The Responsive Chord: The Responsive Chord: How media manipulate you: what you buy… who you vote for… and how you think.

By Tony Schwartz and John Carey

The essential guide to how media shape our lives. By the creator of the most talked about political ad in television history.
Tony Schwartz drew on his unparalleled experience in the communications industry to give us The Responsive Chord, an engaging read and one of the seminal books on media. Schwartz came to understand that most advertisers, politicians, and educators―in fact, most all of us―use a model of communication long outmoded by the coming of electronic media. A model which has made us blind to many of the inner workings of modern communication. In The Responsive Chord, he puts forth the resonance principle--that the meaning of an ad (or any other piece of communication) is not present in the ad itself but rather in how the ad relates to the vast array of knowledge and associations already held in the mind of the viewer―both factual and emotional. Thus, audience members do not merely digest a message; they are an essential force in creating it. Schwartz guides us through the many fascinating consequences. The implications for anyone looking to impart a message or influence decisions are enormous.

With so many people now getting their information through social media and "fake news" sites, it is crucial that we understand the strong forces by which these outlets act upon us and, yes, manipulate our ideas and actions. The Responsive Chord reveals these forces in a captivating and eye-opening read.

"I read The Responsive Chord as a freshman in college and it affected everything I've ever made since. Its message is practical and deep. I'd recommend it to anyone."
― Ira Glass, Creator & Host of NPR's This American Life

"Tony Schwartz was a genius in his understanding of the communications revolution of the 20th century. My interview with him was one of my favorites and one of the most important of my own long career in broadcast journalism."
― Bill Moyers, Journalist, Political Commentator and White House Press Secretary

"Tony Schwartz was not only an original theorist but a master persuader whose must-read book is brimming with indispensable insight about how humans construct meaning through media."
― Prof. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director, Annenberg Public Policy Center

"Here's the still-true story about how a media environment can shape our thoughts, our purchases and, yes, our votes. It's not just the content that influences us; if only it were that simple. No, it's the media themselves, the political economy driving them, and the atomizing impact of their targeted messaging. Maybe reading this book will prepare us to think more critically about the way social media is used on, and against us today."
― Douglas Rushkoff, author, Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, and Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus

"The Responsive Chord had a profound impact on me when I first read it as a teenager, and it sparked a lifelong interest in the impact of media and technology in education. Re-reading it today, Tony Schwartz's observations about education in a media-saturated environment are deeply prescient and more relevant than ever."
― Luyen Chou, Chief Product Officer, Pearson Education

"I keep talking to Tony, learning from Tony, practically every day. Radio and audio are Tony's World. We just live in it."
― Christopher Lydon, Radio Host of The Connection and Open Source, former New York Times Journalist

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mango
• Release date: Jan 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781633536081

Tony Schwartz

Tony Schwartz is the founder and president of The Energy Project, a consulting group that works with a number of Fortune 500 companies, including American Express, Credit Suisse, Ford, General Motors, Gillette, Master Card, and Sony.  He was a reporter for the New York Times, an associate editor at Newsweek, and a staff writer for New York Magazine and Esquire and a columnist for Fast Company.  He co-authored the #1 worldwide bestseller The Art of the Deal with Donald Trump, and after that wrote What Really Matters.  He co-authored the #1 New York Times bestseller The Power of Full Engagement with Jim Loehr.  

Book preview

The

Responsive

Chord

How media manipulate you:

what you buy…

who you vote for…

and how you think.

Tony Schwartz

Mango Publishing

Copyright © 1973 by Anthony Schwartz

Additional content copyright © 2017 by Anton Schwartz

Foreword copyright © 2017 by John Carey

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, file transfer, or other electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations included in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.

For permission requests, please contact the publisher at:

Mango Publishing Group

Mango Media Inc., 2850 Douglas Road, 3rd Floor, Coral Gables, FL 33134 USA

[e-mail]

For special orders, quantity sales, course adoptions and corporate sales, please email the publisher at [e-mail]. For trade and wholesale sales, please contact Ingram Publisher Services at [e-mail] or +1.800.509.4887.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schwartz, Tony, author. | Carey, John, forewordist.

Title: The responsive chord : how media manipulate you: what you buy, who you

vote for, and how you think / Tony Schwartz ; [foreword by John Carey].

Description: Second edition. | Miami, FL : Mango Media Inc, 2017. | Originally published: New York : Anchor Press, 1973. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016052627 | ISBN 9781633536050 (pbk.) |

ISBN 9781633536081 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Communication—Social aspects. | Advertising—Psychological aspects. | BISAC: SOC052000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies | POL065000 POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Process / Media & Internet.

Classification: LCC HM258 .S32 2017 | DDC 302.2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016052627

www.mango.bz

www.tonyschwartz.org

Cover design by Cheryl Lynn F. Hermann and Islam Farid

Interior design by Kevin Callahan

First edition 1973, Anchor Press/Doubleday. Paperback edition 1974, Anchor Books.

Second edition 2017, published by Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

To my parents,

my wife, Reenah,

and my children, Kayla and Anton.

Contents

Additional Online Materials

Foreword to the Second Edition

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The Resonance Principle in Communication

How to Strike a Responsive Chord

The New Communications Environment

Hard Sell, Soft Sell, Deep Sell

The Inside of the Outside

Education in the Global Village

Sounds in the City

Some Applications

Postscript

References

Index

About the Author

Additional Online Materials

For additional content, including audio and video of examples discussed in this book, visit:

www.tonyschwartz.org/extras

Foreword to the Second Edition

As a communication professor who teaches about new media and a researcher who has studied new media technologies for companies such as Google, Comcast NBCUniversal and the New York Times, why do I rely so heavily on a book written decades ago? It’s because The Responsive Chord describes with great clarity how media affect our lives and gives us practical guidelines that are just as relevant today as when the book was first published.

The Responsive Chord analyzes how and why our modern media environment works on us and in us. For example, why do some video bloggers who talk about things of little importance to anyone attract millions of followers? Tony Schwartz explains, "People are more likely to choose programming on the basis of some personal function it serves, rather than for specific content. In many instances, it does not matter what a program is about." (p. 51) As Sam Roberts of the New York Times writes, Mr. Schwartz presciently anticipated camcorders and also cellphones, iPods and other [modern] electronic devices. Insights from the book also help us understand current media phenomena such as viral media, social media, virtual reality, and mobile media.

Tony Schwartz’s work in advertising, audio documentaries, political communication, public service media and soundscapes of everyday life is voluminous and legendary. He worked on five presidential campaigns, dozens of senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns, and thousands of television and radio commercials for hundreds of major corporations as well as countless social causes, including public health, crime prevention, educational funding, civil rights, environmental conservation, police-community relations and nuclear disarmament. This output was complemented by more than a dozen commercial records, sound for Tony Award winning Broadway shows and Oscar-winning films, two books and hundreds of radio programs. The entirety of his collection of audio recordings and related works was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2007, shortly before his death. Transporting it there required three large trucks.

In order to understand the principles that underlie The Responsive Chord, it is helpful to know a few things about Tony Schwartz and his work. Early on, Schwartz was heavily influenced by posters and poster art. He worked as a graphic artist for the Navy during World War II, creating and studying posters that urged support of the war effort. After college, he worked for the famous French poster designer, Jean Carlu. Many of the TV commercials he discusses in the book have the characteristics of a poster: a strong visual image that evokes emotions to convey a simple message. Though the audio is often complex, in the end the commercial usually communicates only one thing, e.g., people who drink Coca-Cola have fun, or, when you flee a room that has caught fire, close the door.

Another of Tony’s qualities that helped define his work was his strong populist sensibility. As a Jewish child growing up in rural New York, he was frequently beaten up at school. He developed a great compassion for the underdog and, more generally, for ‘common folk.’ You can see evidence of this throughout his work. For instance, in his passionate work for social causes, frequently without pay; also in his rejection of slick productions in favor of lower-budget approaches that lacked pretense but hit hard; and in his custom of using ‘real’ sounds and real people. Though Tony Schwartz worked with some of the best announcers of the 20th century, such as Bob Landers and Bob Marcato, he did not like to use actors playing people. If, for example, a commercial called for a postman, he would find a real postman for the part. He reasoned that because announcers were only a product of the media—there were no ‘real’ announcers in everyday life—listeners would accept them for who they were. However, there were real postmen, teenagers, firemen, etc. in everyday life and, properly directed, they came across as more authentic than actors. This led to some interesting consequences. At one point, when a Coca-Cola commercial called for teenagers at a party, Tony decided to use the students of a class he taught at the Dalton School. The commercial that resulted, Coke Party, won several awards and ran nationally for many months. Because of the commercial’s success, the teens in the commercial earned the equivalent of a semester’s tuition at their very expensive school. Schwartz’s class was very popular after that.

Articles about Tony Schwartz often call out another of his personal traits: Tony’s agoraphobia, a fear of being far from home or in vast open spaces. While those accounts often exaggerate his condition—in reality, he left his house every day, owned a car and drove it around Manhattan, and once even took a cruise to the Caribbean—the phobia nonetheless helped shape his work. Since he did not like to travel far from his home, he relied heavily on media to stay in touch with others who were at a distance. He came to understand, at the most microscopic level, how we all rely on media to communicate and how he could use this understanding to communicate with anyone. Media education scholar John Culkin famously said, I don’t know who discovered water but I know it wasn’t a fish. We all live in a media space but few of us can see it. Tony Schwartz could see the media space we all live in and use it to powerful effect.

All intellectual work builds on the ideas of others and influences those who follow. The Responsive Chord was strongly influenced by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan and his landmark book, Understanding Media. Others who influenced the work include John Culkin and anthropologist Edmund Carpenter. In turn, The Responsive Chord inspired legions of marketers and creative directors in advertising, and generations who followed in political and public service communication. Tony Schwartz also shaped an army of undergraduate and graduate students who studied with him and eventually used the book as an anchor for their careers. I am one of them.

I studied with Tony Schwartz in the late 1960s at Fordham University, where he taught with John Culkin, Ted Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. At the end of a year of study, he offered me a job. I spent several memorable years working for him. That wealth of experience with Tony taught me a good deal about who he was and how he worked.

I first met Tony in his studio, a 10′×15′ room in the basement of a townhouse on 56th Street in Manhattan. Floor to ceiling shelves filled with reel-to-reel audio tapes lined three of its walls. Along the fourth wall he had installed his plywood work console, which was cut to hold his recorders and mixers. That low-key setting only magnified the experiences that followed. The equipment in his studio was the best in the world: KLH-1 speakers, Sennheiser microphones, Ampex and Nagra recorders—all modified by the brilliant sound engineer, Fons Iannelli, to far exceed the specs for the equipment. The sound quality created in that room was better than anything I have heard before or since. Except for special moments, it was not loud, but always had an incredible presence, so that the room itself became like a set of headphones.

Into this magical setting came the moguls of Madison Avenue, powerful politicians, media executives, scholars from many fields, and Tony’s students. Many of the moguls—picture the characters of the TV series Mad Men—felt that they were ‘discovering’ Tony and commissioned work that would win awards for them and advance their careers. However, they did not always know what to expect. Having enjoyed a three-martini lunch at the 21 Club the day before, they would go to visit Tony, who would offer them a hero sandwich and soft drink from Rocco’s sandwich shop around the corner. They probably assumed that when Tony ‘made it’ he would take over a big suite on Madison Avenue. Not a chance. When Tony acquired a bit more money, he bought the Pentecostal church next door and moved his studio into its first floor.

Though some of the people coming to Tony’s studio were seeking a gun-for-hire who would sell products and make them even more powerful, most were fans of Tony and colleagues who wanted to see what he was up to and share ideas. Again and again over a period of years, people like Chet Huntley from NBC News, Art Pearson from Bristol Myers, Bill Moyers from PBS, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, astronomer Carl Sagan, Herb Schmertz from Mobil Oil, documentary film-maker David Hoffman and psychiatrist and philosopher Harley Shands showed up to learn from and with Tony. The U.S. Information Agency regularly sent foreign dignitaries to meet Tony and take in his perspectives on media and society. For me, working with Tony and his various visitors was like a rolling graduate-level seminar with people who cared deeply about how media function in our lives.

Tony Schwartz was a meticulous observer of the social media of his day. There were no Facebook or Twitter but he observed and recorded how people used the telephone—the way we now use Facebook or Twitter—to convey their own feelings and ‘retweet’ gossip, funny stories and emotions. He understood the fundamental structure of these social exchanges and used this understanding to create social communications. For example, in one powerfully artistic audio piece, he mixed an actual recording of a telephone conversation between a runaway teenage girl and her mother with the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home. The result was a stunning montage in which the teenager’s raw emotions and her accounts of life on the streets meld with the irony and pathos in the song.

Tony Schwartz also pioneered in a number of media innovations: for example, using real children in commercials (previously, women were used to imitate children’s voices in the mistaken belief that children could not be directed), instant commercials that responded to something which happened a few hours earlier, a truly portable recorder, time-lapse audio and virtual reality audio. He also created the first anti-smoking commercial.

Much of his work foreshadowed the media environment we live in today. For example, using large, high-quality speakers he created virtual reality experiences in his studio for visitors, transporting them to other environments. He also created viral media campaigns. One example was a campaign to save John Jay College, the school that trained the firefighters and policemen of New York. He used media to organize thousands of protesters outside City Hall and to prompt thousands more to telephone the public officials who were targeting the school for closure. Many notables joined the viral campaign, including famed anthropologist Margaret Mead who heard the commercials and called Tony Schwartz, volunteering to appear in radio commercials for the school. The campaign succeeded and the school was saved.

The Responsive Chord addresses media in terms of changing perceptions of space, such as the preference by many people to experience reality in media spaces rather than physical spaces. Because Tony Schwartz did not like to travel, he used the telephone to transport himself to other spaces and people into his space. In this way, and at a time when they were very rare, he did hundreds of tele-lectures over the phone. His work with perceptions of space preceded that of many modern communication scholars, such as Scott Campbell, James Katz and Richard Ling, who study how media, especially mobile media, have changed our perception of space. They consider, for example, what it means to experience two