Episode 2 The Men Who Made Us Spend

We live in a world where spending never stops.

WOMAN ON PA SYSTEM: Ladies and gentlemen,

can you please stop panicking?!

But why do we buy what we buy

and how is our desire to spend manipulated?

Every other company on Earth is trying to get you to spend money

and they're putting all their effort

into getting you to spend your money on stuff all the time.

I'm Jacques Peretti,

and in this series I'm going to investigate

the men who made us spend,

and the one emotion they've relied on for decades to do it...

CRASH

..fear.

They've found ever more subtle ways

to manipulate our fears and reactions.

Poor Marge. She'll never hold a man

until she does something about her breath.

WOMAN SNEEZES

They've exploited our anxieties

to sell everything

from cars to soap...

You're not as clean as you think.

..to the secret of eternal youth.

And the good news is you don't have to take anything off.

OK. Even better!

I'll be investigating how they've used every tactic

from paranoia to reassurance

to unlock our primal instincts.

People tell me, "Wow, I want this car."

"Why?" "I don't know."

That's good marketing.

And I'll discover how it led

to millions of us taking medication we may not even need.

It is by far the most successful drug product ever launched

in the world.

OWL HOOTS

On this West London back street,

I've got an appointment with a man who's after more than my money.

He's out for blood.

Hi, Jacques. How are you doing?

Not bad, a little nervous.

-No reason.

-OK.

'Dr Daniel Sister is about to perform

'his trademarked Dracula Therapy on me.'

OK, please...

lay down here and relax.

-And relax?

-Yes.

-OK.

'The treatment begins by drawing a vial of my blood.'

It wasn't too painful?

Doesn't feel too bad at the moment.

'For a mere £550,

'he's going to extract the clear plasma in my blood

'and inject it back... into my face.'

-OK, ready?

-Yep.

'Growth factors in the serum are supposed to make my skin

'look and feel younger.'

So, how bad is it?

Well, that wasn't bad at all. That was just a...

..needle...in my face.

-Yeah.

-But it didn't feel...

-It didn't feel any different from an ordinary injection.

-No.

What do you think the motivation is for people coming to see you?

People want to stay as young as possible

for as long as possible.

Also there is maybe some kind of anxiety to...

well, to be still young enough to have a second life, a second chance.

So if people have fears, you're providing the solution.

I relieve the fear,

I relieve the anxiety

and I open the door for their new life.

A better life, hopefully.

'This kind of plasma therapy has also been used

'for a variety of medical conditions and sports injuries.'

Do I look younger?

Not yet.

-HE LAUGHS

-Not yet?!

It takes about two to three weeks,

and then you'll have the result.

HE LAUGHS

'Although its cosmetic benefits are yet to be clinically proven,

'Dr Sister's success at selling it owes a lot to a tactic

'that is endemic in modern consumer culture.'

The surprising thing about that was that I'm not even worried

about looking old and ageing until I went and had that treatment.

And now I'm starting to think I should be fearful of this.

What he's done really cleverly is he's tapped into that fear

and has provided me with a solution.

Most of us like to think of ourselves

as sophisticated, savvy consumers,

alert to any attempts to manipulate our emotions

in order to make us spend.

And yet adverts like these continue to try.

Finding some blood when you brush again?

That could be gum disease, you know.

And it's not going to get any better if you ignore it.

It's pretty clear what buttons they're trying to press here

to get us to dip into our wallets.

-It was a beautiful day in the park...

-Kevin, can you hand me...?

..that turned to panic in an instant.

Kevin?

-And everything depended on a BrickHouse Child Locator.

-Kevin?

Kevin?!

Although it seems too crude to convince us,

somehow it does, and I want to find out how.

'So I've come to get my head examined.

'The electrodes in this "neural net" measure brain activity.'

How do I look, Carol?

You look awesome. Yeah.

'Psychologist and expert in consumer behaviour Gorkan Ahmetoglu

'is going to use this to help explain what happens

'inside our brains when we watch adverts with a strong fear message,

'like this 2008 commercial for Volkswagen.'

-Have you tried not saying "like" every other word?

-What?

Remember your ski trip story?

-Yeah.

-"I was, like, going down the hill..."

Next door, they're monitoring the electrical impulses

from different parts of my brain.

The area that engages when I watch the advert

is the part of the brain scientists know responds to fear.

Holy...

People in general will be much more motivated by the fear

of losing something than the prospect of gaining something,

This is precisely the aim of the advert.

It is to trigger that particular emotion of anxiety,

so consumers will feel vulnerable,

they will feel that there are high consequences

of not taking an action.

'Just because my brain responds to fear,

'that doesn't guarantee I'll go out and buy what they're selling.

'The marketers need to know how to frame these appeals

'to our subconscious.

'And I'm off to meet the man who tells them.'

I'm deep in the French countryside looking for the home

of an esteemed anthropologist and psychologist called Dr Rapaille.

Clotaire Rapaille has spent over 30 years

advising companies as diverse as Kellogg's, General Motors

and tobacco giant Philip Morris.

'It looks like the setting for a Hammer horror film

'but the man who lives here has turned fear

'into a different kind of business.

'And it's a lucrative one.

'This chateau is one of six properties

'he owns around the world.'

-Hello. How are you?

-Dr Rapaille.

-Come in, please.

-Thank you for your time.

-My pleasure. Come in.

-Thank you.

-It's a nice little place that you've got here!

-Yeah.

THEY LAUGH

I like it very much.

'Dr Rapaille believes that our primal desires

'always dictate our conscious choices.

'Clients get him to expose

'these subconscious emotional responses to a product.'

People will say, "Wow, I want it."

And I say, "Why?"

"I don't know."

So if you can break the subconscious code,

that gives you direct access to the line

that gets you to sell things to people?

Yes. And that's success.

When you do that, you're very successful.

'For over 20 years, a host of car manufacturers

'have benefited from that success

'and Dr Rapaille's understanding of fear.'

-REPORTER:

-The Hummer is taking post-war America by storm,

from Manhattan to California.

Dr Clotaire Rapaille is the car psychologist

who advises General Motors.

It's a weapon.

So the message is, "Don't mess with me.

"If you want to bump into me,

"I'm going to crush you and I'm going to kill you."

'According to Dr Rapaille, the car that I came in, an SUV,

'owes its very design to fear.

'His advice to car makers focused on exploiting

'our most powerful primal instinct - survival.'

A car is a message.

When I see the car, in the rear-view mirror,

uh, I want to feel, "Oh, OK, this one is big, this one is powerful.

"Let's let them go."

-So it's an important protective barrier?

-That's right.

It gives me superiority in a very dangerous world.

-So perception and fear of danger...

-Yeah.

..is the absolute animating principle

when it comes to us making purchases?

Right. If you don't provide a car that responds to this fear,

you're not going to sell it. This is it, you see?

So then you go out of business.

THEY LAUGH

Rapaille's techniques proved even more potent

after the shock of the 9/11 attacks.

By the early 2000s, SUVs accounted for over 20%

of all American car sales.

SUVs are the fastest-growing segment of the car market.

And they're the mother lode of profitability.

Millions of car-buyers were reassured by the security

SUVs offered.

But they were being led by base emotion rather than reason,

because the SUVs' very design made them LESS safe, not more.

SUVs are twice as likely to roll over as regular vehicles.

About 60% of SUV accident deaths involve roll-overs.

Cars are the perfect product for seeming to shield us from danger,

tapping into our survival instinct to sell us protection.

But this notion of soothing our fears

has almost endless potential for getting us to spend.

It's an idea explored here in the highly-stylised world of Mad Men.

At fictional 1960s ad agency Sterling Cooper,

lead creative Don Draper tells his clients

how to turn fear to their advantage.

Advertising is based on one thing.

Happiness.

And you know what happiness is?

Happiness...is freedom from fear.

It's a billboard on the side of the road

that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing...

..it's OK.

You are OK.

Don Draper owed a debt to the real "mad men",

advertising professionals who had honed this very philosophy.

But the Hollywood version was only half the story.

Jonah Sachs is an expert

on the history of storytelling and marketing -

and of a system the ad men have been following for decades

to get us to spend.

And it was just a very simple idea

that could be taught and learned

by anyone who's creating the copy for an ad, uh,

that you create anxiety in an audience,

tell them something that they didn't know but is not good,

and then you introduce a magic solution.

-CHILD:

-What is glossophobia?

-COMPUTER:

-Glossophobia, or speech anxiety,

is the fear of public speaking.

SACHS: 'We all know that storytelling engages us.'

'We lean in and want to hear the story, and like any good story,

'it's got a damsel in distress,

'it's got a villain and it's got a hero.'

-CHURCHILL:

-'The task which has been set us is not above our strength...'

The damsel in distress is the consumer,

the one who needs to consume the magic solution to defeat the villain.

'The villain is any number of frightening things

'happening out in the world.

'And the hero is the one proffering the magic pill,'

the thing that can save your life and takes that damsel in distress

and whisks them away from the fear and the danger.

-CHURCHILL:

-'Never give in. Never. Never. Never.'

APPLAUSE

So the moral of the story is that without your favourite product,

you're in danger.

It's a sales technique the root of which goes back nearly 100 years

to this man, Stanley Resor,

one of the pioneers of modern advertising.

In 1916, Resor took over ad agency J Walter Thompson

and set out to professionalise the industry.

His rigorous training programmes

taught a new wave of college-educated ad men

how psychology and human motivation were fundamental to their work.

What Resor said was that human beings

were this writhing mass of, um, individuals

who, kind of, come together in this sort of, um,

jostling push for food and for safety,

and that the only thing they really would respond to was fear.

The first product to benefit from these insights

was an obscure antiseptic...

called Listerine.

In need of new customers,

its owner called in two of advertising's new professionals.

And they find out it has an interesting property.

They say, "Your product is actually great for curing halitosis."

They leave that hanging in the air,

because no-one really knows at the time what halitosis is.

So, of course, the client asks, "What's halitosis?"

"Halitosis is bad breath and it's an epidemic in society," they tell him.

"We're going to let people know that

"this silent social killer is there but it never announces itself,

"and if you have it, you can't get where you want to go in life

"and you're going to be a social outcast."

Jane has a pretty face.

Men notice her lovely figure

but never linger long.

Because Jane has one big minus on her report card -

halitosis.

Bad breath.

So they invent what they call a whisper copy,

or advertising by fear, and they create this campaign,

a very story-based campaign about this woman.

And she'll never be married. Why?

Because she has halitosis.

But there is a magic solution to it - Listerine.

'No-one really knew that bad breath was a problem,

'until the ad created that anxiety.'

SHE GARGLES

It was the basis for a campaign that would run for decades.

The trouble is, you could have halitosis and never know it,

and even your best friend won't tell you.

Why take chances when there's such a pleasant, extra-careful precaution?

Listerine...

Listerine's "whisper copy" created a market for mouthwash from nothing.

# He said that she said that he had halitosis... #

In seven years, the company's revenues rose from 115,000

to more than 8 million.

Listerine's success in making people desire a "cure"

would be picked up by a vast industry

that had been built on the treatment of genuine medical conditions.

Henry Gadsden, the head of one of the world's

biggest pharmaceutical companies,

bemoaned the fact that they could only sell to the sick.

In an interview with Fortune magazine,

Gadsden shared a vision of the future where drugs companies

were more like chewing gum manufacturer Wrigley -

selling to everyone.

To do that, they would need to scare more of us into believing

we were chronically ill

and in need of the relief their drugs could provide.

It was a British firm that led the way.

In 1984, executives from British drugs company Glaxo

came to Manhattan to ask the marketing men to do for them

what they'd done for Listerine and find them a disease.

Glaxo were launching a powerful new heartburn medication.

But they had a problem.

Zantac was a prescription-only drug,

and most people bought heartburn remedies over the counter

from their local pharmacy.

They would have to be persuaded to visit the doctor instead.

'I've come to meet one of the branding experts

'who came up with the solution.

'Vince Parry, then working at Saatchi & Saatchi,

'told me how he helped to transform the way drugs are marketed.'

You want people, instead of going into the drugstore

and buying Tums or Rolaids, you want them to go to a doctor's office

and get a prescription for a chronic medication.

That's a vastly different behavioural change you're asking for.

We have to put a name around that

and we have to put a serious rationale around it

to justify the complexity of that transaction.

In other words, we're going to go out there

and make a big deal about this therapy

but no-one yet knows they need it.

-REPORTER:

-Most doctors agree it's normal

to suffer occasional heartburn

but when it doesn't go away, the diagnosis might be GERD.

What was essentially heartburn

became the far more fear-inducing Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease -

a name soon being heard everywhere.

When it happens at least twice a week,

you may have GERD or Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease.

People are afraid of being diminished,

of being less than normal, of being substandard.

When they hear that there's a name for that condition,

they can go talk to a doctor and maybe get a medication for it,

that is... That takes away the terror of not being normal.

Today, clinicians worldwide use the term "GERD"

to explain patients' symptoms of heartburn or acid reflux.

By the time its patent expired,

over 240 million people worldwide had Zantac prescriptions.

This one drug made Glaxo 3.5 billion every year.

Zantac's success helped change the very idea

of what constitutes medicine.

Soon, drug companies were offering cures for all manner

of obscure physical conditions and strange psychological syndromes.

Don't you think the drugs industry, given its immense power,

has a duty to step back from these syndromes

rather than to be giving us more medication for more syndromes?

You can't underestimate demand from consumers.

People want relief

and they want quick relief so badly

that it's almost difficult not to provide it for them.

Heartburn can't kill you but heart disease certainly can,

and in the late '90s, a new class of drug came on stream

that would give its makers the chance to sell us

the biggest wonder cure to date.

They were called statins.

Now, new machines like this make it far easier to find people

with very high cholesterol levels.

And, once they're found, there is a new drug that is from America,

and only available there, which could revolutionise their treatment.

Statins could be used for the treatment of heart disease

by reducing one of the risk factors that contribute to it -

high cholesterol.

Now, this drug could help those people by reducing

the liver's ability to make cholesterol.

In 2014, 8 million people in Britain alone take a statin every day.

Only around a third of them have suffered from the condition

that statins were invented to target - heart disease.

But we can't get enough of them

because cholesterol has become a national obsession.

You'll just feel a sharp scratch on the finger.

At specialised cardiac screening events like this, and at the GP,

more of us now get checked for high cholesterol than ever before.

Is cholesterol something that people worry about?

Yes, I think it is a concern for people.

And what we do actually see at the screenings each day

is that we are able to identify people that have

maybe a higher level of cholesterol.

I think I had my cholesterol level done in, sort of, October.

Well, there's quite a lot of heart disease in my family.

Do you feel well in yourself? You look like a healthy chap.

Yes, I feel well in myself, but never mind feeling well,

you don't know what's wrong inside.

I'd rather find out now and I can go home

and do something about it, than not find out.

'High cholesterol is actually just one of many factors

'that can lead to heart disease or stroke,

'but today many of us act like it's the only one that counts.

'And a typical doctor's recommendation

'to treat it with statins seems pretty sensible.

'But is it?

'Dr Kailash Chand is Deputy Chair of the British Medical Association

'and a GP with over 30 years' experience.

'His opinion as a GP is that millions of people

'have been led to feel anxious about cholesterol,

'and statins are being unnecessarily overprescribed.'

That fear kind of mentality when it comes in,

the easiest possible solution is

go and ask Doctor that measure my cholesterol.

If my cholesterol is high, I need something doing about it.

So it's the fear, the fear of high cholesterol and what that might do

which is actually propelling people to take the drug

rather than the actuality of them being seriously at risk?

Yeah, absolutely. Putting them on statin tablets

I think, in my view, is negligence.

'Dr Chand's view may be controversial,

'but one thing's certain -

'we're obsessed with statins and cholesterol.

'Where did that come from?

'To find out, I'm going to meet the man who launched

'the bestselling drug of all time.'

'In 1999 Bob Ehrlich was in charge of the consumer marketing campaign

'for a powerful new statin called Lipitor.

'With other statins already on the market

'he needed a way to help his product stand out from the crowd.

'But the results of clinical trials that he could use to market Lipitor

'were still years away.'

It's an interesting problem we had,

which was we couldn't say, "Lipitor prevents heart attacks",

so we decided to focus on what we could focus on,

which was, "We're the best at lowering cholesterol".

And we went out and advertised that.

What was different about the Lipitor campaign

from other campaigns that were being run by other companies?

Well, the thinking was, cholesterol is one of the things that

consumers can understand, react to, try to lower.

The more consumers know about a condition,

the more educated they are, the more they're likely to take action.

They caught the public's imagination

with an easy-to-understand campaign

that targeted their new selling point, cholesterol.

Consumers remember basically one thing, and one thing only.

You can't tell them a lot. They're not...

One, they're not that interested. So you've got to hit them with

what's the most important thing that they'll remember.

It was a simple message the company would stick to for years.

Know Your Number.

And it was about to reach a vastly wider audience.

The government came out today with new and aggressive guidelines

for treating millions of Americans at risk for heart disease.

-REPORTER:

-Exercise, weight loss...

Eligibility for statin treatment in America at the time

was determined by a committee of the National Institute of Health.

This committee now lowered the threshold at which

cholesterol was considered too high.

To do that, exercise and diet can help...

If there was a motto for the new guidelines just published today

it might be something like, "How low can you go?"

Overnight, the number of people apparently "at risk"

from high cholesterol rose from 13 million to 36 million.

The result for the drugs industry was clear, wasn't it?

It was ker-ching.

Well, if the numbers trebled,

I think that was a decision that the health-care experts made -

the more people that take statins, the better off society will be.

Lipitor's manufacturer, Pfizer, had financial ties

to six of the seven committee members

who made the decision to lower the cholesterol threshold.

In Europe, including Britain,

cholesterol guidelines were also soon being lowered.

But the drugs companies needed a different tactic to reach consumers.

Here, direct advertising of drugs is banned,

so they worked with patient groups and charities

to get their message out.

BROADCAST IN FRENCH

Broadcast in France and Canada,

this hard-hitting public awareness film

tells in reverse the tale of what could happen

if we don't get checked.

It was sponsored by the Lipid Nurse Network

and Canadian Diabetes Association,

but it was paid for by Pfizer.

More than 1 in 500 of the population

has a specific genetic defect

which doubles the cholesterol levels in the blood.

In Britain, cholesterol charity Heart UK

offered the public advice about high cholesterol

with a highly emotive campaign.

I'm one of those 500

and I didn't realise until it was almost too late.

Among their various commercial partners was Pfizer.

Heart UK is passionate about preventing premature deaths

caused by high cholesterol,

and also campaign to improve the detection and treatment

of high-cholesterol conditions.

GPs faced more and more patients anxious about their cholesterol.

And in 2004, the government gave them

a further incentive to prescribe statins.

-NEWS BROADCAST:

-'Family doctors have voted to accept a new NHS contract.'

At its heart was a new set of performance indicators

that would tie surgery budgets to results.

-REPORTER:

-For doctors, a promise of better pay and hours.

But, of course, they have to give something in return.

They'll have to meet quality targets.

GPs were now required to screen for and treat cholesterol.

But some in the medical establishment

believe that we are too eager to prescribe statins.

So it wasn't just the public who bought into this idea

that cholesterol was this scary thing.

Government, GPs, the medical establishment,

everyone bought into this idea?

Yes. The GP had to do it.

The GP had no choice but to bring the cholesterol down.

So how do you bring the cholesterol down?

Rather than at that stage, in my view,

going for lifestyle changes, going for exercise,

easiest way found was put them on statins.

What we have done is then we over-diagnose and over-treat.

Pfizer told us, "Statins have significantly benefited patients

"and public health by helping to treat cardiovascular disease.

"And it is a widely-held,

"established view within the medical community that treating patients

"to target cholesterol levels

"reduces the risk of cardiovascular events.

"When working with patient organisations,

"we always ensure that they are not dependent on any funding

"we provide and their independence is not compromised."

Pfizer also told us that our assumptions misrepresent

the responsible approaches to marketing

taken by the pharmaceutical industry.

In England alone, the NHS now spends

over a quarter of a billion pounds every year on statins.

They are the most prescribed drugs in the country.

Henry Gadsden had a vision of "selling to everyone"

and, thanks to the fear of high cholesterol,

that vision was closer than ever before.

But there was still a limit to the number of people

they could sell their cures to -

until they realised that no-one is immune from risk.

The alluring prospect of a limitless market beckoned

for industries that could capitalise on the mere RISK of getting ill.

All they had to do was play on our desire to stay well

and our fear of the alternative.

A whole new anxiety was about to pressed into service -

hygiene.

Stale smells up here often come from down there

in your carpet. Smells from your dog...

30 years ago, we had a pretty relaxed approach

to keeping ourselves, and our homes, clean.

# Do the Shake n' Vac

# And put the freshness back

# Do the Shake n' Vac And put the freshness back... #

The notion that we are constantly at risk of contamination

or infection barely troubled us.

# Do the Shake n' Vac

# And put the freshness back. #

Shake n' Vac. In three fragrances.

We could do as we pleased.

Spread a little fear.

Vomiting, diarrhoea...

Caused a bit of a stink! Ha-ha-ha!

Today, we're bombarded with messages

that germs are an unqualified evil

to be purged at all costs.

The temptation is to move from traditional cleaners like these

to new antibacterial products like these.

A new word has entered the lexicon - antibacterial -

and with it, thousands of germ-killing products

from hand gel and kitchenware to mouse mats and even children's toys.

-# She's fresh

-Fresh

# Exciting... #

I'm heading to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

to find out whether these products

really are better at keeping us clean.

Director of the School's Hygiene Centre Dr Val Curtis

has offered to show me what happens to the germs on my skin.

OK, so, Jack, can you put your hand under the UV light

and let's see what you can see?

-OK. Can you see it glowing?

-Yeah.

-There's a green glow on your hands.

-Turn your hands over.

-And this is just touching doors and so on,

but it's actually right across my hand.

I mean, I keep my hands clean, I would have thought,

but they don't look that clean.

-No.

-So...

-They look pretty dirty to me.

What I want to do now is wash both your hands,

one of them in the latest generation of antibacterial soaps -

this one claims to kill ten times more than any other.

And this is just plain white soap.

-Would you like to put them under my lamp?

-Certainly.

See what we can see?

-I would say it's pretty much the same.

-It's pretty much the same.

So that's exactly how these two soaps work.

They both wash germs off your hands.

So the plain soap actually has got rid of the bacteria?

-It's got rid of 99% of the bacteria, I would say.

-Yeah.

That's soap that isn't marketed as antibacterial, it's just soap.

It's plain soap.

From the day you were married,

you and your family have been working for life's...

Our conversion from plain soap to antibacterials

began in the unlikely setting of a luxury soap brand.

Simon. Tahiti.

With Imperial Leather, Cussons had a market-leading brand.

But, like most soaps, it was firmly rooted to the bathroom.

The pure English soap.

Cussons Imperial Leather.

So in 1994, they launched a product

that we would need all over the house.

It's not easy keeping your hands clean and fresh.

Every day, they pick up all kinds of hidden germs.

The tone may have been light,

but the message was deadly serious -

germs were everywhere

and we needed Carex antibacterial soap to combat them.

-So after every little job...

-BABY BREAKS WIND

..always handle with Carex.

It's a message that would make Carex

the market leader for the next 20 years.

'Cussons' former head of product development Barry Shafe

'was one of the men behind the launch

'of the UK's first domestic antibacterial.'

Carex has been hugely successful

but doesn't just soap and water do the job?

To a very large extent, yes.

Simply washing our hands does most of the job,

but by bringing attention to it,

we're encouraging more people to wash their hands more of the time.

Yes, on the one hand,

that's obviously very, very good for business.

If you can bring an antibacterial benefit into that, as well,

then you're doing an even better job.

Weren't you, though, in the business of actually trying

to create a kind of climate of fear around the idea of hygiene?

No. Quite simply, because we all know -

it's just common sense prevails -

that people know that a kitchen is never perfectly clean

and that you have to keep on top of it.

Here, look at this!

Yet Cussons and its competitors

did exploit our paranoia to push an ever-growing range

of antibacterial soaps, hand gels and other products.

New Carex Protect Plus...

It didn't matter that plain soap was just as effective.

Germ panic was now firmly planted in the consumer's mind...

..which meant that these companies were well placed

to take advantage of the occasional health scare or pandemic.

-NEWS BROADCAST:

-Swine flu cannot now be contained.

That's the warning from the World Health Organisation

as it heightens its alert...

'All of the publicity that those concerns get evokes the need'

in the minds of all of us to stay clean and healthy,

and that is the only thing that needs to be in the consumer's mind

to make them see Carex as a good idea.

Cussons responded to the swine flu outbreak

with this powerful national press campaign...

and their sales rose by over 200%.

So why are antibacterials so successful

if, as Val Curtis showed me,

we don't really need these products?

'She puts it down to a familiar trick -

'their ability to target our primal instincts.'

It's not about science or rationality,

though we're given the science argument

as a reason to believe it.

Humans come equipped with an emotion of disgust.

Right back in our earliest history,

you see this need for purification,

for getting rid of substances

that are yucky and nasty and might make us ill.

So there are certain products that we used in rituals for purification,

things like vinegar, things like lemon,

and you find that those things are actually put into products nowadays,

because, in our ancient brain, those are things that cue purity.

That primal fear of getting ill

soon piqued the interest of the food industry.

They showered us with hundreds of new products

and sold us the idea that an ordinary balanced diet

was no longer enough.

To stay well and stave off disease,

we needed food and drink that would give us added protection.

In Europe, tighter regulations

have now placed stronger limits on the health claims

food and drink companies can make.

In 2009, this campaign,

confidently extolling the virtues of a brand of pomegranate juice,

was ordered to be withdrawn.

But some companies had already developed

more sophisticated ways

to touch our nerves about health -

sophisticated enough to sell us the most basic commodity of all -

water.

RAP MUSIC

50 Cent was the man to bring a new health product to the masses.

The rapper had spotted an opportunity.

I was in a supermarket and I saw a gallon of water for 2.89

and I walked further down the aisle

and I saw another gallon of spring water for 59 cents.

Chris Lighty was working closely together, he was managing me,

and I said, "I want to sell water."

And he was like, "What?"

THEY CHUCKLE

I said, "I want to sell water." He was like, "To who?"

I said, "Everybody! Everybody needs water."

It might have been an easier concept for him

if I'd said I wanted to sell liquor.

50 Cent and his manager homed in

on a colourful new brand called Vitaminwater.

'They hatched a plan designed to impress

'and went to see the company's then marketing chief, Rohan Oza.'

'He now lives in the hills above Los Angeles.'

He...set up a meeting with three of us

and Fif walked in with a Vitaminwater.

My assumption was Fif was genuinely drinking the product.

He was very conscious, cos he's very in shape, very fit

and he drank the product.

So once we realised that was the case...

He's a very smart businessman, as well.

He says, "I want to become a partner in the company."

And so we structured a deal where 50 became an owner in the company

and helped build it with us.

What a beautiful marriage.

It was great, yeah. He did pretty well out of it.

I can't say how much. It's an agreement we have.

I don't tell anybody how much he made and he doesn't shoot me. I think it's pretty fair!

MUSIC: "Symphony No 9" by Beethoven

50 Cent took a reported 10% stake in the company

and set about promoting

Vitaminwater's revitalising properties

with this expansive, big-budget ad.

Sounds like he's integrated his hit, In Da Club.

Extraordinary.

50 CENT: Vitaminwater. Try it!

This is a product that appears to put health front and centre.

It's not just that it's water enhanced with vitamins,

it's the range of carefully-named flavours -

from Revive to Defence.

And it's bottled in this clinical packaging

that seems designed to affirm the drink's unique selling point -

it's a soft drink that actually does you good.

But in 2009, the Advertising Standards Authority

ruled that Vitaminwater couldn't be considered healthy

because its sugar content was nearly as much as a can of Coke.

Do you not feel any kind of guilt that really you were trying

to push a product with the word health attached that is not healthy?

People didn't think this product was going to let you, you know,

leap off tall buildings in a single bound,

or, or, you know, climb skyscrapers with your web.

People realised, "I'm getting vitamins, the product tastes great."

But don't you think by calling it healthy,

you're cynically kind of preying on people's anxieties about health?

Well, it depends how you classify it. It's all relative.

What Vitaminwater was providing and we were being very clear about

is it's a healthier approach.

If you drink plain water all day everyday

and take your vitamins, that's fine. But the bulk of people don't.

The top ten beverages in America indicate that.

Owners of the number-one beverage took note.

Coke is fighting back, recently buying a small beverage company

called Glaceau for 4.1 billion.

In 2007, Coca-Cola took over Vitaminwater's owners, Glaceau.

Glaceau doubled its sales last year

and is expected to surpass 1 billion in sales

in the next few years.

We've got an amazing opportunity

to really take Vitaminwater to the next level.

50 Cent celebrated his investment.

# I took quarter water Sold it in bottles for two bucks

# And Coca-Cola came and bought it for billions... #

And marketing chief, Rohan Oza, went to work for the new owners, Coke.

People do some crazy things to stay healthy,

like sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber.

Marketing for Vitaminwater now pushed even more explicitly

its health-enhancing properties.

I like to keep it real simple by drinking Vitaminwater XXX.

The vitamins and antioxidants help support a healthy body...

On their website, they went further still,

with suggestions that certain ingredients

could reduce the risk of colds, chronic diseases, even cancer.

Some people treat their body like a temple.

Coke's more explicit sales pitch

had caught the attention of

the Centre for Science in the Public Interest,

an organisation dedicated to protecting consumers

from deceptive labelling and marketing.

They decided to sue.

After drinking Vitaminwater Energy,

Lebron James found the energy to try ruling another court.

He's become the most dominant defence attorney

in the state of Ohio.

Coke had created a fictional court case

to inventively advertise their product's virtues.

Cos Nicky versus Oregon proves

that we are free from the tyranny of false accusation.

Now they found themselves defending a real lawsuit.

Dude's faking. I rest my case.

CHEERING

I asked the CSPI's lead counsel, Stephen Gardner,

why they turned to litigation in response to Coke's marketing.

Because we're all scared of dying.

Companies like Coke, but not alone,

have chosen to prey on those fears

and to make people believe

that this is part of the solution.

It isn't.

They were making purely illegal, completely unfounded claims

to prevent a variety of diseases.

They claimed that it would inhibit growth of tumours,

which is doubletalk for prevent cancer,

of the skin, lung, oral cavity,

oesophagus, stomach, liver,

prostate and other organs.

-Wow.

-Awesome, but not true.

They were absolute and total nonsense.

These claims were completely unsubstantiated.

And all they would do at best is give people false hopes.

At early legal arguments, Coke said that

no reasonable consumer

could have been misled by Vitaminwater's labelling.

Ahead of the expected trial, they insist the claims are

without merit and will be rejected

and that Vitaminwater is a great-tasting, hydrating beverage

with essential vitamins and water

and labels, showing ingredients and calorie content.

The specific health claims have been removed from their website.

And according to a spokesperson for Coca-Cola in the UK,

Vitaminwater has now been reformulated to be sweetened

with a combination of natural sweetener and sugar,

reducing it to 65 calories per bottle.

Is Vitaminwater the distillation of fear marketing

in a single bottle of seemingly-innocuous sugary water?

A product the customer will reach out to every day

and feel they are protecting themselves against illness?

If fear could be invoked to sell us flavoured water,

anything seemed possible.

The men who made us spend

questioned how they could use the ultimate anxiety

to sell us the ultimate cure, life itself.

# I'm 74 years young...#

As the baby-boomer generation approaches retirement age,

they're finding themselves targeted like never before.

I'm at the 50+ Show at the NEC in Birmingham.

And the reason these shows work so well

is because they tap into the priorities and concerns

of a huge section of the population.

There's a Gardening Question Time panel,

a Choosing Your First Cruise panel.

And the things that really matter are advice

on how to safeguard your finance and your health.

# I'm 74 years young... #

What are you all here for? Is there any reason you've come today?

When you're retired, your life doesn't stop then.

You find other things to do.

-Yeah. For sure.

-So this is why we're here, to see what we can do.

The organisers know their market.

The concerns of visitors here, and of many over-50s,

are increasingly about keeping their bodies and minds young and active.

In the last decade, a new wave of companies

looked to cash in on some of these insecurities.

Among the first was gaming giant, Nintendo,

with a product marketed

as helping to keep those senior moments at bay.

Oh, my gosh! How long has it been?

Honey, it's my old buddy, David. We went to high school together.

Honey, this is...er...

Has this ever happened to you?

Exercise your mind with Brain Age.

Train your brain in minutes a day.

By completing a few challenging exercises and puzzles,

you can help keep your mind sharp.

Nintendo's new Brain Age and Brain Train games

adapted the ideas of neuroscientist, Dr Ryuta Kawashima,

into a series of mini games.

Simple mental exercises

designed to stimulate the brain and keep it young.

David. Nice to meet you.

David Yarnton, then the head of Nintendo UK,

was the man who brought the game to Britain.

We spent a lot of time taking product out to be sampled by the over-50s.

We went to medical centres, so people in the waiting room.

We put product in there to sample.

We actually worked with Saga

and got their people to sort of sample it,

get some feedback from them to what people,

what their fears about, you know, growing old were.

And it was all about, I think, people didn't want to lose their youth.

So having fun was really important.

The brain, as they say, is a muscle.

So just as I will exercise my mighty muscles,

the brain has to be kept fit, as well.

They enlisted trusted national treasures

to highlight the game's big hook,

calculating the player's brain age

and showing how, with practise, it could improve.

You've got a little pencil that you can use.

It proved a winning formula,

with over a million copies sold in the UK in the year after its launch.

I thought I'd have a brain score of 25,

but there you are, the truth will out.

Over 10 million people worldwide

keep their minds active with Brain Training.

Brain Training became the best-selling game

in Nintendo's history.

Tell me about what Brain Age is. How does that work in operation?

It wasn't necessarily to say that it's going to make you younger,

but it was just a sort of measure,

to sort of see, you could judge yourself,

do lots of practice and maybe bring it down

as you got quicker and better.

So to try as a bit of mental gymnastics.

It is very much sort of nudging you towards the idea that

this thing will improve your memory and so on,

so that's a health benefit.

One of the things we never did, and we were very, very...important

that we made sure that we never made any health claims with the product.

Really, it came from people outside of the company.

Black.

David's company didn't really need to make any actual health claims.

Your brain is in its 60s?!

That's a bit harsh.

I thought I did quite...

Simply by telling me that my brain is in its 60s,

the game plays on the anxieties we all have

about mental decline as we get older.

So I'll keep going back to get my brain age down

and, I presume, my mind younger and more alert.

Whilst there's conflicting evidence

on whether brain training really does sharpen the mind,

Nintendo's success spawned

a multitude of products taking a similar approach,

like online training company, Lumosity,

and their appeal to people after a better brain.

Learn faster.

-Just not miss stuff.

-I did it to be quicker.

Just to stay sharp.

It's not surprising.

We live in an era when many of us will have to work for more years

and in a more competitive environment than ever before.

And the pressure to remain relevant in the workplace

is fuelling fears not just about our ageing minds, but our ageing bodies.

# You make me feel so young...#

There are thousands of products that promise to

smooth our wrinkles, but the lotions

and creams on our high street are just the tip of the iceberg.

# I'm such a happy individual. #

I've come to Las Vegas, a city that defies nature,

to learn about the success of an industry that wants to do the same.

This is the annual get-together of the global anti-ageing industry.

What's all this about?

It's i-Lipo, it's a pain-free laser treatment.

It's FDA cleared. So we're trying to show the before...and after.

Here, hundreds of businesses

are pitching some incredibly sophisticated products

to thousands of delegates.

And you've got socks here, what are the socks for?

The socks are actually a product that thermo-regulates the body

and allows blood vessels to expand or contract as needed.

-They modulate the body.

-Wow!

And this is just a glimpse of an industry

that today is worth over 250 billion.

We send focused electromagnetic fields

through special applicators into the patient's body

to find dysfunctional areas in the body.

Can I have a go?

Let's do it. Let's find a machine for you.

Yes, please.

-Your stomach is responding.

-Right. I'm hungry.

-No, that's not...

-That's not it, no.

-Your knee also.

-Yep.

-Did you used to play sports?

-Um...not really.

-OK. End.

-OK.

So, what's the diagnosis? What should I do?

-You're very healthy when I look at you.

-OK.

However, you're drained.

The choice here is bewildering.

There's exhibitors offering bespoke pharmaceuticals

and promoting everything from hormone therapy

to stem cell rejuvenation.

And they're trading on the biggest fear of them all, the fear of death.

What I've seen in there has given me

an idea of the vast scale of this industry.

There are people who have come from all over the world

to sell their anti-ageing products,

but the mindboggling thing is that they don't seem

to actually have to prove that any of it works.

What's all the more incredible

is that many of the customers are doctors

because this is a "medical conference."

You deserve a lot of credit for bringing to the public

a new paradigm of healthcare.

Yeah, that's all right, you can applaud.

APPLAUSE

In here, they're taking great care

to present anti-ageing as a credible medical speciality

that applies scientific innovation and medical technology

to the prevention, treatment and reversal of age-related diseases.

But there's one particularly controversial treatment

that has massively raised the public profile of their industry.

You're about to meet some folks

who think that they may have found the key to eternity.

The programme includes growth hormone,

which can make people feel younger and stronger.

Human growth hormone therapy

involves the injection of a naturally-occurring hormone

that triggers the growth of bones and body tissues.

68 years old, a long-time bodybuilder and fitness freak,

Dr Mentz and many of his patients inject themselves with hormones

considered by many to be downright dangerous.

His roster of patients includes movie stars

and the president of a foreign country,

some of whom pay as much as 1,000 a month for the treatment.

Is this a wonder drug? Well, we wondered ourselves.

I'm 74 and I worked out two hours last night and I've recovered.

And I can stay up till midnight.

It's over 20 years since human growth hormone

was first used as an anti-ageing treatment.

Back then, it was the catalyst for these two men

to create an entire discipline.

Ronald Klatz is chairman of the Academy for Anti-Ageing Medicine.

Bob Goldman is its president.

They make their money not from selling treatments,

but from spreading the word about anti-ageing.

Their company runs events like this around the world,

attracting lucrative sponsorship and thousands of paying exhibitors.

It's earned them close to 60 million.

Here, they're treated like the A-list celebrities who support them.

Bob and I have been good friends for a long time. For decades.

And I always have been a big admirer of Bob's work.

But I wanted to talk to them about making money out of an industry

whose credibility is questioned

by many in the medical establishment.

You have a fantastically successful business,

but what it's not based upon

is any kind of efficacy or clinical testing.

Oh, baloney!

That's not only a crazy comment, it's an uninformed comment.

Everything we do is science-based.

The people who claim that they're not

are the people who have little regard for integrity,

truth and academic honesty.

I mean, it's really a... It's a disgrace.

To claim that anti-ageing is unscientific

is to claim, er...that the world is flat.

America's National Institute of Health,

one of the world's top medical research centres,

cautions against many of the treatments

offered by the anti-ageing industry.

They warn of harmful side-effects

and insist there are no therapies proven to prevent ageing

or influence the ageing process,

including hormone therapy.

They're playing with words.

What they're saying is, "We've looked at this and we've determined

"that there is no 'anti-ageing' benefit."

But what is anti-ageing?

If you ask me what anti-ageing is, anti-ageing is anything that improves

the functionality of the human...species.

You might as well say that no-one has any credibility. This is a...

-No! All I'm saying is it's...

-..and you're saying it's not true.

You're right. And the Department of Defence and the UN

and, er...the, er... the President of the United States

told me that there were nuclear weapons in Iraq.

And how could we not believe that?

You're not quacks selling an impossible dream?

We're not selling...!

-..false hope to people?

-We don't sell anything!

We don't sell any commercial products.

So, you've created a 250 billion business,

but you haven't made any money out of it?

-That's not our...

-You haven't done very well, then, have you?

We would be happy with 5%, but no, we...

We'd be happy with 1%.

We're talking about the industry itself.

That's not our... That's not a benefit for us.

But didn't you sell 80% of your business for 60 million?

That is the commercial end of the exposition business.

We make money from the business of the conference business.

What would you say to people who say

that really you're pushing a fear and an anxiety

that people have about ageing, and you're kind of exploiting it?

We all age.

Yes, we're all ageing, but it's your choice how you age.

It's your choice whether you're old at 55 or 60

or 65 or 75 or 95 or 105.

That is your choice. That's what we're offering.

But isn't that an impossible... I mean, a ridiculous dream?

-Because it's...

-Of course it's not! We're not against ageing.

We're against the diseases of ageing.

People say, "Well, who wants to live to be 89?"

A guy who's 88.

Because when it comes your time, all of a sudden,

"Wait a second, I'm not ready to go."

# You're still a young man, baby... #

Bob and Ron have honed a seductive, even lucrative, sales pitch.

And like so many others before them,

they've done it by picking up on age-old anxieties.

However sophisticated today's consumers seem,

it's a technique that works on enough of us enough of the time

to make a lot of people very rich.

Over 100 years ago, the men who made us spend

first learned that purchasing to make us feel better about ourselves

is rooted not in aspiration, but in fear.

They ensure there will always be new anxieties

and new solutions to those anxieties

that we never even knew we needed.

Fear is at the very heart of why we buy.

Next time, how children were turned into consumers.

We train a generation of kids to think,

"There's got to be product, there's got to be toys!"

And adults turned into kids

with credit cards.

Marketers began to realise if they could get adults

to behave more like children,

they would become better buyers, better consumers.

What secret methods do shops use to make you buy?

Take a ride on the Open University's shopping carousel

and find out what influences you while you're shopping.

Go to...

..and follow the links to the Open University.