Long Life Interview:
with the Secretary
of The Cryonics Society
What Is The Cryonics Society?
LL: Some of our readers may not know about the Cryonics Society. Could you give us a little background?
DP: Gladly. The Cryonics Society is a nonprofit organization funded by tax-deductible donations. It was founded by Nick Pavlica, Bruce Waugh, and myself. Its goal is to gain public support for cryonics and for cryonics-related research by educating the public about its value and benefits.
What made us start the Society was our awareness of the real threat that negative press coverage posed to cryonics – in particular, the events that followed the media circus surrounding the suspension of Ted Williams.
Williams’ suspension led to anti-cryonics legislation being proposed in Arizona by state representative Bob Stump.
Even though an independent Michigan-based provider called the Cryonics Institute had no connection with the Williams case, Michigan legislators soon followed suit, and passed a Cease and Desist order forbidding the Cryonics Institute from providing suspension services during its investigation. The investigation led to the Cryonics Institute now being regulated as a cemetery.
The plans of another cryonics firm, Suspended Animation, to build a facility at Boca Raton were shut down by a City Council ruling.
It looked for a moment as though this anti-cryonics trend might go viral. Things were pretty grim. Clearly an effort was needed to counteract media hysteria and misinformation and replace it with the facts.
Cryonics had to present itself to the public in a more positive way. It seemed to some of us that if the cryonics community didn’t start doing a better job of promoting itself, it would cease to exist.
There was also the fact that cryonics has a long history of promoting itself badly. After forty years of receiving more publicity than the moon landing, barely 3,000 people have signed up. Cryonics is still viewed by many people as little more than science fiction or a scam. Existing cryonics promotional efforts are a tragic record of failure. The Ted Williams case showed how easily that failure could put an end not just to existing cryonics patients but to cryonics itself.
We figured it was time for professionals to give it a try. Nick is a successful direct-mail marketing specialist. I’m a professional business writer and marketing consultant by profession. Bruce is a retired Canadian attorney who’s represented very successful business organizations.
We all felt that if standard marketing practices could successfully market everything from pet rocks to fundamentalist churches, it could successfully market this new form of life extension.
So we formed the Cryonics Society. To better safeguard and promote cryonics.
LL: And what does the Society do?
DP: We provide positive accurate information about cryonics to the media and the public. We serve as an unaffiliated non-profit resource for responsible journalists and officials. And we work pro-actively in a variety of ways to provide a clear non-technical case for supporting cryonics to the general public.
LL: Could you name a few?
DP: Well, we did a direct mail campaign which reached over 30,000 people. We’ve developed a well-reviewed web site (www.cryonicssociety.org) which has averaged thousands of visits per week.
We’ve gotten calls for information from CNN, the Washington Post, and other groups and journalists.
We issue press releases, we network with people in the field and with the public. We try to make the public aware of organizations that are questionable, such as Sibirsky Marmont and Cryonics Institute Germany, and warn them about problematic ones, like Kriorus. We also assist people who are searching for valid providers and direct them without favoritism to Alcor or CI or other legitimate organizations.
LL: Really? Can you give our readers an example?
DP: Sure. We got an email just before this interview from a television producer called Myrna Everett interested in doing program segment about cryonics out West. I put her in contact with Jennifer Chapman of Alcor
Soon after a radio producer called and wanted to know about cryonics people in New England. I’m aware that the Cryonics Institute has several members in the area, so I directed her to CI, and gave her contact information for Alcor too.
Do activities like that get attention, coverage, and maybe memberships or funds, for those organizations? Maybe not in every case. But over time, almost certainly.
An Independent Voice
LL: The key existing cryonics providers must appreciate your support. Do those organizations support CS in return?
DP: No. Many CS supporters are members of those organizations, of course, but the organizations themselves have not contributed.
LL: Really? You would think that it would be in their best interest to help your efforts.
DP: Yes, you would think so.
I don’t want to give you the impression that we just direct people to the major providers. We reply to letters and calls and emails from the public requesting information directly. We put out news updates. Sometimes we make the case for cryonics directly to the public. Our pro-cryonics articles appear in mainstream magazines – one, in Mensa Journal, reached a prime target readership of over 50,000. A podcast interview I did with writer Steve Cobbs went out to a projected listenership of 200,000 people.
Of course, we’ve managed to do what we’ve done so far only because of support from individual people in the cryonics movement. That’s been critical. There’s an iron law in marketing: you can’t do it if you can’t fund it. What we do is possible only because people who care about the survival of cryonics support us with their contributions.
LL: Seems like a lot.
DP: The concern of cryonics providers is, quite properly, on how to best provide an essentially technical, medical service. Our focus is more cultural. We look at how cryonics is perceived, how it presents itself, what supports or blocks its public acceptance, and, of course, how to improve those perceptions and that presentation.
LL: And yet there doesn’t seem to be talk about the Cryonics Society on Cryonet and other cryonics discussion groups.
DP: There’s not much need to go to the cryonics community and get them to support cryonics. They do that already. It’s people who keep hearing the wrong things about cryonics that we need to reach.
In some ways, it’s a paradox. Any organization doing marketing fails if it draws more attention to itself than to what it’s trying to promote.
Take those journalists above that we directed to Alcor and CI. That may get coverage and memberships and funds for Alcor and CI, but will it get attention for the Cryonics Society? No. Nor should it. The story’s not about us. We don’t suspend people. We don’t have big dewars or shiny medical equipment that looks impressive on film.
That said, we’ve done some good, and made some progress. We’ve formally achieved government approval and are now an established nonprofit organization. That not only helps enhance our legitimacy with the public – it also means that any contributions sent to us are completely tax-deductible.
(Which is good to know, if you’d rather spend your tax dollar supporting cryonics instead of the IRS.)
Doing all that takes time and effort. We’d rather do it than chat about it on Cryonet. After all, we need to take our message to the public, not to each other. It’s an important distinction.
What everyone needs to understand is that making cryonics work isn’t just a technological problem. It’s a social problem. We need to solve that social problem if we want to survive.
The State of Cryonics Marketing Today
LL: As a marketing consultant yourself, what would you say are the biggest problems in promoting cryonics?
DP: The way that it’s already been promoted now is certainly a major problem. People don’t buy a product just because of benefits of the product: they buy because of their perception of those benefits. The perception of cryonics is intensely negative – it’s seen as impossibly expensive, as something involving mutilating the dead, defying God’s Will, abandoning religion, dealing with cultists and scam artists. At best it’s seen as science fiction just out of our reach, and not as emerging science fact and an affordable real-life option. That’s a tough preconception to overcome. Particularly with some in the cryonics movement continuing to feed it daily, as they bash God, call the public names, and vilify critics and each another.
Very few of the people rejecting cryonics can give you good arguments, much less hard evidence, justifying their opinion. Their rejection is superficial — in fact, it’s a nearly automatic reaction to a negative image. Where does that image come from? Mostly from presentations in the media that emphasize the most negative caricatures of cryonics. Caricatures that people who support cryonics have done all too much to foster.
Another problem is simple lack of knowledge on the part of people in the cryonics community as to how to market it properly.
Cryonics advocates have a very strange notion of what marketing is. They seem to confuse it with any kind of sales effort. You’ll repeatedly hear, for instance, that a car salesman in the 1970’s once tried to sell cryonics but didn’t succeed. They’ll then assure you that this proves definitively that marketing just plain doesn’t work when it comes to cryonics, and never will. It’s like saying that since your slingshot didn’t hit the moon, then of course NASA can’t ever reach it either.
Marketing as a professional undertaking is simply a complete blank to cryonicists. Market surveys, direct mail, branding, e-marketing – these are unknown. Getting on TV or in the paper is considered sufficient, if not a triumph.
But the problem is that the media likes to sends its message – not your message. And that can backfire, since the media would almost always rather sensationalize than inform.
When it comes to media coverage, cryonicists tend to apply the Madonna Principle – anything they say about you is good, so long as you get mentioned. Getting mentioned in the case of the Ted Williams debacle nearly shut the movement down entirely, but have we learned our lesson? Not yet, I fear. The way we approach the public keep failing, but we still keep using the same ineffective approaches.
LL: So how should marketing be applied to cryonics?
DP: Marketing is basically a five-step process. The first step is researching the market: you gather as much relevant information as you can about the consumers you’re targeting through surveys, questionnaires, focus groups, interviews, direct observation. Eventually you build up a statistically valid profile of the people you want to sell to. That gives you a solid accurate idea of that public’s likes, dislikes, needs, preferences.
Once you do, you go to step two. You configure or present the product in a way that satisfies their purchasing criteria. Often you’ll do a series of test runs on a variety of small consumer groups and observe the results, sometimes incorporating the test market’s feedback.
When the responses are good, you go to step three: presenting the tested promotion to the public. This is where advertising – which is only one small element of the marketing process – comes in, although other approaches such as stimulating word-of-or what is called ‘stealth’ or viral marketing can be applied as well. Usually this is done on small populations first, then scaled up as more general acceptance is confirmed.
As the product is being presented, you enter the fourth step: monitoring the reaction of the market and gathering feedback.
The last step is to incorporate that feedback and loop back into the second step, continually re-configuring the product so that it always aligns closely with the consumer’s preferences.
This is a greatly oversimplified picture, but the main point to understand is that marketers do not come up with what they feel is ‘a good product’ and try to shove it down people’s throats through relentless spamming and advertising. What they do is systematically uncover what the market wants, then shape their product till it satisfies those wants.
That’s why it’s such a strong, indeed irresistible, process. It doesn’t impose something on you that you don’t want. It finds out what you do want, and shapes the product and/or how it is perceived into something that that fits in with your goals, your needs, your situation and world-view. Resisting good marketing means resisting yourself. Very few people can do that. Even fewer want to.
LL: Why hasn’t this process worked in the case of cryonics?
DP: Because it’s never been tried! Do you know that there’s never been even one statistically valid marketing analysis of public attitudes towards cryonics? The closest has been Scott Badger’s 1998 survey which got 517 responses to an internet newsletter – worth doing, certainly, but neither a representative sampling nor one large enough to make valid inferences.
The fact is, we don’t know what the public thinks of cryonics. No one knows. No one knows what segments of the public might be more sympathetic to cryonics than others, or what approaches might be more effective. We guess, but we lack the hard data to be conclusively sure.
And the real tragedy is, people in cryonics don’t even try to know. They simply abuse the public as ‘deathists’ who are too dim-witted and backwards to embrace cryonics, the way we, the enlightened few, do.
The public, of course, responds to our indifference and contempt with equal indifference and contempt. And so neither side provide the research funds or social support that could make cryonics a reality.
LL: What would you say is the biggest problem promoting cryonics?
DP: The biggest problem, pure and simple, is money. You can’t place ads if you can’t pay the printer or the publication. You can’t send mail if you can’t pay for the postage and the envelopes. The very biggest obstacle to cryonics is the attitude of the cryonics community towards promoting it. They don’t. Period. Not to any effective degree.
If every member of the cryonics community sent Ogilvy & Mather a hudred dollars, we could cover enough operating expenses to possibly reach hundreds of thousands of individuals with a controlled, positive, pro-cryonics message. A hundred dollars isn’t really a lot. Advertising expenses are even tax-deductible. People spend more than that on a dinner or a book or a movie every other day.
But getting people to send proper marketing people, or even a grass-roots effort like the Cryonics Society, that small amount can be a real struggle.
LL: Why?
DP: The usual reasons. People are busy. They’ve already contributed to their existing provider or a provider’s research project and they feel they’ve done their part. They intend to contribute one of these days. They’ll make a mental note to do it, then get caught up in something else.
Their hearts are in the right place. But that by itself won’t change the way cryonics is perceived. And in the long run that could lead to disaster.
LL: But surely spending money on research is a good idea.
DP: It’s a wonderful idea. But if money were spent on better promoting cryonics, the resulting rise in memberships, donations, and public support could enable more research, more extensive and better funded research.
Marketing Cryonics Tomorrow
LL: What do you say to the argument that you need to make cryonics work first, before the public will even consider supporting it.
DP: Ah, that was Saul Kent’s argument in “The Failure Of Cryonics” — a terrific article, by the way. But I’m afraid I don’t agree.
LL: Why not?
DP: The public buys things all the time that aren’t proven to work. Astrology, psychoanalysis, healing crystals – none of them work. But people spend millions on them regardless. Has any religion demonstrated in a laboratory that believing in that faith alone will produce certain salvation? No. But that doesn’t stop billions of people from joining up, and tithing every Sunday.
Donations and funding pour in for cancer, leukemia, diabetes research and run into the tens of billions. Is it because these researchers have ‘cures’ that ‘work’? They don’t. But nonprofits in those areas have managed to systematically communicate a strong credible message to the public that their work and their research holds promise, and so is totally justified.
We haven’t.
And we must. The think that once cryonics works, people will rush to buy it. That’s an assumption. Maybe it’s true. But maybe not. Consider stem cell research. No one banned it when it didn’t work. Suddenly it did. And as soon as it did, funding was banned in the US, and research was banned in nine out of fifteen European nations. Cloning works! Our legislators don’t care. The voters are comfortable with the same old same old. So that’s what they’re going to get, until someone changes their mind.
Why do we assume this won’t happen with cryonics? If it were perfected tomorrow, environmentalists might regard it as a tangible threat to population control, not a fantasy one. Funeral directors might regard it as a real competitor, not a potential one. Both might lobby legislators to restrict it. Fundamentalists might regard it as a outright slap in the face of God. The moment cryonics works may be the moment government shuts it down permanently.
That is, unless the ground is prepared beforehand, and a sympathetic public is prepared and made ready to welcome it, and to oppose attempts to stifle it.
But that takes a professional marketing effort. Which only professionals can make. Or that only professionals employed by grass-roots nonprofits like the Cryonics Society can make.
LL: Why only CS?
DP: Because existing cryonics organizations aren’t up to the job. I’m not saying that out of lack of respect for their many accomplishments. It’s simple realism.
For one thing, they’re not marketing agencies and not marketing professionals. They have people to treat, patients to care for, facilities to maintain. Their funds go to operating expenses, employees, equipment, training. They can’t give the task of promoting cryonics their total focus.
For another, there’s the factor of public credibility. Let’s face it: every existing cryonics provider has gotten a wealth of negative and critical press. They’ve endured legal investigations, bureaucratic interference, misrepresentations, and outright mockery and abuse. Whether they’re innocent or not is not the point. Once the press throws enough mud, it sticks.
Besides: existing providers are companies, and companies are competitors. I think there’ll always be a feeling that any promotional money spent should promote the organization and not cryonics generally. It’s unavoidable. Existing cryonics providers are companies offer a product and work hard to make a profit. They’re here to beat the competition, not support it. But that inevitably leaves cryonics looking like a scam, and its providers like hucksters. Instead of the idealists that we all know they are.
Businessman David Pizer once wrote, “I have always felt that a cryonics organization that does NOT do suspensions and does NOT collect money when someone dies, is a good organization to have around for political and legal battles should they come up, as people who often oppose cryonics point to the money the suspension companies take in when they do a suspension.”
He’s right.
LL: So where’s the organization that fits that criteria?
DP: Right here: the Cryonics Society.
The Cryonics Society is focused on promoting cryonics and nothing else.
Its people have professional marketing skills, backgrounds, and experience.
It isn’t in competition with any of the existing providers – indeed, it works to send business to all legitimate providers.
Not least, we have a record that is immaculate. Existing cryonics organizations have controversial histories and controversial practices. Whether those histories and practices were justified is not the issue. The media continually highlight and emphasize the worst and most sensational elements, and that emphasis profoundly alienates the public and the scientific community. The very people who should be our friends.
The Cryonics Society has no such drawbacks. We’re simply a nonprofit advocating for legitimate scientific and medical research, for better public education, and for the right of people to do with their remains as they wish without government interference. Who in the world can object to that?
The Cryonics Society is uniquely suited to send the positive message we need. That’s why it needs people’s help and support.
LL: And yet let’s be frank. You haven’t been very successful, have it? Neither in terms of popular membership nor provider support has the Cryonics Society galvanized the general public. You would appear to have a long way to go.
DP: Yes. We do.
It hasn’t all been a matter of beating our heads against the wall. We’re done some good. We’ve raised consciousness here and there, and pointed some people to cryonics providers and gotten them signed up. Every life matters, and I like to think our efforts may have saved a few.
But we’re not done yet, and we’re still learning. Still evolving.
The answer may lie in expanding our mandate. Initially the Cryonics Society thought of itself as sort of adjunct provider of boutique advertising agency services to existing cryonics providers. The problem was, there were only two possible clients in that market, and they thought they could do it better themselves. History has shown us all the hard way that they were wrong.
But only a bad marketing agency blames the market. It may be that we need to reinvent ourselves into something that more closely resembles a think tank than a ad agency. What’s the saying—nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come? Maybe what the field needs is precisely new ideas, and not repeating failed efforts to sell old ones.
Times have changed a great deal since 1967, when James Bedford became the first man to enter cryospace, as it were. Maybe we need to sit down and think the entire cryonics effort through again from top to bottom.
Copyright 2006-2024 by Long Life Magazine and the Cryonics Society
Note: this interview was originally published in 2006. We have updated some of the comments to reflect some of the changes since then.
All text and commentary in the Cryonics Society web site may not be reproduced without the written prior consent of the authors.
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Tel.: 585-473-3321