Cry me a goddamned river. The evils of GoogleFaceTube are nothing but the logical conclusion of advertising. This is like someone being sad at a faster car than theirs being invented, only both cars annoy the shit out of everyone.
Its interesting that if you watch Mad Men, this was actually discussed in a show set even in the 70s - that precise targeting and media would outpace any creative work.
"The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. `What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.`"
Advertising has changed. It's no longer on a billboard in your face, but now a virus and fabric of influence in your mind that permeates and multiplies subtly through every medium you consume. Each piece of information collectively assembles inside your brain to fashion and form an opinion. The new science of advertising is figuring out how to put these pieces of the puzzle together so that you organically assemble an opinion on matters favorable to product sellers.
You actually make a really interesting point here. Advertising has permeated nearly every segment of media consumption. An interesting example is articles like this, and “reviews” of products that are actually paid adverts where the “reviewers” get kickbacks for every referral that leads to a sale. [1]
On the other hand, it's now easier than ever to avoid all marketing in media. In the analog world you couldn't install an adblocker to your newspaper, or purchase a tv subscription without ads, or choose a radio station without ads in between. Now it's all available, and at least my world is almost completely advertisement-free -- except for those paid reviews you mentioned.
I wouldn't follow an influencer, though I'm not very representative obviously. I'm quite OK with product placement. Content ads require that they are marked as advertisements, and can then be blocked.
Another example is when discussion forum “comments” have a link to an article, but actually the “commenter” links to an advertising company’s rehosting of the article.
Is it me or does this article contradict itself throughout the piece? It tries so hard to sell it’s headline, but every point and interview it does paints a completely different picture.
You want to sell a da Vinci? Well then you have to make private meetings with potential clients, and, you have to create ads that sell it as iconic.
You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you have to sell the story of it being generally accepted as a high quality brand.
You want to sell luxury? You have to sell timelessness and trust.
Aren’t those things exactly what Don Draper would have done?
In general the article skimps over how ads are actually made, and talks mainly in how they are delivered, but that has very little to do with the death of Don Draper. Because even if you’re not always shooting ads at everyone, you still have to tell stories that set you a part from everyone else.
It’s only valid point in the subject seem to be that advertisers are no longer in the front of business magazines. Ironically, neither are car manufacturers, except for one, Musk. Who coincidentally put one of his cars in space in a very spectacular PR event that I personally doubt he decided upon because an algorithm told him it would be popular.
I think the round about point is that since no one is tuning into the mass media which might build the collective mass culture (or that mass media is changing to target advertising that directly targets individual dreams and desires), that there is a problem in manufacturing mass culture... because culture has become balkanized. So basically you have a problem with individualism taken to its logical conclusion after the century of self, to a century of personalized amplified self which causes society to break down say in 50-100 years. It's an interesting idea, what are the things which bind us together culturally when we really don't have culture, we have commercial culture... we have cambell's soup ads.
The article talks about mass advertising. The true story here is the advent of surveillance capitalism in which data-driven behavioral manipulation is the new means of production.
You can see a curious parallel in the death of psychoanalysis and the rise of evidence-based psychology and CBT but somehow depression is still not getting better. I don't believe Man is as simple as something to be fully captured by psychographic profiling. Articles like this are precisely the symptoms of the evergrowing decline in symbolic efficiency of the surveillance capitalism regime.
I just have missed that, reading the piece. I wonder how well that’s working out though. I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, and we’re doing various tests on ML and it’s honestly turning out to be really bad at predicting anything.
It doesn’t always fail, but it fails more than rolling a die.
Well maybe. There are some pretty big differences in how ML is traditionally applied and how it's used in the public sector where we focus much more on an individual level and have a much lower tolerance of errors. Right now the predictions we're getting of ML are so terrible they might as well be random. That's terrible, because we're not trying to determine if we can sell you X, we're trying to predict how likely you are to fall into X. Because the public sector doesn't really interact with the adult you, unless you're either damaged, have broken something or want to change part of society.
Imagine we scored you as a likely alcoholic because people with a case history like yours indicated a high risk of alcoholism. So we start taking preemptive measures and the entire system grinds into gear, partly trying to prevent you from falling to the bottle but also preparing for if you do. You really wouldn't want to interact with a public system that's put the wrong label on you, trust me. So we have to be more than a little sure we get things right.
You can probably use ML to predict general trends, but I don't have much data on it, because we use traditional analysts in the public sector. Not because they are great at it, but because they're there. We've been predicting general trends since before computer technology, and the people who work in those departments typically aren't very tech savy. It would be a tremendous cost of resources to make them use ML, or to replace them with data scientists.
I guess in the future those analytics departments may increasingly rely on ML, but to be completely honest, I have no idea if ML or traditional analytics is better at predicting the outcome. The fact that we haven't started using ML, haven't hired a single data scientist or signed a single contractor on the area probably speaks for itself though, if it was truly valuable, I suspect we'd have it by now.
By comparison, RPA didn't really have a great start in the public sector, but today it's absolutely everywhere because it turned out to be really valuable.
It's not like we don't use ML at all though. We do, for stuff like sorting through four million case files looking for specific errors. Something that takes tens of workers months of work to do, but can be done in a few hours when you rent enough hardware in the cloud. We just don't use ML for any sort of analytics or prediction.
"Imagine we scored you as a likely alcoholic because people with a case history like yours indicated a high risk of alcoholism. So we start taking preemptive measures and the entire system grinds into gear, partly trying to prevent you from falling to the bottle but also preparing for if you do. You really wouldn't want to interact with a public system that's put the wrong label on you, trust me."
That's exactly the sort of specific example that is missing from the stories about ML doing things like encoding existing biases.
We’re still learning how to apply it. In many cases, ML is something that can solve a problem, but it’s often not the obvious/best solution appropriate for the public sector use case vs a pre-existing rules engine, for example.
> You want to sell a da Vinci? Well then you have to make private meetings with potential clients, and, you have to create ads that sell it as iconic.
That’s sales, not marketing. You wouldn’t bother to create ads for a Da Vinci, as the pool of people with the means to buy one is so small and the process of buying one is so convoluted. See also jet engines.
> You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you have to sell the story of it being generally accepted as a high quality brand.
The article is contesting that what you actually need is to make people aware of your brand at the moment they are about to consume one. The brand associations matter in this on some level, but are tangential. Stella Artois has completely different brand connotations in the US to the UK and EU for instance.
"Before Christie’s sold Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017, it staged high-profile public exhibitions of the painting around the world, and made an expensively produced video to showcase it – in effect, an ad. On the face of it, all this activity was a flagrant waste of money: almost nobody who consumes the marketing for a da Vinci is in the market for it. Christie’s salespeople knew all the potential buyers personally. They can, and did, visit them in the privacy of their penthouses.
"Yet Christie’s realised that those buyers would pay an extra few million for the privilege of owning a painting that was “iconic”. This isn’t some quirk of billionaire art collectors; it’s human nature. We value things more highly when we know that others value them."
What are those connotations? As someone who has had the misfortune of drinking Stella, I speculate that Europeans challenged themselves to make something even nastier than Budweiser, and they succeeded.
Stella has a higher end reputation in the States, vs what I believe to be a Budweiser type reputation in Europe. Similar to the disconnect between PBR's marketing in the US and Asia (although PBR is the other way around)
Then I stumbled upon Budweiser in Prague and had a brew from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser_Budvar_Brewery. We were desperate for a real Czech beer and some food, saw that Budweiser logo in the window and were dismayed. Yet the food menu looked good, so we went in, read about the 800+ yr old Budweiser so ordered one. It was a wonderful, dark, malty brew. Loved it! My expectation of Budweiser in Europe is much higher now.
While I agree with the general/intended sentiment of "Advertising is has changed from a bunch of slick white guys in suits, to tech", it might be worth pointing out that Don Draper doesn't _exactly_ have anything to do with what the author is discussing. The author implies that ad tech is ruining _traditional_ advertising, which is true on the Sales side, but have you seen some of the high PPC/CPM ads on some Youtube videos? They still _heavily_ rely on great creative. And let's not forget that Don Draper was the Creative Director - not head of Sales (which would've been Pete I believe).
>The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla
Nope, It’s nowhere near that. The fact that tech media writes a lot about a car manufacturer doesn’t make it the most popular manufacturer in the world and brief google trends research shows that.
Tesla even managed to stand out in this very article when it is only briefly mentioned with multiple comments alluding to this brief mention. I'd say it's quite safely the car industry leader in buzz, if nothing else.
In this bubble. I think a lot of people here would probably be surprised how many automobile purchasers have never even heard of Tesla--or at least are only vaguely aware it's "that electric car company."
Igor Beuker's speach at the Qt World Summit 2017 followed a similar premise. Traditional advertising has gone the way of the Dodo and the Math Men have taken over.
Note that he talks about a fake ad exec, not the most famous real one of that era, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy worked for the Gallup Poll before he went into advertising. He was into data-driven advertising. "Advertisers who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore the signs of the enemy." The author is attacking a straw man. Ogilvy is still relevant. The author of the article here, not so much.
Just last week I was at an unusually good talk by an Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland mentioned in the article.
>Rory co-heads a team of psychology graduates who look for "butterfly effects" in consumer behaviour - these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make
Also thought this podcast with Rory Sutherland by Farnam Street / The Knowledge Project was particularly good, especially in what the actual value of brand is:
I thought the bit on economics was interesting - that motivating people by paying or fining them is limiting because there's a lot of other factors you can look at if you are creative. (48m)
A lot of people who don’t do it for a living assume that advertising, design, marketing promos and the like are created by a bunch of creatives sitting around a conference table and going with whatever strikes their fancy. But there’s a lot of data, focus groups, A/B testing, etc. The data’s imperfect and there’s certainly still a creative process but it’s not just a bunch of art and English majors winging it.
>In 2016, Facebook in effect charged the Trump campaign lower rates than the Clinton campaign, because Trump’s ads made people angrier and thus generated more clicks. Nobody took a decision to charge Trump less. It was the logical outcome of the ad business’s core principle: the more attention you win, the more you get paid. Since negative emotions are more likely to win and hold attention than positive emotions, the system has an incentive to spread fear and loathing. Russia’s entire propaganda campaign relies on an advertising model that rewards paranoia and spite.
The details are only gradually coming out - facebook released the ads a couple of days ago and Dominic Cummings the campaign manager has refused a summons from parliament to come explain what happened.
I guess we have to wise up to it a bit and maybe change the algorithms to be less hate promoting.
"[In a recent article for the New York Times, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci] found the same pattern on non-political topics: videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism; videos about jogging led to videos about ultra-marathons. The stakes were always being upped. YouTube, she concluded, was a “radicalising instrument”. That isn’t, she says, because YouTube’s engineers are zealots. It’s because Google (YouTube’s owner) is selling attention to advertisers, and its algorithms have learnt that the best way to keep people hooked is to push ever more extreme material on them."
It's pessimistic, since by design it can only get worse.
> Advertising, once a creative industry, is now a data-driven business reliant on algorithms. The implications are deeply sinister – not only for the consumer but for democracy itself.
When everything is labeled a "threat to democracy", nobody takes that actual threats to democracy seriously.
> These days, consumers are less likely to have favourite brands, since “their favourite brand is going to be whatever Google tells them at that moment is going to match their exact needs”. The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.”
Really? I would use Tesla as an extreme example of effective marketing and cult of personality around Elon Musk. Elon Musk is Cindy Crawford.
> “When’s the last time you saw an ad agency executive on the cover of Business Week?"
Not sure Business Week is really a barometer of what's going on today, but that's fair. However you do regularly see the leaders of these companies, who are the face and effectively the advertising. Not sure if there is a person or team behind their image.
> Clients are spending less on the kind of entertaining, seductive, fame-generating campaigns in which ad agencies specialise, and more on the ads that flash and wink on your smartphone screen.
Really? I think sponsored content that's actually entertaining is a lot more common now.
> Clients only have to decide how many people they want to reach, and how much they want to spend; algorithms do the rest.
Wasn't this automated before and the automation was just done by the ad agencies? Why bother hiring ad agencies in the first place
> The advertiser might create multiple ads and serve different executions to different slices of its audience. Some companies, such as Cambridge Analytica, claim to be able to target personality types using this method. The more valuable your particular profile is to the advertiser, the higher price its algorithm will pay the publisher to get an ad in front of your eyes. In this way, every scintilla of attention is transformed into money.
In the past advertisers often had multiple ads that played in multiple mediums, targeting multiple audiences. And yes, more value mediums (e.g. target market with a more affluent readership) does cost more. Why wouldn't it?
This whole article is just a list of complaints and contradictory observations without a central theme or any coherent structure.
Marketing doesn't work but is extremely common. Its rampant with fraud but is incredibly convincing. It's a huge turn-off with consumers tuning out but it's dominating our lives
You guys should check out - lazyeight.design , we're essentially trying to build the world's first creative agency on the cloud and using a ton of data for project estimates and to calculate our monthly hourly pricing (which changes monthly).
It's scary how targeted google ads are now a days. I was talking about buying a bed to my mother and noticed ads for mattresses started popping up in my ad sidebars. I miss being anonymous.
Ok, tongue-in-cheek remark. I left Facebook, block ads aggressively, use DuckDuckGo, and live in the weak sauce privacy of the Apple ecosystem.
Since I block ads, I also block a bunch of trackers. But given that I can’t see most ads, I have no idea whether people are trying to sell me mattresses after I discuss beds.
For all I know, I don’t live in a house with the shades drawn, maybe I live in a house with one-way shades such that the advertisers can watch me, but I can’t see anything they’re trying to show me.
——
If the above is the case, I will still be vulnerable to micro-targeted astroturf stuff. Like bots posing as Members of whatever social media I participate in, dropping brand names in their conversations.
Is everyone on Swedespeed really a Volvo enthusiast? If one of them posts a picture of a Trek mountian bike on their roof rack, how do I know this is “organic,” and not an ad campaign?
For how long will the above be a pleasant chuckle about a dystopian possible future, and not everyone’s daily “reality?”
This is already happening with political discourse, it must be inevitable for commerce.
They both invoke the notion that the individual can contribute in a meaningful way through subservient behavior towards goals that are left to be defined by others
It’s capture of our nostalgia; securing the reality we feel comfortable with. It comforts us such that we eschew our own search for novel utilitarian answers, leading us to abide government and corporate solutions
I disagree with a number of points in this article.
"Now, we live in an age in which the intangible haze of soft-sell is no longer necessary, and the battle for market share comes down to the raw strength of your product. “The sun has passed midday on brand,” he says."
I don't think this is remotely true - as an example, take a look at the insurance industry (GEICO, AFLAC, AllState, etc). These guys are spending on massively on brand advertising. Now, obviously, the LTV of these customers is huge so they can afford the high CAC that comes with brand advertising. This advertising is pure Don Draper imho.
"The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.”"
Yes they have a great product - and, at the moment, they have that differentiation and, most importantly, buzz. That will change as the market for electric cars matures - and then you'll see Tesla start to advertise. It doesn't make any sense for them to spend on advertising right now given that they are in the press literally every day (right now for some stuff that isn't necessarily positive). Maturity of market matters.
"Clients have even started to question the ad business’s claim to efficiency. The model I described above is a simplified version of a dizzyingly complex system whose details few can fathom, involving multiple companies taking multiple fees. Unsurprisingly, fraud is rampant."
If this is true we'll likely see a pullback in digital advertising - or at least a movement to direct buys only on specific websites (vs. network buys).
My opinion: digital advertising is proving to be less and less efficacious, with costs going up and results going down. At the same time, we have less and less product differentiation. The result should be more spending on traditional brand advertising. Digital advertising is a channel - and spend to that channel will ebb and flow.
In my small world of advertising (B2B SaaS), I've seen digital advertising becoming largely ineffective. Too many companies marketing similar products and services. I would argue, in this world, brand advertising therefore becomes more important. That is, developing a brand is as or more important than product because all the products (in the eyes of prospects) are largely the same. Note that I am not saying product doesn't matter, or that a product cannot differentiate in a specific market (e.g. Slack), but that companies need a distribution advantage to succeed over every other company - and that either comes from the product or brand (e.g. Drift).
Now, having said all this, do I think the Ad Tech industry is a mess and that a major shakeout is needed? Yes. Do I think that digital advertising is largely too consolidated with a handful of players (Google, Facebook and now Amazon) - yes. Advertising can be still be great and useful - but Ad Tech needs some help.
Outright advertising in the old school sense is dead and has been for a long time. Marketing is not. I think this author is deeply confused. Now, more than ever, the perceived value of cheap products is being inflated by brand. Look how much people pay for a can of Red Bull, which offers less volume than a soda and less caffeine than a coffee. Look at how much people pay for Starbucks coffee and Hermès purses. It’s all smoke and mirrors. In many cases, you’re paying more for an inferior product because the brand gods took advantage of your cognitive bias.
The example of Tesla is particularly ridiculous to me and shows how little understanding of marketing the author has. Tesla isn’t a no-marketing company that only relies on its good product. What about a Tesla is superior? Not the interior. Mercedes has them beat there. Not the technology - it’s been proven unreliable at best. Not the range - many gasoline cars have better range. Not the price - their current offerings are far higher than an average person can afford. It’s questionable whether they’re even better for the environment than other cars. In fact, Tesla is so good at marketing that they’ve bamboozled the author and he doesn’t even realize it. Elon Musk knows the way to manipulate perceptions, and he’s very, very good at it.
I think you make a big mistake in using the word 'inflated'. The joy of doing something is configured in our brains, and we enjoy that. Science has shown that we like and are willing to pay more for things merely on the brand.
Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!
I usually buy brand name over generic stuff because it is quantifiably better to me in some way. Cereal that tastes better, garbage bag doesn't rip, etc.
You might have slightly misconstrued the parent comment.
To rework your idea: there's a spectrum for the quality of kisses. Some people figured out a way to convince you that their kisses are better than they actually are. Others are likely better, but they don't know how to market themselves, and thus don't get kissed as much.
The trouble is that a product delivers a complex set of values upon its user, and all-too-often, when someone sneers that it doesn’t have any value, that it’s “just marketing” conning its users, they are willfully ignoring the values that it confers.
I have spent literally my entire adult life listening to people say that Apple products were inferior to PCs, going right back to the days when they’d explain that bit-mapped graphics were useless decoration, and that keyboard shortcuts were superior to mouse interactions, and so forth.
It’s clearly true that for some users, in some use cases, a certain product does deliver less value than for others. But ignoring the fact that other people see the product’s values in other ways is a monumentally arrogant and unempathetic way to view humanity.
Most people don’t buy caffiene by the milligram or whatever. The label on the bottle appeals to a desire to fit in with other people buying the same label, or to aspire to belonging to that tribe, and so forth.
It amuses me that this even needs to be explained on Hacker News: Most people who participate in the threads do so for complex social reasons that are not particularly different than the reasons that some people buy Starbucks, some people buy from an indie shop, and some people hit the Timmie’s drive-through.
—-
Going back to kisses, consider a blind kiss test. I might say that of three kisses, B was better than A which was better than C.
But if you tell me that the kiss from C involved Lauren Bacall... I would rank it higher than the other two immediately! There is no fraud or nonsense going on, I value the complex bundle of values around a kiss from Lauren Bacall higher than two “no-name” kisses even if they are functionally more pleasant in the moment.
> Most people who participate in the threads do so for complex social reasons that are not particularly different than the reasons that some people buy Starbucks, some people buy from an indie shop, and some people hit the Timmie’s drive-through.
To make a stronger statement, there is "actual" value, it's just that people are bad at describing it. Many people will go to Starbucks every day because "they like it" and that's about as good an explanation as you can get out of them. But they didn't just wake up one day and decide they were going to like Starbucks.
For me personally, I like the consistency of Starbucks. If you order the same drink at two different stores you'll get the same drink. This isn't something that a large corporation like that does on accident. It requires a lot of effort to get that consistency. And it's just one of the many reasons someone will like Starbucks without recognizing it's one of the reasons.
People similarly like Apple products for reasons that sound vague ("it's easier to use") but which are not an accident. Apple is highly vertically integrated to ensure many of those reasons. It's no coincidence that Tesla is also vertically integrated.
It seems important to you to prove that certain products are objectively bad, and the people who like them are somehow wrong to do so. Why? Tastes differ.
Nonsense! One of marketing's main purpose is to convince you that some thing is superior in some way regardless of whether or not it's objectively true (or even objectively provable).
Tastes differ, but we're talking about marketing, and I tend agree with the parent post that Tesla's marketing around their cars is much better than the production quality or design of the cars.
Why? Because I’m backing up the opinion that I presented. Or would you rather everyone makes statements without saying how they came to those conclusions? That said, I never claimed anyone was wrong - just taken advantage of. Your comment has me wondering if you own or commonly purchase one of the products I mentioned. You seem hurt.
Okay, fair enough. But I think it's possible to show that the article isn't right without trying to also prove something else?
I agree that people don't pick products based on their objective goodness. However, this doesn't mean they're picking objectively bad products or being "taken advantage of" either. Or at least not in these examples.
Do you really want to say that one flavor or brand of beverage is objectively tastier than another, or that people shouldn't care about what it tastes like? Or maybe they just like the shape of the bottle. Is that wrong?
Or take cars. There are a lot of objective measurements you can make, but no objective way to decide on how much these features should matter or whether they are worth the cost. Some people care about having better-than-usual acceleration or a more luxurious interior, and others don't. Some people care about fuel efficiency only to save money, others want to do their part to help save the environment even if it costs more. Some people buy cars based on the image they want to project. None of these things are objectively wrong.
I'd reserve "being taken advantage of" for cases where people thought they were buying one thing and got another, not where they're making choices based on different goals.
So there is 'discovery' which is knowing a solution exists to a solve a need I might have (that I might not even know about). Technology is reasonably good at this.
Then there is 'selection' which is picking the 'best' product in a competitive landscape. Here I'm not convinced even Tech has this captured. If I am shopping for cars, for example, I might get a Tesla Ad (they do have a few AdWords) but the technology showing me that AD isn't optimizing for me, it's optimizing for a click-through or maybe a conversion which are different things. Maybe you look at me, my income, my driving needs and say hey - look, maybe you want to go with like a Kia Crossover over a Model S. A Model S would be fairly financially irresponsible given your income. The money saved with a crossover would equal $XX,XXX by the time little Bobby is ready for college. And what about those camping trips? You occasionally drive further than the expected range anyway.
Right now if I want to compute the TOC of a Tesla vs a Kia given what I usually drive in a year minus the tax incentives or whatever I'd have to bust out excel and spend a few hours. This isn't sexy. This isn't what advertising used to be, but if they want to do the math for me I'd pay attention to that way more than that I do AdWords.
77 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 83.1 ms ] threadAdvertising has changed. It's no longer on a billboard in your face, but now a virus and fabric of influence in your mind that permeates and multiplies subtly through every medium you consume. Each piece of information collectively assembles inside your brain to fashion and form an opinion. The new science of advertising is figuring out how to put these pieces of the puzzle together so that you organically assemble an opinion on matters favorable to product sellers.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3065928/sle...
I despise AT&T coming onto my property to tell me how great it is.
If it was so great, I'd be praying for it (google fibre) and ZERO advertising would be required.
Spend that money on great products, Build a better mousetrap.
You want to sell a da Vinci? Well then you have to make private meetings with potential clients, and, you have to create ads that sell it as iconic.
You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you have to sell the story of it being generally accepted as a high quality brand.
You want to sell luxury? You have to sell timelessness and trust.
Aren’t those things exactly what Don Draper would have done?
In general the article skimps over how ads are actually made, and talks mainly in how they are delivered, but that has very little to do with the death of Don Draper. Because even if you’re not always shooting ads at everyone, you still have to tell stories that set you a part from everyone else.
It’s only valid point in the subject seem to be that advertisers are no longer in the front of business magazines. Ironically, neither are car manufacturers, except for one, Musk. Who coincidentally put one of his cars in space in a very spectacular PR event that I personally doubt he decided upon because an algorithm told him it would be popular.
its headline
You can see a curious parallel in the death of psychoanalysis and the rise of evidence-based psychology and CBT but somehow depression is still not getting better. I don't believe Man is as simple as something to be fully captured by psychographic profiling. Articles like this are precisely the symptoms of the evergrowing decline in symbolic efficiency of the surveillance capitalism regime.
It doesn’t always fail, but it fails more than rolling a die.
Though if it fails more often “than a roll of a die,” doesn’t that hint at some predictive power? Maybe I’m misunderstanding.
Imagine we scored you as a likely alcoholic because people with a case history like yours indicated a high risk of alcoholism. So we start taking preemptive measures and the entire system grinds into gear, partly trying to prevent you from falling to the bottle but also preparing for if you do. You really wouldn't want to interact with a public system that's put the wrong label on you, trust me. So we have to be more than a little sure we get things right.
You can probably use ML to predict general trends, but I don't have much data on it, because we use traditional analysts in the public sector. Not because they are great at it, but because they're there. We've been predicting general trends since before computer technology, and the people who work in those departments typically aren't very tech savy. It would be a tremendous cost of resources to make them use ML, or to replace them with data scientists.
I guess in the future those analytics departments may increasingly rely on ML, but to be completely honest, I have no idea if ML or traditional analytics is better at predicting the outcome. The fact that we haven't started using ML, haven't hired a single data scientist or signed a single contractor on the area probably speaks for itself though, if it was truly valuable, I suspect we'd have it by now.
By comparison, RPA didn't really have a great start in the public sector, but today it's absolutely everywhere because it turned out to be really valuable.
It's not like we don't use ML at all though. We do, for stuff like sorting through four million case files looking for specific errors. Something that takes tens of workers months of work to do, but can be done in a few hours when you rent enough hardware in the cloud. We just don't use ML for any sort of analytics or prediction.
"Imagine we scored you as a likely alcoholic because people with a case history like yours indicated a high risk of alcoholism. So we start taking preemptive measures and the entire system grinds into gear, partly trying to prevent you from falling to the bottle but also preparing for if you do. You really wouldn't want to interact with a public system that's put the wrong label on you, trust me."
That's exactly the sort of specific example that is missing from the stories about ML doing things like encoding existing biases.
That’s sales, not marketing. You wouldn’t bother to create ads for a Da Vinci, as the pool of people with the means to buy one is so small and the process of buying one is so convoluted. See also jet engines.
> You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you have to sell the story of it being generally accepted as a high quality brand.
The article is contesting that what you actually need is to make people aware of your brand at the moment they are about to consume one. The brand associations matter in this on some level, but are tangential. Stella Artois has completely different brand connotations in the US to the UK and EU for instance.
The ad that's just looking at people looking at it is brilliant, really a work of art on its own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsEAJkTP0-M
The effort that went into selling that painting is one of the more fascinating stories of the last year.
"Before Christie’s sold Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017, it staged high-profile public exhibitions of the painting around the world, and made an expensively produced video to showcase it – in effect, an ad. On the face of it, all this activity was a flagrant waste of money: almost nobody who consumes the marketing for a da Vinci is in the market for it. Christie’s salespeople knew all the potential buyers personally. They can, and did, visit them in the privacy of their penthouses.
"Yet Christie’s realised that those buyers would pay an extra few million for the privilege of owning a painting that was “iconic”. This isn’t some quirk of billionaire art collectors; it’s human nature. We value things more highly when we know that others value them."
Similarly, Heineken is very much worth trying in the Netherlands. I’d never drink it here in the US.
Nope, It’s nowhere near that. The fact that tech media writes a lot about a car manufacturer doesn’t make it the most popular manufacturer in the world and brief google trends research shows that.
https://youtu.be/y6gAUZW4DGE?t=4m23s
>Rory co-heads a team of psychology graduates who look for "butterfly effects" in consumer behaviour - these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make
The talk's on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiB5H18aug&t=1187s Recommended if you are in to that stuff.
https://fs.blog/rory-sutherland/
I thought the bit on economics was interesting - that motivating people by paying or fining them is limiting because there's a lot of other factors you can look at if you are creative. (48m)
That stuff seems to be quite a problem these days. I was just looking last night at how the Brexit vote was probably swung by a bunch of immigrant fear mongering on facebook in the 2 weeks before the referendum - graph of the polls https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIQI7gXgAAAmbd?format=jpg and one of the ads https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIM5XLU8AAuB7o?format=jpg
The details are only gradually coming out - facebook released the ads a couple of days ago and Dominic Cummings the campaign manager has refused a summons from parliament to come explain what happened.
I guess we have to wise up to it a bit and maybe change the algorithms to be less hate promoting.
"[In a recent article for the New York Times, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci] found the same pattern on non-political topics: videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism; videos about jogging led to videos about ultra-marathons. The stakes were always being upped. YouTube, she concluded, was a “radicalising instrument”. That isn’t, she says, because YouTube’s engineers are zealots. It’s because Google (YouTube’s owner) is selling attention to advertisers, and its algorithms have learnt that the best way to keep people hooked is to push ever more extreme material on them."
It's pessimistic, since by design it can only get worse.
When everything is labeled a "threat to democracy", nobody takes that actual threats to democracy seriously.
> These days, consumers are less likely to have favourite brands, since “their favourite brand is going to be whatever Google tells them at that moment is going to match their exact needs”. The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.”
Really? I would use Tesla as an extreme example of effective marketing and cult of personality around Elon Musk. Elon Musk is Cindy Crawford.
> “When’s the last time you saw an ad agency executive on the cover of Business Week?"
Not sure Business Week is really a barometer of what's going on today, but that's fair. However you do regularly see the leaders of these companies, who are the face and effectively the advertising. Not sure if there is a person or team behind their image.
> Clients are spending less on the kind of entertaining, seductive, fame-generating campaigns in which ad agencies specialise, and more on the ads that flash and wink on your smartphone screen.
Really? I think sponsored content that's actually entertaining is a lot more common now.
> Clients only have to decide how many people they want to reach, and how much they want to spend; algorithms do the rest.
Wasn't this automated before and the automation was just done by the ad agencies? Why bother hiring ad agencies in the first place
> The advertiser might create multiple ads and serve different executions to different slices of its audience. Some companies, such as Cambridge Analytica, claim to be able to target personality types using this method. The more valuable your particular profile is to the advertiser, the higher price its algorithm will pay the publisher to get an ad in front of your eyes. In this way, every scintilla of attention is transformed into money.
In the past advertisers often had multiple ads that played in multiple mediums, targeting multiple audiences. And yes, more value mediums (e.g. target market with a more affluent readership) does cost more. Why wouldn't it?
This whole article is just a list of complaints and contradictory observations without a central theme or any coherent structure.
Marketing doesn't work but is extremely common. Its rampant with fraud but is incredibly convincing. It's a huge turn-off with consumers tuning out but it's dominating our lives
Ok, tongue-in-cheek remark. I left Facebook, block ads aggressively, use DuckDuckGo, and live in the weak sauce privacy of the Apple ecosystem.
Since I block ads, I also block a bunch of trackers. But given that I can’t see most ads, I have no idea whether people are trying to sell me mattresses after I discuss beds.
For all I know, I don’t live in a house with the shades drawn, maybe I live in a house with one-way shades such that the advertisers can watch me, but I can’t see anything they’re trying to show me.
——
If the above is the case, I will still be vulnerable to micro-targeted astroturf stuff. Like bots posing as Members of whatever social media I participate in, dropping brand names in their conversations.
Is everyone on Swedespeed really a Volvo enthusiast? If one of them posts a picture of a Trek mountian bike on their roof rack, how do I know this is “organic,” and not an ad campaign?
For how long will the above be a pleasant chuckle about a dystopian possible future, and not everyone’s daily “reality?”
This is already happening with political discourse, it must be inevitable for commerce.
I'm basically free from seeing online ads and from sharing too much of my life away.
https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/commercial-advertis...
They both invoke the notion that the individual can contribute in a meaningful way through subservient behavior towards goals that are left to be defined by others
It’s capture of our nostalgia; securing the reality we feel comfortable with. It comforts us such that we eschew our own search for novel utilitarian answers, leading us to abide government and corporate solutions
"Now, we live in an age in which the intangible haze of soft-sell is no longer necessary, and the battle for market share comes down to the raw strength of your product. “The sun has passed midday on brand,” he says."
I don't think this is remotely true - as an example, take a look at the insurance industry (GEICO, AFLAC, AllState, etc). These guys are spending on massively on brand advertising. Now, obviously, the LTV of these customers is huge so they can afford the high CAC that comes with brand advertising. This advertising is pure Don Draper imho.
"The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.”"
Yes they have a great product - and, at the moment, they have that differentiation and, most importantly, buzz. That will change as the market for electric cars matures - and then you'll see Tesla start to advertise. It doesn't make any sense for them to spend on advertising right now given that they are in the press literally every day (right now for some stuff that isn't necessarily positive). Maturity of market matters.
"Clients have even started to question the ad business’s claim to efficiency. The model I described above is a simplified version of a dizzyingly complex system whose details few can fathom, involving multiple companies taking multiple fees. Unsurprisingly, fraud is rampant."
If this is true we'll likely see a pullback in digital advertising - or at least a movement to direct buys only on specific websites (vs. network buys).
My opinion: digital advertising is proving to be less and less efficacious, with costs going up and results going down. At the same time, we have less and less product differentiation. The result should be more spending on traditional brand advertising. Digital advertising is a channel - and spend to that channel will ebb and flow.
In my small world of advertising (B2B SaaS), I've seen digital advertising becoming largely ineffective. Too many companies marketing similar products and services. I would argue, in this world, brand advertising therefore becomes more important. That is, developing a brand is as or more important than product because all the products (in the eyes of prospects) are largely the same. Note that I am not saying product doesn't matter, or that a product cannot differentiate in a specific market (e.g. Slack), but that companies need a distribution advantage to succeed over every other company - and that either comes from the product or brand (e.g. Drift).
Now, having said all this, do I think the Ad Tech industry is a mess and that a major shakeout is needed? Yes. Do I think that digital advertising is largely too consolidated with a handful of players (Google, Facebook and now Amazon) - yes. Advertising can be still be great and useful - but Ad Tech needs some help.
The example of Tesla is particularly ridiculous to me and shows how little understanding of marketing the author has. Tesla isn’t a no-marketing company that only relies on its good product. What about a Tesla is superior? Not the interior. Mercedes has them beat there. Not the technology - it’s been proven unreliable at best. Not the range - many gasoline cars have better range. Not the price - their current offerings are far higher than an average person can afford. It’s questionable whether they’re even better for the environment than other cars. In fact, Tesla is so good at marketing that they’ve bamboozled the author and he doesn’t even realize it. Elon Musk knows the way to manipulate perceptions, and he’s very, very good at it.
Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!
* Pringles are the worst kind of Pringles. In fact, No Name makes better Pringle type chips
* Glossettes are also not as good as the Walmart brand glossette equivalent.
I've been compiling a list with friends of such examples where the brand name product is objectively not as good as some knock off.
To rework your idea: there's a spectrum for the quality of kisses. Some people figured out a way to convince you that their kisses are better than they actually are. Others are likely better, but they don't know how to market themselves, and thus don't get kissed as much.
I have spent literally my entire adult life listening to people say that Apple products were inferior to PCs, going right back to the days when they’d explain that bit-mapped graphics were useless decoration, and that keyboard shortcuts were superior to mouse interactions, and so forth.
It’s clearly true that for some users, in some use cases, a certain product does deliver less value than for others. But ignoring the fact that other people see the product’s values in other ways is a monumentally arrogant and unempathetic way to view humanity.
Most people don’t buy caffiene by the milligram or whatever. The label on the bottle appeals to a desire to fit in with other people buying the same label, or to aspire to belonging to that tribe, and so forth.
It amuses me that this even needs to be explained on Hacker News: Most people who participate in the threads do so for complex social reasons that are not particularly different than the reasons that some people buy Starbucks, some people buy from an indie shop, and some people hit the Timmie’s drive-through.
—-
Going back to kisses, consider a blind kiss test. I might say that of three kisses, B was better than A which was better than C.
But if you tell me that the kiss from C involved Lauren Bacall... I would rank it higher than the other two immediately! There is no fraud or nonsense going on, I value the complex bundle of values around a kiss from Lauren Bacall higher than two “no-name” kisses even if they are functionally more pleasant in the moment.
To make a stronger statement, there is "actual" value, it's just that people are bad at describing it. Many people will go to Starbucks every day because "they like it" and that's about as good an explanation as you can get out of them. But they didn't just wake up one day and decide they were going to like Starbucks.
For me personally, I like the consistency of Starbucks. If you order the same drink at two different stores you'll get the same drink. This isn't something that a large corporation like that does on accident. It requires a lot of effort to get that consistency. And it's just one of the many reasons someone will like Starbucks without recognizing it's one of the reasons.
People similarly like Apple products for reasons that sound vague ("it's easier to use") but which are not an accident. Apple is highly vertically integrated to ensure many of those reasons. It's no coincidence that Tesla is also vertically integrated.
Just curious, do you disagree with this?
Tastes differ, but we're talking about marketing, and I tend agree with the parent post that Tesla's marketing around their cars is much better than the production quality or design of the cars.
I agree that people don't pick products based on their objective goodness. However, this doesn't mean they're picking objectively bad products or being "taken advantage of" either. Or at least not in these examples.
Do you really want to say that one flavor or brand of beverage is objectively tastier than another, or that people shouldn't care about what it tastes like? Or maybe they just like the shape of the bottle. Is that wrong?
Or take cars. There are a lot of objective measurements you can make, but no objective way to decide on how much these features should matter or whether they are worth the cost. Some people care about having better-than-usual acceleration or a more luxurious interior, and others don't. Some people care about fuel efficiency only to save money, others want to do their part to help save the environment even if it costs more. Some people buy cars based on the image they want to project. None of these things are objectively wrong.
I'd reserve "being taken advantage of" for cases where people thought they were buying one thing and got another, not where they're making choices based on different goals.
(No, I don't drink Red Bull or drive a Tesla.)
Then there is 'selection' which is picking the 'best' product in a competitive landscape. Here I'm not convinced even Tech has this captured. If I am shopping for cars, for example, I might get a Tesla Ad (they do have a few AdWords) but the technology showing me that AD isn't optimizing for me, it's optimizing for a click-through or maybe a conversion which are different things. Maybe you look at me, my income, my driving needs and say hey - look, maybe you want to go with like a Kia Crossover over a Model S. A Model S would be fairly financially irresponsible given your income. The money saved with a crossover would equal $XX,XXX by the time little Bobby is ready for college. And what about those camping trips? You occasionally drive further than the expected range anyway.
Right now if I want to compute the TOC of a Tesla vs a Kia given what I usually drive in a year minus the tax incentives or whatever I'd have to bust out excel and spend a few hours. This isn't sexy. This isn't what advertising used to be, but if they want to do the math for me I'd pay attention to that way more than that I do AdWords.