Gruen Planet: Series 2 - Episode 2 (ATOM Study Guide)

Four seasons into The Gruen Transfer and what have we learned? That most of us can be bought or sold. And that sometimes, it actually feels good. We're all coerced and serenaded by advertising, an industry devoted to changing our minds and our behaviour.

But advertising is not the only industry that wants to get inside our heads and move the furniture around. Which brings us to spin, branding, and image control. Along with advertising, they form the nervous system of twenty-first-century life. They're the levers pulled behind most news stories, the silent partners in public debates.

Gruen thinks it's time to look at these dark arts as well. Because everyone is on the sell. Tyrants. Sports stars. Actors. Criminals. Politicians. Deities. Charities. Entire nations. They're all trying to persuade us to think, buy or do things that we weren't thinking, buying or doing yesterday.

Gruen Planet, the latest Gruen show – in advertising they call it a brand extension – will run an x-ray across the world each week, unpicking the stories that affect us all. How do you protect an unstable government when a backbencher goes feral? Does Tiger cut it anymore as a business? How has the Arab uprising been turned into Western profit? What was the Dalai Lama doing on MasterChef? Who do you turn to when your family name is your brand and it's become toxic?

Each week, host Wil Anderson will be joined by regulars Todd Sampson and Russel Howcroft, along with some of Australia's smartest communications experts. They will take us inside the persuasion business and explain why the world appears not as it really is, but as others want us to see it – why everything is spin, branding, advertising and image control.

In this episode:

• Latest News – dishonest advertising, the will of the late Adam Yauch and a gruesomely scary ad for a brand of ice cream that ostensibly loves 'little babies'
• 'The Image Renovators' – the reconstruction of Brad Pitt's brother as one of us
• 'Spin Cycle of the Week' – Lance Armstrong's cancer foundation receives huge amounts of donations after he is banned from cycling competition, Paralympian Evan O'Hanlon covers the brand names on his sports gear, and children are asked to comment on the packaging and display of cigarettes in an ad promoting plain packaging
• 'The Pitch' – Australians should accept the carbon tax
• 'Crisis Management' – Qantas fights off bad news with an onslaught of advertising publicity
• Worst performance by an athlete in an advertisement – Lleyton Hewitt and Sorbent.
• Important topics in this episode the ways in which advertisers and the media construct fame, persona and identity out of a real-life subject for their own purposes. Also, we look at the power of the 'Like' click icon in social media, and see how a large corporate business can draw on advertising to promote its 'successful' brand in the face of bad news about its financial downturn.

Curriculum Links

This study guide is mainly aimed at middle and upper secondary school levels, with relevance to:

• English
• Media Studies
• Graphics
• Ethics and Philosophy
• Psychology
• Business Studies and Marketing
• Cultural Studies
• Politics
• SOSE/HSIE