The ABC's of a benign conspiracy
#1 in an ongoing series.
A brief introduction: I spent several years, across multiple platforms of both blog and newsletter, writing “Attention Industry”. The name and idea were based on the concept that I worked in a melange of interconnected categories across media, marketing, entertainment and education that were all fighting for one thing: as much human attention as possible. I recently (a couple of months back) stopped writing about the Attention Industry, in large part because I stopped believing in it as a viable framework for thinking abut the communications landscape. All that to say, this is a new thing, but it’s fundamentally an evolution of the last thing.
Welcome, to a benign conspiracy.
I’ll explain what that is momentarily, but first I think I should offer some background.
Modern digital marketing is going to be the thing that kills advertising. In large part because we (people who do marketing communications things) continue to fall for any attempt to pretend the two ideas are interchangeable rather than at least partially in conflict.
(This is likely where you accuse me of being a luddite. I’ll give you a second.)
I remember the earlyish days of digital marketing shifting it’s conversation from performance tracking to audience targeting, around the time social media started becoming mainstream. In an attempt to pull ever more dollars from more “traditional” media sources, the discussion moved from better metrics to perfected audiences - the latest in a long run of elusive solutions to the age old question of “which 50% of my marketing budget is wasted”.
I remember it because I was there, I was brand new and I believed with the holy fervor only available to the converted - social media was going to change the world, all of it, for the better.
The idea was simple - if you knew people well enough, if you understood their behaviour and needs, advertising would shift from being either irrelevant or an annoyance, to a service. You’d know when someone needing a new product, what their favourite brand was, and voila, they’d get a friendly reminder that today was the right day to get Crest toothpaste, and here’s a coupon to try some new mouthwash, too.
This was a great concept if you pretended that all companies exist to serve customers, rather than to profit from them. (Remember, I was young and naive.)
The reality is a little less friendly. It’s the same retargeted ad showing up everywhere for many consecutive days, despite the store not having your size in stock, because they can tell you came to a product page and left, but not why. It’s platforms learning that engagement is better fuelled by feeding you extreme, misleading content, because they focus on what gets people to keep watching, but again, don’t know why.
It’s what AI discussions sometimes refer to as a Paperclip Maximizer - a system with a goal, and zero interest in what it destroys or damages in pursuit of that goal.
The side effects, to say the least, have been interesting. There’s a decent argument to be made that in pursuit of maximizing engagement, clicks, and lower funnel sales, all in pursuit of maximizing digital ad revenue for (mostly) Facebook and Google, we’ve managed to seriously damage public discourse, democracy, media literacy, and the social fabric of the world. And I know someone wants to insist that we’re not really talking about the world, but I’d suggest you look at the impact YouTube has had on politics in Brazil, or the impact WhatsApp rumours have had in India. These are global issues, full stop.
The problem, for advertising specifically, is that we’re being used as the excuse and justification for all of this. The things happening to our society are happening in pursuit of money made primarily through selling advertising space around social posts, in the middle of videos, or leveraging the data assembled through social and shopping behaviours to aim display ads at people. Which means, not for the first time, we’re nearing a moment where people can make a compelling point that advertising is flat out evil.
This is the conflict - the reality of digital marketing in 2019, and the platforms that enable it, is the best justification for distrust and hatred of advertising as a concept, let alone as an industry.
Generally, these moments lead to great transformations in how advertising works. One of them was the creative revolution in the industry, partially in response to Vance Packard’s “The Hidden Persuaders” and the public reaction to it. I think we have a chance to have another one of those moments. But we need to actually acknowledge how precarious this current moment is for those of us in the world of communications.
So: a benign conspiracy.
I’m firm in my belief that advertising doesn’t have to be evil. It can be a positive force at best, but more often, it should be benign. Gentle, maybe even kind. Doing no harm in pursuit of it’s goals.
That said, it should also get things done. Generate interest. Inform. Move product. This requires a little bit of plotting and planning, nudging people and actions in the right direction.
That’s what I want to explore in this newsletter. Ways to get back to advertising being impactful, without necessarily being net-negative for society. I’d settle for going back to the days when the worst thing you heard about advertising was that a lot of it was crappy, but ideally I’d like to aim higher than that.
That’s what we’re going to be doing here. Hopefully you’re interested in seeing how that goes.