Learning from Advertising How to Trick People into Altering Their Behaviour

Personal Reflections on a Crash Course in the Power of Imagery

I was born and raised in Toronto Ontario. I received all my formal schooling in my hometown. I made it all the way from nursery school in 1954 to completing a Ph.D. in Canadian History from the U of T in 1984.

During this long stretch of formal schooling I took one major break from the institutionalized grid of sequenced pedagogy.  During the culminating stage of this break I toured on my BSA motorcycle the back roads of equatorial East Africa and Central Africa. This safari included a circumnavigation of the sometimes snow clad Rwenzori Mountains in the border of Congo and Rwanda. I shall draw on my memories of these experiences in a later offering I am working on for publication here.

The prelude to this break in 1970-71 came in my high school years when I was able to land a lucrative part-time job modelling clothes, mostly for mail order catalogues. Much of this activity took place at a major photography studio run by Pringle and Booth.

Pringle and Booth is a storied old company based in Don Mill, Toronto’s first major post-WWII suburb. Over the years the company’s staff captured many iconic photographs including annual team portraits of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Pringle and Booth is a Photography Firm that Did Much to Chronicle the Visual History of Toronto Including the History of the Toronto Maple Leafs

When I worked at Pringle and Booth, the company specialized in producing high-resolution images for major retailers including Eaton’s, JC Penney, and the Chicago-based organization, Sears Roebuck and Company.  

 In the days before Kmart, Walmart and Amazon.com, Sears Roebuck was the largest retailer in the world. Its rise to fame and fortune was founded in the enormous success of its famous catalogue. In the late 1960s I appeared frequently in the pages of this legendary vehicle of mass marketing

The main photographer who taught me how to pose for catalogue shoots had been an artist at the Sears Roebuck headquarters in Chicago going back to the 1930s. He would sometimes speak of the era of the “New Deal” when he took part in the shift away from drawing pictures to the production of high-resolution photographs as the primary means of representing the Sears line of products. The jovial old timer told me that during the Depression years he used to select models for the Sears catalogue by picking candidates out from food lines for soup kitchens.   

I was surprised to find myself working as an integral part of what was then the biggest mass marketing operation in the world. Two times I took time off from high school when Sears sent the Pringle and Booth team, including me, to photo shoots in Jamaica. I found in Jamaica a land of sumptuous resorts side-by-side with the grinding poverty of the largest part of the Black population.

All and all my time as a model, which included some appearances in magazine ads and TV commercials, was lucrative as well as educational.

Looking back I can see that this experience provided me with an instructive introductory window into the world of advertising, a world that extends to commerce in imagery, Public Relations and propaganda. For a time I was well paid to put the face of contentment on conspicuous consumption as a primary route to happiness and fulfilment.

I learned a lot from being part of the process of creating images that pretend to be plucked out of real life but are in fact highly engineered products designed to elicit preconceived responses.

That deceptive process has become a leading force driving many of our most consequential economic, political and cultural interactions. The goal is, after all, to alter perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of large numbers of people in their capacity as consumers of products, ideas political agendas many of which involve the selling of wars.

My background in advertising helped me to look critically in later years at media spin doctoring, propaganda, and psychological operations. These spinoffs from advertising were among the subjects that attracted my attention in reading, writing and teaching in my years of working in the academy.

This preoccupation would become important for me when I worked at figuring out what lay behind, for instance, fabricated catastrophes as epitomized by 9/11 and the manufactured COVID crisis. Both were false flag events. Both sagas were expertly engineered to elicit dramatic responses drenched in the potent political currency derived from public fear, anxiety and hysteria.

The 9/11 and COVID fiascos were strategically misrepresented by the Mighty Wurlitzer amplifying the lockstep propaganda of the intelligence networks and their mainstream media outlets. The tsunami-like effect of widely-replicated waves of media disinformation created widespread public panic.

Please see my initial substack essay,

The false flag misrepresentations provided justification for supposed remedies to protect against the imagined incursion of enemies and menaces strategically-conjured up with the goal of seeming to justify many actions. These actions included wars on many Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, economically disastrous lockdowns, and mandated injections. These injections were declared without evidence to be safe and effective when they were in fact unacceptably lethal, injurious, and harmful to fertility and natural immunity. 

The results of the 9/11 and COVID power grabs are to be seen in massive ongoing alterations of humanity’s political economy. These alterations continue to cut away the remnants of national sovereignty and personal autonomy. They threaten most of us with various forms of financial ruin and dispossession. The proliferation of catastrophes is particularly corrosive to the proprietary basis of the working class and the worldwide middle class even as the poor are being plunged into plagues of increased homelessness, malnourishment, illness and premature deaths.

The process is centralizing globalist power in unaccountable supranational agencies where woke gibberish is meant to disguise the expanding tyranny of corporatist domination by the hugely entitled few over the dispossessed and disenfranchised many.

A hugely disproportionate facet of this mounting tyranny stems from the activities of an inbred cabal of Talmudic bankers augmented by their favoured gangs of psychopathic multibillionaires. At the middle levels of this power grab are armies of operatives that permeate government, Silicon Valley, academia, the judiciary, Hollywood, the UN, and many professional associations including those of doctors. The agents of the takeover also inhabit countless think tanks, NGOs, “private- public partnerships” etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum.  

The federated parts of this massive leviathan are deeply engaged in the busy extinguishment and enfeeblement of millions of human lives. The assault extends to attacks on the inherent and constitutional rights and freedoms of those that survive an increasingly bold and unabashed scheme of global depopulation extending now to elimination through famine, economic collapse and the prospect of imminent nuclear warfare.

The scheme of culling humans as well as creating transhumans through combinations of digital and genetic engineering forms one aspect of an increasingly horrific unfolding holocaust in our midst.

Both 9/11 and its COVID follow-up two decades later were instrumental in ushering in a host of emergency measure declarations to advance the subordination of the tattered remnants of democracy to the demonic machinations of a ruthless centralized dictatorship .

The effect of imposing on society accumulating heaps of emergency measures-- measures that are almost never repealed-- is to strengthen many forms of arbitrary executive rule. The other side of this process is to weaken and eliminate checks and balances including those that are expressed in courts, legislatures, universities, media and such.

This method of streamlining decision-making excludes multitudes of average people from having any say in determining the shape and content of even our own futures let alone of our societies. Onslaughts of conniving tactics put great pressure on people to give way to methods of absolute control by the few over the many.

The still-misrepresented events of 9/11 plus the COVID-19 Hoax are being extended into fake all-purpose campaigns of repression mounted in the name of forcing humans to cut carbon emissions. The primary theatre of these psychological operations is the primary platform of contemporary warfare, namely the minds of human beings.