An Italian journalist explores the links between the iconic telemarketers of the 1980s and selling online today
There’s a scene in Paolo Sorrentino’s 2018 film Loro in which a character bearing an extraordinary likeness to Silvio Berlusconi – sometime cruise-ship crooner, vacuum cleaner salesman, priapic media mogul and latterly Italian Prime Minister – picks a number at random out of the phone book and dials.
A Milanese woman picks up. This is the opportunity for our faintly ridiculous hero, puffed up on his ego and wealth but riven with existential doubt as to his true place in the world, to test out whether he still has what it takes. What it takes, that is, to sell a non-existent apartment to a woman he has never met, to seduce her with glittering, empty promises and a smooth voice.
‘Loro’ means ‘them’ in Italian. Though the film is ostensibly about Berlusconi, it’s also about a type, and the products of an era – an era which Berlusconi shaped through his media empire – when salespersonship met liberalised television met a love of unbridled American capitalism. That is, the 1980s and early 1990s.
Not all the telemarketers who made their name on Italian television in the 1980s and 1990s were, in any sense, smooth. As Ilaria Padovan recalls in a wonderful article for Il Tascabile their techniques were often “theatrical and histrionic”. Roberto da Crema, sporting a magnificent moustache and a mullet, bangs the table and wheezes with excitement so keen is he to sell. (Look at a clip of him here if you don’t believe Translator’s assessment). Wanna Marchi’s approach to selling beauty and dieting products, no less high energy, generally ended with a shrill cry of “D’accordo?” (“You agree?”). In 1989, her catchphrase was incorporated into a pop song available here.
“Today it is difficult to explain to the younger generations the television we grew up with”, Padovan says. It was a new capitalist frontier. Also the means of new local television channels staying alive. The old telemarketers may seem ridiculous, Padovan says, but they knew how to distinguish themselves – the first rule of marketing. They represented something different, refreshing, compared to the grey figures on public TV. It was like having, as she puts it, the “provincial fishmonger inside the television.” There was something perhaps even democratic about it, particularly for regions in Italy that had been forgotten or marginalised.
Some of the telemarketers of the 1980s and 1990s are having something of a revival – becoming icons a second time around. The travel company SiVola employed Roberto da Crema in a recent campaign. In 2022, Netflix made a television series about the rise and fall of Wanna Marchi and her daughter Stefania Nobile with the English title Fortune Teller: A TV Scam. (Spoiler alert if spoiler alert needed: the story does not end particularly well, and for Nobile, trouble with the law appears to be ongoing).
It would be easy, Padovan suggests, to assume that we have escaped these gaudy times. But have we? Couldn’t the telemarketers’ call and response techniques – without the response of course, it’s television – be simply termed today social media “engagement.” As Alessandro Orlando puts it, “people buy me, they don’t buy what I sell”. This is the same person-to-person relationship as what would today be called an Influencer. Padovan finds herself watching a recent South Korean reality show called The Influencer which still more overtly gamifies social media marketing.
Selling on social media may be, she says, more “contemporary, refined and reliable.” But are today’s online influencers – Cristina Fogazzi (1 million followers) or Clio Zammatteo (3.5 million followers) – really so completely different to yesterday’s telemarketers? (Padovan mentions a third, Chiara Ferragni who, like Wanna Marchi and Stefania Nobile before her, has had a dramatic fall from grace in the glare of the limelight). Did telemarketers mark out the territory for those who have followed?
The current era of the mega Influencer is facing significant challenges. There is growing cynicism amongst consumers. (One report suggests 87% do not believe influencers actually use the products they sponsor). Padovan spots a shift towards what she terms “micro and nano creators” – closer to their audience, smaller scale, more authentic, more likely to be shared by family and friends (whose recommendations tend to be most trusted of all).
But in this game of capitalist cat-and-mouse, sellers will always find a way to sell. Dreams of the future remain marketable propositions in the present, however (and whoever) presents them.
The full original article by Ilaria Padovan was published in Italian on 10 February 2025.
It is available here: ‘Da Telemarket a Instagram’, Il Tascabile
Il Tascabile is an Italian-language online magazine with a diverse range of topics (from astrophysics to culture by way of economics, science and technology).
