Thornton might have felt sore, but as Gaskell and the other industrial novelists understood, those were the rules of Victorian capitalism. It did not matter who you were or how big your business was. It was not just about staying within the law, but on the right side of public opinion too: the “moral economy of the English crowd,” as E.P. Thompson once put it. A reputational whip, more often than a bureaucratic one, kept the show on the road.

Donald Trump is unlikely to be a great admirer of the industrial novels of the 19th century. Yet this week, by denouncing Jaguar’s “total disaster” rebrand and praising American Eagle’s ad featuring Sydney Sweeney (“the HOTTEST ad out there”), he found himself playing a very Victorian role: dispensing public reputational justice with moral fervor. Jaguar’s campaign, launched last year, enlisted pastel-clad models in surreal landscapes. It was a Hail Mary bid to resurrect what wistful motorheads still call “the British Porsche”.

It was meant to make a splash, though not, I suspect, in this particular fountain. In truth, though, this is about much more than a single ad, company, or president. Trump’s attack, and Jaguar’s brief brush with the pillory, speaks to the triumphant return of Victorian moral capitalism — a mood that can turn any firm, no matter how big, or how well-regarded, into a public spectacle.

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Rolls-Royce is an engine of prosperity

By Aled Maclean-Jones

There’s an enjoyable history of US Presidents going after British companies. In 1971, Rolls-Royce management drew the ire of Richard Nixon after succeeding in running the company into receivership, having just agreed to supply engines to Lockheed’s new flagship, the L-1011 TriStar. In 2010, Barack Obama kicked off a search to find “whose ass to kick” after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The ass in question was BP’s.

Rolls-Royce and BP are, frankly, in a different league from Jaguar and American Eagle. Rolls-Royce, during the 1971 crisis, held the fate of one of America’s important companies in its hands. BP, shortly before its time under the Presidential gaze, was the third largest company in the FTSE, and comfortably one of the twenty largest companies in the world. Contrast this with today’s targets: a soon-to-be-relaunched marque of a luxury car company, and a clothing brand that specializes in jeans. These are not industrial giants or systemic threats to global markets, but lifestyle brands punished, or rewarded, simply for being on the right or wrong team.

This matters more than it seems. When we talk about the shift from Victorian moral capitalism to the system we are more familiar with today, it is easy to focus on the obvious changes: the end of the satanic mill, the closure of the workhouse, the disappearance of the emaciated chimney-sweep who still haunts the 19th-century imagination. But just as important was what happened in the 20th century. As the moral economy receded and the regulatory state took its place, public and political outrage became the preserve of the giants: the BPs, the Lockheeds, the Rolls-Royces of the world.

For everyone else, it was the age of the corporate civilian. Stay compliant, stay quiet, and you were generally left alone. In this world, the rules of the game were relatively clear. If you played in certain industries, and at a certain level, it was no longer just about your product and your customer, but about how you looked to the world at large. A touch of the Victorian spirit still applied, as Tim Cook so perfectly exemplified yesterday, arriving in the Oval Office to bestow a gift of gold upon the President. In 1878, Disraeli received the same from the City of London.

Any meaningful divide between corporate civilian and corporate combatant is gone. In truth, it has been for some time. The trends that brought us here are not going away: the unforgiving flatness of the internet (as Astronomer, a little-known data firm rocked by the Coldplay kiss-cam, now acutely understands); the retrenchment of globalization; and the rise of policymakers who increasingly see themselves not as economic stewards, but as cultural commentators. The forces that ended the era are much larger than any single president.

Perhaps now it is even more difficult than it was for Mr Thornton himself. Then, it was clear what would bring public and political ire. Refuse to pay wages. Punch up your coffee with chicory and dirt. Forge an exchequer bill or a letter of credit. Inveigle, as Trollope’s villains so often do, a few hundred pounds from your wife, her father, or her lover. Open your shop on a Sunday. Do any of that, and only then would you draw scandal, satire, and Parliamentary scrutiny. Or, in Thompson’s memorable phrase, face “marauding bands” to “set the price at the popular level.”

Today, the offenses are harder to predict, even compared to the simpler, clearer-cut culture war boundaries of just a few years ago. Hence why car brands, jeans companies, fitness firms, and light beer manufacturers alike find themselves at the center of conversations they never meant to start. What happens when every company, not just the biggest or most geopolitically exposed, has to develop its own cultural imagination? They get Victorian.

Last week the US cryptocurrency company Coinbase launched a two-minute musical takedown of contemporary Britain, its newest advertising campaign. The video isn’t really selling a product. It’s making one thing clear: which team Coinbase is on. Inevitably, the inspiration for the advert, an all-singing, all-dancing tour of an England of calcified dirt, soot-stained street-sweepers, and endemic poverty, was the most iconic of the literary tentpoles of Victorian moral capitalism: Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

Even American Eagle, with their impish campaign in which the actress fixes up a Ford Mustang before driving off to the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great genes,” might have thought they could be no more contemporary. They might be surprised to learn that Pears Soap got there first. In 1882, they paid actress, socialite, and royal mistress Lillie Langtry to become the face of their product. It worked then. It works now. By 1889, Pears was spending £100,000 a year on advertising (around £15 million today), easily justifiable given its annual profits of £70,000 just three years later.

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The return of moral capitalism matters not just for companies, but for countries too. For a long time we have lived in a world where certain firms operate not only as commercial giants, but as national emblems. In the UK, we have a long tradition of co-opting companies into the machinery of the state. They collect employee taxes, act as pass-throughs for government support schemes, and sit at the heart of our national security regime. But what happens when we have to treat them as cultural actors too? The President’s attack on Jaguar will likely bounce off. But what if the next one doesn’t? What if, instead of calling for the resignation of a US CEO, as he did yesterday, he called for the resignation of a British one?

Historically, our companies have been good at this cultural game: closer heirs to the Victorian imagination than we might care to admit. As Alfred Marshall wrote of Britain in 1890, “the same causes which have enabled England… to set the tone of modern politics, have made them also set the tone of modern business.” Could we not do the same again? While the Swiss president rushed to Washington to plead against 38% tariffs, it is telling how the UK-US trade deal announcement devolved into a debate about the symbolic power of British brands.

“I won’t do that deal on cars unless someone shows me there’s another kind of car that’s comparable to a Rolls-Royce,” the President declared, leading, of course, to the greatest irony of the Jaguar post: that it, alongside the other British luxury carmakers, stands to benefit most from the deal signed by its loudest critic just two months ago. This, I suppose, is what a cultural imagination can do in practice: make the very politician denouncing you the one to whom you now owe the most.

It’s easy to treat this with the indignance of Margaret Hale moments before the shoe hits her temple: “you come to oust the innocent stranger” she calls to the baying mob. Savvier, perhaps, to do as Lillie Langtry did: step into the role and steal the scene. As another Victorian wit (and, coincidentally, devotee of Langtry) put it, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

The United States needs a health secretary who will, at the minimum, cast a skeptical eye on the pharmaceutical industry, which turns enormous profits and helps ensure American health care will always be commodified. Before the pandemic, most Democrats had little problem railing against Big Pharma. They were the villains, deservedly so, of the opioid epidemic, and it was not an exaggeration to say several of the pharmaceutical behemoths, most notably Purdue Pharma, had blood on their hands.

When Covid arrived, however, the politics shifted. Republicans resisted the vaccines once President Joe Biden was in office, even though Operation Warp Speed had been a Team Trump accomplishment. Democrats defended the Covid vaccines and their manufacturers — Pfizer and Moderna, in particular — at all costs, even though the jabs did cause injuries in relatively rare instances and couldn’t stop the spread of the novel coronavirus as originally promised.

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Naturally, RFK Jr. was a Covid-vaccine skeptic. Hence he became, in the 2020s, a public enemy for many liberals.

Yet he should be listened to when it comes to one of his most cherished causes: banning pharmaceutical advertising from television. In a sane world, this would be a bipartisan cause. Few countries on Earth allow pharmaceutical companies to relentlessly market their drugs to unsuspecting consumers. Non-Americans are always shocked by what is permitted on the airwaves. Turn on the television, especially the news, for any length of time, and you will be barraged by ads for every type of malady under the Sun. Since the Nineties, drug companies have spent tens of billions on these ads.

Drug advertisements began appearing with regularity in newspapers and magazines in the Eighties, but they were mostly kept off TV by a requirement that ads naming a specific illness include the long list of side effects. In the late Nineties, the Food and Drug Administration relaxed its rules, permitting advertisers to briefly summarize the drug’s risks. The TV floodgates were thrown wide open. These days, the most aggressive campaigns are for newer medications that haven’t yet gone generic; competing brands duke it out in a packed field of similar drugs to reach patients with widespread conditions like arthritis and diabetes.

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The average American drug ad is easily parodied but plainly effective. Typically, some older adults are shown in a cheery setting with friends and family. The color palette is bright. A narrator with a warm voice speaks about health challenges that might arise. The older adults are never shown to be in pain or distress; they might be taking a jog, playing with their dog, or firing up the grill. They’re bright-eyed, maybe laughing. Towards the end of the ad, the narrator will briefly summarize the drug’s side effects. Anyone with a morbid sense of humor can enjoy the contrast, just a bit: the scene remains focused on life’s joys as the narrator informs you the drug might cause rashes, bleeding, blackouts, or suicidal thoughts (in “rare cases”, rest assured).

But we know the big business of Big Pharma is no laughing matter. The drug companies are prepared to furiously fight any sort of ban that Kennedy might attempt. They will call up their expensive lobbyists on retainer in Washington to bend rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats to their will. They will probably get to Trump, who doesn’t feel passionately about the issue.

The courts have snagged reforms in the past. Efforts to minimally restrict drug ads have repeatedly been defeated, often on First Amendment grounds. The first Trump administration tried to require that commercials mention the drug’s price, but a judge blocked the policy, saying that it lacked authority from Congress.

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Will Congress act? In theory, if Trump prioritized the ban, lawmakers could push it forward. The current Republican Party will obey Trump’s commands. The narrow majority the GOP holds in the House could be bolstered by a slew of progressive and populist Democrats who might view a fight with Big Pharma as a winning issue. Several centrist Democrats in swing districts, including Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington state, campaigned on a platform that was critical of pharmaceutical companies.

There’s a coalition to be built if the Trump administration takes the issue seriously. If a critical mass of Senate Republicans back legislation, it’s not hard to imagine the most Left-wing members of the Democratic conference, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, supporting a ban on TV ads. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut who may run for president and has swerved in a more populist direction, could be a convert, too.

But that’s the rub: Trump has never demonstrated that he is all that interested in the granular work of getting policy priorities through Congress. In the first term, he was content to let Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan hash out a corporate tax cut and attempt — unsuccessfully — to repeal ObamaCare.

For now, Congress is focused on classic GOP priorities like tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting Medicaid, the health-care program that covers more than 70 million Americans. In addition to being cruel to the poor, a budget reconciliation package with tax and health-care cuts is likely to prove inflationary, especially when paired with tariffs. Beyond the tariffs, there’s no grander project here. The populism Trump promised isn’t being delivered — DOGE, and its wanton budget cuts, certainly aren’t it.

What conservatives don’t quite understand is that the truest owning of the libs will come through triangulation. Trump can begin to subdue Democrats by pursuing policies like a ban on TV pharmaceutical ads, forcing the Left to stand with him for something popular or oppose him and appear extremely out of touch. Trump doesn’t seem to have that kind of savvy. He’s fine to let his party scheme over Medicaid cuts.

That will not end well for the GOP. Democrats know how to campaign on health care, and taking it away from working-class people will make the 2026 midterms rather easy for the party out of power. Those political ads write themselves. They’ll be sandwiched between the 30-second spots for heart disease pills that may cause internal bleeding and murderous thoughts. In rare cases.

Given its predominance in recent years, it’s easy to forget that the phenomenon is a relatively recent one. It was in November 2011 that John Lewis first sucker-punched the UK public with a Christmas ad so obscenely emotional that it would change the tone of festive ads for a generation. We saw a small boy impatient for Christmas morning: when the crack of dawn arrives, he leaps out of bed, runs past the stack of presents in his room and bursts in on his mum and dad with the gift he has bought for them all by himself. There was barely a dry eye left in the country.

It was grand and glossy — and almost shocking in its attempts to pull on the nation’s heartstrings. British ads had usually aimed to be funny; like the society they spoke to, they preferred to hide their feelings behind gags and irony rather than hang them all out for the neighbours to see. But just over a decade ago, as the nation was first acclimatising to the sour taste of austerity, it was as if we were all ready for something brazenly sweet. By 2012, every other brand was employing the same formula: tear-jerking tales of Yuletide loneliness, love and redemption, all set to whimsical, ghostly cover versions of classic pop ballads. 

This year’s offerings look more like the festive ads of the Eighties, which helped shape Generation X’s childhood perception of Christmas. Watching them now on YouTube reminds me of an altogether less serious time, in which The Goodies and Windsor Davies dressed up as Santa and hawked discount blank cassettes from Woolies; in which groups of lads got trollied on cans of Harp and chatted up Linda Lussadi at the Christmas party. And the slogans: so transactional, so knockabout, so pleasingly guileless: “For Christmas, Woolworths is right up your street!” “Can you imagine Christmas without a trip to Boots?” 

These were the days when British advertising was regarded as the best in the world: it was funny, earthy and colloquial. Its so-called “golden age” had been fostered by an eclectic generation of young creatives, many of whom would go onto bigger and better things: Ridley and Tony Scott, David Puttnam and the Saatchi brothers among them. From “Heineken Refreshes The Parts Other Beers Can’t Reach” to “Tell Them About The Honey Mummy”, the ads were extremely memorable and didn’t ever insult the audience by taking themselves too seriously. The prevailing attitude of the British adman was: if you’re going to push yourself into someone’s living room uninvited, you might as well do it with a bit of charm and good humour. To shamelessly pull at the heart strings was thought of as manipulative and altogether American. 

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There were some exceptions. The Eighties Yellow Pages campaign, featuring elderly fly fisherman J.R. Hartley seeking out his long-lost magnum opus, was a rare tearjerker that many ad people of the time found cringeworthy. But it was a success for the brand, and people have remembered it ever since. Written by British adman David Abbot, it was directed by the American Bob Brooks who said: “When I first came to the UK, I found that the ads were funny but there was a reluctance to become too emotional — the Yellow Pages ads showed there’s nothing wrong with sentiment. Why do you think there are so many dogs and babies in commercials? Because the consumer responds to it!” 

In the early years of the 21st century, this idea was fully embraced by the British ad industry, by now unrecognisable from its glory days: gone are the misfits and mavericks who had once dominated the creative departments. In the last couple of decades, advertising has been created via corporate processes overseen by middle-class marketing graduates. Ads have become formulaic, and humour is widely mistrusted as a selling device — not least because it is harder to translate across the international markets that big brands now traverse. Emotions are more universal, more adaptable, and less dependent on dialogue. It’s an approach that generally makes for boring and forgettable adverts — but which comes into its own around Christmas. People are more sentimental at this time of year, yes, but “sadvertising” doesn’t just pull on the heartstrings. It’s also designed to guilt-trip parents, playing into their intense desire to give their kids the perfect Christmas.

Does making us feel bad actually translate into commercial benefit for the advertiser? “If you’re anything other than the market leader, then these sorts of ads don’t help you,” says legendary adman Dave Trott. “They just remind people that it’s Christmas and they need to buy presents. And then they all go on Amazon to buy them.” His advice is this: “Supermarkets and stores need to say more than Christmas is great. They need to specify why you should do your Christmas shopping with them.”

This might have been the realisation that John Lewis came to before conceiving this year’s ad. It switched ad agencies for the first time in over a decade for the 2023 campaign, and dropped the “sadvertising” approach that it had once pioneered. Made by Saatchi & Saatchi, the new ad is a strange, entertaining little film whose main character is a giant, anthropomorphic Venus flytrap. With shades of ET, it feels like a significant gear change: less glum and more fun. “People are over having their heartstrings pulled by Christmas ads,” says Ben Mooge, Executive Creative Director of Publicis, the group who own Saatchis. “Joy, comedy and celebration is the new thing.” Maybe the British public, collectively traumatised by a succession of national crises, are just fed up of being made to feel bad. And perhaps brands have come to realise that it’s not their place to lecture the consumer.

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Plus, it’s actually helping sell stuff. John Lewis sources tell me sales of Venus flytraps have already increased by 600%. Whereas in the wake of last year’s John Lewis ad — centred on a middle-aged dad learning to skateboard in order to bond with his new foster son — consumers who turned up at John Lewis looking to purchase a skateboard themselves were disappointed to find that the stores didn’t actually stock them. 

But while the big brands might have ditched sadvertising this year, the strategy is still working for some. Charlie’s Bar — a small pub in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland — produced a sadvertisement for just £700 this year, which promptly went viral. It features an elderly man being shunned by passersby in the street before arriving at Charlie’s, ordering a pint of stout, and being approached by a dog, whose owners eventually join him for a chat. The ad was viewed over 1.5 million times on social media within its first week. This is what John Lewis knew all along: sadvertising works best when it taps into our deepest fears. And there’s nothing we fear more than being alone.

A similar trick was pulled off five years ago with the launch of Stop Funding Hate. It seems such a reasonable demand, doesn’t it? Who wants to fund hate? Everyone is against “hate”, aren’t they? But of course, the detail lies in exactly how you define it.

In the case of Stop Funding Hate the answer is straightforward. For this group, “hate” is the existence of any media or publication which leans — or can be accused of leaning — anywhere to the right of the political centre. Since its founding the group has targeted a range of conservative-leaning papers and magazines. Its modus operandi is always the same: it identifies a conservative outlet full of “hate”, and then lobbies its advertisers to pull their cash — thus eliminating one of the major revenue streams of the free press.

There are, of course, a number of things wrong with this; the most obvious being its mistaken presumption that to advertise in a magazine or newspaper is to endorse everything contained within its pages. If this is a category error, then it is one that Stop Funding Hate has been very happy to revel in — for the simple reason that it allows them to pursue their deeply political, targeted agenda. It is also, incidentally, a game that anyone with sufficient time and venom can play.

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One could, for instance, set up a group called “Stop Funding Bigotry”, and target any company which advertises in a range of Left-wing papers. We could then pretend that all Left-wing papers are a source of bigotry and that advertising in them constitutes an endorsement of it. As I say, you could do that. But it would be a fairly maniacal way to behave, and inimical to the idea of tolerance or respect for a differing range of views that must exist in a free society.

But even by its own maniacal standards, Stop Funding Hate this week managed to excel itself. In the month running up to the launch of GB News, the group announced that it was planning to target every company that advertised on the channel. Indeed, Stop Funding Hate boasted in advance that it had engaged a crack team of researchers to find out who was advertising with GB News — presumably by tuning in and making a note of each advert during the commercial break.

Within days of the launch, their arduous work had clearly paid off. The group identified a number of advertisers who quickly folded under pressure. Among them was Ikea, which has since announced that it has “safeguards in place to prevent our advertising from appearing on platforms that are not in line with our humanistic values”.

What might those “humanist values” entail? We need only look to Ikea’s French wing for an answer; it has just been fined €1 million and its former CEO given a suspended two-year sentence for hiring private detectives to spy on the private lives of its employees.

Yet by talking about “safeguards” Ikea helped hand an additional victory to Stop Funding Hate. For such a term suggests that material on GB News is not merely “hateful” but also so dangerous as to require a type of safeguarding commonly associated with the language of child protection.

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Yesterday, bosses at Ikea seemed to wake up to the absurdity of such rhetoric; the furniture retailer acknowledged that it “is simply too soon to make an informed decision as to whether advertising there is in line with our advertising policy and brand guidelines”. It was, in effect, an apology without the apology — though encouraging all the same.

It is yet to be seen whether other businesses follow suit. But even if they do, it is crucial we remember the remarkable rapidity with which they caved in to Stop Funding Hate. It was not the first time and it won’t be the last.

And if the past week’s corporate capitulation has taught us anything, it’s that there’s really only one driving factor: Stop Funding Hate’s intention to put out of business not just media organisations that it disagrees with, but those which it fears it could disagree with in the future. There is a name for that: “totalitarian”. If you can’t cope with any dissent — and Stop Funding Hate have consistently shown that they can’t — then you disavow democracy and sacrifice the principles of a free society.

So what is to be done? One possible solution would be to play in the game Stop Funding Hate is showcasing. In that world, a small group of us would single out Stop Funding Hate, pointing out that it is a hate-group — because it hates the free press, among much else. We could then go a step further, and target any and every company that has ever cooperated with such a hateful group. We could lobby, petition and harass them, while stressing that Stop Funding Hate is racist, homophobic, sexist, misogynistic and much more. At this stage, facts or details needn’t matter, for the winds of righteousness would be beneath our wings.

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We might then add that, as a hate-group, Stop Funding Hate seems to be propelled by racism and sexism. Since the initial team who are presenting shows on GB News appears to be notably more ethnically diverse, and with a better gender balance than any competitor channel, we could say that there can really be only one reason why Stop Funding Hate is trying to rid them of their salaries. And that is a desire to return women to the drudgery of household chores and ethnic minorities to the era of Jim Crow laws.

Would these claims be outrageous? Certainly. Would they have any basis in fact? Only if you allow hysterics and catastrophists the right to decide that their interpretation of events is reality. But that is what Stop Funding Hate has been doing. It would be an irrational and blinkered approach — yet it is the logical extension of the world that this vicious hate group has chosen to instigate.

For Ellul, that meant establishing the underlying myths that hold a society together: the American Way of Life, faith in Progress and Happiness. Everything, from conscious PR campaigns through to unconscious decisions by movie makers, connected people to these underlying myths: “Propaganda in the United States is a natural result of the fundamental elements of American life.” Ellul saw the country’s over-intense insistence on its cohesive identity as a symptom of uncertainty about whether it could hold together.

“There is only one America. No Democratic Rivers. No Republican Mountains” intones a Joe Biden Presidential campaign ad, with lush shots of the American landscape. It’s a message that goes right to the anxieties that have always lingered underneath the surface in America. The backdrop of today’s Presidential election is the fear that America is disintegrating as an imagined community. Americans are alarmingly polarised: increasingly more likely to dislike and distrust people from other parties; less likely to live near them and, as a recent Pew Research poll shows, placing their trust in different partisan media environments. In response, each Presidential campaign has chosen opposing strategies for its election ads. It’s a test not so much of policies but which dynamics are stronger: the forces pulling America together, or those pushing it apart?

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“We’re the United States of America” stressed Biden in an epic ad last week, which showed a shower of images of people from all walks of life: a rainbow coalition brought together by the Democrats with Biden’s personal emotional experiences as the glue. Biden has positioned himself as someone who has experienced horrific personal loss with the death of his wife and two sons, meaning he can feel other people’s pain too. ‘We are united in our trauma’ is the message, with Donald Trump defined in absentia as the “divider in chief”, incapable of empathy. Biden’s betting big that even some possible Trump supporters are worried about the divides in American society and will vote for a candidate that stresses unity: Vote for Trump and we might lose America.

The Biden team have taken into account that, in a world where all the old Left-Right economic ideologies don’t cleanly define parties, the only thing that can bring a diverse coalition together is something more nebulous: a feeling that each can project its own agenda onto. Trump won 2016 with anger and resentment, now Biden is betting that more positive emotions can compete: “compassion” his ads say, “is on the ballot.”

The Biden campaign is also swimming with Christian motifs. In perhaps his most moving ad, one of his speeches is interlaced with Black Eyed Peas singing ‘Where is the Love’. “Father, father, father help us / Send some guidance from above,” they plead, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if they meant God or Biden. At the end of the ad we see a line from Cornel West: “Justice is what love looks like in public.” Then the word Love appears on a black screen, after which the word Vote appears, the Os of the two words crossing. There are echoes of the American Pledge of Allegiance: “One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Ellul argued that effective propaganda has to tap into existing myths to be successful: the ad needs to resonate with a big underlying thing that people live by already. And so Biden connects his own campaign with the powerful founding story of American religious redemption, the caring father of a nation that has lost its way in the last four years, but just needs to, as another of his ads puts it, “remember who we are”.

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Part of Donald Trump’s propaganda power has also been to connect his own story with a fundamental American myth — that of the businessman, the dealmaker. It’s a myth he has played into his whole life and cemented when he hosted The Apprentice. The sophisticated arguments from Trump critics accusing him of crypto-fascism don’t resonate with audiences who know Trump as the guy who hosts a prime time business reality show. (How can he be Hitler when he was in Home Alone 2?) And he is constantly selling Americans some great new deal he’s sealed. In recent ads on a tour of Pennsylvania he even used clips of Biden admitting that Trump’s trade deal with Canada and Mexico is “better than NAFTA”. But the salesman role is not only metaphorical. When I checked Trump social media ads with the help of NYU’s ad-tracker tool, I found people were literally using The Donald as a way to promote their own deals: something called ‘Trumprack’ was flogging Trump whisky flasks and sweaters (“a sweatshirt for the silent majority” ran the tagline).

Trump’s critics also accuse him of being a cheesy, sleazy salesman — but maybe that’s part of his appeal. He can play every embodiment of the American wheeler-dealer drama, from a gauche Great Gatsby to the door-to-door salesman down on his luck. After he came out of hospital recently there was something pathetic and desperate in the way Trump begged pensioners to vote for him. Here was Trump as Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman — but one who could then, in an ad filmed the same week, fly into the White House on a helicopter to martial music in scenes with a whiff of Mussolini. The Salesman dies — and is resurrected!

But the dealmaker myth is hard to tap into when the main threat facing the nation is one that can’t be flattered or bullied into submission. No matter how artful Trump is, Covid-19 will go about its business. And so the President is left invoking divisive ‘wedge’ issues: Biden will strengthen ‘the radical Left’ and usher in riots; Trump will defend wealthy suburban lifestyles from poor people in the inner cities. The ads are right out of B-movie urban apocalypse movies, with thundering cords and burning buildings; you half expect Kurt Russell to appear.

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Trump seems to be hoping that the forces driving America apart are so strong he can further fuel them, then ride them to victory — or at least into confusion. Some fear that what might be just an ad campaign for Trump will be taken seriously by Right-wing militias. Every week I get a newsletter from The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank, about the latest online campaign in the dankest parts of the internet. Such groups are already trying to seed doubt in the results of the election if it goes against Trump and planning pitched battles in its aftermath. They are waging a vicious civil war — but for now it remains in squalid echo chambers.

Whether Trump wins this week or not, can the cohesion Ellul saw as essential to the American project ultimately survive in a media landscape broken up into such information archipelagos?  The way Trump is both reality show and buffoon yet a symptom of things genuinely disturbing makes this election, like so much with the Trump era, seem simultaneously petrifying and silly. An ad from actor Mandy Patinkin, who is running his own pro-Biden get-out-the-vote campaign, captured the tension best. It starts with a sense of impending doom and drama: “This November 3rd everything is at stake” it bellows, only for the ad to break off and cut to a discussion in the recording studio between Mandy and his wife about whether he is being too hysterical. They try to re-record the ad in a more measured tone, but keep on slipping into angst, finally screaming “It’s going to just be more fucking chaos.”

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.” [1.  This and other quotes from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, helpfully curated by Jane Carruth at goodreads.] – Alice in Wonderland

The market economy did pretty well for us in the 20th century. Companies produced stuff from cars to record players, and consumers got increasingly savvy about quality and price. About our rights. And about shopping around among competing products. We read Which? (UK) and Consumer Reports (US) and consumerism the movement was born.

Then something weird started to happen: the digital revolution.

We fell down the rabbit hole with Alice into Wonderland, and everything started to look weird.

In the beginning was Kindle

Amazon suddenly started offering us digital books – no need to trek to the bookshop, just buy and download!

But “buy” needs to be in quotes. A Kindle book won’t fill your bookshelves, but there are other things you can’t do with it. You can’t sell it, you can’t even give it away, because of course it isn’t really “yours.” You’ve really just borrowed it – or, rather, the right to read it. OK, you’ve rented it. While it looked as if Amazon had come up with a new way to enable you to buy books, what it had really done was re-create something from the 19^th century – the lending library where you have to pay.

Curiouser and curiouser

While you have to pay to rent books on Kindle, there are plenty of digital goods for which you pay nothing at all. That seems wonderful. Something for nothing! But, as the old saying goes, when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. (An old saying we could do with reviving in the digital era.)

The biggest problem is this: when it comes to “free” digital goods and services, because you aren’t using your credit card or getting monthly bills you tend not to think of yourself as a “consumer” at all. You’re just a “user” – a word the digital industry likes –or a “member.” To be a consumer you must buy things, don’t you, with money?

Actually, no. All it takes to be a consumer is to make an exchange, a transaction in the market-place. One of the curiouser ironies of the digital industry is its core business model, which takes us back to the days of primitive societies. They didn’t have cash, yet they still had transactions. We’re back in the history-book concept of barter. I’ll trade a dozen eggs for your chicken.

Barter is trading that doesn’t involve money. Its revival lies at the heart of the digital economy. And it’s one reason barter-based companies like Facebook and Google and many smaller ones are so hard for governments to regulate. Or for consumers to take seriously as companies.

What’s the trade-off?

So, users of Facebook and Google rarely sit down and ask themselves “how much am I paying to post these pictures, or ask these questions?” We just fire up our browsers and jump in. Of course, there are costs involved in our doing so – we pay for broadband cable or some other access to the internet. But we know we aren’t paying for the services we use. Are they some sort of charity?

What we need to be asking ourselves is, Where do these huge corporations make all that money?

There are three kinds of answer. One is simply advertising. Facebook and Google are sucking up more than half the ads on the internet, and the internet is steadily sucking ads from print and other real-world locations. We see ads and we assume this is how we are paying – and we may also know that for a century and more this is how newspapers have operated: the cover price has only covered a fraction of the cost; the rest comes from ads.

But here it’s a lot more complex. Because this is less about ads than about data. Everyone opening the New York Times sees the same ads for Macy’s department store and BMW and Givenchy. No two people using Facebook will ever see the same ads. Because these companies are sucking up enormous amounts of data about their users, analyzing it in ever more complex fashion, and using or selling it to shape our purchasing decisions. If you ask Facebook for all the data they have on you and you’re a typical user, it will run to well over one thousand printed pages.[2.  A well-known case that brought this to light is that of Austrian law student Max Schrems. Kevin Parrish, “User’s Facebook Data Request Produces 1222 Pg PDF on CD.”]

As Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jeff Hammerbacher famously put it, “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” And that’s why mathematicians, who write the formulae that turn your raw data into ads that will make you buy, are in such demand.[3.  Ashlee Vance, “This Tech Bubble is Different” Bloomberg, April 14, 2011.]

But there’s a third way to answer the question, and it’s even more disturbing: If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. That is, the service you are using is profitable because it sucks up your data and uses it to target ads at you and everyone you have ever known.

Put it like that and it’s a bit more obvious that these really are big businesses, and we really are consumers who pay for what we get.

Alongside the “free” stuff like Google there are also many digital goods and services for which we actually do pay – for example when you buy software like Microsoft Word or download Apple music or movies from Netflix. In many of these cases we’re doing both: paying cash, and also paying in data.

Those “privacy” statements

If we’re paying in data, do we have any say in how much data they take?

Those “privacy” statements that we sign giving permission to companies to search our phones and sell our data are the key. They’re separate from “privacy” settings – on Facebook and other sites – when you can decide how much of your stuff you want other people to see. These are take-it-or-leave-it contracts that rarely give you any choices and hand over your data to the company.

What’s a consumer to do?

‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’
‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat.
– Alice in Wonderland

There’s one obvious change in the law that could turn the weird world of digital goods into something that better resembled the consumer market-place we understand. We could require companies who seek our data – either as the price of service, or as part of it – to offer a cash alternative. We could require them to give us a consumerist choice.

Facebook for $10 a month – and all your data stays with you? Google for $20, same conditions?

Suddenly we’d all realize we were dealing with huge corporations that make money off us. And we’d be free to make a choice – as to whether we want to buy the product or be it too.

***

READ MORE: Ashlee Vance’s Bloomberg article from April 14, 2011, gives a brilliant insight into the data-ad process by telling the story of a mathematician who started early at Facebook.

“Top university in England for long-term graduate prospects.”

“London’s top modern university – and one of the top 10 in the UK.”

These were among the more spurious claims put forward in the marketing materials of six universities that the Advertising Standards Authority this week singled out for misleading prospective students with trumped-up claims. The decision is noteworthy for its timing: the consumer watchdog is cracking down at a moment when university fees are front-page news. That the ASA received complaints about university prospectuses in the first place signals a shift in how we see universities – from hallowed institutions to which we seek admittance to one of the pricier items on our shopping lists. A big transaction but, still, a transaction.

UnHerd asked Chief Executive Guy Parker about why the ASA chose to intervene now, and what else is coming down the road in the increasingly commercial sphere of education.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Universities have been making boastful statements about their rankings and status for a while. Why did the ASA decide to provide more scrutiny now?

There’s nothing wrong with universities promoting themselves in the best possible light.  But we’ll step in when an advertising claim crosses the line, whether it’s in a paid for space or on a university’s website or social media posts.

Our action follows a case in the summer involving Reading University and its claim to be a “top 1%” world ranking university. It also responds to a series of complaints that other universities have been making similar claims.

Is there really any meaningful way to substantiate a claim like ‘top 1% in the world’?

There may well be if the claim is carefully worded and qualified.  Universities have to follow the same rules that apply to all advertisers – if you’re making an objective claim, make sure it’s presented unambiguously and make sure you can prove it.

It seems like there’s more advertising for universities than ever. In the US, it’s not uncommon to hear radio commercials complete with jingles. Is that a trend?

The ad landscape surrounding universities has certainly changed in the UK.  Thanks to the introduction of student fees and the removal of the cap, it’s an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Can you give us an idea of what the new guidelines will look like?

It’s common sense stuff, like providing context to universities about how the advertising rules are applied, the kinds of claims that are likely to be problematic, the evidence the ASA is likely to expect you to hold when making a claim and how to avoid breaking the rules.

And we have a range of sanctions that we can impose if an advertiser is unwilling or unable to work with us and follow the rules. That includes, ultimately, referring them for potential statutory action, including fines. But that’s unlikely to happen here.  The universities we’ve investigated have responded positively to our findings – even if some of them have disagreed with them.

Where did the initial complaints come from? Is there any recourse available to students who feel they’ve been duped? 

It’s not an issue that we get many complaints about, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem or that we shouldn’t take action.

Going to university is a big financial commitment and misleading would-be students is not only unfair, it can lead them to make choices that aren’t right for them. In this instance we thought there was a real risk of consumer detriment and that the problem was widespread.

Most people choosing a university are really young – where to go is the first big decision they make for themselves. Even for older folks, it’s not like buying a car or clothes – it’s a highly specialised product. Everyone buying it is an inexperienced consumer. Does that factor into the ASA’s decision?

It does, yes. When judging whether an ad is likely to mislead we use the ‘average consumer test’: what is the likely knowledge and understanding of the average consumer who sees and responds to a claim in the ad?

In these cases, we took into account that the claims are targeted at students, predominantly young, relatively inexperienced consumers. Clearly, they won’t have the same level of understanding about league tables as the marketing department of universities.

Those responsible for crafting and proving the advertising claims need to realise that.