Gruen Planet: Series 2 - Episode 4 (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 – Cravendale cats with thumbs, an ATM gives $50 notes away at random, and a product called '18 Again' makes its users 'feel like a virgin'
• 'The Image Renovators' – Gina Rinehart
• 'Spin Cycle of the Week' – Wil 'Anders' is cut down to size in House Husbands, a five-year-old Public Enemy song goes to number four in the UK as a result of a Paralympics ad, and the Australian Christian Lobby draws a comparison between the health risks of smoking and homosexuality
• 'The Pitch' – to convince all Australians to give up drinking alcohol
• 'How Do You Sell' – a road safety message to young women?
• Worst performance by an athlete in an advertisement – Reen Corbett
• Important topics in this episode include the way in which journalists may extract and use a public figure's own words for their own purposes. Also, we see how shock value in an ad can be an extremely powerful force for a positive purpose – but does shock value have a lasting impact?

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