Advertising 101 Part 2

Diversity and inclusion tear us apart...

Vintage 2023 inclusion…

As addicts in what I call the Great Age of Addiction — an age when state-sponsored addiction is the default rule rather than the exception — we are every bit as complicit in our meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital as we are with any other addiction to any other narcotic. Like all addicts we routinely underestimate the power of the narcotic while we exaggerate our ability to resist the addiction.

The exact same phenomenon is true with advertising, especially among the deluded denizens of big blue corporate media markets, the places with the densest populations of the biggest media addicts — those who actually believe that their roles as producers and distributors of corporate media narcotics confer some special immunity against the addiction and advertising messages that somehow afflict only those of us gullible or racist enough to live outside the big blue media bubbles. Apparently, only red-state rubes are that misinformed, disinformed, and malinformed.

Back in the late 1990s, at the height of the mercifully brief Dot Com Era, I was asked to sit on a panel of computer industry illuminati at a major industry trade show. The primary question before us was how to expand the influence of the still-fledgling digital media industry.

All of my fellow panel members agreed that the best way to grow digital media was to demonstrate the benefits of the Internet as a commercial medium and thereby cultivate consumer trust and confidence through organizations like the newly emerged IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau). But that struck me as unnecessarily high-minded on the one hand, and thoroughly disingenuous on the other. Seemed to me that consumers likely didn’t need someone else to explain the benefits of the Internet to them. And besides, no one in either radio or television had ever felt the need to explain anything to anyone.

So instead I suggested that the best way to expand digital media was to sell more computers, the way early radio pioneers sold more radios, and the way early television pioneers sold more TVs. There was no radio advertising, no reach, without a large installed base of radios, I argued, and no television advertising without a large installed base of TVs. The exact same dynamics would apply to digital media: sell the boxes. Build it and they will come.

The World Wide Web emerged as a commercial medium when it did because that’s precisely when desktop computer technology — most notably: graphics, audio, and data transfer — reached sufficient capacity to emulate and challenge the TV experience.

Four other notable moments in advertising occurred during the Dot Com Era:

1. Aggregate cable TV reach exceeded broadcast network TV reach for the first time. Suddenly, broadcast became the alternative to cable. The proliferation and success of cable (build it and they will come) as a commercial medium forced the transition at the agency level, where advertiser dollars are brokered by the trillions for consumer time and attention, from an overt reach model measured in soft data accrued by inexact survey to a covert version of reach predicated on hard behavioral targeting data. Reach went underground.

2. The billing revenue of discrete media agencies, those that trafficked only in media planning/buying (and otherwise produced no ads for their massive clients), eclipsed the billing of their creative and integrated counterparts for the first time — all made possible by derivatives of the same electronic spreadsheet that gave rise to the Wall Street culture, but did little to help those on the creative side of the business.

3. The rise of the first major digital advertising networks based almost exclusively on behavioral targeting data. Psychographics replaced demographics as ad industry currency of the realm.

4. The migration of digital products — laptops, mobile phones, and tablets — designed exclusively as office productivity tools into our homes as consumer gadgets expanded the commercial reach of digital advertising from the desktop into — ultimately — our pockets and purses. And wreaked havoc on society.

Throughout it all, the reach objectives and requirements of advertisers remained the same, regardless of the medium. Advertisers still need to reach new prospects. Only now the aggregate reach provided by the far more fragmented cable and digital media landscapes yielded another grotesquely profitable business opportunity: the entirely covert collection, parsing, and resale of behavioral data behind the scenes. The behavioral keys to your home and your spouse and your kids and your finances and your healthcare and your privacy were suddenly in the hands of the biggest digital thieves posing as legitimate marketers and government agencies. They called it Big Data. I call it what Mussolini would have called it: fascism, the marriage of corporate and state interests.

Here’s a brief excerpt from…

The Quality of Life Toolkit

Over the next couple of years, as I continued to challenge the efficacy and ethics of digital media sacred cows like behavioral targeting and Big Data, my industry star continued to fade until, finally, it was all but extinguished. My weekly column about the business downsides of default media addiction in a prestigious online media publication was effectively cancelled in 2005, when I compared the standard digital media industry practice of dropping cookies without notification on unsuspecting site visitors to the sinister date rape practice of dropping roofies into cocktails at a bar. Now, of course, just about every commercial website offers opt-in notification about cookies the moment you pull up a digital barstool — precisely so you won’t feel like a victim of virtual date rape…

Thus the advertising and marketing industries became the covert bagmen for the accelerated consolidation of institutional power and wealth among institutions — private and public alike — already far too wealthy and far too powerful. The standard advertiser demand to expand into new markets in search of fresh meat was about to take an ominous turn.

Per Marshall McLuhan’s prescient observation two generations earlier, the medium was indeed shaping up as the message. In Roger Ailes and FOX News, the rest of corporate media finally found an expedient boogeyman, one that appealed to an audience outside their own blue media bubbles, an audience that soon became easy targets of elite derision and hatred. The cable revenue model that prioritized enmity and division over the common good proved beyond any doubt that hate sells like nothing else in the digital 21st century.

Perhaps not so surprisingly (in retrospect, at least), academia — the Wuhan Lab of lethal ideas — suddenly found common cause with the elites of corporate media, once considered by denizens of the ivory tower as media treif, unfit for consumption or consideration by any except the most uneducated masses. Five minutes in the commercial sunlight on the ground floor of their ivory towers, however, was enough to convince them that the same profit model of division and derision that worked so well for cable news offered a financial windfall for them as well. So they released the expert hounds of toxic societal cancers like critical race and gender theory through their new BFFs in the blue corporate media — which by then included Google, Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter. It was a marriage made in heaven as both industries — corporate media and academia — entered a golden age of revenue, growth, and government access.

By the year 2015, behavioral targeting had already evolved into targeted institutional hatred and division — for immense profit. The electronic media that once brought us together over the great issues in the 20th century now tore us apart over the most trivial of matters in the 21st. And that was before Trump.

So next time you wonder what went wrong, just remember: It took three generations and tens of trillions of advertising dollars to get from there to here…