The Changed World of (h)Ads...

     You have to love those hooks, those words that either pull you in or baffle you.  Take the piece in The London Review which featured words such as corbels and gibbets, precentor and prising (what??).  I had to look them up; cool words but really, who uses them in everyday life?  Advertising is sometimes like that with catchy phrases or jingles (We Are Farmers...), or more often a play on words.  That Rolex watch ad from the last post came from the same book that these award-winning 1989 ads did, a book which i remember from way back when the idea of spending $40 or $50 for a book was far out of my league.  This was 1989 after all and that amount of money, in today's dollars, was over $125.  Who'd be crazy enough to spend that amount on a book?  And an advertising book, no less.  But I went ahead and got it...go figure.  As it turned out, it would be the first time such a book had been put together for such "awards" (the annual versions of The One Show continue, as do the Clio awards with this classic from 1990).

     Obviously, I've loved advertising, primarily for its creativity and little else, but only as a viewer, (I do have friends who either taught or worked in such fields and neither was impressed with my "old" book).  Who didn't look forward to those Budweiser ads during the Super Bowl?  But something seems to have changed with advertising (even at the Super Bowl).  How many pharmaceutical or election ads will you remember once they're gone, especially when the "side effects" portion of those ads for pills takes up nearly as much time as the ad itself (and note that at the text at the bottom of most of those ads disclose that both the patients and the "doctors" are actor portrayals as if they are afraid to show actual patients and/or results?).  But in the old days, that is those days before online went on line, you tended to see an ad only a few times, often on a billboard or a bus going by, and sometimes appearing in a magazine as well.  And perhaps because studies show that our minds are most malleable between the ages of 14-24, I seem to remember more of those ads from that period, even though none of them were beneficial to someone my age: cigarette ads (the Marlboro man, who ironically died of lung cancer), Playboy clubs (my high school hormones were in high gear and this magazine's image was about as risque as it got), fast food (Coke and McDonald's, the latter of which had Barry Manilow compose its iconic "You Deserve A Break Today" jingle), and on and on.  No ads for fast cures (perhaps an antacid or two) or paints (really??).  But things have changed...

      Back then, looking at an ad, and for how long, and whether it influenced you, was basically a crap shoot, one left to marketers who targeted demographic studies and trying to lure shoppers walking by store windows.  In today's world, tracking you is far easier, and often without you knowing it.  Take this bit from The London Review a few years ago on the "pixels" that arrive on your phones and laptops: The type of pixel used as a tool to gather data is a tiny, transparent image, which you can’t see on your screen.  When I first realized that, without knowing it, I must have downloaded pixels of this sort many times, I was spooked.  What does the invisible pixel do?  It turns out that in itself it does nothing.  What matters is that your browser requests the pixel, which it is prompted to do by computer code that a webpage downloads to your browser when it accesses the page.  As a programmer explained to me, ‘the code runs in the browser to gather as much information as it can and encodes that into the address of the image it requests.  Whatever you look at on the site; whatever you buy; the things you add to a shopping cart but don’t buy; information about your browser: all this and more can be transmitted via this process.  The most widely used pixel seems to be Facebook’s, which the advertising technology firm QueryClick reckons is present on 30 per cent of the world’s thousand most visited websites.  Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms use the data the company’s pixels generate to optimise the delivery of ads.  In an article in the Atlantic last year, Ian Bogost and Alexis Madrigal reported that these pixels were playing exactly that role for the Trump campaign.  The background "fingerprinting" (which you also can't see or notice) is even worse...

     The article continued: Online advertising may have been the prototype of surveillance capitalism, but in Zuboff’s view (Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism) it was only the beginning.  Her analysis ranges widely, from uses of harvested data that seem all too plausible --in helping decide whether a given individual should have access to life insurance or health insurance or car insurance, for example, or how much it should cost-- to the downright bizarre, such as automated vacuum cleaners that try to make money on the side selling floor plans of their owners’ apartments.  The techniques of surveillance capitalism combine big data, machine learning, commercially available predictions of user behavior, markets in future behavior, behavioral ‘nudges’, and careful structuring of ‘choice architecture’ (the actions available to users and how they are presented).  Zuboff’s fear is that the ensemble is already effective in steering human actions, and may become even more so, playing an ever larger role in determining the way we think and behave.  Yikes...what happened to the good old print ad that you could pick up, put down, and that was that?

     For one thing, there's that big word: machine learning.  It's not really AI but more of a precursor to it; AI will only accelerate its "learning."  It too operates in the background.  Here's how another piece in the same magazine put it about the data your smartphone collects: Machine learning optimization is a service offered throughout digital advertising, but the doyens are Google and Meta...A major digital advertising platform such as Facebook or Google is like an iceberg, Seufert said [app economy analyst Eric Seufert].  Visible above the waterline are the characteristics of users on which advertisers tend to focus, such as age, gender and ‘interests’ such as an enthusiasm for cars.  But below the surface, invisible to the advertiser and too copious to make full sense to human beings, is the much larger volume of heterogeneous data that the platform possesses. This is the data that can make platforms’ machine learning optimization of advertising considerably more effective than human-guided targeting...The​ submerged portion of the iceberg is enormous, but exploiting its full power to optimize advertising means sorting the data within it.  The crucial issue is what practitioners call ‘identity resolution’: the capacity to discern, in an automated way and with some degree of accuracy, that two or more often very different data traces involve the same human being.  In advertising on phones, identity resolution largely boils down to something deceptively simple: whether or not the various data traces involve the same phone.  In the early years of smartphones, it wasn’t difficult to tell.  Every smartphone, whether Apple or Android, had a unique identifier number, which the phone’s owner could not alter or delete, and which was visible to the apps installed on the phone and the ad networks that displayed ads on it.   The article goes on to say that advertising in this way has moved past the simple gathering of "cookies," which most of us can delete, and instead has added 32-digit "identifiers" (you still have the option to block those in both Apple and Google, although few know about this or how; and it still doesn't fully stop advertisers from following you).  

     From the digital advertisers' viewpoint, making placement decisions is pretty much out of their hands as they rely on "auctions" to bid for positioning.  Moving that ad up on the web page, making that ad appear first on your phone, that sort of thing.  These views are not a one-time fee but are constant, as in per-laptop or per-phone.  Algorithms scan tens of thousands of bids per second and make the decisions.  And if that all seems ludicrous, think back to your side as the viewer.  Our attention span for the most part has dropped to 8 seconds (some tracking sites put it at little more than a single second, wrote eMarketer).  And why is that?   Wrote the analyst: Gen Z decides instantly where their interests lie, and then they skip or scroll past content that doesn’t intrigue.  That contrasts with older generations who expect to sit through ads as they did (and still do) with TV commercials...Half of US Snapchat users are Gen Z.  Gen Z has a higher penetration of US TikTok use than any other age group.  Young users make up a significantly smaller portion of connected TV and linear TV viewers, where ads are frequently over 15 seconds.  The term being circulated more and more is Tik Tok brain.  Wrote a piece in The Week: Kids generally have difficulty using directed attention because the prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until age 25. TikTok's constantly changing environments do not require that level of sustained attention. "If kids' brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don't move quite as fast," Manos said [Michael Manos, clinical director Center for Attention & Learning at Cleveland Clinic Children's],

     But just when it all seems so out of our reach, that of controlling advertisers' all-seeing data, old-fashioned ads may be making a comeback, wrote the Harvard Business Review.  Said part of the piece: As consumers are spending most of their waking hours online, it seems they are becoming increasingly numb to conventional digital advertising and engagement.  They report frustration and negative brand association with digital advertising clutter that prevents them from reading an article, watching a video, or browsing a website.  For example, a HubSpot survey found that 57% of participants disliked ads that played before a video and 43% didn’t even watch them.  As a result, marketers are looking for a way to cut through the noise...research by Ebiquity suggests that traditional media channels --led by TV, radio, and print-- outperform digital channels in terms of reach, attention, and engagement relative to costs.  This performance differential is amplified as costs of online advertising have increased, especially when accounting for impression, click, and conversion fraud — whereas the costs of traditional media have fallen.  It simply makes good economic sense to rebalance spending away from digital clutter.

     Final thoughts: I'm happy to see this trend of returning to simplicity, or at least what seems to be an announced plan to do so, but admittedly I'm a bit skeptical.  After just an hour of doing the basics in the morning --a few minutes of a news summary, a quick check of emails, a few searches for this blog-- my file "cleanup" shows nearly 900 cookies needing to be erased and close to a gigabyte (that's 1,000 megabytes) of temporary "junk" files attempting to store themselves for later.  And yes, I do have all the filters on to "block" third party cookies and such.  And all of that still appears even after I disabled Google's GAID (Apple has similar advertising identifiers).  I "clean" out such cookies and temporary files each time I use the computer or phone but it remains an uphill battle; what one site will clean (say, Norton Utilities), another will spot what was left and clear the remainder (run those programs again and discover that many cookies and files "return").  And likely because my older brain is less susceptible to be targeted, I have found myself zoning out when such ads appears, quickly scrolling down to the rest of the article while multiple images and videos play over and over in between.  It would seem that I have become a Tik Tok brain...

     As you can see from these images from the 1989 advertising book, it doesn't take a lot to make an ad penetrate and stick with you.  Granted, a lot of work and creativity was hashed out to get these award-winning ads in front of your eyes; but glance at a magazine today and see how much (if any) time you spend glancing at the ads.  And the variety of ads seemed to be more meaningful, telling you not only about a product but often about an issue.  Try and find that in today's world.  So the bottom line is that perhaps advertising simply reflects where we are in the world of today, who the marketers feel will "fall" for their ads or be influenced by them.  There's no escaping the drugs we're on, both legal and illegal.  Pharmaceutical companies can do end-arounds to get you to use them (I just saw my first Botox ad...for migraine headaches!).  Obesity drugs Wegovy and Ozempic advertise only their benefit to counter diabetes, while charging $100 in the UK, and $1350 in the US.*  In recent Senate hearings it was revealed that the manufacturer of both drugs has now made more money from those two drugs than they spent in their entire research budget...for the past 30 years!  Thirty years.  Now that's some "good" advertising...

*Said a piece in Bloomberg: A few months ago, Eli Lilly & Co. --the world’s most valuable drugmaker-- ran a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal and other publications taking aim at the booming market for knockoff weight-loss drugs.  While the company has taken a number of legal actions against medical spas, doctors and compounding pharmacies that sell or promote copycat versions of its blockbuster shot Zepbound, it’s now appealing directly to consumers:  “We are making obesity medications.  But want to ensure you are taking the real product,” the WSJ ad said.  Some businesses are hitting back.  On Monday, telehealth company Noom Inc. took out its own cherry red advert in the Journal “challenging recent comments from Lilly regarding compounded medications,” a spokesperson said. Noom, which was one of the first telehealth companies to offer weight-loss shots, recently began selling a copycat version of Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy for $149 a month.  With brand-name weight-loss drugs costing over $1,000 a month in the US, telehealth companies like Noom are luring in customers with lower prices.  The catch is that these drugs don’t follow the same rigorous approval process as brand-name drugs or generics -- and compounding pharmacies are only allowed to make them when the real medications are in short supply.  And on a side note, my buying the ad book was sort of a culmination of my days of collecting print ads I found captivating, carefully keeping them in plastic sheets and put in a folder, complete with all my notes on what I found interesting about them and what caused me to pick only that certain ad.  It became a dairy of sorts, capturing my thoughts from that period.  No one has seen that folder (not even my wife), likely due to a lack of interest.  If and when I head to the old-folks home in the ground, that folder will likely join so many other ads of that era and head to the landfill to become a sliver of creative compost, something forgotten but perhaps something slightly missed...