Wag the Dog

SPRINGBORO, OH --Why does a dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail were smarter, the tail would wag the dog.

These words were the opening screen shots written in the 1997 movie Wag the Dog, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert DeNiro. The movie depicted a fake war invented by a political spin doctor (DeNiro) and a Hollywood producer (Hoffman) before the election to divert the National attention away from a sex scandal of the incumbent President.

I watched the movie yesterday for the second time and really enjoyed it. Besides the great acting, the movie conveyed a subliminal message of how easily the general public can be swayed to think, believe and act a certain way.

This wag the dog theory could easily be applied to the art of advertising. Through the years, advertising agencies have made a living convincing us, the public, to buy a product. We might not really NEED the product but we parade to the store (with our tail wagging) to buy it.

In 2007, a TV show called Mad Men debuted, telling the story of a fictional ad agency in the 1960’s located on Madison Avenue in New York City (thus the title Mad Men). Who can forget the character Don Draper and his trials and tribulations navigating cutthroat competition to land national accounts?

Sometimes all it took was a slick ad line and lots of media repetition to bring in big bucks for the client. Yes, it was a *dog eat dog” world in the 1960’s to get our tails wagging to buy a product. This form of mental manipulation continues today.

In 1973, I went to work for the Maytag Corporation in Newton, Iowa as a sales representative. My company used the Leo Burnett ad agency out of Chicago to build its brand image. Can anyone remember that catch phrase invented by Leo Burnett that put Maytag on the map to sell a ton of washers and dryers?

The message given to Leo Burnett was that the Maytag washer was engineered better than their competition and would give the consumer many more years of service. Given this message, the agency came up with this: “Maytag, the Dependability People. Built better to last longer with fewer repairs.”

Genius! That said it all in a nutshell. However, how would you convey this message on TV? To do this, Leo Burnett created the Lonely Maytag Repairman, played by a famous character actor named Jesse White. Every Maytag commercial concluded with the saying, “Maytag washers make me the loneliest man in town.”

Jesse White’s “Ole Lonely” character playing the Lonely MaytagmRepairman on TV made him more money than he ever made in Hollywood. I had the pleasure to work with him doing promotions for the product in Dayton. He even acted in a few Kenley Players productions in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

Today we, the public, are bombarded daily with so many advertising messages and slogans that it would make our head spin. One that sticks in my mind is an ad for a car company asking the question, “Doesn’t everyone want an SUV?”

Never mind the higher CO2 emissions, the exorbitant amount of steel used and the higher price tags. What we see is an affluent couple in the driveway of an expensive house getting a new SUV with a red bow on top, thus appealing to our desire for status and success. The result is over half of the vehicles on the road today are SUVs.

One other example of mind programming and tail wagging was the 6 foot rule during Covid. Who invented that one? I can still remember a few years ago at a local grocery store when I committed the deadly sin of standing 5.99 feet in front of a patron and she backed off. I am pretty sure that neither one of us caught anything short of cooties from that encounter.

During the next few months, we will be bombarded with many political ads depicting not only the merits of one candidate but the evils of the opponent. The lies and slanderous comments are already starting and the repetition of the same might influence you to regret for the next four years your impulsive decision to mark the wrong X. 

My advice ... do your research and fact checking beforehand. Be the Dog and not the Tail.

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