What's life like in advertising these days? When I was a child you could buy a commercial during the Saturday morning cartoons to sell your toy (or buy the whole cartoon) and you could put your car commercial on during the Evening News.
And you'd reach most of your "demographic."
But now? a maze of influencers and fragmented media (I don't think influencers really matter much, they are just the most familiar item in the new landscape for advertisers.)
The ability to hold a big audience in the millions of a predictable demographic is deeply sought after. To me that just seems like trying to wind the clock back to the 80s when things were simple.
Social media plays a huge role here, and that is exactly why I think we should promote the idea that advertising on social media is as rude as advertising at a funeral or bat mitzvah.
Oh and to be clear I don't really count someone selling things they made by talking about them, or saying "I wrote this book" or whatever as "offensive" advertising.
In fact, it is the only way that promotion should function along side people talking about stuff and criticism.
@futurebird advertising back in the day was heavy on correlative data to determine success.
Advertising today gives has more direct cause and affect traceability for ROAS (return on ad spend) especially in the form of online advertising, direct marketing, and SEO. Happy to dive deep into this stuff with you if you want.
However to be honest, as far as I know, all this "improvement" hasn't really lead to any sort of decrease in marketing spend as a function of gross revenue.
My soap boxy thing is that a lot of people in marketing departments today want to think they're being very quantitative but in reality they're really bad at it and lack a lot of functional skill. As a result a lot of departments no longer deep dive into customer personas and demographic focused messaging.
Everyone just wants to do scattershot marketing to hit kpis but pretend they're not.
Maaaaaaaaaaan, the early 2010s when the marketing department where I worked would tout followers on social media as something significant to ROI, and me catching an earful for chuckling about it in front of everyone, like, it was all vibes and no actual cradle to grave analysis of how a banner ad led to a 3 day booking.
@grumpasaurus @futurebird
To be fair, there's also the story of how someone (Uber?) halved their ad spend, bracing themselves to see what effect it had, and... nothing happened, there was no perceptible change
Apparently the more direct metrics were so dominated by fraud that they were meaningless
@grumpasaurus @sabik @futurebird From what I understand, half of advertising isn't even formally meant to be for direct buy-in, but in name recognition for when they needed it.
Which would explain why so many free services can survive on ad-revenue; "Yes, this person didn't want to spend money for the service I am providing, but they may want to buy your thing later - oh, is your thing also a service?"
@sabik @grumpasaurus @futurebird I would say the fraud is a different kettle of fish, yeah.
Though not moving the needle when you halve your spend feels like it's something that will take much longer to actually notice - since it's not like people *immediately* forget about your previous ads.
@sabik @grumpasaurus @futurebird “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”
- attributed to John Wanamaker (and a number of other people: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/04/11/advertising/)
I would be delighted if there were more restrictions on advertising:
* It should always be labeled "This is a paid advertisement."
* It should not target children, gamblers or make outlandish claims.
* It should not be on social media or built into apps.
* It should be subject to an obnoxious public review process.
Everything would just be better. People will pay for entertainment and games.
@futurebird @hjwp Also the "advertising" that people are blocking today is different from what "advertising" used to be. Fewer agency people, doing more ads each, means that each ad carries less info on brand quality and reputation, and it makes more sense to block them
A recent "favourite". An ad for an insurance company with someone shouting "we care about you", over and over again.
With the company name at beginning and end. Which I've forgotten.
True.
And it's become a harms race with support from a large branch of academic research in psychological tricks to manipulate attention and memory.
Along with the massive invasion of privacy to enable better "targeting". As in actual arms races.
I work in (community) #TV (Australia)
We have let out sales staff go.
We no longer rely on Advertising for main income. We do get some money from Government ads.
Our main income streams are now training and production.
We do some promotion of artists for festivals, but it's programming rather than ads (eg. Interviews)
Selling Ads was nearly impossible.
TV ads are dead, they just don't know it yet.
Advertising in corporate media has dropped to the point they are having trouble staying alive. Hence opportunities for Bezos to swoop them up. However, the major corporate media players are still in the hands of a half doz or so men with high, but declining influence. The real money is in the tech players with highly targeted ads, hence the need to steal your data and spy on you.
Journalism is having a really hard time finding a model that allows them to stay alive and independent.
@futurebird I listen to a lot of podcasts and, in the last two years specifically, the number of minutes spent advertising has at least doubled. I think there is a correlation with the 'end' of the pandemic, big companies sort of realized that there are no "everybody watches" platforms any more and seem to be scrambling.
I even get new ads when I relisten to old episodes of podcasts, so they are up cycling ads everytime!
I still think nothing that needs advertising is worth buying.
@Urban_Hermit @futurebird The good thing about podcast ads is you can fast forward them.
I don't use podcast apps. If there's no obvious download button, open developer tools, hit play button, grab the mp3 link and save. Almost always works.
If a news website puts up a paywall or subscription wall, refresh, CTRL A, CTRL C, flip to word processor, and paste. Surprisingly, most of them send the whole article and then block your ability to see it. This gets around that.
@futurebird Streaming services keep showing me ads for cars.
WTF?? I buy a car once every twenty or so years, I hope each year that it won't have to be this year, and when I do eventually need to buy a car the models, or even the brands, that have been advertised to me over the decades will no longer exist.
What *is* the point of showing me SEVERAL MINUTES of car ads every time I watch telly? Is the targeting really that bad? And it's not that they know when my car is finally going to break down, because it's been going on for years.
@futurebird I'm on the anti side of this. In 1999 I wrote an app called Ad Extinguisher. I cannot read while something is moving on the screen, so have gone to a lot of trouble over the years to avoid that. Have pretty well removed ads from my life, and as a result they really bug me when one does show up.
Advertising IMHO is a form of pollution. The first 10% might be useful, making you aware of something you want and don't know about. Past that it is an attack on the mental wellbeing of...
@futurebird the public. For example, if you are waiting, there are two ways to avoid waiting becoming suffering. You can either find something interesting to think about, or do the mindfulness thing and intentionally keep words out of your head.
Neither option is possible if there is an ad playing. Medical ads are the worst. Health fear is one of the worst mental states, and deliberately inducing that is just evil. When those ads are playing, I get out of the supermarket faster, and buy less.
@futurebird So to me the breakthrough would be finding a way to reach the public without causing annoyance or pain. If I am trying to find something online and an ad gets in the way, that is unpleasant.
However, I look through Slickdeals and Vine every day. Sometimes buy something too. Those are ads but I want to see them. How can we make advertising more like Slickdeals, and less like pop-ups on phones and shingles vaccine commercials in Ralphs?
myrmepropagandist
Allan Chow
Ciggy Bringer of Smoke
sabik
Alexander The 1st
Kennric
Harry Percival
BoxOfSnoo
Don Marti
Eric Lawton
Wulfy—Speaker to the machines
martijn
Chu 朱
Urban Hermit
mike805
Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE
A cool crab wearing shades