Sometimes I feel like throwing up when I hear more stories about advertising, advertising and more advertising. It's such a sad trend. Either people want to make money advertising things directly or our best engineers work for companies that provide advertising. There is so much potential lost with all the effort going into advertising instead of producing products that make the world better.
> There is so much potential lost with all the effort going into advertising instead of producing products that make the world better.
Devil's advocate / on the other hand: there's so much potential lost with all the effort going into producing products that make the world better, but which fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising.
They fall flat because they aren't keeping up with poorly made products that have all their budgets put into advertising.
We can keep flipping this as long as we want. At the end of the day, it sucks that companies get a bigger (short-term) reward by dumping more into advertising and marketing than into the product itself.
I’m curious about all these world changing wonder products that just aren’t popular because a marketing agency wasn’t involved in manipulating... I mean educating the public.
While advocating the use of Open Source software at a fairly large corporation I used to work at, a common refrain was "You get what you paid for" I eventually started replying to that with "So we get marketing, and lunches with sales teams?" It actually worked a bit.
I would suggest a minor adjustment, they fall flat due to a lack of visibility and public acceptance. Advertising is only one such way to achieve that. Unfortunately advertising is capital-driven and there is only partial overlap of products that make the world better and capital. There is also a significant amount of overlap between products that don't make the world better and capital.
There are two ways to fix this problem, one is to find ways to drive more capital to products that make the world better, the other is to find better ways to drive visibility and acceptance that don't revolve around capital.
I think this is because people do what's comfortable for them. A lot of technical founders don't want to go outside of their comfort zone when that's exactly what they need to do to help their product succeed AND grow as a person.
Edit: This regards all forms of product promotion, not just paid ads.
That wouldn't be so much a problem if there wasn't already such an extreme level of advertising of shitty products to begin with.
It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising".
What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"
This is actually another reason why advertising is bad. The reason why those hypothetical products would "fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising" is because of the noise created by other advertisers. Cut that noise out, and suddenly very little would be needed to effectively communicate to people about new products.
Yeah, but I guess it could be worse... they could be working on "civilian control systems" in the "defense" industry. Now they just spy, FUD, astroturf, and Psyop for brands and corporations. Govts and lobbyists can hire them!
It's probably best not to discuss crypto-coinage in this context.
"Yeah, but I guess it could be worse... they could be working on "civilian control systems" in the "defense" industry. "
They are working very hard on building up the infrastructure and technology needed for total population control. The needs of an advertising company and an authoritarian government are very similar.
I think online advertising is mostly a hoax, with very few exceptions. I usually dismiss anything that remotely resembles an ad and just shut it off, even if it was really interesting. So I tend to think that the companies that pay for ads online are the ones paying for the cost of browsing the Internet for free, so I hate ads a bit less after that :)
I know this isn't what you mean to emphasize, but this reads a bit as "only products and services no one on the internet hears about are not a hoax". Of course you know it's more nuanced than that, but your comment makes your worldview seem narrower than you probably intended.
Counterpoint: How much innovation has been incentivized due to so many internet services being free while being subsidized by ads.
It's definitely a nuisance, and left unchecked can become a Black Mirror or Maniac-esque nightmare. But in it's current format it still feels like a worthwhile exchange.
I don’t know. It would be difficult to quantify. But, personally, I don’t think, for example, the web has improved much in the Web 2.0 era. It might be worse.
I think so too. MySpace and Friendster already connected people and since the first version I don't think Gmail has improved much. Most current changes seem to be more about making products more addictive but not necessarily more useful.
The internet services themselves are almost completely nonsense that we could do without. It's difficult for me to think of a single ad-based website or application that serves a purpose outside of its' own self propagation.
The knock-on effects of circulating money for development work into new languages/libraries/frameworks might well be.
Something worth remembering whenever these discussions come up, is that for a large number of people, including me at the time, that is too much money to spare.
Well, consider that in that case, the fact that advertising enabled you to view the site is a fluke that will probably be extinguished eventually.
If you have literally zero money, even to spend on activities with high expected future return, your value to an advertiser is zero, and eventually they'll figure out how to not waste resources on you.
The correct answer to poverty is not 'make the world a bit shittier for everyone and hope it balances out'.
(As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)
> (As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)
A lot of the best content on the Internet is hosted by its own creators, paid out of their own pocket, out of willingness to share the knowledge.
I run a collaborative writing forum for mostly a pre-teen and teen demographic. It's the ilk of what got me into writing as a young one. They don't have money to spend, but ads keep the forum alive.
It would be extreme to say my forum has nothing to offer these youngsters, or that my lone banner-ad eclipses any good my forum may be doing.
As ads die, we're just going to continue witnessing the centralization of the internet which surely isn't all that great, either.
Well, the forum costs $250-300+/month. Ads on the same forum used to give me $3,000/mo back in the day which bought me time to enrich the forum. Now they only cover $200/mo at best, so I'm left paying $100+/mo out of pocket. It's not just server costs, but database costs and ancillary services like S3 hosting/bandwidth, $20/mo to CloudFlare, and more. And, most of all, the amount of my own time that I expend to run it all. Not to mention the constant anxiety of "is it still online" I always have in the back of my head.
Everyone's charity has a limit. I consider shutting it down all the time but it becomes hard when I browse my own forum watching people connecting and writing. And losing money on this forum over the years is one of the sacrifices I've made which accelerated my return from the beaches of Thailand. Sometimes I look at that with regret. The forum cost more than my rent.
Using off-the-shelf software like vBulletin/Xenforo is expensive. You end up throwing money at scaling issues because it's essentially a black box.
I ended up migrating to my own software to wrestle control over costs. But it was an incredible amount of work to rebuild a popular forum from scratch. I could do it because I was in my mid-20s living off savings in Thailand. But I'm not, anymore, and I'm left throwing money at scaling issues again because it's hard to commit serious engineering work to something that isn't a profitable venture. The opportunity cost is huge.
I know a lot of people working to make the world better, that have had to move onto other things because they lack an understanding of advertising. In fact most people I meet who strongly desire to serve others almost completely misunderstand how advertising works. Working to make the world better shouldn't be mutually exclusive to understanding advertising, but often seems to be.
>And I know a lot of people working to make the world better, that have had to move onto other things because they lack an understanding of advertising.
It would be fair to say this is tied pretty tightly to lack of business skills.
I think most of us expect that on the "Most Admired/Least Admired Scale" marketers clump towards the bottom, not the top.
There are plenty of failed KickStarters/GoFundMe's to peruse, but this is endemic among non-profits. While many do NOT offer services that could be self-supporting, many others could be, but there is insufficient business or advertising understanding to pursue being successfully self-supporting.
Among inventors, many pursue licensing or finding large partners (a reasonable idea, as far as it goes), but I've seen some pretty ridiculous advertising attempts.
But the real gold mine is from the files of marketing consultants working with teachers/service providers. Only some clients are in the "trying to make the world a better place" category, but many overlap that. Here's where you really find the greatest numbers of admirable folks very out of their depth at marketing.
> Working to make the world better shouldn't be mutually exclusive to understanding advertising, but often seems to be.
From what I've observed, working to make the world better isn't mutually exclusive with understanding advertising, but is strongly anticorrelated with wanting to do it. People who think about making the world better tend to understand that advertising is a cancer on society.
You see this alot on FB, “tag 10 friends in this ad to enter a draw” kind of thing. It is one of the reasons that social media is poisonous to genuine human relationships.
I have this vague suspicion that social media will die out with our generation because of this.
It came along when we were all high school/college or so, and this big platform to refind old contacts was a surprising new experience.
Then all of collectively went into the workforce and suddenly had public images to manage and so the whole thing very quickly became yet another advertising channel via tragedy of the commons.
Reconnecting with old acquaintances is just one (outdated, as you mention) use case of social media. They have become much more subversive (and profitable) as media/advertising engines.
They'll survive as long as companies are willing to put money into advertising and enough people are influenced by (not even "suckered by") the ads. So basically forever.
I have never, ever seen anything like that on Facebook, at least not in years, though I know it exists. But I use
tools to curate my feed pretty aggressively.
So nanoinfluencers are people with small following on social media that are given free products in return of advertisement.
Reminds me a type of sponsorship in sports and hobbies. The brands or shops select some individuals and give them access to their collection at advantageous price (say -30% of retail price, but not free), in exchange of simply wearing or using the stuff. Similar idea of "influencers" as advertisement platforms.
Next step: startup providing an API for influencers as a service.
There has to be a point of saturation where the culture as a whole turns back to some version of authenticity. Clearly it's not going to be the millennials, perhaps the next generation will figure it out.
I think in every generation there are those who turn their back on it all. This has been going on since at least the 60's with the Hippie movement. Counterculture has been a thing since (psychological[1]) advertising has been a thing.
There will be no point at which society as a whole flips against it - the sad truth is that advertising works, really well, and most people happily sign up to this lifestyle. The war for your headspace is a hell of a lot better than the wars that came before it.
The 'woke' (or whatever term you'd prefer) generation is never coming - but there will be people within every generation that turn their back on advertising and the promises it makes.
1: As in advertising that targets our desire to be happy/powerful etc. rather than merely describing the product. Watch Century of the Self documentary for more information on how this form of advertising came to be.
If anyone is looking for a "picoinfluencer" opportunity, my fantasy football team is seeking a new sponsor. There are 9 other 24-32 year old tech workers in the league and my team is currently 8-2.
I’m really concerned that I never heard of those brands before. Besides the obvious annoyance caused by these ads, is there any guarantee those no-name products (as far as I’m aware none of them are a household brand at least not in the UK) are safe?
I can see shady fly-by-night operations using these “influencers” to shill their dangerous & non-compliant shit and possibly get people hurt. Sure, they can also be buying conventional ads but (I hope) most people are wise enough not to fall for them or at least carry out due diligence where as it being posted by a “friend” (I’d say anyone that sells out their followers isn’t really a friend) inherently gives it legitimacy.
We’ve already got this situation with multi-level marketing schemes using social media to shill their garbage (most is crap, and some is outright dangerous with multiple reports of nasty side-effects) and con new victims, I’d rather not see this expand even more.
Clinique is not a no name product by any stretch of the imagination. They've been going since the sixties and their products are available on pretty much any UK high-street. I guess you're not the target market for mid-high end skin care products?
It's crazy how advertising has evolved. First, advertisers were somewhat honest about their products, generally relying on Smith's little theory that buyers are rational and can thus be convinced by a strong argument about the qualities of the product. Then at some point (w/ the dawn of Western snakeoil/ cure-alls?) advertisers figured out purchasers aren't so rational after all and are better convinced by psychological manipulation--targeting their weaknesses, showing them images that associate the product with happy families, etc. Now advertisers go a level deeper. Instead of suggesting some general association between happiness and their product, they can target you at the personal level and have your friends and relations (often the closest people to you psychologically speaking) serve as manipulation relays. No need to figure out some general fear or desire in the populace that you can target--just make it seem like the product is already embedded in the buyer's world. Like his friends are the direct representatives of its efficacy and the happiness it will bring.
It's moved onto dopamine triggers of course, but even simple website "stickiness" I think may be an example of the kind of embedding you mention. Engage long enough and when the brain says "I engage with this site" it becomes self-fulfilling and engagement has no set end point.
From what I've heard the "some point" was primarily a result of one man Edward Louis Bernays, who lead the charge towards these somewhat predatory practices, effectively inventing modern public relations and advertising. There was a really interesting ( and comical ) podcast about it from the folks at Stuff You Should Know:
> targeting their weaknesses, showing them images that associate the product with happy families, etc.
This part is explored really well in The Century of Self documentary. It describes how Madison Avenue used new psychology concepts and Baby Boomer individualism to invent modern advertising.
First Thought:
Noticed that the NYT is listed as a client on Obviously's site, the main influencer marketing agency mentioned in the piece and can't help but wonder if there is a behind the scenes PR play going on here. There's certainly some journalist merit to the article but without any disclosure that the paper and the company have / do work together it just doesn't feel 100% above board to me.
Second thought:
At the risk of falling down a slippery slope, what is the end result of the advertisification of everything? If everyone with any sort of social presence is now a billboard that's going to erode what little "trust" there is in social networks even further. At some point this is going to take down the "review economy" - the Yelps, Foursquare, etc of the world because you won't know who's leaving a review and who's a local nano-influencer posting to get their monthly free meal.
Reminds me of the "ad buddies" from the Netflix show Maniac except instead of seeking them out they seek you out.
There is no firm difference between “advertising” and “the media” and there never has been. Only varying levels of forthcomingness regarding intent. Burger King is trying to sell you hamburgers - no confusion there. A newspaper? Less clear of what they’re trying to sell you, but don’t doubt it for a second - they’re selling you something.
The NY Times in particular has tried to portray themselves as independent and unbiased, when they’ve been anything but for essentially their entire history.
There is a fundamental difference between journalism and advertising.
When you see people advancing this point of view it's always worth pausing to notice and reflect on who benefits from efforts to erode this distinction.
You think media organizations aren’t trying to push a particular narrative? They’ve been doing this since yellow journalism, Hearst and Pulitzer over a hundred years ago. Every side of the political spectrum does this.
"Pushing a particular narrative" or generally having a point of view is not the same thing as advertising.
It's undeniable that there are biases and preferences in journalism, and that there's no such thing as a truly objective point of view. Journalism is made by humans.
But that's a fundamentally different argument than equating advertising with journalism. They aren't the same. Fact-checked reported journalism that attempts to be objective is fundamentally a different thing.
And it's also a factual statement to say that there is an organized effort to obscure this difference, and that this effort benefits specific groups.
If a media organization is fully user supported then they are separate. The problem, at least in US media, our media is almost completely advertising supported. The editors of the organization always have to be mindful of upsetting the people that actually pay for the service. This can put a deep and hidden bias in the reporting structure.
I consider that the earliest strain of this thought that I am aware of is from Noam Chomsky, who wrote in 1988 the book Manufacturing Consent [1]. There is also the 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman [2].
I think it is fair to say the clarion call of "Fake News" has been around longer than some people think and spans across the political spectrum. In fact, when I hear people insist that CNN or some other mass-media outlets are the cure for alt-right and/or Donald Trump, I wonder if they remember the time not so long ago where they were considered the prime enemies of the left.
This happens because news agencies realized that the original definition of NEWS isn't a viable business model. If I were a reported of a news agency that followed the traditional news model - I'd be saying something like "Hey, this happened here at this time." Because that's the original definition of NEWS (North East West South).
However, over time, news agencies realized the potential of injecting opinions into NEWS as real news. "Hey, here's what we think of what happened at this place at this time. Here's what you should be thinking too" Suddenly, they can do things they couldn't do before:
1. Change the direction of what you should be thinking about.
2. Change the tone of the opinion to reflect positivity or negativity.
3. Masquerade wrongful events as right ones by parallel justifications and unneeded context.
4. Masquerade advertisements as opinions.
5. Derive strong reactions from readers thus increasing engagement.
And this gives them enormous power over us. THIS is their business model - the ability to control (us) a given set of people.
For eg., that's why Facebook is powerful. The value they add to their investors and advertisers isn't being able to connect with everyone and anyone. Instead, they can use their newsfeed to tune what you should be thinking about, how and when exactly. All those reactions they collect, is to fine tune exactly these parameters.
Imagine being able to change your mind or distract you around election time. How valuable is it to governments? I'm not saying they do these things, but then this is the weapon the media (Facebook, Yahoo, etc.) possesses and they could/could have been doing these things to control us.
So, this is what the newspapers are selling.
So, when Yahoo writes "Hey Apple suxxx here's why you should be buying an Android phone instead", you know it's a slow day for them and they just want to increase their engagement and ad revenue. That and probably they took money from some Android maker behind the scenes (this happens all the time).
Today's media landscape is more diverse and independent than ever before. This is why I can read 16 reviews about a video game then watch 50 more.
All individual actors have agendas and flaws. Maybe a harsher review is produced on a bad day, but that doesn't inherently mean the reviewer is on the take.
Don't confuse media, the obvious medium, with journalism, the content, that is how propaganda is mislabeled and spread.
Examples 1 and 2 could be raw opinion rooted in fact that the reader disagrees with or could be propaganda. Heavily dependent on the context and source.
Examples 3 and 5 are stated in the negative and perceived as propaganda, but where does rightful reporting end and 'unneeded context' start? When the reader begins to disagree? Again heavily dependent on the context and source.
Example 4 is a paid endorsement, exactly what should be expected in a capitalist system.
Once upon a time newspapers were trying to sell you more newspapers by being a good source of news and journalism, generally.
TV news used to be a loss leader until the past 20 years or so. You could see essentially the same news regardless of what channel you preferred. Now the world looks completely different depending on what source you consume.
It's a relatively recent phenomenon that news has been corrupted by advertising, clickbait and catering to specific audiences as they fight for smaller and smaller pieces of the pie.
Traditionally in the newspaper business advertising revenue paid for paper, ink, printing and distribution, and sales of the paper itself paid for journalism. Cut off the latter and what’s left?
I recently cancelled my sub to the NYT after nearly 20 years; now they are trying to tempt me back with the slogan “debate, not division”. But they still employ guys like Charlie Blow who just vomit bile across the page to drive more clicks so that’s a no from me. In retrospect they have been on the decline for years, and paying customers like me saw no fewer ads and were subjected to no less tracking than free readers.
On the back of Carryrou’s work on Theranos I have a sub to WSJ now. I am totally willing to pay for content, but I won’t tolerate piss-taking.
I was working with a guy who came from let say “disruptive car company”. He really laid out and explained that almost all “news” you see in the NYT, WaPo, etc about big companies was designed to first and foremost effect a stock price. When you see “charismatic company leader does X” it was a directed move to effect some stock. That at his company he was in the marketing, PR, and finance co-op that did exactly this.
Laid out just how much everything is manipulated. So yes, I believe that if you are reading an NYT about this and the target happens to be advertisers on NYT, that’s not an accident, nor is it speaking highly of NYT’s journalism standards.
Probably nowadays Instagram is the medium that shows more "ads", considering the number of users that publish "promoted" content. It reminds me those fashion magazines that show like 130 pages of ads in 150 pages.
It's kinda sad to see people promoting stuff in exchange for some free samples, just so they can call themselves "influencers". I'm wondering if people are not getting tired of all of this fakeness.
Humans are strongly wired to evaluate differences between humans, and advertisers are skilled at creating the signals that humans use to evaluate.
But they don't have to work too hard. "Influencers" can be created virtually out of thin air. Simply say "this is an influencer", and in the absence of contrary signals many people will treat them as such.
(We've all heard of a NOT famous person hiring friends to pretend to be paparazzi when they go out somewhere, fooling people who see them, being introduced to someone "famous" that we've never heard of, etc., etc.)
I wonder if having sponsors also lends legitimacy to these influencers. Before they were just someone with some followers, but now they have corporate recognition.
This is not that different from the people who are told to post on Insta and FB after they've received a service: styling at a hair salon, nails, makeup; it's not even that far from posting on their own accord after they've been to a restaurant or concert.
The meaningful difference is in the former case, the revealed preferences are swayed by the exchange of money and may not authentically reflect the person's true opinion, whereas in the latter case the revealed preferences are swayed solely by social convention (and may not authentically reflect the person's true opinion).
This group at Princeton conducted a study into whether influencers disclose their relationships with advertisers to users. Turns out the vast majority do not. Interesting read.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadDevil's advocate / on the other hand: there's so much potential lost with all the effort going into producing products that make the world better, but which fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising.
We can keep flipping this as long as we want. At the end of the day, it sucks that companies get a bigger (short-term) reward by dumping more into advertising and marketing than into the product itself.
I’m curious about all these world changing wonder products that just aren’t popular because a marketing agency wasn’t involved in manipulating... I mean educating the public.
Edit: This regards all forms of product promotion, not just paid ads.
It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising".
What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"
It's probably best not to discuss crypto-coinage in this context.
They are working very hard on building up the infrastructure and technology needed for total population control. The needs of an advertising company and an authoritarian government are very similar.
And if the targeted advertising isn’t detected? Isn’t the whole topic here to advertise in a way that doesn’t seem like a website banner ad?
It's definitely a nuisance, and left unchecked can become a Black Mirror or Maniac-esque nightmare. But in it's current format it still feels like a worthwhile exchange.
The internet services themselves are almost completely nonsense that we could do without. It's difficult for me to think of a single ad-based website or application that serves a purpose outside of its' own self propagation.
The knock-on effects of circulating money for development work into new languages/libraries/frameworks might well be.
I'm rather glad I could skype my brother in Japan even when I couldn't afford international call rates.
And so on...
In my experience the sites which you pay a small monthly fee ($5-10) to are far superior
If you have literally zero money, even to spend on activities with high expected future return, your value to an advertiser is zero, and eventually they'll figure out how to not waste resources on you.
The correct answer to poverty is not 'make the world a bit shittier for everyone and hope it balances out'.
(As an aside, I also used to have ~no money, and can't really say I required ad-based sites to learn. I just pirated it all, used sites without advertising, used IRC, etc. I think this idea that everything has to be ad-supported is quite a modern phenomenon.)
A lot of the best content on the Internet is hosted by its own creators, paid out of their own pocket, out of willingness to share the knowledge.
I run a collaborative writing forum for mostly a pre-teen and teen demographic. It's the ilk of what got me into writing as a young one. They don't have money to spend, but ads keep the forum alive.
It would be extreme to say my forum has nothing to offer these youngsters, or that my lone banner-ad eclipses any good my forum may be doing.
As ads die, we're just going to continue witnessing the centralization of the internet which surely isn't all that great, either.
It's hard for me to get a sense of scale here, I wouldn't have thought that this sort of thing would require more than a token level of resources.
Everyone's charity has a limit. I consider shutting it down all the time but it becomes hard when I browse my own forum watching people connecting and writing. And losing money on this forum over the years is one of the sacrifices I've made which accelerated my return from the beaches of Thailand. Sometimes I look at that with regret. The forum cost more than my rent.
Using off-the-shelf software like vBulletin/Xenforo is expensive. You end up throwing money at scaling issues because it's essentially a black box.
I ended up migrating to my own software to wrestle control over costs. But it was an incredible amount of work to rebuild a popular forum from scratch. I could do it because I was in my mid-20s living off savings in Thailand. But I'm not, anymore, and I'm left throwing money at scaling issues again because it's hard to commit serious engineering work to something that isn't a profitable venture. The opportunity cost is huge.
I wish you the best of luck.
Such as? I can’t seem to think of any examples.
I think most of us expect that on the "Most Admired/Least Admired Scale" marketers clump towards the bottom, not the top.
There are plenty of failed KickStarters/GoFundMe's to peruse, but this is endemic among non-profits. While many do NOT offer services that could be self-supporting, many others could be, but there is insufficient business or advertising understanding to pursue being successfully self-supporting.
Among inventors, many pursue licensing or finding large partners (a reasonable idea, as far as it goes), but I've seen some pretty ridiculous advertising attempts.
But the real gold mine is from the files of marketing consultants working with teachers/service providers. Only some clients are in the "trying to make the world a better place" category, but many overlap that. Here's where you really find the greatest numbers of admirable folks very out of their depth at marketing.
From what I've observed, working to make the world better isn't mutually exclusive with understanding advertising, but is strongly anticorrelated with wanting to do it. People who think about making the world better tend to understand that advertising is a cancer on society.
It came along when we were all high school/college or so, and this big platform to refind old contacts was a surprising new experience.
Then all of collectively went into the workforce and suddenly had public images to manage and so the whole thing very quickly became yet another advertising channel via tragedy of the commons.
Reconnecting with old acquaintances is just one (outdated, as you mention) use case of social media. They have become much more subversive (and profitable) as media/advertising engines.
They'll survive as long as companies are willing to put money into advertising and enough people are influenced by (not even "suckered by") the ads. So basically forever.
Children will go online looking for toy or game reviews not knowing even their friends have sold them out for a couple bucks.
Still, strength is probably more important as a child.
Reminds me a type of sponsorship in sports and hobbies. The brands or shops select some individuals and give them access to their collection at advantageous price (say -30% of retail price, but not free), in exchange of simply wearing or using the stuff. Similar idea of "influencers" as advertisement platforms.
Next step: startup providing an API for influencers as a service.
The much maligned "Klout" was an early form of this but cratered for dumb reasons.
There has to be a point of saturation where the culture as a whole turns back to some version of authenticity. Clearly it's not going to be the millennials, perhaps the next generation will figure it out.
There will be no point at which society as a whole flips against it - the sad truth is that advertising works, really well, and most people happily sign up to this lifestyle. The war for your headspace is a hell of a lot better than the wars that came before it.
The 'woke' (or whatever term you'd prefer) generation is never coming - but there will be people within every generation that turn their back on advertising and the promises it makes.
1: As in advertising that targets our desire to be happy/powerful etc. rather than merely describing the product. Watch Century of the Self documentary for more information on how this form of advertising came to be.
I can see shady fly-by-night operations using these “influencers” to shill their dangerous & non-compliant shit and possibly get people hurt. Sure, they can also be buying conventional ads but (I hope) most people are wise enough not to fall for them or at least carry out due diligence where as it being posted by a “friend” (I’d say anyone that sells out their followers isn’t really a friend) inherently gives it legitimacy.
We’ve already got this situation with multi-level marketing schemes using social media to shill their garbage (most is crap, and some is outright dangerous with multiple reports of nasty side-effects) and con new victims, I’d rather not see this expand even more.
Agreed, but the rest of my point still stands. I feel there’s a lot of potential for abuse here.
It's wild.
https://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/live-in-chicago-...
This part is explored really well in The Century of Self documentary. It describes how Madison Avenue used new psychology concepts and Baby Boomer individualism to invent modern advertising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self
Second thought: At the risk of falling down a slippery slope, what is the end result of the advertisification of everything? If everyone with any sort of social presence is now a billboard that's going to erode what little "trust" there is in social networks even further. At some point this is going to take down the "review economy" - the Yelps, Foursquare, etc of the world because you won't know who's leaving a review and who's a local nano-influencer posting to get their monthly free meal.
Reminds me of the "ad buddies" from the Netflix show Maniac except instead of seeking them out they seek you out.
The NY Times in particular has tried to portray themselves as independent and unbiased, when they’ve been anything but for essentially their entire history.
There is a fundamental difference between journalism and advertising.
When you see people advancing this point of view it's always worth pausing to notice and reflect on who benefits from efforts to erode this distinction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_controver...
> When you see people advancing this point of view...
This is an ad hominem and not an argument.
It's undeniable that there are biases and preferences in journalism, and that there's no such thing as a truly objective point of view. Journalism is made by humans.
But that's a fundamentally different argument than equating advertising with journalism. They aren't the same. Fact-checked reported journalism that attempts to be objective is fundamentally a different thing.
And it's also a factual statement to say that there is an organized effort to obscure this difference, and that this effort benefits specific groups.
If a media organization is fully user supported then they are separate. The problem, at least in US media, our media is almost completely advertising supported. The editors of the organization always have to be mindful of upsetting the people that actually pay for the service. This can put a deep and hidden bias in the reporting structure.
Journalism and advertising are both products (distinct as they are) being sold thru the same media, e.g. a newspaper or a 30-minute cable TV timeslot.
I think it is fair to say the clarion call of "Fake News" has been around longer than some people think and spans across the political spectrum. In fact, when I hear people insist that CNN or some other mass-media outlets are the cure for alt-right and/or Donald Trump, I wonder if they remember the time not so long ago where they were considered the prime enemies of the left.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
However, over time, news agencies realized the potential of injecting opinions into NEWS as real news. "Hey, here's what we think of what happened at this place at this time. Here's what you should be thinking too" Suddenly, they can do things they couldn't do before:
1. Change the direction of what you should be thinking about.
2. Change the tone of the opinion to reflect positivity or negativity.
3. Masquerade wrongful events as right ones by parallel justifications and unneeded context.
4. Masquerade advertisements as opinions.
5. Derive strong reactions from readers thus increasing engagement.
And this gives them enormous power over us. THIS is their business model - the ability to control (us) a given set of people.
For eg., that's why Facebook is powerful. The value they add to their investors and advertisers isn't being able to connect with everyone and anyone. Instead, they can use their newsfeed to tune what you should be thinking about, how and when exactly. All those reactions they collect, is to fine tune exactly these parameters.
Imagine being able to change your mind or distract you around election time. How valuable is it to governments? I'm not saying they do these things, but then this is the weapon the media (Facebook, Yahoo, etc.) possesses and they could/could have been doing these things to control us.
So, this is what the newspapers are selling.
So, when Yahoo writes "Hey Apple suxxx here's why you should be buying an Android phone instead", you know it's a slow day for them and they just want to increase their engagement and ad revenue. That and probably they took money from some Android maker behind the scenes (this happens all the time).
/endrant
Anytime you hear that a word is derived from an unusual contraction or acronym, please check it against a real etymology source.
Huh? News is just the plural form of the word new.
All individual actors have agendas and flaws. Maybe a harsher review is produced on a bad day, but that doesn't inherently mean the reviewer is on the take.
Don't confuse media, the obvious medium, with journalism, the content, that is how propaganda is mislabeled and spread.
Examples 1 and 2 could be raw opinion rooted in fact that the reader disagrees with or could be propaganda. Heavily dependent on the context and source.
Examples 3 and 5 are stated in the negative and perceived as propaganda, but where does rightful reporting end and 'unneeded context' start? When the reader begins to disagree? Again heavily dependent on the context and source.
Example 4 is a paid endorsement, exactly what should be expected in a capitalist system.
Also news isn't based on an acronym for cardinal directions. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/news-etymology/
TV news used to be a loss leader until the past 20 years or so. You could see essentially the same news regardless of what channel you preferred. Now the world looks completely different depending on what source you consume.
It's a relatively recent phenomenon that news has been corrupted by advertising, clickbait and catering to specific audiences as they fight for smaller and smaller pieces of the pie.
I recently cancelled my sub to the NYT after nearly 20 years; now they are trying to tempt me back with the slogan “debate, not division”. But they still employ guys like Charlie Blow who just vomit bile across the page to drive more clicks so that’s a no from me. In retrospect they have been on the decline for years, and paying customers like me saw no fewer ads and were subjected to no less tracking than free readers.
On the back of Carryrou’s work on Theranos I have a sub to WSJ now. I am totally willing to pay for content, but I won’t tolerate piss-taking.
Laid out just how much everything is manipulated. So yes, I believe that if you are reading an NYT about this and the target happens to be advertisers on NYT, that’s not an accident, nor is it speaking highly of NYT’s journalism standards.
(we used to jokingly refer to the article body as "seo ballast")
It's kinda sad to see people promoting stuff in exchange for some free samples, just so they can call themselves "influencers". I'm wondering if people are not getting tired of all of this fakeness.
But they don't have to work too hard. "Influencers" can be created virtually out of thin air. Simply say "this is an influencer", and in the absence of contrary signals many people will treat them as such.
(We've all heard of a NOT famous person hiring friends to pretend to be paparazzi when they go out somewhere, fooling people who see them, being introduced to someone "famous" that we've never heard of, etc., etc.)
The meaningful difference is in the former case, the revealed preferences are swayed by the exchange of money and may not authentically reflect the person's true opinion, whereas in the latter case the revealed preferences are swayed solely by social convention (and may not authentically reflect the person's true opinion).
https://medium.com/acm-cscw/was-this-an-ad-an-investigation-...