Advertising in 2017 (and Beyond): Can We Get Consumers to Buy Immortality?

On February 14, 2011, I had a meeting with the head of the Colorado Tourism Board—I was there to pitch our agency’s idea for boosting visits to the state, not through advertising, but by creating an online crowdsourced model in which ordinary citizens would become what we called Ambassadors to Colorado. 

The idea died. 

Yet, I left the meeting feeling incredibly optimistic. Because that was the day I learned we’d soon live forever. 

On the lobby coffee table, I’d noticed the latest issue of Time, which featured the headline, “2045. The Year Man Becomes Immortal.” Inside, the lead article centred on Ray Kurzweil, inventor, genius and predictor of the future. In 1990, Kurzweil predicted a computer would defeat a world chess champion by 1998—it happened in 1997. Also in 1990, he predicted that, by 2010, computers would be capable of answering their users’ questions by directly accessing the Internet—search engines anyone? He predicted what turned out to be Google Glass AND virtual digital assistants (Siri/Cortana/Alexa/Etcetera) AND self-driving cars. 

In fact, since the 1990s, Ray Kurzweil has made 147 predictions. 115 have been right on the money and another 12 have been “essentially correct,” which means he was off by a year or two. That’s an 86% success rate. 

Which brings me back to 2045. 

The headline, as headlines frequently are—was a tad misleading. 2045 was the year Kurzweil had plucked from whatever version of a crystal ball he possesses, as the advent of The Singularity—the point at which we humans would have the ability to wirelessly link our brains to a cloud-based neocortex, thereby increasing individual intelligence by a billion-fold. 

You may have suddenly reminded yourself of the jet.com commercials in which people’s minds are blown. 

So then, if 2045 is the year we’re able to merge our own intelligence with Artificial Intelligence, creating a state Bryan Johnson, another noted futurist and founder of Kernel, refers to as HI or Human Intelligence, what’s the actual year we become immortal? 

Ray Kurzweil, who by the way, is the Director of Engineering for Google’s machine learning project, says 2029. And if the past is any indication, he has an 86% chance of being right. 

Using math requiring no where near a billion-fold increase in intelligence, that’s 12 years. And if Kurzeil is right, again, as he usually is, there will be a number of other mind-blowing advances coming and coming soon. 

Where does that leave us in the advertising industry? What will be our role in ushering in these astonishing, life-changing innovations? After all, before we ever persuade, don’t we simply announce? Aside from the news outlets, aren’t we the ones who bring the new and exciting to the population?  

Indeed we are. And while cell phones, flat screen TVs and VR headsets have been exciting announcements, ripe for the larger-than-life appeal created by great ads, technology that allows us to create what’s known in futurist circles as Radical Life Extension and yes, even immortality, will prove to be a much harder sell. 

Consider this: Bryan Johnson’s start-up, Kernel, backed by $100 million in capital, is building a chip that can be implanted directly into the brain. Kernel’s first neoprothestic will be designed to combat Alzheimer’s and other degenerative brain disorders. Yet, the leaders of the company, who see their sole purpose as creating “hardware and software to augment human intelligence,” have much larger work, in mind. Yet, a recent poll performed by the Pew Research Center found that while 36% of respondents were somewhat or very enthusiastic about having a performance-boosting chip implanted in their brains, 69% admitted to being somewhat or very worried. 

What would Ray Kurzweil say? In the past, he’s argued, these drastic changes won’t take place overnight—instead, people will gradually become accustomed to a startlingly advanced future through a series of smaller, yet still profound, innovations. Still, when it comes to the selling of immortality, we in the advertising industry will undoubtedly have some very heavy lifting to do. We’ve never really had a “product” to sell that could essentially split us right down the middle as consumers, possibly with religion on one side and everyone else on the other. 

While 2029 certainly isn’t here yet, it’s close on the horizon. And if Kruzweil and the scientific community have anything to say about it, we will have dramatically improved access to a host of advances, the likes and promise of which, the majority of humanity has not even dreamed of, let alone wished for. 

So, how would you sell immortality? 

Eric Kiker is Chief Strategy Officer at LRXD