Death to Bullshit
deathtobullshit.com
deathtobullshit.com
America is spent out. The US personal savings rate is under 5%. Everything else gets spent, and the saved money gets spent later. There's no "pent-up demand" waiting to be unlocked by advertising.
Advertising is thus a net lose for Americans. All that effort adds to cost. For some products, including movies, long distance phone service, and many prescription drugs, the advertising cost exceeds the manufacturing cost.
This is an argument for a tax on advertising. Advertising expenses should not be deductible business expenses at all.
Note that neither Amazon nor WalMart advertises much, compared to other large businesses. Target spends more on ads than WalMart does, although WalMart is much bigger.
What? Amazon is googles largest advertiser and walmart outspends target almost 2:1 ...
http://adage.com/article/digital/amazon-tops-list-google-s-2...
[1] http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/fix-walmart-s-woes-spe... [2] http://adage.com/article/agency-news/amazon-reviews-media-ac... [3] http://adage.com/article/digital/amazon-loses-126-million-ma...
However, advertising when you are a large brand serves a different function than when you are smaller. Large brands need to protect their position in the market, smaller brands need to drive sales.
My guess about your original comment is that you were exposed to Target back to school commercials recently and so they appeared like a larger advertiser than amazon or walmart who focus less on back to school.
The reality though is that advertising comes in many shapes and sizes, and is bought in many different ways. Limiting this to direct media buying is a little deceptive as some brands engage in PR and other strategies that serve the same goal as advertising, without paying a publisher for placement.
It isn't an equal comparison to use direct ad buying as a barometer to prove that advertising just shifts demand and doesn't create it, when PR and other marketing strategies are arguably the same exact thing, just bought in a different way.
I see Americans working very hard when I feel they would get more life satisfaction out of cutting expenses, primarily the big three: transportation, housing, and food.
Getting people healthier and saving more can never lead to bad outcomes.
You forgot taxes, which for me is larger than transportation, housing, or food and is nearly as large as all three combined.
I have often suggested that the financial benefit of advertising seemed unconvincing. Advertising spending certainly has been shown to increase revenue, but how often does it come to pass that the revenue gain from advertising translates to a sufficient increase in gross-profit to cover the advertising expenditure?
Google is a company that is built on data and advertising. Surely they have the required information and the skills to analyse to give an answer.
Wait, WHAT!? Advertising is a tax-deductible business expense? Why on earth?
(Capital gains tax kinda does, at least in the jurisdictions I know about; you can offset losses against gains. But earned income seems just as much like business revenue as capital gains...)
Where do you draw the line between, "I need clothes to function as a human being", and "I buy clothes because I'm into fashion?"
We could probably come up with some general fair-ish rules, but their effects on consumer spending might do more harm than they help.
Most consumer debt was tax deductible. I believe it changed in the 1970s.
In general an expense is deductible as long as it has a legitimate business purpose.
This is why any economic recovery plans that don't focus on growing the income of middle- and lower-class americans is doomed to fail. The rich can already buy anything they want, and they're saving like crazy. Until we unleash more demand from the lower- and middle-class, all efforts are futile.
It's also why we should be focusing on, and supporting, raises in the minimum wage, reductions in work weeks (more demand for leisure goods and services), and decreased tax burden on the middle class.
This necessarily implies a (potentially dramatic) increase in taxes on the wealthy. They can afford it. If someone claims they'll cut and run to a tax haven country -- let them. We'll do better without them around.
Ultimately, that's the problem. The Capitalist project has reached its end, but the shareholders don't want to admit that and entrepreneurs don't want to admit that to them... because why would you invest if you can't continue to make outsized gains against a market that doesn't support your vision of profit.
Whether the Nordic model is really socialist is a subject of intense debate among the Left (as usual).
That the voters choose to vote themselves high taxes for the purposes of high government spending is more a function of their culture than anything else.
Did you actually read what was written? It hasn't failed. It's failing to produce for Capitalist themselves in terms of profits. Capitalism has succeeded. But that means the journey is at its end. There is no going back, there is only going forward. And forward does not look like the present or the past.
The cost of production is going up while the profits are going down.
As a web person it's not hard for me to see. No one wants to pay for web development but want all the features. Technology enables this to some extent but there are limits to what can be done. The product has to be perfect and has to be free or nearly free. etc. etc. Sooner or later I will fail to deliver on expectations.
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Ess...
I do recall some rather elaborate book, perhaps entitled Capital, being written about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall...
Rising minimum wage and reducing hours does the exact opposite. Decreasing a tax burden is a good idea - but decreasing the tax burden on everyone.
'Tax the rich' while a popular strategy to single out a minority group, is ultimately a useless strategy as there aren't enough rich people to tax, and they already disproportionally pay more than anyone else.
The UK dabbled in extremely high investment taxes at 98%. I think this would fall under your 'tax the rich' proscription. The unfortunate side effect was that investment was virtually stopped overnight and the country stopped growing GDP for two whole years, making everyone significantly poorer and destroying many industries and companies.
Unfortunately I read this type of comment frequently, and they all fall into the trap of the 'daddy model of wealth' : http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
But not all is lost, you did suggest that middle class income is key, understanding that productivity is the key to income growth is the key to that. However, cutting hours and increasing pay are the exact opposite to increasing productivity.
This is the exact same story we've been told for 30 years: if you want more jobs and more productivity just lower taxes. It didn't work then and it doesn't work now. It just enables the ultra-wealthy to siphon off wealth from the rest of society.
Ultimately that hurts productivity.
>The UK dabbled in extremely high investment taxes at 98%. I think this would fall under your 'tax the rich' proscription. The unfortunate side effect was that investment was virtually stopped overnight and the country stopped growing GDP for two whole years,
IIRC this was actually due to the oil crisis. The US, on the other hand, dabbled in ~90% tax rates in the 50s when it experienced high growth levels never before seen since.
Have you read the linked essay? Do you disagree with the central premise, that a society with no income inequality is a society that is not innovating and getting better?
One mechanism is the things that go by the name 'unearned income': interest payments, dividends on shares you own, streams of rental income.
Another is simply fraud: http://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/bill-black-our-system-so-...
Their money buys condos (which they leave empty) in large cities suffering from a shortage of housing. That's one example of wealth sequestration that hurts everybody else.
>Have you read the linked essay?
I have.
>Do you disagree with the central premise, that a society with no income inequality is a society that is not innovating and getting better?
I disagree with this part:
>Doing what people want is not the only way to get money, of course. You could also rob banks, or solicit bribes, or establish a monopoly. Such tricks account for some variation in wealth, and indeed for some of the biggest individual fortunes, but they are not the root cause of variation in income
With a hand wave Paul Graham dismisses all evidence of fraud which has accelerated income inequality in the last ~10 years and the mere existence of the principal/agent problem and nepotism (which explains how bad CEOs get paid so much).
His argument boils down to "in theory you can be 50 times as productive as someone else" => "nearly all people who are paid 50 times as much as their workers must be 50 times as productive". Just world fallacy.
>When we say that one kind of work is overpaid and another underpaid, what are we really saying? In a free market, prices are determined by what buyers want.
Also this. Unfortunately no such thing as a free market exists anywhere.
It's all about how we value people.
Labor is the source of new wealth creation. Capital can augment this by sourcing technology, automation, etc...
There is also infinite demand. That's good news. However, this demand breaks down into two coarse buckets:
1. Demand backed by liquid dollars and or access to credit
2. Demand not backed by liquid dollars and or access to credit.
The latter kind of demand doesn't do us much good, in that people want and need stuff, but do not have the means to participate in an economy to get those wants and needs satisfied. As a result, they go unmet, or are met by crime or local trade, or some other means that does not contribute to the overall demand otherwise present in the economy.
Wages have been essentially flat in the US for roughly 40 years. During that time, productivity has gone up, profit has gone up, GDP has gone up, and the cost and risk exposure seen by ordinary Americans has also gone up.
Our response has generally been to work more hours and or improve access to credit.
Many people also take on significantly greater risk exposure due to needs consuming most of their liquid dollars, which prevents them from accumulating savings.
It's not necessary to increase taxes on wealthy people to improve on this scenario and create more demand.
What is necessary is they simply take less. Increasing wages will increase demand. Think of that as an investment, not a tax, or cost.
As liquid demand improves, so will employment and so will tax revenue to the treasury. That tax revenue can be put to good use on infrastructure and other public works type efforts that are long overdue.
Spending on something that results in value being added to the nation makes the nation worth more and it makes the nation better able to compete globally, given that value is roughly aligned with those goals.
Obviously, the dig a hole and fill it in type scenario so often cited isn't a value add, and would not have the desired impact. But bridges, roads, networks, etc... would provide better paying jobs and those better paying jobs would begin to present demand rapidly.
The Interstate Highway system is a great example of this in action. We've been paid back many times the amount of money put into that system, and it presented lots of demand to business as well as enabled trade. Private investment, in tandem with the roads and liquid dollars available, resulted in lots of new economic activity, jobs and opportunity.
One problem I have with the idealized market view of labor is the imbalance between the buyers and sellers. A strict market view says the more supply of labor, the lower the cost in response. So a basic job is worth very little as there are always lots of competitors willing to work those basic jobs.
However, when a job does not pay as much as it costs the laborer to perform the work, we end up with a gap. The laborer has basic needs that will be met, or they die. That laborer may also have wants, that may or may not be met depending.
Where full time work, and that is a 40 hours / week on average expectation, does not actually deliver enough dollars to meet the basic needs of the laborer, something has to give, and that thing that gives is our safety net spending, crime, and other expensive things close the gap.
In reality, our taxes are subsidizing labor.
As much as wealthy people are concerned about being targeted to fund more of the society, all of us should be concerned about labor subsidies like this. I agree on limiting the scope and size of "tax the rich" type solutions, BTW.
But I also am sensitive to having to pay for labor subsidies when it's clear the enterprise could very easily pay modest living wages.
People have lives that break down into thirds. One to sleep, another for family / personal time, and one for work. Some argument can be made about the division of personal time and work, say 40 hours or 50 hours or 30 hours, but beyond that, it's not realistic to expect people to live to work and work to live.
This means full time labor needs to deliver enough income for the laborer to live a modest life and meet basic needs. That is the cost of labor for the laborer. And in this market based view, we all talk about the cost of business and margins. Perhaps we need to think about the laborer as a business and understand that they too have some basic costs, and that margins actually present in the form of non-committed, liquid dollars.
Demand.
If we do not value our labor properly, we fail to actualize demand in our economy which results in the AD as loss case we face right now. This also means we do not have the economic activity necessary to maintain our basic standard of living expectations either.
Pay people more. In the vast majority of cases profit will still be made and the business will still be viable, just with a reduced income expectation. For some, the increase in demand associated with more liquid dollars out there will mean growth by volume or revenue growth by improving on value added in the form of higher quality, etc...
And there is the choice right there. Some enterprises make that choice and they pay modest living wages when they could be paying minimum ones. Most aren't doing that, instead paying the absolute least, and the product of that is tepid demand and an ever increasing drain on our safety net programs, which are often performing as labor subsidy programs when they are intended to be real help for people who need it.
Full time laborers, on average, really do need to make enough to fund labor full time, or we deny ourselves the full benefit of that economic activity.
Finally, productivity continues to rise, but wages do not. Until we change those dynamics somehow, there is absolutely nothing that shows even more productivity would somehow resolve the problem.
The answer is taxes and regulations. Taxes make everything more expensive. Regulations choke supply of everything from energy to land. Of course, some taxes and some regulation is necessary. But the first thing to do is to stop adding more taxes and regulations. Nobody can seriously believe that adding more taxes and regulations are going to make things better, so the first thing to do is halt and reverse direction.
Regulations are necessary too. Without them, we will experience very significantly higher risks and with those come costs.
The reason is simple: They are not getting paid enough. Wages in the US have been essentially flat while most everything else is on the rise, including profit.
Savings are not to be seen due to the inflationary policy of the FED.
But impression or persuasion based advertising is generally unhelpful or actively harmful.
I recently ran across a fascinating (and scarily dystopian) take on the future of that sort of advertising: http://escapepod.org/2013/05/16/ep396-dead-merchandise/
Though potentially you could persuade people to work harder.
Take me, for instance. I could theoretically retire, if I were happy to live, Mr Money Mustache style, on a very modest income. But every time I pass one of those Jaguar billboards I am reminded to keep working so I can retire later with shinier objects.
Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit, that their collective voice outweighs those that do not simply by the fact that those are often the users who click ads, share things, and otherwise generate more value and revenue for the publishers than those that do not.
While the arms race to fight this stuff is commendable (I myself run at least NoScript at home and it is beautiful), I can't help but think the only way to win is to not play.
By that I mean coming up with revenue alternatives for publishers that not only generate more revenue than this approach, but also provide a direct incentive to not use these things.
If such magical solution existed, they would switch of their own volition. Instead, they focus their efforts and dollars (and by extension the focus of an entire industry that has been built on those dollars) on adding more items to the list of bullshit.
Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy, the equilibrium amount of billboard advertising would go way down.
Advertisers play a zero-sum game, committing more and more resources to one-up each other. They're wasting ever increasing amount of fuel, minerals and man hours on epsilon marginal benefit. Those are real, tangible costs for society.
Are you sure the prevalence of bullshit isn't healthy? If there weren't so much bullshit, you'd be less immune to it when it matters. Seeing the wrong kind of doctor after being diagnosed with cancer, for example.
Usually I find the state-made info signs on the sides of freeways more informative than the advertisement billboards because it displays everything I need in one quick glance. The tiles of each "food" or gas or whatever option partitioned left or right, denoting which way I need to turn after the exit. That's just me, though. And I'm a weirdo who sometimes drives with his phone in airplane mode and chases NPR on the dial.
-> If there weren't so much bullshit, you'd be less immune to it when it matters.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It's not like it's 2 alternatives of content we're talking about, one legitimate and one not. I think it's more that there's legitimate content that's constantly getting interference from this extraneous and meaningless noise.
It's important to remember that such abstractions enable you to reject the content you don't personally see as meritorious as unwholesome. And that's a sure way to fool oneself. Rewind the clock a hundred years and you might be arguing for prohibition. It's also classic no true Scottsman, for what it's worth.
One's noise is another's music. Why is it there if no one finds it helpful?
A better distinction is mistaken or not mistaken.
OP had a good answer: Negative externality.
Sure, but I'm not talking about subjective opinions about content. I'm talking about the other things interfering with my ability to consume the content I'm trying to consume. And I don't think that this is a classic "no true Scottsman" in that sense. I'm not making any statement about what is or isn't true internet content (because obviously that would be silly). Perhaps my word choice of "legitimate" was unwise in that way.
I've never found my life "degraded" by a billboard, even if it was for a product I'd never buy. In fact, some of them are still useful, especially when driving long distances on the Interstate. They're something to break the monotony and give you something to think about, if only for a minute or two. Some are downright funny/amusing, and others at least provoke a "I wonder what that's supposed to mean" reaction.
"cognitive pollution"? That smells suspiciously like bullshit to me.
By that definition, anything outside of one's immediate focus and interests is "cognitive pollution." If that's the standard, then it's so vague and subjective as to be nearly useless. As forms of advertising go, I can't think of many which are less disruptive, or easier to simply ignore, than billboards.
A better example might be alternative medicine. It's bullshit because it's mistaken. It's a negative externality because it costs nothing to imply that it works. And it's harmful because it can kill you.
Most cases of bullshit aren't as extreme, and I'm trying to think of some better examples of bullshit that won't kill you but will degrade your life. TV comes to mind.
If also has to bring you no value as it acts to distract you.
> As forms of advertising go, I can't think of many which are less disruptive, or easier to simply ignore, than billboards.
Each billboard is less disruptive, but a hundred can cry for your attention at once.
Anyway, I acknowledge that a lot of people get really worked up over billboards. I just have a hard-time getting excited over that. Maybe there are better examples of this "cognitive pollution". shrug
Of course there would be something where the billboard would have been, but advertising is designed, at great expense and with a huge amount of effort, to arrest the attention of the audience. (A significant amount of which is accomplished by being intentionally obnoxious.)
There certainly are better examples[1], but I think you are being willfully obtuse.*
Please... that kind of thing just lowers the level of discourse for everybody involved.
Of course there would be something where the billboard would have been, but advertising is designed, at great expense and with a huge amount of effort, to arrest the attention of the audience.
Perhaps it is, and what I'm saying then is that that doesn't bother me. But it's probably a reflection of some ideological / philosophical bias on my part. I've never been up-in-arms about advertising the way some people are. I don't even surf the web with an adblocker installed. Ads are something I see as occasionally beneficial, occasionally Really-Fucking-Annoying, and mostly just ignorable background noise. The only time I find myself drifting into anti-ad rage is when the ads are particularly obnoxious, or repetitive, etc. For example, video/audio ads on a page that start playing with no prompting from the user. That gets on my tits a bit, and that's where I jump on the "end the bullshit" bandwagon somewhat.
They're not funny / amusing / thought provoking anymore. They're not even readable or recognisable because there's too many of them. The photo title from the link is "300 billboards on a 20km road". And it's a fairly standard thing in Poland for example.
I seem to have no way to signal my demand for such things other than avoiding products and brands that advertise, but my signal is probably misinterpreted by companies thinking they're not advertising enough.
Maybe a better term is just negative externality. The masses suffer the negatives while the advertiser and the business paying for the ads receive nearly all the benefits.
I'm seeing some BS here..a lot of hyperbolic, pseudo-psychology BS.
A negative externality is when one does something which imposes a cost or an 'economic bad' on someone else who is not being compensated for it.
The noise from the neighbor who mows his lawn at 7:00 on a Sunday morning is a negative externality. The neighbors lives are slightly worse off because their sleep, which was interrupted, has value to them.
When determining what should be done about this there are only a few ways this could go, the lawn-mower compensates his neighbors for the noise, the neighbors compensate the lawn-mower to mow his lawn at some other time, or the homeowner's association compels the lawn-mower to stop.
But there's at least one solution with a problem. If the neighbors pay the lawn-mower to not mow his lawn then we've created a situation where someone can be paid for doing something annoying to others and then demanding compensation to stop.
Hopefully you've seen how this metaphor translates to advertising, and specifically for the practice of paying to remove advertising.
Based on the numbers of users of various ad blockers there are a huge amount of people who find ads in general as a negative externality. Although you might argue that they're being compensated on websites by receiving some desirable content in return this doesn't translate to billboards where the annoyed viewer is gaining no other value.
Thank you for not echoing some of your colleagues' ridiculous "if you block ads there will never be any more art ever" arguments.
Really? People do do an awful lot of stuff which doesn't work. Is there good evidence that this stuff works?
A corollary: I do believe that "metrics" in on-line advertising are a tool for people using them to bullshit themselves into believing their ads work. Even an average college-educated person has zero understanding of statistics, and without it, it's easy to draw any conclusion you like from any dataset.
Whereas the alternative is that maybe you're just wrong or misunderstanding of how things work.
I'd generally put higher odds on you being wrong, than of an entire field being so completely off base, at least a field as large and well researched as this.
I generally would too. But we know now that it is indeed possible for a very large and "well researched" field to be wrong - just look at the state of soft sciences. A lot of evidence came up recently show that 90% of research in those fields is bullshit (often intentional). It's not beyond realm of possibility that a big part of advertising industry forms a self-contained system of moving money around with zero relation to the real world.
So, the size of your marketing department is more related to the size of your competitors department, than any actual effectiveness. Which is another way of reinforcing monopolistic consolidation. A large competitor likely can significantly outspend a smaller one with advertising dollars, which just goes to cement its position in the market.
You know as well as I do that the myth of these strategies succeeding for every business cases and for every brand (and the propagation of that myth by the entire industry) is more of a strategy for bringing in clients than it is for helping them achieve more online success.
I think one would be better served learning how to coexist with the bullshit than trying to put a stop to it, and I'm usually pretty idealistic. It's just too uphill of a battle to fight millions of years of inertia across our whole species (look at the advertising industry, how huge it is, you think we're going to put a stop to that by simply appealing to people's senses of beauty on the Internet or whatever? And that's just one piece of the bullshit).
Never gonna happen. Human beings are born to bullshit. The fact that we compete for mates and the way the different genders have differing optimal mating strategies pretty much ensures that. We are always going to bullshit each other to a certain degree, as we try to achieve the ends we are innately wired to pursue.
That doesn't mean we can't fight back against bullshit of the nature described in TFA, but we won't ever live in a world with no bullshit. Or if we do, it won't be recognizable as anything like human society as we know it. If anything, it'd probably look like the worst dystopian nightmare scenario we can think of.
I think we've accumulated some nuance over the millenia. Killing the mating competition, or even lower level violence, is very relatively rare these days. And I'm pretty sure that significant numbers of people approach meeting and mating with more sincerity than bullshit.
You may be right. But that doesn't contradict what I said. I'm not saying we approach that, or anything else, with complete bullshit. I'm saying we all (or close to all) approach it with some bullshit. Perhaps not even consciously, but we're all trying to sell ourselves, make ourselves look more desirable, etc. in various ways.
Killing the mating competition, or even lower level violence, is very relatively rare these days.]
"Relatively" in this context is ill-defined, but I'd be curious to see the numbers on how many murders/assaults/etc. ultimately involve jealousy over romantic/sexual partners, infidelity, cuckolding, etc.
And "relative" really is a key word here because while this is happening insanely fast on universal time scales, it's actually agonizingly slow within the context of a human lifetime. Which creates a catch 22: I could devote my life to stamping out some form of bullshit (if simply by promoting education), and on my death bed wonder if my efforts were even distinguishable from noise. But it is combined efforts like these that do gradually move the needle, and for each person that makes that evaluation and decides it's not worth it, it will take that much longer.
So too should we strive limit bullshit.
I don't think this is an example of the naturalistic fallacy, as least not as it's commonly understood[1].
I am not trying to reductively define anything in terms of "natural" properties, which would be an example of the naturalistic fallacy. I'm merely making an observation, that certain levels of bullshit are intrinsic in human nature and that it's probably fantastical thinking to believe we can ever completely eliminate bullshit.
Humans are also "born to lie" and "born to kill", but societies create structure and limits.
And have we eliminated lying or killing?
So too should we strive limit bullshit.
Agreed. We just shouldn't be naive in thinking that it's going to be easy to eliminate it completely. And we should probably acknowledge that it might not even be possible to eliminate it completely.
You make it sound like the clueless ones are always the same people though. I certainly paid for my share of BS (and guilt-tripped my parents into paying before that) and now I feel like I'm not doing that any more (even though there was no point when I didn't feel this way..).
> Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit,
I don't think that's necessarily true. Just because deception is effective doesn't mean people want to be deceived. Just because alcoholism is "effective" in getting people to drink doesn't mean people want alcoholism. (A weird analogy, I know, but it logically parallels your conclusion, to an admitted extreme.)
Are we sure of that? It might depend on our definition of "work". A lot of the people responsible for doing this stuff may just be doing it because if they admit that none of it works, they'll have nothing else to offer and will be out of a job. It's not terribly hard to make up data showing some kind of effectiveness, or just to misinterpret real data in a way that can convince others to let you keep doing it. For every marketing or advertising craftsman out there who builds something that works, gathers useful data, and interprets that data honestly, there are probably 20 people who have no clue and just keep churning out the same stuff because they don't have anything else to offer. Whether it's profitable, or profitable enough to be worth doing, is anyone's guess. Given how cheap impressions are, especially the kind of ultra-low-value impressions that bullshit provides, it's pretty difficult to imagine this stuff paying for itself, even if most of it is autogenerated or written by the world's most desperate English-speakers.
It might help more to come up with other jobs for the people who are putting the bullshit out there. Jobs they can do well, ideally. As it stands, I'm not sure the bullshit is serving their employers as much as it's just something for them to do so they keep getting a paycheck.
Let me share a personal anecdote from watching a social media marketing company at works.
These marketing people got contracts to do brand/site/service promotion on everyone's favourite social networking and image collecting sites. They wrote many posts, made interesting graphics, etc. Generally did a good, honest work at that. Then every month they had to write reports detailing the effectiveness of their efforts. The way they did it was like this:
1) gather metrics provided by social media platforms they used
2) put them in a DOC file
3) start with the conclusion that they did their job well and helped the marketed company tremendously
4) invent some plausible-sounding reasons to connect the data from 1) to conclusion in 3)
And mind you, this wasn't intentional dishonesty. They simply have no fucking clue about the meaning of the data, or what can (and can not) be reasonably inferred from it, so they don't even try. They don't even know what they don't know. But their clients don't know anything too; it's basically both sides not knowing what those colorful graphs and tables of numbers mean and bullshitting one another without even realizing it.
I guess one can't generalize from one example, but mind this: social media marketing companies are not staffed by math PhDs, they're staffed by social sciences undergrads who decided that, given current state of the job market, learning Photoshop is better than working at McDonalds. They may be good at making interesting content, but they have zero necessary knowledge for getting right conclusions from data.
As someone who is deep in the thick of that stuff, I'll be the first to admit the data is very fuzzy, and relies on a lot of statistics to really get a sense of whether things are working when there is not a strong direct response component (see: brand display advertising). Even the value things like paid search are entirely subjective depending on the attribution model you use and how you measure incremental lift.
But that isn't to say it is all voodoo that doesn't work. Its just that to measure it properly you need some very expensive technology and/or proper stats training.
That's what I believe too. It does work when done properly, but most of the shops are not equipped to even begin to understand how to do it.
What kind of expensive technology do you mean in particular, if I may ask?
Static attribution models like first touch, last touch, U-shaped, and even custom weighted models provided multiple lenses through which to view your data to see how it would be valued if more credit was given towards it (since historically things were viewed via last touch lenses for the most part). Google Analytics offers some great attribution tools for free if you're interested in checking those out.
Beyond that, static models have their weaknesses, so dynamic models such as the data-driven model in Google Analytics Premium are a nice step up. There are other solutions that handle this too such as VisualIQ, Adometry, Convertro, etc. Those were all recently acquired by Google, and others btw.
Then there is software that attempts to help you model incremental lift in addition to dynamic attribution models. I just demoed Adobe's econometric modeling tool in their Adobe Analytics package (that feature set might be in the higher-level version) and that was about the closest I've seen to date for doing it the way I consider the "right" way (ie. user-path level attribution and modeling for incremental lift using literally whatever external data you can feed into it).
I'm an ad tech nerd so let me know if you have any other questions.
I haven't seen anything really that handles the reporting of that specifically. Typically modeling ideal frequency caps is left as an exercise to the user, and banner blindness is typically looked at by CTR as certain channels like FB can see a steep drop in that pretty quickly after as little as 2 weeks if you have a relatively small audience you are saturating.
This gets more interesting on the retargeting side as people often complain about constantly seeing ads for a company--yet the reality is higher frequency caps often work because it keeps the brand top of mind or reminds them they needed to do something.
But again, not familiar with any specific technical solutions with features built around modeling that and providing recommendations. That is still largely a human effort that requires analysis of touch point data on the frequency cap side, and other directional metrics on the banner blindness side.
Would love to know if you or others know of any solutions that handle that better. I'm sure DSPs/networks like Criteo and others have their own in-house solutions, but part of the challenge is that there's no great way to set global frequency caps across DSPs/networks if you use multiple platforms.
It's whether (a) buying ad impressions on a clickbait listicle (or other "bullshit" page) is cost-effective or effective at all, (b) whether writing and hosting such pages is profitable once all internal costs are properly considered, and (c) whether the advertising formats the author is complaining about are cost-optimal or even effective at all. I took the GP's claim that "it works" to mean that the answers to all three questions are an emphatic yes. I'm not so sure we know that, and I'm not so sure it's true. It seems likely that the answers might well be "almost never", "probably not", and "maybe sometimes", but factors other than profitability are at work that cause the people making the decisions to do these things even when an omniscient rational corporation would not. Improper use of statistics or poor data collection could certainly be an explanation for that, but I propose that it's more basic than that. Of course, I might also be wrong, and maybe all this bullshit does work, and works very well. That just doesn't seem like the slam dunk that was implied.
The formats, popularized by such ad networks as Taboola and Outbrain gained popularity because publishers needed ways to drive additional ad revenue without adding what appeared to be more display ads.
This happened to combine with the layout/design tactics of sites like Buzzfeed and HuffPo that have nailed the approach to keeping users engaged, clicking, and reading.
Coincidentally, this also helped provide a source of content for sites didn't really care about drawing the line between journalism and sales. Not that more respected publications haven't been trying them--just with tighter controls over the advertisers (perhaps via direct sales only).
Affiliates are all over these as expected, and if they can make it work, then that says something because affiliates operate on crap margins and have many other challenges.
That said, there's almost certainly a significant amount of dollars in there from companies just testing it because you need to constantly be testing new traffic sources and approaches. In fact, I always recommend companies carve out a test budget that they can just consider wasted, and if it happens to perform or they learn something, then it usually pays off in spades.
There are always those that are less savvy and tossing money away on wasted impressions. Then there are folks like myself who understand the limitations of the data, the nature of the medium, have their own audience data, etc. In many ways it parallels the differences between Wall St. and Main St. in the investing world.
Producing bullshit is more profitable because it still attracts eyeballs (and therefore ad revenue), but is much less costly to produce. Thats why the presence of large amounts of ads, needless pagination, and interface bullshit are a reasonable indicator of content bullshit.
I believe "manslaughter" and "murder" should be switched around here.
IIRC, Harry Frankfurt argued that bullshit was worse than lies, since it corroded this simple but for-society-to-function-in-the-long-run incredibly important distinction (or aspiration).
"Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires."
I bookmarked it for those off days when I need a good laugh.
Every piece of bullshit you see is how a great many people pay their mortgages and feed their children. Casting them out to the street is unlikely to make things better.
Everyone's bullshit is someone else's reason for existence. The product I work on is completely superfluous to my life, but over a million people pay for it including some of my coworkers.
For example, sure there's lots of advertisements of snowboarding, but if any/all of them disappeared, it doesn't mean I would stop wanting to do it. But of course, I don't need it. I'm still spending my money on gear / clothing / transport / accommodation / food / services that are related to snowboarding, because I want to do it.
People wanted things before bullshit all around us existed (or existed only in a limited and local scale). Civilisation existed before the first advertisement agency was created.
Finally! I get rid of two things I hate in one go!
>It's hundreds of millions of people with nothing to do all day and no way to sustain themselves, an inevitable civil war with the landlord class, and a revolution that manages to install a government's that quite possibly worse.
Why do you find it easier to imagine the end of civilization than the end of capitalism?
There's little difference between "things that people don't need", and "things that people may need but are done inefficiently".
In the late 19th century, you might have said that "a world with cars means utter economic collapse of the whip-and-buggy-and-horse trades". And you would be right - but that just means people (and jobs) are reallocated to more useful stuff.
And that is what would (and should, but never will) happen if bullshit is eradicated -- rather than total economic collapse. This kind of eradication does not happen overnight - it takes a long time, and except for the incumbents who are too happy with their share, everyone sees it coming and adjusts accordingly.
No one argues that bullshit is constantly being iterated on. But cars are bullshit - i.e. we lived for a long time without them, and they needed to be advertised to take hold. Now simply having a car is entrenched bullshit, and the cutting edge is convincing people to buy expensive ones.
You don't need a car, but cars are necessary to facilitate the American Dream, also sold to us by advertising in the 40s/50s, of living in suburbs. Home ownership and the things that go with it are equally bullshit.
One of the first documented shifts in public opinion orchestrated by a PR firm is America's belief that roads are for cars instead of people.
Video and transcription: http://leoherzog.com/jon-stewarts-incredible-bullsht-speech
Even though this proposition is in bold 20-pt type, no arguments were offered to support it. It isn't obviously true, and indeed there are reasons to suspect the converse. Dare I say it, but a bald emotionally-appealing assertion of this sort seems sort of like... bullshit?
Of course that's only a valid argument when bullshit is not the main product. I don't doubt websites such as buzzfeed and 9gag will keep on thriving.
So because of that, I had always been in favor of ads. Not as in I'd plaster my site with ads, but if a site displayed ads, I would endure them because if I wanted the content that's the trade off. Otherwise I could find similar content somewhere else.
Then The Verge's article about slow browsing came about, and the retorting articles about things and I realized ads have gone way to fucking far.
17 years I have been online. 17 years I had never installed an ad blocking plugin or anything. Last month I installed uBlock Origin and turned it into blacklist mode.
I still feel sites who have ads in place that aren't intrusive and annoying deserve to be displayed, but sites like The Verge, or CNN or anything like that which blast you with 300 requests where 90% of them are ads. Or sites where ads become more important than the content; These sites get instant ad blocking enabled for them.
It's time to take a step back.
I got my start in computer crime (chasing the crimes that others committed) and if it wasn't for others committing computer crime, I would never have gotten into what we do.
Should I be in favor of other people committing computer crime?
I sort of hoped that after clicking "I am a racist" to dismiss the "Like us on Facebook" page, that the popup chiding my brazen admission would have hijacked the OK button to post my admission to all logged in social media sites.
But unfortunately Brad seems to be to honorable for that, even after people doubly-confirm that they want the bullshit. And counter-to-reality, the pulsing read "Turn this bullshit off" link works as advertised.
Anybody know if there actually are any studies that show that these ads (1) help businesses attract clients and (2) do so without alienating more clients than they attract? Or are they all just for businesses that don't care about keeping customers anyways (e.g. weight loss fads)
Companies often take the cheap approach because they're cautious about the return they're going to get, don't know any better, are cheap themselves and don't appreciate design.
This book should have a spot on everyone's desk in hard copy. Use it as a coaster, walk around with it in the hallways, take it to meetings. No need to preach from it though - its very presence will be enough of a sign to others re: your tolerance levels of the amount of bullshit stinking up the current situation.
EDIT: BTW, I do indeed have a copy of On Bullshit, but I use "The Elements Of Style" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elements_of_Style ) book in the exact same way as I suggested above for On Bullshit. I think they are two sides of the same coin :)
BTW - what I found most enlightening in the book is how he articulates the difference between the "bull session" and bullshit.
Section II (looking at my copy in front of me), which discusses composition, was most useful as my paper was chock-full of techno babble, needless words and lacked consistent design from section to section and paragraph to paragraph.
* (this is an exaggeration on the extreme low end :) )
You want to argue that bullshit content is what's keeping people uninformed? I say no, it takes a certain innate sense to rise above the natural flow of misinformation. Some people can only be guided by rhetoric - they make their decisions based on consensus in their local network and too easily trust people who claim to stand for it.
What we have is a war: between those who guide the senseless and those who exploit them. Take your pick.
But ultimately it's about concentration. I believe, for the most part, that multitasking is a myth. When I am reading something difficult, or that I would like to remember in detail later, I need to focus on it exclusively and read it without interruption. That means ad blockers, print view, etc.
> As the landslide of bullshit surges down the mountain, people will increasingly gravitate toward genuinely useful, well-crafted products, services, and experiences that respect them and their time
This sounds like wishful thinking to me. Marketing and design are surely down to a psychological science by now.
https://blog.applovin.com/data-desk-6-whatever-it-would-cost...
Really? I just read an article about how Apple is intentionally avoiding a traditional social media presence as a part of its marketing strategy. So does the science work like, "if you are rich enough to buy out several independent nations, do not use social media for marketing?" Or what?
And as a designer myself, I have to say "science" applied to design has a bad reputation among designers [1]. I put the word in quotes because true science is an interest of mine. And if one day in the future the application of science to design is solidified, hopefully this means fractal design software will rise from its current "American Idol without Simon Cowell" state of chaos to become part of the Adobe Creative Nebula, or whatever it's called by then. Because right now, the golden mean and fractals are just a couple of the millions of tools in a very intuitive toolbox, and they seem most likely to underwhelm when used alone as part of some grand demonstration of science meeting design.
So: If there's a science to all of this, by all means elucidate.
[1] http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html
Product quality, user interaction, control (and yes, that is value added to a lot of people who don't want to know stuff and just have tech work for them), etc...
Compare two pieces of technology on specs alone, and a lot of value is ignored. This is what is behind your average, "Apple computers cost too much" argument. The buyer of an Apple computer sees value in the OS, environment, packaging, design, etc... and they are willing to pay for that value too.
Others do not value those things, seeking only to get technology features at a lower price. To them, it's all fluff and margins play out accordingly.
Avoiding traditional social media is very likely part of that high value experience. People who don't want to be bothered or who want to run a little outside the mainstream mass means, ways, paths, pick up on that and it's likely working for Apple.
Consider two companies, both delivering a similar product. One competes on price, the other value added. The always low price company will do a lot of volume, but will also see very thin margins. The one delivering lots of value, properly positioning it, and asking to be paid for it, will do less volume, but see much higher margins.
Both companies will have to maintain all the infrastructure needed to service the market.
Apple is extremely well capitalized and this is part of why they are. Apple does the work others do, but does it well and with design sensibilities and experience goals that people will pay nicely for.
No need for a massive social media campaign. Those who see that value will pay for it easily. And it's not hard to miss, given the alternatives.
You would hope that a rallying cry of Death to BS would invoke a slight bias towards withholding BS and focusing on facts that make a difference.
Do I agree that there is way too much noise online? Yes, but complaining about it is as noisy as things come!!!
General de Gaulle's comment on a similar slogan: "a vast programme".
I sympathize with the author but I'm not really sure what to make of this.
As for advertising, paying for entertainment and information with some time and attention is not really bullshit. It's a voluntary exchange, and both sides would not engage if they did not have some inclination that they would be better off than without the exchange. There are other things you can exchange for entertainment and information, and you can completely opt out.
..these seem useful. I must be missing some nuance re their bullshittyness - can anyone elaborate?
QR codes are an international standard, have plenty of good libraries to generate and process them, can store more information, have excellent error correction, and easily scan from odd angles.
Other types of bar codes... not so much.
At least in Dublin, Ireland you can still see them, e.g. on bus stops, sometimes on brochures here and there and as a rule the context suggests they should just lead to an ad and nothing else.
For example, I print QR codes on the back of my business cards containing a VCard record, to make it easier to import them into an address book if needed. Or at home, I have a QR code that automatically populates credentials for my WiFi network when guests come over. It's also the easiest way to add a TOTP code to Authy or Google Authenticator.
I like to think these are reasonable uses.
iBeacon is bullshit. I sincerely hope it'll turn into something useful with time, but for now, it's just a toy for advertisers.
Also, solutions add up. In our local Hackerspace, we often used a combination of QR code, plaintext credentials and an NFC sticker for things like Wi-Fi access and switching lights on/off wirelessly.
Isn't this almost certainly done better with a link to a vcard file?
Not to mention that giving someone a business card with a link to download contact data is just wrong on many different levels. It's using a very wrong tool for the job. To put a contact file on-line you have to host it somewhere. Then the person you gave the card to has to retype the URL. URL that, like with most of the Internet, will probably be dead in six months.
Generally, the solution to the problem of digitizing the data you have physically in your hand should not involve sending packets around half of the globe.
A specific example relating to UX: I always point people to this gov.uk design guide as an excellent example of clear writing that is easy to understand. It's not perfect, but it avoids being too wordy and I think it's a good example to emulate
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/user-centred-design/resour...
What's amazing is that the author pays his own bills as a result of such bullshit existing. The companies he's consulting to don't magically make money from nothing.[0]
This is the lowest ranked comment right now, but I think it is great, and I want to rephrase it in a way that maybe more people can appreciate it (and hopefully doesn't get me downvoted like crazy)
So the reason I take offence at "advice" or a movement like this (not sure what it's supposed to be) is that it makes the speaker and everybody who associates with it look incredibly good, while it is barely bothering to offer any proof as to why it is actually good advice.
I am aware that this sounds cynical and I beg you to resist the temptation to downvote and/or ignore this comment. Instead I'd invite you to ask yourself: Could this argument have something to it despite the fact that it's pretty uncomfortable?
Going on, why does getting behind this make us look good? It shows that:
* we are not ignorant of questionable business practices in our field
* we don't prey on the (intellectually) weak in order to sustain our businesses
* we value ideals like craft more than money (ignoring that most of these practices are not driven by greed at all but are the only way to ensure the survival of some companies, which brings me to the next point, that)
* we are not afraid to "stick it to the man" (even though "the man" is probably a complete strawman and we don't have to fear any real retaliation for expressing this opinion)
Now there is nothing wrong with advice that makes us look good per se, but is it also good advice?
> People's capacity for bullshit is rapidly diminishing
Again, this may sound good, but it could have been said at any point in time and be true, the question is: Is it diminishing faster then new ways of bullshitting arise?
And maybe it is not diminishing at all. Take gambling for example. It is obviously "intentionally deceptive or insincere" in that it won't make you rich, it is in fact mathematically proven to make you lose money, yet people seem to have gambled for thousands of years and will probably go on to do so for thousands of years to come.
The attempt of linking bullshit to Sturgeon's law is also pretty weak IMO. It's not like anybody set out to put something in the bottom 90%, it's what happens to, well, 90% of things, and it's not at all clear that it was BS that put it there. In other words: Naively looking at the top 10% and saying: "None of those is doing BS" does not mean the lack of BS got them there. All it says is that "In the top 10% you don't have to BS (because you can afford not to)", or even just "BS doesn't get you any further in the top 10% (and that's why nobody is doing it)".
Finally, Buzzfeed is certainly in the top 10% of "lighthearted entertainment on the internet" and it is BS (and only BS) that got them there, because that's the kind of environment that "lighthearted entertainment on the internet" is like. No amount of shaming will change anything about that (but would still make us look good, so produce some quality content over there already!).
tl,dr: Be aware of advice that sounds good. People will like to offer it even when it is not practical at all, or only under very specific circumstances, that may not apply to you.
Thankyou!
It's basically a manifesto written by an individual interested in being another absolute arbiter of taste. It completely ignores the nuances, relativism and circumstance of how people internalize ideas, make decisions and generally connect.
It even go as far as to say that it is the reason why being a great engineer or creator of things is am anti-pattern for NOT ultimately adding something worthwhile to society.
There is no absolutism to quality of ideas or structure of communications. Their is genuine hard workin taking what you create and weaving into people days and narratives.
This manifesto will one day embarrass it's creator with it's naivety when they are older and more experienced.
Their problem with the article is that it makes the wrong assumption that everyone should be able agree on what does / does not count as bullshit. Including, recursively, the article itself.
In the past and in places many of us prefer not to go now, there were "arbiters of taste" who were able to influence many people's thinking by representing themselves as "the truth" (you know - the one without the bullshit).
We now live in a more open marketplace of ideas which, most likely, your parent is happy about. He / she would not like the article's author, nor anyone else, to resume such authority. They likely believe that though bullshit-everywhere might be true, it is still a price worth paying for diversity of ideas.
The world is full of ideas and things being built everyday. Not respecting the "bullshit" effort of attempting to get an idea to standout with messaging, marketing or any other type of distribution reflects a naiveté and is in fact a practice of inflexible bullshit on what type of ideas are important.
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