Brandwashed (39 page)

Did you bother to read the latest
Apple iTunes user agreement? Me neither—so let’s review what it says. Included are new terms and conditions in which Apple asks—or rather, requires—that iTunes users consent to let Apple know where their iPhone, iBook, or MacBook is at any time. In other words, if you want to use the Apple iTunes store (and it won’t let you in until you click “I accept”), you have to agree to let Apple track your computer in real time 24/7
and
share that information with third parties. (Don’t forget that Apple knows a lot about you already, including all your past purchases and your credit card number, which it keeps on file.) No wonder Germany responded to Apple’s demands with the country’s federal justice commissioner insisting that Apple without delay “disclose the details of the location data it is collecting from handhelds,” and that in the United States the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus has demanded that Steve Jobs explain the sudden appearance of this new policy and how, precisely, he intends to guarantee users’ anonymity.
⁴⁶

A few years ago a neat little April Fool’s joke revealed just how little attention we pay to this kind of fine print.
Gamestation, a British online video game retailer, playfully buried a clause in its terms and conditions that read, “By placing an order via this Web site on the first day of the fourth month of the year 2010 Anno Domini, you agree to grant us a non transferable option to claim, now and for ever more, your immortal soul. Should we wish to exercise this option, you agree to surrender your
immortal soul, and any claim you may have on it, within 5 (five) working days of receiving written notification from
gamestation.co.uk
or one of its duly authorized minions.”
⁴⁷
How many souls did the company capture? Roughly 7,500, or 88 percent of all the people who bought stuff from the site on that April 1. April Fool’s!

Y
es, it’s true that we as consumers are partly to blame for all that companies know about us. We place way too much information online. We blog. We chat. We tweet. We play Foursquare. We post our favorite YouTube videos. We enter our credit card numbers every time we want to buy a book, a T-shirt, a plane ticket, and more. We announce to our Facebook friends where we’re going on vacation, that we like Pink Floyd, Cold Stone ice cream, Pixar, and
House
. And each time we do, we’re playing right into the hands of the data miners.

It’s no huge surprise, given how much of their lives the younger generation spends on Facebook and Twitter, that when I gathered groups of teenagers from across the country to talk about privacy (in conjunction with the recruitment firm Murray Hill Associates), the word “privacy” appeared to mean nothing to them; either they were completely indifferent to the subject or they’d completely given up on it. It was a little chilling.

It should also come as no surprise, given how much time today’s kids spend online, that data miners are collecting information about children as young as four or five. Some do this via online questionnaires that pop up on kid-friendly sites, asking kids their age, favorite toys and cartoon characters, and buying behavior, and sometimes even the buying behavior of their parents. Your kid wants to register for the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes kids’ Web site? Well, he’ll have to
join
first, by giving his first name, answering a security question, and offering up his parents’—i.e., your—e-mail address. Once you’ve answered with a confirming e-mail, Warner Bros. will ask for your child’s e-mail address, followed by his zip code and year of birth, and then will require you to check a box agreeing to the terms of agreement on his behalf. What
are
those terms of agreement? According to the Web site, “We may ask them to provide us with their first name, hometown, and e-mail address. On some pages of our sites, such as where children can send electronic postcards to their friends, we also may ask your child to provide personal information about other people.”
⁴⁸

Then again, even if your kids don’t sign up for the Looney Tunes Web site, it’s not too difficult for marketers to mine data about them given the fact that, according to Internet security firm AVG,
92 percent of American children have a
digital footprint before the age of two,
⁴⁹
7 percent of babies exit the womb to find they already have an existing e-mail address, and 5 percent have a social network profile (and almost a quarter of all newborns already have a photographic presence online, too, as 23 percent of parents upload their sonogram photos online). And as social networking becomes even more ubiquitous, there’s no question in my mind that these numbers will continue to grow. Remarks J. R. Smith, the CEO of AVG, “It’s shocking to think that a 30-year-old has an online footprint stretching back 10–15 years at most, while the vast majority of children today will have online presence that will continue to build throughout their whole lives.” He also cautions parents to be mindful of the
privacy settings on Web sites where parents “share” photos and information about their children, including YouTube and Flickr.
⁵⁰

Still, while many of us are fully aware that all these details about our likes, dislikes, habits, and personal lives are out there floating around in the ether, most of us are ignorant of the
extent
to which every movement we make, every step we take, every item we buy is being recorded and transcribed onto an indelible digital footprint that stays with us for the rest of our lives (and in fact will outlive us long after we’re gone). As the
New York Times
notes, all of us are members of “the post-privacy society, where we have lost track of how many entities are tracking us. Not to mention what they are doing with our personal information, how they are storing it, whom they might be selling our dossiers to and yes, how much money they are making off them.”
⁵¹

It’s true. We
are
living in a postprivacy society. Nothing drove this point home more for me than a poignant irony IBM boss Sam Palmisano noted in a recent speech: that today, some thirty-two closed-circuit
cameras sit within two hundred yards of the London flat where author George Orwell wrote
1984
, his dystopian book about the prying eyes of Big Brother.

So yes, we all know that every time we tweet our whereabouts on Twitter, update our Facebook profiles, buy something online with our credit card, or swipe our reward card at a drugstore, we’re letting information about ourselves out into the world. But we don’t fully realize that every time we do, we’re essentially giving companies and marketers permission to record, store, compile, and analyze every last bit of information we choose to share—and many pieces of information we don’t—and then turn around and use it to trick, manipulate, and seduce us into buying more stuff. The fact is, as our world becomes increasingly networked, digitized, and hyperconnected and we inevitably conduct even more of our lives online, it will become harder and harder to escape the prying gaze of the data miners. Sure, we could toss out our cell phones, deactivate our Facebook profiles, and cancel our credit cards, but let’s get real. We’re far too brandwashed to do anything as drastic as that.

I
t was close to midnight, Pacific Standard Time, as one truck after another crept down a quiet, gated village road in the heart of Laguna Beach, one of the most beautiful oceanside communities in Southern California (as well as one of the most affluent and most expensive: the median income for a family is $146,562, and the average home price easily tops $1 million). Most of the ornate, sprawling stucco houses were in shadows, their owners asleep—with the exception of the very last house on the block. Considering the time of night, it was unusual to see one, let alone several, vehicles on the road. Yet five or six trucks stood silhouetted in the driveway and along the front curb, as workers silently unloaded camera equipment and cardboard boxes, then carried them inside the house.

What was about to take place over the next eight weeks was among the most risky and unconventional operations my team and I had ever concocted. If a single person in the neighborhood had found out what we were up to, the entire project (which we’d been planning and preparing over the past six months) would be jeopardized. Why? Because the families in this upscale neighborhood could have no idea they were about to become unwitting participants in a massive, $3 million social
experiment whose results would reveal a side of consumer behavior few of them would have believed.

Inspired by the 2010 Hollywood movie
The Joneses
, about a family of stealth marketers who move into an upper-middle-class neighborhood to peddle their wares to their unsuspecting neighbors, my scheme was both simple and ambitious: to test the power of word-of-mouth marketing. I would create a real-life version of the film, taking a real-life California family, dropping them in a real-life California neighborhood, and then film them in every waking moment as they went about covertly persuading friends, colleagues, and loved ones to buy a number of carefully selected brands.

First step: I hired one of America’s top reality-show casting directors (Marcy Tishk, who has worked on shows ranging from
Jersey Shore
to
Paris Hilton’s My New BFF
) and producer
Andy McEntee (whose credits include
The
Millionaire Matchmaker
and
Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
) to narrow a large field of candidates to select our perfect all-American family. If our experiment was to succeed, the Morgenson family had to represent a perfect mix of ages, styles, interests, and aspirational values. After a lengthy search, Marcy and Andy found their ideal candidates in Eric and
Gina Morgenson and their three sons, Jack, Sam, and Max—a successful, good-looking, picture-perfect Southern California family who agreed to make it their life’s mission (well, for at least a month) to discreetly persuade their neighbors to buy a broad array of products.

Let’s meet them.

Eric Morgenson:
In his midforties, with a degree from an East Coast college, Eric is a successful, compassionate, funny, sports-obsessed, and involved father (with a latent party-hearty streak).

Gina Morgenson:
Sophisticated, charming, and popular, Gina is politically and environmentally aware, as well as a fashion trendsetter among her friends.

Jack, Sam, and
Max Morgenson:
As sports-crazy and outdoorsy as their father, Jack, Sam, and Max are hip, handsome Justin Bieber–esque Southern California adolescents (ages sixteen, fourteen, and twelve), smitten with music, skateboarding, technology, and, like most teens and tweens, the latest brands and styles.

Now I want you to picture the scene that took place several days later.

In the Morgensons’ spacious yard (complete with heated in-ground swimming pool, Toro-mowed and impeccably landscaped lawn, and three-car garage housing a 2005 Ford Expedition Eddie Bauer edition, a 2008 BMW 750Li, and a 2008 Nissan Altima coupe),
Eric Morgenson shows off his grilling techniques and new Frontgate and T.J. Maxx barbecue tools to a handful of male buddies. Two hundred feet away,
Gina Morgenson is entertaining a group of female friends in her state-of-the-art kitchen (containing an array of top-of-the-line KitchenAid appliances, including a combination microwave-oven, induction cooktop, ice maker, trash compactor, toaster, immersion blender, and water filter), gushing about how hard she’s fallen for a beautiful new jewelry line. Upstairs, Jack, Sam, Max, and a few school friends play the newest game on Xbox while showing off the hip new Vans and etnie sneakers they’ve recently picked up on a family shopping spree.

The point of this multimillion-dollar experiment was to test the seductive power of word-of-mouth marketing. By filming a “real” family in spontaneous, unscripted situations and scenarios like these, from barbecues to champagne brunches to shopping expeditions, we would document how the Morgensons’ circle of friends responded to specific brands and products the Morgensons brought into their lives. When put face-to-face with another family’s “enviable” lifestyle—and the brands and products that sustain it—would they want all the things that family has? And more important, would this influence be so powerful as to make them actually go out and buy those things?

With the help of thirty-five video cameras (seventeen hidden from view) and twenty-five microphones tucked away inside the furniture and fixtures, providing us with a 360-degree view of every room in the house, so we could follow the Morgensons wherever they went, the results of this clandestine operation would ultimately reveal something shocking: that the most powerful hidden persuader of them all isn’t in your television set or on the shelves of your supermarket or even lurking in your smart phone. It’s a far more pervasive influence that’s around you virtually every waking moment, brandwashing you in ways you don’t even realize: your very own friends and neighbors.