He cited an essay by Václav Havel on the power of the powerless. Although a greengrocer doesn’t believe in communism, he still hangs up the slogan “workers of the world, unite.” Because everyone does it, the lie stays alive. So: yes, propaganda works.
Even in market economies, we know persuasion works. Companies pour billions into advertising to build their brand and market position. Consumer behavior shifts slowly—and erodes just as slowly once you stop advertising. So you have to keep pushing. The posters along the road. The commercials on TV. The slogans you find irritating the third time you hear them and end up humming along to by the fifth.
But a quicker variant has been added. More and more often we see guerrilla tactics—to stay in the Cuban spirit for a moment. Hyper-targeted ads that pop up exactly when you’re tired, bored, or lingering just a bit too long on the same web page. That’s when we become more susceptible. And before you know it, there’s a delivery person at your door with a multifunctional ab trainer you forgot you ordered.
In the past, we were influenced, too. By the neighbor’s new car, for example (present company excepted, of course!). But the scale, speed, and precision are new. Persuasion has become more structural, smarter, and more invisible. The dream of every ad agency: not just getting into your head, but staying there.
And that’s where things start to get uncomfortable. We are rightly critical of propaganda by authoritarian regimes. But companies in democracies also have an incentive to subtly “reprogram” consumers. Perhaps more innocently, because it’s “just” about consumer behavior. Product A is really so much better than Product B. Fine—until that commercial persuasion seamlessly overlaps with data, state power, and geopolitics. Then suddenly it’s also about citizens, opinions, and democratic processes.
The data leak scandal around Cambridge Analytica is already eight years old. Since then, geopolitics has become more complicated and technology more powerful. And those images of the Big Tech bosses at Trump’s inauguration last year certainly don’t suggest a clean separation between commercial and political interests. We already expected that from Russia and China. A free market is no guarantee of a healthy democratic rule of law. In fact, as data, economic power, and political influence concentrate into fewer and fewer hands, that market itself becomes less free. Project that line far enough, and you eventually end up with one provider and one party. Then capitalism, ironically enough, ends up looking suspiciously like a little bit of communism.
Still, I want to end on an optimistic note. The good news is: by now, we know how persuasion works. And once you recognize it, you can defend yourself against it. We can demand transparency. Develop media literacy. Create rules that distribute power and make algorithms explainable. And part of distributing power is cherishing an independent public broadcaster.
And something is shifting already. A ruling in Brussels didn’t ban the default mechanism behind tracking ads, but it did sharply restrict it. Since the end of last year, Meta has stopped political and “social issue” ads throughout the EU—according to the company because the new EU rules are difficult to implement. That costs them some profit. But more importantly: they are signals that the pendulum can swing back toward stricter limits on personalized persuasion.
And we as citizens—and consumers—can learn to guard our attention better. Maybe we just need to advertise that a bit more.
So spread the word. Sell this message!
Charles Kalshoven is expert strategist at APG.