The great packager
I was on vacation last week, which meant I had plenty of time to catch up on all the books I’ve been meaning to read. One of them, “How the Irish Saved Civilization” by Thomas Cahill, has been on my To Read list for five years. Since the rest of the book deals with how the seemingly uncivilized Irish preserved great literature and history after the fall of the Roman Empire, I was surprised to read a passage that dealt with marketing and public relations.
In the first chapter, Cahill speaks about the philsopher and scholar Cicero, calling him the “great teacher of argument…the techniques of the successful politician, the methods of modern advertising – the whole panoply of persuasion is to be found in Cicero.”
Cool right? We can trace our field of public relations back to the Roman Empire. Cahill was not so enamored:
“We are made uncomfortable and bored by Cicero’s elaborately coaching us in all the tricks of his trade – the many techniques for convincing others to act the way we want them to. As a philosopher, Cicero was the great packager of his age, an unoriginal thinker with real flair, who could dramatize all the currents and schools of thought so that anyone might understand them well enough to talk about them at a cocktail party.”
Apparently the sound bite was created more than 1,000 years ago.
Joking aside, I can’t stop thinking about that passage. What is it that would make a noted historian turn up his nose at Cicero’s contribution to Roman society, a contribution which the author says influenced modern persuasion? The terms advertising, marketing, public relations often evoke such negative reactions today as well. Perhaps it is because the package is often created as a distraction from what is really contained (or not) within the box.
One example of this so-called distraction public relations is BP’s reaction to the oil spill. From the beginning, the focus seemed to be on image, not reality. The company downplayed the situation, publicly underestimating the amount of oil that was gushing into the Gulf and over-enhancing their many solutions.
Even now, the commercials that feature beach clean-up teams on nearly pristine white sand ring hollow as the oil keeps flowing. Lives have been changed in the Gulf forever. BP has to make more than just pretty commercials and promises to convince the Gulf region that it is trying to improve the situation. Real trust requires transparency. Real dialog requires listening.
Cahill may have considered Cicero to be an unoriginal thinker, but real influence comes from the seemingly boring ability to speak clearly and persuasively. That is an ability worth studying and cultivating.
