00:00:00.000hey friends joe here and you are listening to under the influence0.82
00:00:10.140i don't know about you but my house is filled with crap just just a lot of it there's so
00:00:17.300much stuff and it's amazing because for most of my adult life i lived in a very very small
00:00:25.860one-bedroom apartment in New York City. And everything fit in there, right? And then when
00:00:32.920I moved to San Francisco and I acquired a husband and a baby, we still lived in a pretty small
00:00:39.380two-bedroom place. And again, everything fit. And now that we are living in Philadelphia where
00:00:47.100things are a little more affordable, we've got a house. We've got a center city townhouse,
00:00:53.580like row house and it's got four bedrooms and all of the freaking closets and it's just packed
00:01:00.620to the gills and I'm like where did all of this stuff come from and I know where it came from
00:01:06.300it came from the fact that we just buy too much stuff we do we do and it is it is a human problem
00:01:14.220it is an American problem we buy way more than we need we keep way more than we need we throw out
00:01:21.380way more than we should be. And most of us are just drowning in stuff. So this year, I am being
00:01:29.480really conscious about this. I'm cleaning things out. I wrote a whole newsletter over the influence
00:01:36.520about how I've been Swedish death cleaning, which does sound like a Scandinavian metal band that I
00:01:41.360would join. But it's been working. I really I've been really getting in there and just donating
00:01:48.000a ton of stuff and right now what I'm doing when I see things that I want to buy online which is a
00:01:55.720lot because our eyeballs are always on screens I take a pause I take a pause and if I really like
00:02:02.740it I will put it in a document and go back to it at the end of the week after after there's been
00:02:08.360been some cooling off time and only then only then will I get it if I truly truly think that
00:02:15.320I need it. And you know what? I haven't really gotten anything since I started doing this.
00:02:23.180And it's really, it's proof to me that marketers and brands and influencers really are worming
00:02:31.920their way into our brains in a way that we've never actually seen before. And I think that is
00:02:38.540leading to so much overconsumption. Here to talk to me about all of it today is Mara Einstein.
00:02:46.060Yes, she is actually tangentially related to that really old genius dude. She is. She is.0.93
00:02:53.360Mara is a marketing expert, and she talks a lot about the cult of influencers and the cult of
00:03:00.600marketing and how easy it is for us to get sucked in by deceptive marketing. We are going to talk
00:03:08.080all about how online influencers are selling products to consumers that we don't need that
00:03:13.360we don't want and frankly that we just just don't have any room for okay and some of it is like some
00:03:19.080of it is good so much some of it is great and also there are influencers that i freaking love
00:03:22.720who are just like running really fantastic businesses good on them but there's also also0.73
00:03:29.260a lot of crap and also a lot of bullshit mara was actually in the new netflix doc buy now the0.95
00:03:34.800shopping conspiracy, the one that stripped bare many of Amazon's more deceptive and dangerous1.00
00:03:40.160tactics. Well, this episode is going to go a little deeper than that. We're going to go beyond
00:03:44.360Amazon. We're going to talk about how advertisers use all of these deceptive marketing tactics,
00:03:48.880and then how that trickles down to influencers.
00:03:51.180i'm excited to dive into one of my favorite subjects which is how are marketers manipulating
00:04:05.680us online how are they manipulating us on social media because i think it's a thing that's only
00:04:10.980going to get worse as ai continues to get better am i right in in being afraid of that absolutely
00:04:18.480Absolutely. Because as AI gets better and better, it becomes harder and harder for people to be able to figure out what is real and what isn't.
00:04:29.540What happened the other day, though, as you might remember, is that Meta put up a couple of those fake AI profiles that they had created.
00:04:40.300Oh, yeah. What's underneath it is it says AI, AI made or manipulated or whatever is a AI by meta. So so it says that on there. So in the same way that you look for advertising and underneath it, it's supposed to say sponsored by or paid post or hashtag ad.
00:05:05.680And the same place, that's where they put, you know, manufactured by AI, by Meta. But again, in the same way people don't tend to look for that, it's underneath the name of the person, which isn't necessarily where we think to look.
00:05:23.900but it's also very ghosted back and in a very light gray so your eye is going to flash right
00:05:32.100by it and particularly if you're engaging with this content online you're looking at it while
00:05:37.920you're scrolling really quickly because remember the technology is created in such a way to never
00:05:44.140have a stopping point and that's really purposeful so if you think about a book when you're done with
00:05:50.840a book. You're done with the book. You close it. You walk away. Same thing with a movie or a
00:05:54.740television show, though Netflix kind of taught us to binge watch. The way the shows are created
00:06:01.000are to work as individual pieces. Social media is not created that way. It's created for you to
00:06:07.380scroll and scroll and scroll. And so you lose a lot of information, particularly if you're looking
00:06:14.080at a more static space like an instagram so the i think what some people may have
00:06:24.520sort of gotten clue to is how stilted the language is when it comes to ai created verbiage
00:06:34.480maybe not so not well the pictures are bad too and you you can figure those out particularly
00:06:39.040if they do video because if they do yeah they never show the person's face or their hands0.98
00:06:44.640because a because ai hands ai hands are like alien hands they're fucked up0.92
00:06:53.420like six fingers and they're they're in the wrong places or they're extra0.92
00:06:57.820um but there was the one person that they created they first posted up which was0.66
00:07:03.480really shocking, was supposed to be a Black queer mother.0.99
00:07:29.040and they're supposed to be on a beach somewhere,0.93
00:07:32.200and that looked silly and then she was she was a queer so she says something about oh i go with0.80
00:07:40.240my wifey to the kids and i try to find out things for them to do when we're on winter break oh come0.88
00:07:46.060on really nobody told that nobody nobody calls nobody calls anyone a wifey no woman calls anyone
00:07:52.160a wifey okay this was clearly this was clearly written by a straight white man is what it was
00:07:58.020absolutely it was so it was tone deaf on so many levels but when we're talking about
00:08:06.720deception there's there's so many so many places where deception works online and one of the things
00:08:14.900that i'm talk about in in my book hoodwinked is one of the ways that cults work because i'm
00:08:22.700comparing how marketing marketers use the same tactics as cults and what cults do in terms of
00:08:30.020recruiting people first they try to find people who are most vulnerable and when we spend a lot
00:08:37.400of time on social media spaces we get very vulnerable because we're constantly being
00:08:43.540bombarded with a lot of information but also a lot of rage fading right a lot of rage so much
00:08:51.400so much. I mean, I say this all the time. We were never supposed to have information like all of
00:08:58.540this next to each other, right? So pictures of our friend's new baby, next to tips on how much
00:09:04.800protein to eat to get rid of your belly fat, next to images of Donald Trump saying that he wants to
00:09:13.160rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. We were never supposed to get things so squished
00:09:17.880together like that now it's all squished together in our brains and and there's a difference between
00:09:23.140information and fact there's and what we're getting oftentimes is information and and so what
00:09:30.380what are you exactly what you're saying we're we're not supposed to get all that one on top of
00:09:34.560the other because what are we supposed to do with all of that and in the same way i was saying is
00:09:39.540the technology is created for us to scroll so we're going to keep looking for something that's
00:09:44.680going to give us that jolt right that that little little bit of dopamine that's going to keep us
00:09:50.400going and that's what the technology is created to do now influencers are incentivized to to use
00:09:58.720rage or they're incentivized to use awe what one of those two things and we know that that is what
00:10:06.020keeps people connected to the technology now what cults have done is then once they get your
00:10:13.600attention because you've become so anxious is to use deception to get you in the door. So they
00:10:19.580don't tell you exactly who they are until you've been fully immersed in what it is that they're
00:10:26.580ultimately trying to sell. Advertisers do the same thing. They show you the shiny thing on the one
00:10:33.380hand, so you won't look at the man behind the curtain. And advertisers have always done that.
00:10:39.160So if we think about it, maybe in terms of something like multi-level marketing, the way that that's always pitched to people is, oh, here's a really easy way for you to make a whole bucket ton of money in your spare time. Now, anyone who's ever been sucked in by any of these groups know that that's just not the way that stuff works.
00:11:00.500Yeah. Yeah. No, it's just not. It's not. I mean, it's all it all feels like a pyramid scheme and a scam. But then again, so so does social media every time that I open it, to be honest. It really does. I mean, I do feel like I'm being manipulated every time I go on on this platform. So you've been doing this for for a long time. This has been your career your entire life.
00:11:27.660Correct. How have things changed? I mean, what things are constantly shifting, right? There's some people who say, OK, everything went bananas when we went from radio to TV, from TV to digital. This feels bigger to me. This shift feels like the biggest shift that we've ever gone through.
00:11:46.020I would absolutely agree. So I started my career, I started my career as an actress, but when I moved into corporate spaces, I worked in advertising and marketing. And then I worked at MTV Networks, and then I worked at NBC. And then I got out of the business and became an academic and started writing books about media and branding and marketing and so on.
00:12:12.400and it was only a couple of years ago that you began to see the real pivot happen in that the
00:12:23.000advertising dollars were fundamentally moving out of the so-called legacy media like television
00:12:29.740like magazines like newspapers and then moving into digital spaces now the thing that i have
00:12:39.260always said, and people constantly want to correct me, is that digital is a tactic. It's not a
00:12:49.280strategy, right? And what I mean by that is it's one thing in the marketer's toolkit that you can
00:12:55.900use to get people to buy your product and pay attention to you. But it was never meant to be
00:13:01.800the only way for people to learn about products and services. Now, of course, people are going to
00:13:08.800say, well, that was never what media was supposed to be about. It was supposed to be the creation
00:13:13.020of content and all of those other things. But somebody somewhere has to pay for the creation
00:13:21.760of the content. And what happened along the way is that people said that they don't want to engage
00:13:28.740with advertising. And that was my last book, Black Ops Advertising. I talked about all the
00:13:34.560ways that we're marketed to, that we don't know we're being marketed to. And marketers have become
00:13:40.640more adept at hiding and being deceptive about how they are trying to get us to buy their products
00:13:48.060because we have done everything we can to avoid engaging with the advertising.
00:17:55.220How many people are no longer on dating sites because they've been on them for years and years and years and years and never found anybody?
00:18:02.040But everybody knows somebody who found somebody by a dating site.
00:18:08.640So there's enough people who've been successful at it so that people say, oh, yeah, you know, it's going to happen to me if I stay here long enough.
00:18:15.900Well, the same thing is true with TikTok Make Me Buy It, is enough people have actually bought something because of being on a social space that they're able to say that, oh, yeah, no, this stuff works.
00:18:27.640But it doesn't necessarily because so much of it is not being seen by real people.
00:18:35.320You talk a lot about black ops advertising, which is such a great name because I feel like in a lot of ways, advertising has been weaponized.
00:18:43.840how can we protect ourselves? What should we be doing so that we're not being sold to all the
00:18:49.200time, so that we're not being manipulated all the time? Or is it just hopeless? Should we just give
00:18:53.360up? Well, I don't think it's hopeless. If I thought it was hopeless, I would stop writing books
00:18:59.760because I really I don't think it's hopeless. I think part of it is information. If you have the
00:19:05.280information to see what is going on and how people are trying to sell to you, then you can look out
00:19:12.600for it and see what you can do to avoid it. One of the things is obviously to look underneath
00:19:18.820somebody's name and see whether or not that person is being paid. If somebody is being sponsored to
00:19:26.960sell you the information or to sell you the foundation or whatever it is, we come at sponsored
00:19:36.860content differently than we do when it's something that we think is editorial content.
00:20:02.080But I don't think that most people know anymore.
00:20:06.860Well, that's it's it's hard. It's harder to see now than it's ever been before. And it's also two things that are going on. One, you have people who actually are sponsored, who aren't saying that they're sponsored.
00:20:21.920And that's the thing. Yeah. I mean, so much of this, so much of this is integrated into influencer lifestyle content. Right. You just don't know what someone likes or what they're being paid to tell you they like.
00:20:32.760Right. The other part of it is that there are people who aren't being sponsored, who say they're being sponsored because they want sponsors to look at them as people who might be good to do a deal with. Right. And so that gums up the works even more.
00:20:53.940I would just assume, you know, just as a flat out sort of way to engage online, if somebody's saying they love a particular product or service or whatever it is, just assume that somebody's being paid somewhere.
00:21:09.080Because what also happens is what's happening based on people who I interviewed for HUDWings in terms of people who are in the agency business, they say they're moving more toward either big celebrity influencers like, you know, Mr. Beast and Charli D'Amelio or whatever, you know, whatever, or they're going for nano influencers.
00:21:33.680Right. Yeah. And of course, of course, instead of the in-betweens.
00:21:38.440Right. And so the impotines are going to get really lost in the sauce.
00:21:42.900Can you explain what a nano influencer is to our audience?
00:21:47.220Sure. The definition varies based on who it is you're talking to.
00:21:51.840But it's someone who has either less than 5,000 and definitely less than 10,000 followers.
00:21:58.740Oh, my God. I'm not even a nano influencer.
00:25:38.680Right. But what I always say to people is if you are thinking about your cell phone as something other than a shopping mall, you're thinking about it the wrong way.
00:30:41.780It's not like it used to be, which it was like, you know, somebody who used to be a professor or something decides they want to work in marketing.
00:30:49.720That's not who's selling the campuses anymore.
00:30:53.800You mean the $100,000 a year colleges?
00:30:58.080And so what happens, so these are being sold to people by people who used to work in corporate marketing in key positions.
00:31:04.860They're making hundreds of thousands of dollars to sell colleges to parents.
00:31:10.820Now, if you're doing this for the first time or you only have one child, then you are making what you think is like this life changing decision for your child, doing it with a lack of information.
00:31:26.120And what we know from a marketing perspective is that when people lack information and feel like they can't learn more, they will spend, they will pay more money thinking that by default that thing is better, whether it is for your child or not.
00:31:45.760and so you're making these decisions when there's your emotions are so ratcheted up
00:31:53.100and so that's why they're able to get people to buy into this idea that not only do you have to
00:31:59.060go to college but you have to go to the best most expensive or forget it your life is over
00:32:04.040which is which is absolutely which is absolutely not true i um i think about this a lot as someone
00:32:11.240who did attend two Ivy League colleges.
00:32:50.400Well, I have a whole chapter in the book that's called The Cult of Higher Education because I spent five years researching how colleges are marketed.
00:33:00.580So while I was trying to get my daughter into college and I was a college professor and I was researching colleges, I was seeing all of this stuff going on.
00:33:09.220And it's it's no wonder that people have bought into these ideas because the fear that has been generated around what college you have to go to is just disproportionate.
00:33:23.140and so so if we take this back to to the influencer space one of the things that i also
00:33:29.880talk about in in the book is that the anxiety is created in order for you and it's like we
00:33:38.380were talking about rage earlier the rage exists to increase our anxiety and the more anxious we are
00:33:45.720and the more vulnerable we are the more we want to do something that's going to release it
00:33:50.900And so it either becomes spending more time on social media, which then can ultimately lead to us spending more money. So it becomes anxiety, doom scrolling, anxiety, purchase anxiety, right? And we end up in this hamster wheel. Well, who wants to feel like that?
00:34:10.000no one no one but i mean i also think that's the thing these platforms do make a lot of money
00:34:17.440when their ads are effective and you know things like getting rid of fact checking
00:34:23.640on these platforms just increases the rage bait right but what what i think is going i mean i
00:34:31.420I could be proven wrong, but I don't think so.
00:34:37.100Between the possible ban on TikTok and what has gone on with Meta in terms of the elimination of censorship, quote unquote,
00:34:50.140that space is probably going to start looking an awful lot like what Twitter looked like after Elon Musk bought it.
00:35:01.420And so I don't see from what I'm seeing online, I don't see people saying, oh, if Twitter goes away, I'm going to go over to Instagram because it's not the same experience for creators.
00:35:13.520They're saying either they're going to create a sub stack or they're going to create some kind of space where they own it because people are getting to the point where they don't want to create content that doesn't belong to them.
00:35:28.420And that's what that's what sub stack has done.
00:35:30.560But I also think it's only a matter of time before Substack accepts advertising.
00:35:35.200Yeah, but what you can do is you can grab your database from Substack before all of that happens so that you can get ownership of the database.
00:35:47.080Totally, totally. I mean, if anyone has a Substack out there, I download my emails all the time because, you know, I also think Instagram could disappear tomorrow.
00:35:55.680We don't know what's going to happen with any of these platforms.
00:35:57.500again they're not free right they're not free they're making money right off of you um so
00:36:04.320but talk about the influencer question because i want i want to make sure please do don't i don't
00:36:09.940feel like i've put a whole button on that i think you know the way that you can protect yourself is
00:36:16.500to be again more purposeful in terms of who it is that you follow because if it's okay if somebody
00:36:23.480ends up being like a cult leader for you but there's somebody they are somebody that you know
00:36:29.300maybe tell is a really good storyteller and maybe they don't actually ever sell you anything or
00:36:35.600maybe you know you try one thing from them that they that they sell and you do like it and maybe
00:36:41.740you do begin to trust them it's when you start following multiple people you don't have enough
00:36:47.740time you don't have enough time to follow that many people and that many people aren't going to
00:36:53.440be really useful to you so so it's it's about calling the list of people that you follow
00:37:00.120understanding who who it is who is trying to sell you something try and see you know a walk in
00:37:07.660assuming that the person is being paid don't assume that they're not assume that they are
00:37:12.420and assuming that they are would you still buy this product from this person
00:37:17.200or like those questions i do i do right like even if even if you knew they were being paid
00:37:25.320would you still get it right great and the and um i'm also in the documentary by now
00:37:32.760the shopping conspiracy on netflix which yeah no that one's great that one's really great yeah
00:37:37.440thanks and so you know people have been contacting me a lot because of that documentary and they're
00:37:43.800all like, you know, what should we do? What should we do? I, I would never say to someone, stop
00:37:49.100shopping because if you need something, you need something. The issue is you don't need to over
00:37:56.440consume. What I really hate about the influencer space is the shopping halls. Those are, those are
00:38:05.160shopping haul is it how do i know yeah that's when um influencers get a bag of all kinds of
00:38:14.100merchandise a haul h-a-u-l i thought you meant like a haul like no no agent you out shopping oh0.99
00:38:20.800yeah those are so dumb uh they're they're ridiculous and it's you it's always a fast0.97
00:38:26.600fashion company and so it has created this idea in people's mind that oh the shirt was only three1.00
00:38:33.660dollars i'll wear it once and throw it away no no because this is the same group of people that
00:38:39.980will say to you i really care about the environment well either you care about the environment or you
00:38:44.760care about wearing a three dollar shirt and you need to make a decision about which kind of person
00:38:48.600you really are yeah no absolutely i mean i i'm working on doing a less by year this year um
00:38:58.380You know, we already do a lot of secondhand stuff because kid clothes is, I mean, so much of it is fast fashion.
00:39:06.100They grow so freaking fast and secondhand stores have great stuff for kids.
00:39:12.220But also I'm making myself pause before I buy things.
00:39:16.040And this is the one thing that really helps me.
00:39:18.080And I'm like, oh, I don't let myself click and buy.
00:39:21.040I like put it in a list and then I look at it like at the end of the week.0.98
00:39:24.520And I don't want 90% of the shit that I almost bought.0.99
00:39:27.360Right, right. Well, the way to think about it, too, is the way that marketers think about how they bring, get somebody to buy is what's known as the marketing funnel. And so at the top of the marketing funnel is awareness. The second step is consideration. The third step is conversion. And then the fourth step is loyalty, or what we now talk about as marketing evangelists.0.99
00:39:51.760because all marketers really want to do is get you to the marketing evangelist point because they
00:39:58.480want you to buy but then they want you to go online and talk about it to all of your friends
00:40:03.640because it becomes the most inexpensive way for them to advertise and you are a better salesperson
00:40:11.200for them than they are themselves and what has happened in the online space is that that funnel
00:40:18.940has collapsed so in the olden days you know you might see an ad for I don't know a shirt and think
00:40:28.120oh yeah I might like that but then you would have to like get in your car or walk downtown or get
00:40:34.460to the mall and then you'd get to the store and then you'd look at the shirt and then you'd say
00:40:39.560you know what I'm not sure I want to spend fifty dollars on that shirt I don't know if I like this
00:40:45.040sure exactly exactly because there was a pause there was a pause in between all of these actions
00:40:49.940and now there's it's just so instantaneous and that's what i mean the the funnel has collapsed
00:40:57.360so whenever you can think in terms of exactly what you were saying taking a breath find a way to
00:41:04.000expand that funnel back up so that you do have time to make that consideration space longer
00:41:10.980like you know do i do i really need a 280 pair i almost did this the other day i i stared at
00:41:18.780these boots for three days and they're gorgeous they were gorgeous and then i just went
00:41:25.020mary and you don't need those you just don't need that they're gorgeous and they will look
00:41:32.220good on somebody but they ain't gonna look good on you no no exactly exactly it's that pause it's
00:41:39.100that pause it's that i mean i hesitate to even call it mindfulness because every time you say
00:41:42.720mindfulness someone's like i can't meditate um and that's not what it's about it's just like
00:41:47.520it's just stepping away from your screen for a little bit because what it what it's also saying
00:41:54.640to us is you know how are we finding you know not to sound meditative stuff too but how are we
00:42:01.700finding joy in our lives. And some of this, I also sort of peg back to COVID in that we had
00:42:11.320this period of time where we got out of practice of calling people up and spending time and inviting
00:42:17.580people over. And people are thinking you have to do expensive things in order to be able to get
00:42:23.860together with your friends and all of that. You don't. Invite them over, have a potluck, do what
00:42:29.040they did in the 50s, right? And it doesn't cost that much money. And then you get together with
00:42:33.260people and then you find that dopamine hit by spending time with your friends and not by going
00:42:41.440online and scrolling and buying a new pair of boots. Totes. I totally agree. Mara, tell everyone
00:42:48.080where they can find you and where they can find your book. Oh, you can find me at drmarainstein.com.
00:42:55.180That's D-R-M-A-R-A-E-I-N-S-T-E-I-N, like Albert, dot com.
00:43:02.040I'm also on TikTok under the same name.
00:43:04.240You can find me on all socials as Dr. Mara Einstein.
00:43:07.840And my book is called Hoodwinked, How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cult.
00:43:13.020And it's available wherever you buy books.