The Century of the Self (2002)

No trailer exists. This was a BBC television series rather than a cinema release, so it was never given one. The nearest equivalent is the programme page on BBC Two.

What it is

Four hours, made for the BBC, tracing a line from Sigmund Freud through his nephew Edward Bernays, who applied psychoanalytic ideas to public relations in the United States, to the motivational research of the 1950s, to the self-actualisation movement, to the political consultancy of the 1990s.

The argument is that the twentieth century saw a shift from treating people as rational citizens with needs to treating them as consumers with desires, and that this was a deliberate project with named authors rather than a drift.

What it gets right about the trade

Bernays is the correct starting point and almost nobody in marketing has read him. He is the direct link between a theory of the unconscious and the practice of mass persuasion, and he was explicit about what he was doing in a way that would be unpublishable now.

It takes the techniques seriously as techniques. The series does not treat persuasion as silly or as obviously evil. It treats it as something that works, which is far more unsettling and far more useful.

It connects marketing to politics without being glib about it. The same methods, the same consultants, moving between the two. That is historically accurate and it is the part of our trade’s history most often left out of the telling.

What it gets wrong, or at least overstates

Curtis builds an argument by juxtaposition. Archive footage, a flat narration, a cut to something ominous. It is enormously persuasive and it is not an argument you can check.

The thesis is also too tidy. It presents a century of messy, competing, frequently failing commercial activity as a coherent project executed by a small number of people who understood what they were doing. Most of marketing history is people guessing.

And there is an irony the series never addresses: it is itself a masterpiece of emotional persuasion through editing, making an argument about the dangers of emotional persuasion.

The one part worth showing a team

Episode one, the Bernays material on the 1929 cigarette campaign, where he arranged for women to smoke publicly at a parade and framed it as a gesture of emancipation.

It is the clearest demonstration in any film of the difference between selling a product and attaching it to an identity. It is also a direct illustration of how much damage that technique can do when the product is harmful, which makes it a better conversation starter with a team than any case study.

If you run the company rather than the marketing

Worth four hours of your time, and not for the marketing.

The thing it will give you is a working sense of how old these techniques are and how deliberately they were built. Most executives encounter persuasion methods as new, arriving with a vendor and a deck. They are not new. The intellectual work was done in the 1920s and everything since is implementation.

That matters practically, because it changes how you evaluate a proposal. When somebody presents a behavioural technique as a breakthrough, the useful question is which of the old mechanisms this is, and whether it is being used on people in a way you would defend if it were described plainly to them.

The series is also a reasonable inoculation against your own marketing. If you watch four hours of how effectively this works on populations, you will be slightly less confident that it does not work on you.