Oh hey, let's talk about advertising!
Advertising doesn't work. Or rather, it doesn't work at doing the job it kind of wants you to think it does. There are a TON of studies on this subject, but the basic idea is that ads aren't very good at changing your behaviour, but are good at reinforcing it.
The return rate on advertising is ... noisy. Clumsy at best. A favourite example is that Dulux ran a FANTASTICALLY successful (as in audiences responded by all tested metrics) ad campaign featuring a big English Sheep Dog
(don't google the dulux dog)
These ads were outrageously successful. They worked super well. By every metric the ads can be measured, they hit their audience, they were retained, they stuck in the memory, they were well liked and they were associated with the brand. Dulux's sale of paint were not affected at all, in the areas they were using these ads vs the areas they weren't.
Sales of English sheepdogs tripled.
It's not that advertising can't have an impact ,it's just that because you and I and everyone you've ever met live in a marination of non-stop advertising on every level, they are noise we are surprisingly good at ignoring. There are two models of advertising that seem reasonably useful:
- Advertising that engages you in a space you already exist (showing you a show on a channel you watch that you might like; Spotify recommendations, 'coming up' tv ads)
- Advertising that makes the product normal.
If apple spends a million dollars so let's say Jeff Winger uses an iphone, this doesn't tend to make you go 'Oh, I should use that phone because he is handsome' you tend to go 'oh yeah, phones exist.'
(he's using a blackberry)
Now, that other vector, advertising that engages you in an existing space, that's what facebook wants to do and it wants to do it BY YOUR FRIENDS. Showing you ads isn't as good as showing you ads your friends like. Because that legitimises it, and puts it into your space, and then, in order to talk to them about it, you need to watch it to engage with them. And you like your friends, so why not?
So the advertisers aren't selling to you. They are not selling you the product. They are selling advertisements to people who buy advertisements. And that means that they have these perverse incentives where it doesn't matter if these ads get you to buy the thing, what matters is that they can prove the ads were good value. And you might think 'surely those things are related' buy they are really not. And that's why you get this bizarre behaviour as it relates to advertisements and where they put them and how. Being cute and innovative and engaging is super valuable and then everyone runs things into the ground and when the campaign doesn't succeed they don't care because they already got paid.
The fear we had was advertising would work like mind control for products.
The real fear should be that advertising makes us think of capitalism itself as normal.
