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I remember when I was an art director for a sports magazine and the publisher wanted stories written specifically to try and sell ads. For instance, one issue he wanted to do this huge feature on tailgating culture that would feature recipes and poo poo. The idea being that we could sell ads to grocery stores and places that sell grills. Another time he wanted us to do a feature on exercise, injuries and workout routines so we could sell ad space to gyms and rehab clinics. He even wanted a swimsuit issue (ugh) and pitched Venus Swimwear as a sponsor along with the bar that held the model contest. that was a low point. There were more examples but it wound up really loving with the integrity of our stories - for obvious reasons. If one of our writers had a good line on an athlete coming back from an injury or who had some tragic personal backstory, they didn't want to run it unless we could tie into an ad pitch, no matter good of a human interest story it was. I imagine this is pretty common actually but I found it demorazling
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Jan 18, 2021 13:41
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SMILLENNIALSMILLEN posted:i really enjoyed this vice article about SUVs and the advertising that pushes them. i know its not unique to cars but they dont just push the cars as being good choices if you want a car they build an entire self image of who you want to be and push the car as a keystone part of it. the words of the people behind the advertising campaign really drove home to me that you can tell a lot about the people who buy products by looking at the image of consumers portrayed in its advertising and imagining the real life consumer as the opposite of that. if a commercial features big tough guys who are not scared of anything getting things done, the intended customer is not big tough guys who are not scared of anything who get things done, its people who suspect they are not big or tough, that they are ineffectual, and they fear many things. it seems obvious now but it really made me look at advertising, and people in giant cars, in a different way. My observation, which I will happily frame as a question because there are people in here with actual experience from the producers' end whereas mine is entirely an (unwitting) consumer of advertising: With the general assumption that psychoanalysis and Freud are all bullshit (anyone who argues otherwise obviously just wants to bang their own mother and needs justification for it), does it seem like a vacuum has been left for those who apply its theories to advertising? And then, to our horror ITT, it actually works? I'm thinking about the SUV example quoted above, the use of sex in advertising, campaigns like the 'Got Milk?' thing and so on. Another example that springs to mind (prompted by the reference to bacon breakfasts above) is cake mixture: Allegedly when they were first released they were a 'just add water' that didn't sell well. Their psychoanalyst consultants suggested that women felt guilty about putting in so little work, so it was suggested that the manufacturers made it necessary to add eggs and milk, after which the product sold much better. In our general acceptance that Freud Was Wrong (after all, I definitely don't want to have sex with my mum, it still feels like his theories are being put into practice in advertising campaigns with some success.
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Jan 18, 2021 13:59
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The egg wasn't included because 1930s technology for the first cake mixes couldnt get powdered eggs to come out right, not that they did insane research into consumer behavior. In general, I don't know anyone outside creatives or people presenting to clients who dabble or claim to dabble into psychology or other fields. For clients, sure, come up with buzzwordy bullshit and rub it all over them because they love it, but for internal meetings, never. You look at the data and cross section and dice it and let it tell you whatever story it feels like telling you, the you act on it as appropriate. Then sometimes creative submits an ad so offensive that NBC sends you a formal letter to gently caress off and you wonder what the hell brief they were reading and who the hell at the client approved it.
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Jan 18, 2021 14:46
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Barudak posted:The egg wasn't included because 1930s technology for the first cake mixes couldnt get powdered eggs to come out right, not that they did insane research into consumer behavior. Do you have a reference for the eggs story? It seemed to me to be a documented thing that Betty Crocker consulted Edward Bernays, but I'm happy to be wrong. Thanks for the more up-to-date view. So do you think there has been a big break with the Bernays-era advertising where the focus was on playing to people's insecurities, letting them project desires onto an ad and then consuming a product based on that?
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Jan 18, 2021 15:15
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I have no reference for this, but I've always heard they removed the powdered egg from cake mix because people were grossed out and confused by not needing to add it themselves. Would be fascinated to learn otherwise.
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Jan 18, 2021 16:45
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Pastamania posted:If you measure by how many sales they directly generate from people clicking on them and buying things, Google Adwords. By, like, miles. It's not even close. This isn't an accurate way to measure these ads' efficacy, though. If I Google "Amazon," I'm clearly heading to Amazon.com regardless of whether Google serves me an ad for it. If I click the first result (the sponsored one), that's a "hit" according to your metric. If I click the second result (also a direct link to Amazon, just not a sponsored one), that's not a "hit." The ad didn't induce me to visit Amazon, so counting a click on the sponsored link is stupid. The only way to measure the causal effect of advertising on sales is to run an experiment, where you stop advertising for some period of time (or perhaps only in some markets, although that gets tricky with cross-market word-of-mouth) and then see what happens to your sales. This is related to a request made earlier in the thread for this article by Steve Tadelis: https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24 Oakland Martini fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 16:51
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snopes has a write up of the egg thing...it's twelve years old https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/something-eggstra/
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Jan 18, 2021 17:50
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Thanks for this thread, BiggerBoat - and having worked in the industry yourself you're probably the only person with more of a seething hatred for advertising than me. The problem I see with advertising, and I think this is a fairly old/common criticism, but they don't so much advertise a product as they do a lifestyle or a state of being. Down here in Florida where the 'rona is basically writing the state's response there were a lot of really unsettling ads during the holiday season. Publix trotted out their time-worn "little girl wakes up early and makes christmas treats with her mom just like her mom did with her own mom when she was a kid" ad alongside a slew of new ads showing families having a completely normal holiday gathering. The commercial voice would be talking about "the new normal" and "different kind of togetherness" over footage of a young child engaging in light horseplay with their grandparent - in fact, if I were head of some amorphous council of ad accountability, I would place a large portion of the blame for the holiday covid spike on the food production and distribution industries' aggressive ad campaigns during the holiday season. e: just need to get one thing off my chest: gently caress you lincoln, and gently caress you mconnengehahahaey
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Jan 18, 2021 18:40
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There's a lot of really insidious poo poo with advertising imo. Celebrity endorsements especially I think work to an almost perverse extent - while I can't say with absolute certainty that this is only a USA thing, we definitely have a massive, societal-wide celelbrapotheosis system that goes from D-List commercial celebrities who become celebrities by being the face of a company (Lily, the white-smock insurance company gang, the drive-in cheeseburger chucklefucks) or who are already famous and took a fat paycheck to be the face of a company (the home appliance guy dressed up in cop blues, the dude schilling for the "gently caress you, i'm eating" burger company, matthew mcconcenchapdihnhachevapravatdumrongey for those land yacht cars). However you end up recognizable in front of a camera, you sort of become this objective for people to emulate. Sort of like this: quote:Matt Mconomonopea is a "dreamboat." The ladies (and some of the men, I presume?) just go nuts for him. They want him to do things to them, they want to do things to him, a very messy, sexy affair. What's his secret?? Commercials aren't even commercials anymore sometimes - they're mini drama serializations. There are storylines that carry over - I'm supposed to care about Jamie from one insurance commercial to the next. Or Mara, the one with the sense of ironic detachment, boy, what whacky thing is she gonna say to rain on Flo's parade this time? The worst part about this all is that, of loving course I know their names. The whole loving point is to put the worm in your brain that doesn't go away. And pharmaceutical ads! Not only is it perverse for companies to try and convince people they're sick via advertisements, they put an "if you're allergic to fukital, don't take fukital" statement like what the gently caress is wrong with this dumb rear end country, "if you're allergic to peanuts, don't buy gif peanut butter! it's the creamiest!"
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Jan 18, 2021 19:01
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I always found it curious that the one place I saw more ads in Europe was on sports (specifically soccer. Er...football) jerseys - something that doesn’t really happen for major sports teams here (e: outside of MLS which I always figured was trying to mimic Europe). Everything else in the US seems covered in ads (full wrap ads on buses! Ads at the top of the subway! Ads on the ceiling of buses! Ads on the floor! Ads on the sidewalk! Ads on the little bits of vertical space on staircases!), so I found it strange. Anyway, ads stink. How do we fix human psychology so ads stop being so effective? .random fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 19:29
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Is it wrong when marketing is effective, though? For example, I usually hate telemarketing calls because most of them are bullshit. But on two occasions they managed to sell me something I needed at a price better than I'd found elsewhere and I still have a continuing relationship with both companies. Is that inherently bad?
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Jan 18, 2021 22:20
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I’ve been noticing an increase (or at least I’m way more cynical and have noticed it now) in celebrities hawking poo poo on social media feeds like Instagram. It used to be like, haha neat I can follow a celebrity and see funny posts and maybe an upcoming movie they’re working on! Now I just feel it’s way more just shilling off their random endorsements(beverage companies, workout gear, whatever). The nature of social media and clicks and advertising are an extremely maddening thing to think about.
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Jan 18, 2021 23:15
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PT6A posted:Is it wrong when marketing is effective, though? Not in and of itself, no. However: It's just so god damned ubiquitous, aggressive and seems to be the grease that drives everything that wears me the gently caress out. I'm not gonna say I haven't heard an ad or used a coupon that saved me some money or something. But that's not really my point. My post up there about the magazine I thought would explain some things. Like, OK. I recently had to get on Indeed and Zip Recruiter to try and find work. What do you know? All of a sudden I'm seeing an increase in spam! Ok, so now I need how many different email accounts (or loving phone numbers) to separate my commerical/business life from my real one? Fact is, I CAN'T separate them and exist in this society/system in any meaningful way. I'm also getting spam texts now! Websites sell your personal information. It's an actual business model. But if you get your ID stolen or they have a data breach, well, didn't you read that 18 page disclaimer before you clicked that check box? I have FOUR email accounts. A main one, one for Amazon, one for Google and one for just miscellaneous "sign up now and get 10% off" poo poo. They get BOMBED with bullshit constantly. Companies BURY the unsubscribe link. WORSE, actual email I DO need often goes into my spam box, even if I've corresponded with this person several times before. This is because these motherfuckers NEVER QUIT WITH THIS poo poo and the only reason I NEED separate mail accounts OR A SPAM FILTER is because of your marketing poo poo. Email has gone from a convenience to a total loving hassle. There's a GIF or a YT video I can't find showing a guy walking through an airport avoiding Krishnas or something except it's him swatting down pop ups, newsletter subscriptions, whitelists, cookies, apps, coupon offers, free samples and poo poo like that but I can't find it. I had a telehealth appt with my kid's doctor today and while waiting on hold, they played video ads for Nemours. The ads loaded right up but the app didn't work. Funny how that goes, huh? It's a loving HOSPITAL! Go to listen to an online radio station and see if those ads don't load up easily even while your connection to the show stutters or fails to stream at all. At least until you restart and clear your cache of all the bullshit they loaded on your device I can't read or watch a lot of news without first learning about a Ford f150. I find it really loving creepy that if I purchase a laptop or a Nerf toy for my kid online, all of a sudden my feed is filled with targeted banner ads for computers and toy guns. And god for loving bid you're politically engaged and EVER donate $25 or $50 to a candidate you loving like. Because brace yourself for a never ending barrage of spam asking you for more and more money that you never had in the first place and sure as poo poo don't have now. It makes me NOT want to vote for them. Do you enjoy sports? Too bad because an average NFL game runs close to 4 hours and roughly 25% of that time you're watching is commercials. That doesn't even count the in game promos and poo poo hyping up TV shows or whatever. It's just disgusting to me and makes me want to live on a loving island somewhere. Guess that's enough for now. Thanks for the feedback, everyone. Good posts so far.
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Jan 18, 2021 23:17
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BiggerBoat posted:Do you enjoy sports? Too bad because an average NFL game runs close to 4 hours and roughly 25% of that time you're watching is commercials. That doesn't even count the in game promos and poo poo hyping up TV shows or whatever. This one has gotten me. Leaving aside the ethical implications of enjoying the NFL, the way they structure the ads has just gotten worse and worse, and it seems to me it's even infected their coverage of actual games. Like you said, not only are there built in media timeouts for a bunch of ads, not only are there a bunch of live reads for the POST GAME SHOW PRESENTED BY TOSTITOS, but there are also times where they split screen and just show an ad while the game is happening! And on top of that, they now constantly cut away from the game you're watching to tell you about a game that you're not watching. You're hoping to hear some analysis or a replay, and instead LET'S GOT TO THE STUDIO WITH JB FOR A GAME BREAK, WHAT'RE THE CARDINALS DOING JB! And it all creates this oppressive atmosphere where you can't separate what you want to watch from what you don't want to watch. Perhaps this is rose colored glasses, but I seem to remember a time when I could evade most of the commercials by just getting up during the actual commercial breaks. Now it feels like there is no way to do so, because it's a non-stop assault from beginning to end.
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Jan 18, 2021 23:55
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My understanding on the NFL ad thing is that it was a response to TiVo and other services that let you skip or mitigate traditional commercial breaks. They run the ads during the game so you can’t just skip past them, because that affects their revenue. E: Iirc, the first time I remember something like that, it was when they first started doing one more ad after they technically came back from break but before they started showing the game again. But that was 10-15+ years ago, but I seem to clearly remember it being because of TiVo, or so the excuse went. numerrik fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Jan 19, 2021 |
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Jan 19, 2021 00:10
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JohnClark posted:This one has gotten me. Leaving aside the ethical implications of enjoying the NFL, the way they structure the ads has just gotten worse and worse, and it seems to me it's even infected their coverage of actual games. You and me both, my man. I used to really enjoy football and still do to some extent but have been losing interest for some time now in no small part due to the sheer volume of commercials I'm subjected to in game and out. Punt *commercial break* 2 plays, 3rd down, timeout. *commercial break* Dropped pass...wait....play is under challenge... *commercial break* Play is upheld. Punt *commercial break* Run 2 plays. End of quarter. *Commercial break* Couple plays...TOuchdown! Extra point is good! *Commercial* Kickoff *Commercial* 3 plays..."Whoa, we have a man on the field shaken up who might be dead or need a leg amputation...this looks bad...I think he was decapitated on that play, Jim." *commercial* so and so is carted off the field, comatose. "Don't forget tomorrow night the season premier of The Big Bang Theory!" ... gently caress it. And the live stadium experience isn't all that better tbh.
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Jan 19, 2021 00:31
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numerrik posted:My understanding on the NFL ad thing is that it was a response to TiVo and other services that let you skip or mitigate traditional commercial breaks. They run the ads during the game so you can’t just skip past them, because that affects their revenue. Also, yeah, and DVR is the best way to watch any sport besides maybe hockey or boxing (at least once the loving fight actually starts). Speaking of boxing, I remember when they first started to paint the ring with Miller Lite ads or whatever way back in the day. It was new. Go back and watch classic fights and there's no art on the ring floor. Anyway, the fighters kept slipping on the graphics and I saw one dude dislocate his knee. Later, other boxers started painting henna tattoos for casinos on their backs.
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Jan 19, 2021 00:36
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As a German, the only American football game I watch is the Superbowl. It's really funny: They have a couple of extra cameras in the stadium for the German TV station that show whatever is happening in the stadium and on the field during the million, billion commercial breaks you guys have. Really makes me appreciate (real) football every time: 45-48 minutes unbroken game, 15 minute break with commercials, news, and commentary, and then another 45-48 minutes unbroken game.
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Jan 19, 2021 00:39
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Barudak posted:A wildly successful campaign most American's don't realize was one was making Bacon a breakfast food and making breakfast a big deal. The US basically stopped eating lard and now has a generational belief lard is somehow poison or gross or uniquely unsafe and unhealthy and the reason is all basically because a company bought all the palm oil for candle making then electric lights ruined them so they ended up using their palm oil monopoly to invent Crisco The made the first major radio ad campaign in history to talk up crisco and talk down the competition and because it was radio and radio was new it because a truth people handed down for literal generations that you can’t eat lard.
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Jan 19, 2021 00:51
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DTurtle posted:Really makes me appreciate (real) football every time: 45-48 minutes unbroken game, 15 minute break with commercials, news, and commentary, and then another 45-48 minutes unbroken game. Except for the stadium walls made of LCD screens showing ads the entire time (though every sport in the USA has a variant of that too), and ads being displayed in the corners every few minutes for USA viewers, plus the local broadcasters here still reading voice ads at you mid-game.  But completely agreed on the relatively unbroken game, as long as you're not watching it on YES in the USA (if they still have football games shown there? I'm out of market now) in which case they'll actually cut to commercials and you miss actual match-play.
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Jan 19, 2021 01:03
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Alright, this is probably going to be a big old word dump, but now that I'm off the clock and not mobileposting, I've been working on a "layman's disjointed theory" of advertising. I have a high school diploma, read some chomsky, read some mchluhan, read amusing ourselves to death, and have idly listened to far more tv than any sane individual should (that i'm a cspam regular should also largely disperse any notion you have of me being a sane individual. also i moved to florida to marry a florida woman), and all the advertisements that come along with it. first: advertising - in its current form - is a function of capitalism. if we take as a given that capitalism is corrupt (i do), then we have to also take that its functions - modern advertising included - are, to some degree, inherently corrupt. second: broadcast media (and to a likely even larger extent, new media) are neither distribution methods for news and information, nor are they such for entertainment: rather the entertainment and "news" and "information" is an elaborate framework for broadcast media's true purpose: to make rich motherfuckers even more rich. Now, that's not to go whole hog down the Trumpistan "mark zucker is a secret jewlluminati bildeberg globalist zionist" road but I would think even the staunchest defenders of the likes of CNN and MSNBC would at least be aware of the potential for misconduct when the owners of the largely-trusted news networks are also some of the richest (old, white) men in the country - hell, bill gates was a founding partner at msnbc. Wikipedia posted:In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000 list, AT&T was America's largest media conglomerate, in terms of revenue, with Comcast, The Walt Disney Company, & ViacomCBS (controlled by National Amusements through supervoting shares) completing the top four.  "ok but why is all this crap important?" i'm glad you asked, timmy! each of the companies listed above is an entity with a fiduciary duty to its shareholders. what's a fiduciary duty? quote:A fiduciary duty is an obligation to act in the best interest of another party. For instance, a corporation's board member has a fiduciary duty to the shareholders, a trustee has a fiduciary duty to the trust's beneficiaries, and an attorney has a fiduciary duty to a client. the duty the company is tasked with is, simply, to make money.  , baby.what privately owned companies like CNN, FOX, etc don't have a fiduciary duty to do is to act as a neutral relay station of world events. they don't have a fiduciary duty to craft coverage in a way that doesn't glorify gun violence. they don't have a fiduciary duty to openly call an elected official out on blatant lies (and as a corollary, largely any of this that's done is performative - there's a fancy word that gets thrown around sometimes that means it's the equivalent of the fighting in professional wrestling that's closer to coreographed stunts than martial arts. a specific example might be an msnbc talking head defending a climate policy that steps away from crude oil and leans in to fracking against a proposal to lean into coal and crude, two policy stances that largely just kind of circle the bowl at varying intervals from each other rather than countering either of those proposals with a more drastic plan of action a la AOCIA's once-beloved green new deal). this is also complicated by the issue of 'access journalism' - if you hurt a big strong politician's fee fees, they'll simply decline to give you an interview. you lose your access, and you lose strength in 'the market' relative to, say, msnbc if you're cnn - lord knows how often we hear 'tonight, exclusively on [channel], a story you won't see ANYWHERE else!' used to try and reel us in to tuning into, say your local fox affiliate over your local abc affiliate at 11pm so you can sit through crime news, celeb gossip, human interest, a boatload of lovely local car dealership ads, an emergency broadcast system test, and more ads so you can finally catch sports and the weather before knocking out for the night. the purpose of advertising isn't to sell you something: it's to associate a feeling with a product. i found this was most on display this year during the holidays than probably any other time in my life. publix was airing commercials with a soothing female voiceover, talking about how the holidays might be different this year, we're all doing our best, publix stores are open for what you need, you know, the general kind of 'hey let's all be responsible and not have a 4 week superspreader holiday season, but as the voiceover is going on we're being treated to the visual image of...just another holiday meal. grandma is at the table sitting next to the kids, people are hugging each other, family members are coming in the front door, nobody's wearing a loving mask, it's generally a very dissonant mix of imagery and instruction. why is this? let's turn to liberty mutual for the answer. we'll be back after this short commercial break. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWixQmv-FMM liberty mutual actually gives away the game here - commercials that invoke a feeling of nostalgia are more effective for it. the goal of the aforementioned publix commercial isn't to get you to go out and buy a full family holiday meal's worth of food for a quarantine christmas with you, the wife, and the kids, the goal is to associate those feelings of warm holiday gatherings with the publix brand. there's actually quite a lot of "on the nose, if you can see the face" stuff employed in modern advertising. look at the perennial favorite to be internet mocked pool of 2-minute infomericial adverts. grayscale colors, sad faces, borderline 'womp womp' music tracks until BUY PRODUCT! and like dorothy stepping out into a fantastical world, color returns, smiles are found, and the music brightens! the consumer consumed and is happy! don't you want to be happy! just consume! we're getting close now, i promise, i think capitalism requires infinite expansion: legally (fiduciary duty), a company can not simply say 'ok, we're making enough money, it's time to stay the course.' i think this is generally when a vote of no confidence in the board comes in, but i don't know a lot about corporate law past 'it's still illegal to guillotine capitalists' so don't quote me on those repercussions - save to say that They Are There. people, on the other hand, absolutely can say, 'no, this is enough. i don't need more.' i look around at my condo, it provides shelter for my wife and i and my animals, we have food in the fridge, we have running water and indoor plumbing, i could have a little more room but, gun to my head, yeah, my 1 bed 1 bath small condo is enough for me. i'm satisfied with it. how do you resolve this? you convince people that enough isn't enough. "well sure you've got a car that's paid off that you've only put a few thousand dollars worth of repairs into over the last 17 years, but this one has alexa in it! and it parks itself! look how happy this lady is that her car not just parked itself, but parallel parked itself! it's fun! she's having fun! look at her and her friends laughing!" so, that's a lot of words to say that advertising in its current form exists solely as an avenue to ensure the continuation of capitalism
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Jan 19, 2021 01:37
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One of the reasons advertising is getting worse is because of this: The product life cycle:  Basically that graph is the normal trajectory of sales of a given product over time. A long term trend has been the shortening of product life cycles. Basically that graph keeps getting more and more compressed across the x ( time) axis. Now personally my suspicion is that this is related to why the rate of profit falls over time in capitalism. I mean the integral of that graph is what you can make, the gross income, from selling given product X.
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Jan 19, 2021 02:42
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Advertising as it is expressed is a function of the society it inhabits. The US does not have laws stopping medication advertising so we have horrific amounts of money spent on it that claw into every facet of your existence. Other countries do and are more pleasant for it. These are not unchangeable or particularly impossible to change things, either. The US has special laws about political campaigning and advertising media costs so it can and will regulate whenever it feels like it. Media corporations, like Disney, behave very differently when there are severe legal concerns over their outreach to children.
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Jan 19, 2021 03:48
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Bar Ran Dun posted:One of the reasons advertising is getting worse is because of this: That doesn't really tell the whole story, though. Some of the most frequent advertisers are in the industries where you legitimately need the thing they're selling. I can't go without mobile service, insurance, razors, or gasoline; I'm going to buy some form of those products, and the only question is from whom I buy them. This is different from, say, car commercials, where they need to convince me that New Car is much better than Current Car, enough that I should pay them money that I don't have to pay them, or mobile phones themselves where you can reasonably say "eh, my current phone is good enough." Your iPhone 6 is probably just fine as it is, but it ain't gonna work without a plan of some kind, which is presumably why every "new phone" ad I see is attached to a specific wireless provider rather than being funded by the companies that produce the phones.
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Jan 19, 2021 05:35
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The product life cycle is shrinking on those products too! Even if they are durable! The other way to look at it is that each product is in the decline stage. In other words they aren’t making the iPhone 7 while the 6 is still out there because they want to it’s because they know sales for the six are already going to be in decline at a roughly predictable time.
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Jan 19, 2021 06:01
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I mean, every product ceases to be new and more newness isn't inherently bad. In Japan the age of your home is super important because each time building codes get updated (roughly every ten years) all new homes are significantly more secure against earthquakes than old homes. Its not some horrible thing that people prefer newer rather than everyone living in hundred year homes hoping not to die next big one. For other things, like art, novelty is the nature of it. Saying you are content with last years books and don't need new ones is something a lot of people would look at you weird for suggesting. Its the change in product development and distribution that changed product life spans not the ads for those products. I mean model years for cars have been around for nearly a hundred years and laffo if you don't think yearly festival alcohol batches are anything but a several thousand year tradition of getting consumers drunk on the new shiny
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Jan 19, 2021 06:30
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Lib and let die posted:the purpose of advertising isn't to sell you something: it's to associate a feeling with a product. This was good but it got me to thinking about how political advertising typically doesn't follow this model. Sure you have "Joe Candidate is family man who served his country and loves America" with the smiling family and handshaking but, more often, the ads are "my opponent is evil, dangerous and sucks and will destroy your way of life" with unflattering photos and out of context quotes. Studies show that negatvie ads work better than positive ones so I guess political marketing uses kind of the opposite approach; associating BAD feelings with the other person.
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Jan 19, 2021 12:22
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04 The requisite Adam Curtis documentary that probably isn’t at all true but still a decent way to spend 45 minutes
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Jan 19, 2021 12:30
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A very important type of messaging is a reinforcement that you have made the correct decision. Most political advertising falls in there, galvanizing you that what you already believe and think is good and preventing messaging from other sources to lead you astray. Its why facebook political ads are devastatingly effective.
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Jan 19, 2021 12:39
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BiggerBoat posted:This was good but it got me to thinking about how political advertising typically doesn't follow this model. Barudak posted:A very important type of messaging is a reinforcement that you have made the correct decision. Most political advertising falls in there, galvanizing you that what you already believe and think is good and preventing messaging from other sources to lead you astray. Yeah, political advertising is a totally different monster and I think Barudak has the gist of it - it's not about changing your mind, it's about reinforcing and energizing people who already believe certain things. When the RJC farts out a commercial that makes Joe Biden look more appealing to left-wing voters than any democrat party effort to sell Joe to the left they're not warning warning people that Biden is a dangerous socialist - hell, not even Biden's most fervent supporters would try and sell that Biden is a socialist to the element of the democrat party that's left of pelosi. It's meant to energize and/or motivate-through-fear the action of getting out and voting to the base that already believes democrats are bad because they're too far left (  )and it all kind of ties back in to my word dump a few posts ago because they work in tandem with the demographically segregated news broadcasts - tucker carlson will moan about the war on christmas, they'll have a few republican morons on to talk about how the radical left wants to take away christmas, and then cut to a campaign commerical decrying joe biden's radical left leaving the viewer to make the subconscious connection that "if joe biden wins he's gonna take away christmas, so i have to get out and vote for not joe!" it's hypertargeted advertising, targeted at a market that already primed for action.
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Jan 19, 2021 23:58
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^^Yeah, a lot of what's presented as "news" is really advertising, s others have pointed out^^^ I got to thinking a little bit today about the internet and my thoughts on it when it first started to gain traction as a mainstream thing. Reading the Q-Anon thread got me thinking about how one would THINK that the access to information that the web provides would DECREASE the preponderance of conspiracy theories and..well...fake news and phony baloney ads. I remember when it first really began with 56k dial up and my room mate and I were arguing about whether it was a good thing for society or a bad thing, overall. I'm still not sure and I think it's failed to deliver on its promise but at the time my argument was that I didn't think it would make our lives easier and would inevitably lead to a veritable FLOOD of commercials, specifically targeted at you. I don't think it HAS made out lives more convenient. Nobody feels like they have free time or is saving money. But to tie it into the thread, first and foremost, it's created an advertising driven business model that at best is annoying, middling requires you to disclose personal information and at worse, leads to rampant identity theft. I'd argue that this is almost entirely due to our ad driven economy. Remember people raging about pop up ads? That did NOT take long. It god so bad so fast that a lot of links you clicked or websites you visited would lock your computer with pop ups and freeze you browser. They could take over your machine if you weren't careful and savvy. (Not just porn sites either). PC users had to install AdAware software and routinely "clean" their computers of all the malicious poo poo that companies loaded on there. In a lot of cases, having a pop up blocker installed disabled useful websites like banking, applying for jobs or renewing your car registration. They still can. I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the rampant use of online everything has led directly to the massive rise in identity theft. But what do you do, NOT be online? And I still think it's weird having to watch an ad for Activa before I can read the news. Of course newspapers had ads but you could ignore them and often they'd have their own section, especially in the Sunday paper. I get that people need to get paid but the pop ups, banner ads, pop overs and ads on YT vids feel like...pollution almost. A lot like junk mail. poo poo...I didn't mean to write that much.
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Jan 20, 2021 23:52
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BiggerBoat posted:poo poo...I didn't mean to write that much. Hell naw, that's good poo poo man, and way more organized than my disjointed screeds so far haha My old man and I were both introduced to the internet at roughly the same time (he'd been using usenet or some bbs type connection for a few years before I was considered old enough to be allowed to use the computer, but I think he mostly just played one of those long-running play-by-post games). He came home one day with a 1.25" and excitedly exclaimed that he'd gotten a modem from work (I don't even think it was a 56k, I think we were AOLing at 28k or even 14k) and was going to put us on the information superhighway. Looking back on it now, I wonder if any of the parental controls included controls for how much advertising an account noted as a child account would be exposed to - given the rather unregulated nature of consumer internet back then probably not. quote:Reading the Q-Anon thread got me thinking about how one would THINK that the access to information that the web provides would DECREASE the preponderance of conspiracy theories and..well...fake news and phony baloney ads. This is a fascinating phenomenon and it's something that's been touched on in academia and popular writing media since, by my readings, at least the early 90's, though it probably goes even further back to when we first started making national broadcast media available. While the telegram and telephone revolutionized how we communicated with each other (and how news traveled, to some extent), being able to put a reporter on the street with a camera changed how news was delivered - you no longer were talking about events in a passive manner and, to some extent, the 'filter' on bot information and misinformation was weakened - while 'as it happens' coverage does to some level force the interpreters of those events to be more truthful (we can see what happened with our own eyes), it also removes an authoritative ability to remove abject falsehoods - there's not a lot you can do to stop someone running into the middle of a live broadcast, shouting "the world is flat!" and then running off. It's out there, it's been spoken and it might convince someone to start googling and ultimately end up down the rabbit hole of being an unironic flat earther. I mentioned Neil Postman in my first post, I think, and while he's a bit closed to an actual luddite than I'd normally agree with, he does have some very accurate musings - these excerpts are from Technopoly, published in 1992: Neil Postman posted:a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable world. It is a world in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms.” Neil Postman posted:“Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question “What problem does the information solve?” the answer is usually “How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before.” This is the elevation of information to a metaphysical status: information as both the means and end of human creativity. In Technopoly, we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to “access” information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented. The world has never before been confronted with information glut and has hardly had time to reflect on its consequences What we've seen since the advent of broadband internet, especially the Q stuff like you've pointed out, is a validation of Postman's fears about information glut. In Metal Gear Solid 2, Kojima really leans into this idea in a way that, as with the internet, didn't really hit me at the time but now is perfectly clear. At the very end of the game you learn that 90% of the events you've participated in were pre-orchestrated. Conversations with trusted companions turn out to be deepfakes by an AI (or AIs), and as villains are wont to do, monologue the entire plan. quote:Rose: We've always kept records of our lives. Through words, pictures, symbols...from tablets to books... While the rouge AI does waffle between authoritarian and full-on fascism throughout the entire 'debriefing' scene, Kojima's concerns for information overload ring through loud and clear. The problem is always going to be that, be it an self-alleged benevolent AI doing it for us or a team of "information experts," it would have to be transparent and subject to oversight of a kind of level that I just don't think would ever happen - it would just be too much chaos. It would be the worldwide equivalent of D&D slapfights over if Bernie is worth millions or not because his wealth is $1.98m. I'm sure something could be done educationally to 'ward' young minds against misinformation but the goal of our education system isn't to created educated, well-informed, intelligent citizens - it's, to paraphrase one George Carlin, to create people just smart enough to push the buttons, but stupid enough not to raise too much of a fuss when management fucks them over.
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Jan 21, 2021 01:03
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I need to read that book. Also got a chuckle out of "Neil Postman Posted". Because of course he did.
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Jan 21, 2021 01:35
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He gave a talk about the book on CSPAN a number of years back. For all his criticisms of the medium, he was very open to using it to spread his message of technology. Big 'we will sell the capitalists the rope with which they'll hang themselves' energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFj6-z8KeeU There's also this internet-famous comic kicking around that's based on the Foreword to his book Amusing Ourselves to Death  quote:We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares. Lib and let die fucked around with this message at 01:51 on Jan 21, 2021 |
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Jan 21, 2021 01:48
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BiggerBoat posted:I got to thinking a little bit today about the internet and my thoughts on it when it first started to gain traction as a mainstream thing. Reading the Q-Anon thread got me thinking about how one would THINK that the access to information that the web provides would DECREASE the preponderance of conspiracy theories and..well...fake news and phony baloney ads. It feels like conspiracy theories can only exist when everyone is mostly pretty well informed. A conspiracy theory can only exist in contrast to more sane widespread majority belief. Like historically people had all sorts of wild thoughts and rumors and beliefs, and all sorts of people thought all sorts of things that were extremely wrong and crazy, but that was that, you tell your friends the pope's red shoes are human skin and that jewish men menstruate and everyone just sort of goes "okay" or the belief takes hold in one community and not in some other. It's only when most people get onto one page of being mostly broadly sane and everyone can see what everyone else is saying that the conspiracy theories stick out as something abnormal.
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Jan 21, 2021 02:25
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Chiming in to say thanks for the thread and to recommend Naomi Klein's "No Logo" about corporate co-opting of the public space. She also discusses how brands are moving away from selling products to selling a brand identity. I found it to be an excellent read.
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Jan 21, 2021 05:13
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BiggerBoat posted:Not in and of itself, no. However: This is the loving evil. Marketers and consumers are caught in an arms race. The consumer doing everything they can to dodge ads, and the marketer to bypass all of their efforts. It gets increasing frustrating trying to live life without being buried in ads. As for political stuff. I started sending out e-mails to campaigns. "Hello mr. X, While I do support your efforts and I'm a proud member of your party, I do not wish to donate to you, nor do I remember signing up for your e-mail list. I assume you got my e-mail from another political ally I signed up with. Please respect that relationship and I encourage you to think differently about sharing e-mail lists for marketing purposes. Concerned Citizen, esporks" Maybe its pointless, but my hope is that a politician would be more receptive than a corporation would. (whats the difference?) One of my new years resolutions was to limit my exposure to ads and algorithm delivered content. Essentially be more deliberate and mindful with what I consume. Its surprisingly difficult to do. Owlofcreamcheese posted:The US basically stopped eating lard and now has a generational belief lard is somehow poison or gross or uniquely unsafe and unhealthy and the reason is all basically because a company bought all the palm oil for candle making then electric lights ruined them so they ended up using their palm oil monopoly to invent Crisco The made the first major radio ad campaign in history to talk up crisco and talk down the competition and because it was radio and radio was new it because a truth people handed down for literal generations that you can’t eat lard. Have an hbomberguy video where he talks about Transformers (I hope this is the video I think is). The TV show that only exists because our laws around advertising to children changed. Midway through its run the creators had a dire problem, how do you sell toys to kids that have all the toys? EASY. Kill off your entire cast and create a new one. New cast, new toys, more profit! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7f26gVlDQI
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Jan 21, 2021 06:17
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Everybody wants trump team's email list because its a list of solid gold rubes. Advertising as a brand identity rather than a product is not remotely a new phenomenon. Reading this newspaper makes you more informed or a better class of gentleman is as old as newspapers. When deeply successful these idealizations can become accepted imagery and part of the cultures stock tropes. Leyendecker and his disciple Rockwell defined American values and concepts like masculinity, flowers for mothers day, thanksgiving dinner etc. on behalf of advertisers and publications who wanted these positive identifiers with their brand. The hip new thing is to refer to this as "tribes" by the by where consumers self organize and allow certain types of products to become difining of a tribe. Think hipsters as the tribe, pabst blue ribbon as tribe identifier.
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Jan 21, 2021 06:36
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Barudak posted:Everybody wants trump team's email list because its a list of solid gold rubes. I think they mean more that old ads told you about specific products and attributes you might want from the product, real or implied. Now a lot of advertising is just a brand avatar posting the word soup on twitter and making a gundam Model on a stream and none of it has anything to do with what they sell, but they know you just liking the company in a general way is more important than selling a specific item.
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Jan 21, 2021 07:05
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I think they mean more that old ads told you about specific products and attributes you might want from the product, real or implied. Yah old ads are nice and quaint with their text descriptions of what the product is: https://twitter.com/USA_Vintage_Ads/status/1346198610829070343 That account is especially fun seeing the gradual transition from a focus on the product features to keeping some of the old trappings but more just implying sex: https://twitter.com/USA_Vintage_Ads/status/1352068854378344448
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Jan 21, 2021 07:31
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