Ads are almost literally everywhere.
It is rare, but every once in a while I presume to speak for everyone. It’s not like this is breaking news or a controversial hot-take, either. No need to sit down or get a stiff drink:
Nobody, but NOBODY likes advertisements… except ad people.
When I was working IT at Saatchi & Saatchi LA back in the mid-2000’s, Toyota was paying them tens of millions a year to make a handful of splashy national ads. Sure, they were epic, for ads, but all that money floated a five story building bursting with 500 worker bees that would pump out a half dozen ads a year.
I’ve been thinking about this article for a long time, and my plan was to capture ads and break down how terrible they were. But I recently had a small epiphany; everybody already knows what they hate about advertising. I don’t need to tell you what you dislike. Instead, I’ll ask you a question.
When was the last time you derived real, concrete benefits from an ad?
Were you made aware of an amazing new product that you can no longer live without? Did you learn something important about a medicine that could save your life? Has anyone ever actually used J. G. Wentworth’s services? What the hell is grandma hiding?! How much time could you save per day if you didn’t have to bend over to put on your shoes??!!
Spending on both search and YouTube fell, and the company missed street estimates.www.adweek.com
If I were a betting human, I’d wager the vast majority of Americans just ignore ads. We block them on the web all the time. Google is apparently “hurting” from reduced ad revenues because of ad blockers. Zuckerberg’s Facebook has lost millions upon millions developing and advertising it’s VR thingy while at the same time playing politics with his American Edge Project spots on National TV.
AEP stopped making their videos public eight months prior to the time of this publication. This is a common trend of late amongst advertisers. I imagine it reduces the potential vectors for trouble they have to manage from publicly accessible outlets like YouTube. The Comments section can be ruthless.
And if there’s any question about which organizations are providing the bulk of the funding, take a look at their about page (below).
Bear Hill is a private equity firm, Lexington Institute is a Koch-funded think tank that focuses on defense and national security, and the various Chamber of Commerce-related outfits are all-in on Capitalism. Then there’s Meta, or what used to be called Facebook. They claim their charter is to protect “American innovation”, but what innovation is going on in America, unless you consider the rapid increase in corporate acquisitions to be innovative. Mass consolidation does nothing more than funnel more power and money to the 1%.
Advertising isn’t doing what it used to do…
In days long past, before the internet, we used to have three TV channels and a bunch of weird stuff on UHF. We used to read magazines and newpapers or listen to AM or FM radio. In all, we’d see and hear and read ads, and these ads would be targeted to the audience. And how would they know the audience?
They’d ask people.
Sure, I’m clearly glossing over the details which aren’t important to our discussion, but we had services that gathered useful, non-identifying data on what people were consuming. Then, of all things, companies would actually try something new to see what takes off. If it didn’t sell, they’d pull it, eat the cost, and move on to the next thing.
We don’t do that any more. Now it’s all about Google and Facebook and others sucking up as much information as they can to parse out who you are, what you like and dislike, and then targeting you specifically. It’s freaking creepy as hell and it’s ludicrous. It’s not like, outside of digital media, companies can produce unique products for each and every person. The costs would be insane. It makes one wonder what the point is…
The Short Answer: It’s all about manipulation, shaping ideas amongst large swaths of America, guiding the narrative. Fear is a powerful tool, and subtle, obtuse fear is even more so. For more on fear in advertising, read How Fear-Appeal Advertising Works from University of Melbourne’s Pursuit online magazine.
Now it’s all just noise…
Humans hear noise all the time, whether we are aware of it or not. Even deaf people can “hear”. After a while, we become desensitized to those noises that we find annoying. There’s little one can do to stop the source of the noise itself, unless you’re wealthy, of course. For those of us who are not wealthy, most of us have some capacity for tuning out such noise.
This fact has long been recognized with respect to ad breaks on television. When’s the best time to go to the bathroom or get snacks and drinks? Why, the ad break, of course. And even if sit through the ad breaks, few people just sit watching the ads in rapture. Now, there’s the annual Super Bowl ad madness, but like other manufactured cultural touchstones, this non-event merely serves to aggrandize advertising.
As coaches and players hit the turf this Sunday, so do the many advertisers who have spent the past year strategizing…www.ceros.com
Of note, Super Bowl viewership saw it’s lowest numbers in 2019, and if that’s the pinnacle of American advertising, it seems to be losing steam.
While the Super Bowl has managed to remain the most-watched live event of the year, it has not managed to maintain its…amt-lab.org
As I mentioned earlier, we now block ads, and some web browsers now come with ad blocking technology integrated. We’ve learned to look for the “Sponsored” block at the top of Google searches, or we just use an alternative like DuckDuckGo. Personally, I have a small selection of plugins I use in Firefox on Linux and Safari on macOS (see below), each of which have different properties and strengths, all designed to filter out the crap we just don’t want to see, hear, or read.
SAFARI: AdGuard (subscription service), DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, and Safari’s integrated content blockers.
FIREFOX: uBlock Origin, DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials, and Firefox’s integrated Enhanced Tracking Prevention tools.
If ads are dead, what now?
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the advertising industry as it is now needs a complete overhaul. But, as impractical as it is for corporations to create affordable, customized products for consumers, it’s equally so for advertising to simply disappear. It would leave a vacuum, but what’s filling that space now is utterly useless. So, here’s a list of some of the things I think can be done:
- Make the collection of personal information illegal. Not all forms of data collection are bad, however, so some specificity is warranted. What we’ve seen from corporate America, on the other hand, is distrssingly egregious. You will be reminded of this every time one of you are notified that one of your email addresses has been involved in a security breach. An Internet Users Bill of Rights spelling out exactly what corporations can collect from individuals would be a great start.
- The FCC should mandate that most internet, TV, and radio ads be restricted to ads local to the user or region, no exceptions. For the internet, this will require that ISPs give useful location data to advertisers. If you’ve ever been confused about why you’re seeing ads for Phoenix, AZ. when you live in Southern California, this is why. Besides, offering only local ads will give consumers leads on products and services they can actually take advantage of.
- Get money out of politics, specifically the ever-burgeoning budgets that are floating widespread campaigns filled with disinformation and outright lies that fill our TVs, websites, and mailboxes almost every year, depending on where you live. Money is not free speech. The average Joe or Jane can’t afford to run ads on CNN or FOX News. Very few individuals can. So, it’s back to what it should be: one person, one vote. Period.
- Develop an open source replacement for Craig’s List that can be run by municipalities and not some corporate entity. These used to be called Classifieds and you’d find them in your local newspaper. Classifieds can be used for all manner of things, like announcing your new companies Doing Business As (DBA) to satisfy requirements of a local operating license, announcing a yard sale for your neighborhood, sending someone a message, and… oh, anything posted on Craig’s List.
- Put a stop to spam emails, SMS, and calls. Sure, scams aren’t ads, but many are frequently designed to mimic the communications of major retailers in order to trick people into giving the scammers money. In short, theft.
I don’t believe these are onerous or even difficult, but three out of the four I’ve offered need government support. Counting on Capitalism to fix these things is a fool’s errand. The elements that need FCC support require strong leadership, and I don’t see that in the FCC’s Agit Pai, a holdover from the Trump administration that doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon. And if laws need to be passed, well… Congress isn’t exactly passing many of those these days.
When in doubt, grassroots it…
What to do, then? It certainly seems bleak with everything that’s going on in this confused and terrifying world we’re experiencing. Fortunately for humanity we already have all the tools we need to make things better. We just need leaders to take on projects and build a coalition of helpers to make them a reality. It would sure beat spending all our time on Tik Tok or doom scrolling or whatever it is people waste their time on these days.
Like me.
The only tool in our toolbox that needs love, attention, and some sharpening is the will to do them. If it’s unclear, I’m speaking to myself, as well. While I face intense challenges (Long Covid in the form of brain fog and nigh constant exhaustion, the effects of a terrible motorcycle accident in 1990 that involves most of my joints, and lifelong depression) I can still write, but I often spend more time watching YouTube and Nebula, listening to music, and sleeping than penning new pieces. Just look at how few pieces I’ve posted here on Medium and how long I’ve had an account.
No, it’s not going to be easy, but with will to make things real, humans can do anything, and right now one of those things needs to be fixing the internet.
I think it’s killed enough of our children.
PS: Yes, I dropped that mic. The internet of today is not a safe place. Just taking a selfie has become a risk to life as people try to get that shot that nobody else had the guts to capture. Facebook knows that their social networks negatively effect young people. Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a seething pit of hatred and racial tension. These are seemingly insurmountable hurdles, but I stress once more; we have everything we need to create new places on the existing internet, places that are designed to serve, not take.
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