The death of Don Draper?
newstatesman.com
newstatesman.com
>Rory co-heads a team of psychology graduates who look for "butterfly effects" in consumer behaviour - these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make
The talk's on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiB5H18aug&t=1187s Recommended if you are in to that stuff.
I thought the bit on economics was interesting - that motivating people by paying or fining them is limiting because there's a lot of other factors you can look at if you are creative. (48m)
The example of Tesla is particularly ridiculous to me and shows how little understanding of marketing the author has. Tesla isn’t a no-marketing company that only relies on its good product. What about a Tesla is superior? Not the interior. Mercedes has them beat there. Not the technology - it’s been proven unreliable at best. Not the range - many gasoline cars have better range. Not the price - their current offerings are far higher than an average person can afford. It’s questionable whether they’re even better for the environment than other cars. In fact, Tesla is so good at marketing that they’ve bamboozled the author and he doesn’t even realize it. Elon Musk knows the way to manipulate perceptions, and he’s very, very good at it.
Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!
* Pringles are the worst kind of Pringles. In fact, No Name makes better Pringle type chips
* Glossettes are also not as good as the Walmart brand glossette equivalent.
I've been compiling a list with friends of such examples where the brand name product is objectively not as good as some knock off.
To rework your idea: there's a spectrum for the quality of kisses. Some people figured out a way to convince you that their kisses are better than they actually are. Others are likely better, but they don't know how to market themselves, and thus don't get kissed as much.
I have spent literally my entire adult life listening to people say that Apple products were inferior to PCs, going right back to the days when they’d explain that bit-mapped graphics were useless decoration, and that keyboard shortcuts were superior to mouse interactions, and so forth.
It’s clearly true that for some users, in some use cases, a certain product does deliver less value than for others. But ignoring the fact that other people see the product’s values in other ways is a monumentally arrogant and unempathetic way to view humanity.
Most people don’t buy caffiene by the milligram or whatever. The label on the bottle appeals to a desire to fit in with other people buying the same label, or to aspire to belonging to that tribe, and so forth.
It amuses me that this even needs to be explained on Hacker News: Most people who participate in the threads do so for complex social reasons that are not particularly different than the reasons that some people buy Starbucks, some people buy from an indie shop, and some people hit the Timmie’s drive-through.
—-
Going back to kisses, consider a blind kiss test. I might say that of three kisses, B was better than A which was better than C.
But if you tell me that the kiss from C involved Lauren Bacall... I would rank it higher than the other two immediately! There is no fraud or nonsense going on, I value the complex bundle of values around a kiss from Lauren Bacall higher than two “no-name” kisses even if they are functionally more pleasant in the moment.
To make a stronger statement, there is "actual" value, it's just that people are bad at describing it. Many people will go to Starbucks every day because "they like it" and that's about as good an explanation as you can get out of them. But they didn't just wake up one day and decide they were going to like Starbucks.
For me personally, I like the consistency of Starbucks. If you order the same drink at two different stores you'll get the same drink. This isn't something that a large corporation like that does on accident. It requires a lot of effort to get that consistency. And it's just one of the many reasons someone will like Starbucks without recognizing it's one of the reasons.
People similarly like Apple products for reasons that sound vague ("it's easier to use") but which are not an accident. Apple is highly vertically integrated to ensure many of those reasons. It's no coincidence that Tesla is also vertically integrated.
Just curious, do you disagree with this?
Tastes differ, but we're talking about marketing, and I tend agree with the parent post that Tesla's marketing around their cars is much better than the production quality or design of the cars.
I agree that people don't pick products based on their objective goodness. However, this doesn't mean they're picking objectively bad products or being "taken advantage of" either. Or at least not in these examples.
Do you really want to say that one flavor or brand of beverage is objectively tastier than another, or that people shouldn't care about what it tastes like? Or maybe they just like the shape of the bottle. Is that wrong?
Or take cars. There are a lot of objective measurements you can make, but no objective way to decide on how much these features should matter or whether they are worth the cost. Some people care about having better-than-usual acceleration or a more luxurious interior, and others don't. Some people care about fuel efficiency only to save money, others want to do their part to help save the environment even if it costs more. Some people buy cars based on the image they want to project. None of these things are objectively wrong.
I'd reserve "being taken advantage of" for cases where people thought they were buying one thing and got another, not where they're making choices based on different goals.
(No, I don't drink Red Bull or drive a Tesla.)
You want to sell a da Vinci? Well then you have to make private meetings with potential clients, and, you have to create ads that sell it as iconic.
You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you have to sell the story of it being generally accepted as a high quality brand.
You want to sell luxury? You have to sell timelessness and trust.
Aren’t those things exactly what Don Draper would have done?
In general the article skimps over how ads are actually made, and talks mainly in how they are delivered, but that has very little to do with the death of Don Draper. Because even if you’re not always shooting ads at everyone, you still have to tell stories that set you a part from everyone else.
It’s only valid point in the subject seem to be that advertisers are no longer in the front of business magazines. Ironically, neither are car manufacturers, except for one, Musk. Who coincidentally put one of his cars in space in a very spectacular PR event that I personally doubt he decided upon because an algorithm told him it would be popular.
its headline
You can see a curious parallel in the death of psychoanalysis and the rise of evidence-based psychology and CBT but somehow depression is still not getting better. I don't believe Man is as simple as something to be fully captured by psychographic profiling. Articles like this are precisely the symptoms of the evergrowing decline in symbolic efficiency of the surveillance capitalism regime.
It doesn’t always fail, but it fails more than rolling a die.
Though if it fails more often “than a roll of a die,” doesn’t that hint at some predictive power? Maybe I’m misunderstanding.
Imagine we scored you as a likely alcoholic because people with a case history like yours indicated a high risk of alcoholism. So we start taking preemptive measures and the entire system grinds into gear, partly trying to prevent you from falling to the bottle but also preparing for if you do. You really wouldn't want to interact with a public system that's put the wrong label on you, trust me. So we have to be more than a little sure we get things right.
You can probably use ML to predict general trends, but I don't have much data on it, because we use traditional analysts in the public sector. Not because they are great at it, but because they're there. We've been predicting general trends since before computer technology, and the people who work in those departments typically aren't very tech savy. It would be a tremendous cost of resources to make them use ML, or to replace them with data scientists.
I guess in the future those analytics departments may increasingly rely on ML, but to be completely honest, I have no idea if ML or traditional analytics is better at predicting the outcome. The fact that we haven't started using ML, haven't hired a single data scientist or signed a single contractor on the area probably speaks for itself though, if it was truly valuable, I suspect we'd have it by now.
By comparison, RPA didn't really have a great start in the public sector, but today it's absolutely everywhere because it turned out to be really valuable.
It's not like we don't use ML at all though. We do, for stuff like sorting through four million case files looking for specific errors. Something that takes tens of workers months of work to do, but can be done in a few hours when you rent enough hardware in the cloud. We just don't use ML for any sort of analytics or prediction.
"Imagine we scored you as a likely alcoholic because people with a case history like yours indicated a high risk of alcoholism. So we start taking preemptive measures and the entire system grinds into gear, partly trying to prevent you from falling to the bottle but also preparing for if you do. You really wouldn't want to interact with a public system that's put the wrong label on you, trust me."
That's exactly the sort of specific example that is missing from the stories about ML doing things like encoding existing biases.
That’s sales, not marketing. You wouldn’t bother to create ads for a Da Vinci, as the pool of people with the means to buy one is so small and the process of buying one is so convoluted. See also jet engines.
> You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you have to sell the story of it being generally accepted as a high quality brand.
The article is contesting that what you actually need is to make people aware of your brand at the moment they are about to consume one. The brand associations matter in this on some level, but are tangential. Stella Artois has completely different brand connotations in the US to the UK and EU for instance.
The ad that's just looking at people looking at it is brilliant, really a work of art on its own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsEAJkTP0-M
The effort that went into selling that painting is one of the more fascinating stories of the last year.
"Before Christie’s sold Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017, it staged high-profile public exhibitions of the painting around the world, and made an expensively produced video to showcase it – in effect, an ad. On the face of it, all this activity was a flagrant waste of money: almost nobody who consumes the marketing for a da Vinci is in the market for it. Christie’s salespeople knew all the potential buyers personally. They can, and did, visit them in the privacy of their penthouses.
"Yet Christie’s realised that those buyers would pay an extra few million for the privilege of owning a painting that was “iconic”. This isn’t some quirk of billionaire art collectors; it’s human nature. We value things more highly when we know that others value them."
Similarly, Heineken is very much worth trying in the Netherlands. I’d never drink it here in the US.
Advertising has changed. It's no longer on a billboard in your face, but now a virus and fabric of influence in your mind that permeates and multiplies subtly through every medium you consume. Each piece of information collectively assembles inside your brain to fashion and form an opinion. The new science of advertising is figuring out how to put these pieces of the puzzle together so that you organically assemble an opinion on matters favorable to product sellers.
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3065928/sle...
Nope, It’s nowhere near that. The fact that tech media writes a lot about a car manufacturer doesn’t make it the most popular manufacturer in the world and brief google trends research shows that.
Then there is 'selection' which is picking the 'best' product in a competitive landscape. Here I'm not convinced even Tech has this captured. If I am shopping for cars, for example, I might get a Tesla Ad (they do have a few AdWords) but the technology showing me that AD isn't optimizing for me, it's optimizing for a click-through or maybe a conversion which are different things. Maybe you look at me, my income, my driving needs and say hey - look, maybe you want to go with like a Kia Crossover over a Model S. A Model S would be fairly financially irresponsible given your income. The money saved with a crossover would equal $XX,XXX by the time little Bobby is ready for college. And what about those camping trips? You occasionally drive further than the expected range anyway.
Right now if I want to compute the TOC of a Tesla vs a Kia given what I usually drive in a year minus the tax incentives or whatever I'd have to bust out excel and spend a few hours. This isn't sexy. This isn't what advertising used to be, but if they want to do the math for me I'd pay attention to that way more than that I do AdWords.
Ok, tongue-in-cheek remark. I left Facebook, block ads aggressively, use DuckDuckGo, and live in the weak sauce privacy of the Apple ecosystem.
Since I block ads, I also block a bunch of trackers. But given that I can’t see most ads, I have no idea whether people are trying to sell me mattresses after I discuss beds.
For all I know, I don’t live in a house with the shades drawn, maybe I live in a house with one-way shades such that the advertisers can watch me, but I can’t see anything they’re trying to show me.
——
If the above is the case, I will still be vulnerable to micro-targeted astroturf stuff. Like bots posing as Members of whatever social media I participate in, dropping brand names in their conversations.
Is everyone on Swedespeed really a Volvo enthusiast? If one of them posts a picture of a Trek mountian bike on their roof rack, how do I know this is “organic,” and not an ad campaign?
For how long will the above be a pleasant chuckle about a dystopian possible future, and not everyone’s daily “reality?”
This is already happening with political discourse, it must be inevitable for commerce.
I'm basically free from seeing online ads and from sharing too much of my life away.
That stuff seems to be quite a problem these days. I was just looking last night at how the Brexit vote was probably swung by a bunch of immigrant fear mongering on facebook in the 2 weeks before the referendum - graph of the polls https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIQI7gXgAAAmbd?format=jpg and one of the ads https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIM5XLU8AAuB7o?format=jpg
The details are only gradually coming out - facebook released the ads a couple of days ago and Dominic Cummings the campaign manager has refused a summons from parliament to come explain what happened.
I guess we have to wise up to it a bit and maybe change the algorithms to be less hate promoting.
"[In a recent article for the New York Times, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci] found the same pattern on non-political topics: videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism; videos about jogging led to videos about ultra-marathons. The stakes were always being upped. YouTube, she concluded, was a “radicalising instrument”. That isn’t, she says, because YouTube’s engineers are zealots. It’s because Google (YouTube’s owner) is selling attention to advertisers, and its algorithms have learnt that the best way to keep people hooked is to push ever more extreme material on them."
It's pessimistic, since by design it can only get worse.
"Now, we live in an age in which the intangible haze of soft-sell is no longer necessary, and the battle for market share comes down to the raw strength of your product. “The sun has passed midday on brand,” he says."
I don't think this is remotely true - as an example, take a look at the insurance industry (GEICO, AFLAC, AllState, etc). These guys are spending on massively on brand advertising. Now, obviously, the LTV of these customers is huge so they can afford the high CAC that comes with brand advertising. This advertising is pure Don Draper imho.
"The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.”"
Yes they have a great product - and, at the moment, they have that differentiation and, most importantly, buzz. That will change as the market for electric cars matures - and then you'll see Tesla start to advertise. It doesn't make any sense for them to spend on advertising right now given that they are in the press literally every day (right now for some stuff that isn't necessarily positive). Maturity of market matters.
"Clients have even started to question the ad business’s claim to efficiency. The model I described above is a simplified version of a dizzyingly complex system whose details few can fathom, involving multiple companies taking multiple fees. Unsurprisingly, fraud is rampant."
If this is true we'll likely see a pullback in digital advertising - or at least a movement to direct buys only on specific websites (vs. network buys).
My opinion: digital advertising is proving to be less and less efficacious, with costs going up and results going down. At the same time, we have less and less product differentiation. The result should be more spending on traditional brand advertising. Digital advertising is a channel - and spend to that channel will ebb and flow.
In my small world of advertising (B2B SaaS), I've seen digital advertising becoming largely ineffective. Too many companies marketing similar products and services. I would argue, in this world, brand advertising therefore becomes more important. That is, developing a brand is as or more important than product because all the products (in the eyes of prospects) are largely the same. Note that I am not saying product doesn't matter, or that a product cannot differentiate in a specific market (e.g. Slack), but that companies need a distribution advantage to succeed over every other company - and that either comes from the product or brand (e.g. Drift).
Now, having said all this, do I think the Ad Tech industry is a mess and that a major shakeout is needed? Yes. Do I think that digital advertising is largely too consolidated with a handful of players (Google, Facebook and now Amazon) - yes. Advertising can be still be great and useful - but Ad Tech needs some help.
When everything is labeled a "threat to democracy", nobody takes that actual threats to democracy seriously.
> These days, consumers are less likely to have favourite brands, since “their favourite brand is going to be whatever Google tells them at that moment is going to match their exact needs”. The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.”
Really? I would use Tesla as an extreme example of effective marketing and cult of personality around Elon Musk. Elon Musk is Cindy Crawford.
> “When’s the last time you saw an ad agency executive on the cover of Business Week?"
Not sure Business Week is really a barometer of what's going on today, but that's fair. However you do regularly see the leaders of these companies, who are the face and effectively the advertising. Not sure if there is a person or team behind their image.
> Clients are spending less on the kind of entertaining, seductive, fame-generating campaigns in which ad agencies specialise, and more on the ads that flash and wink on your smartphone screen.
Really? I think sponsored content that's actually entertaining is a lot more common now.
> Clients only have to decide how many people they want to reach, and how much they want to spend; algorithms do the rest.
Wasn't this automated before and the automation was just done by the ad agencies? Why bother hiring ad agencies in the first place
> The advertiser might create multiple ads and serve different executions to different slices of its audience. Some companies, such as Cambridge Analytica, claim to be able to target personality types using this method. The more valuable your particular profile is to the advertiser, the higher price its algorithm will pay the publisher to get an ad in front of your eyes. In this way, every scintilla of attention is transformed into money.
In the past advertisers often had multiple ads that played in multiple mediums, targeting multiple audiences. And yes, more value mediums (e.g. target market with a more affluent readership) does cost more. Why wouldn't it?
This whole article is just a list of complaints and contradictory observations without a central theme or any coherent structure.
Marketing doesn't work but is extremely common. Its rampant with fraud but is incredibly convincing. It's a huge turn-off with consumers tuning out but it's dominating our lives