Note that he talks about a fake ad exec, not the most famous real one of that era, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy worked for the Gallup Poll before he went into advertising. He was into data-driven advertising. "Advertisers who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore the signs of the enemy." The author is attacking a straw man. Ogilvy is still relevant. The author of the article here, not so much.
Just last week I was at an unusually good talk by an Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland mentioned in the article.
>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
Also thought this podcast with Rory Sutherland by Farnam Street / The Knowledge Project was particularly good, especially in what the actual value of brand is:
A lot of people who don’t do it for a living assume that advertising, design, marketing promos and the like are created by a bunch of creatives sitting around a conference table and going with whatever strikes their fancy. But there’s a lot of data, focus groups, A/B testing, etc. The data’s imperfect and there’s certainly still a creative process but it’s not just a bunch of art and English majors winging it.
Outright advertising in the old school sense is dead and has been for a long time. Marketing is not. I think this author is deeply confused. Now, more than ever, the perceived value of cheap products is being inflated by brand. Look how much people pay for a can of Red Bull, which offers less volume than a soda and less caffeine than a coffee. Look at how much people pay for Starbucks coffee and Hermès purses. It’s all smoke and mirrors. In many cases, you’re paying more for an inferior product because the brand gods took advantage of your cognitive bias.
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.
It seems important to you to prove that certain products are objectively bad, and the people who like them are somehow wrong to do so. Why? Tastes differ.
Nonsense! One of marketing's main purpose is to convince you that some thing is superior in some way regardless of whether or not it's objectively true (or even objectively provable).
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.
Why? Because I’m backing up the opinion that I presented. Or would you rather everyone makes statements without saying how they came to those conclusions? That said, I never claimed anyone was wrong - just taken advantage of. Your comment has me wondering if you own or commonly purchase one of the products I mentioned. You seem hurt.
I think you make a big mistake in using the word 'inflated'. The joy of doing something is configured in our brains, and we enjoy that. Science has shown that we like and are willing to pay more for things merely on the brand.
Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!
You might have slightly misconstrued the parent comment.
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 usually buy brand name over generic stuff because it is quantifiably better to me in some way. Cereal that tastes better, garbage bag doesn't rip, etc.
Is it me or does this article contradict itself throughout the piece? It tries so hard to sell it’s headline, but every point and interview it does paints a completely different picture.
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.
> 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.
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.
What are those connotations? As someone who has had the misfortune of drinking Stella, I speculate that Europeans challenged themselves to make something even nastier than Budweiser, and they succeeded.
I think the round about point is that since no one is tuning into the mass media which might build the collective mass culture (or that mass media is changing to target advertising that directly targets individual dreams and desires), that there is a problem in manufacturing mass culture... because culture has become balkanized. So basically you have a problem with individualism taken to its logical conclusion after the century of self, to a century of personalized amplified self which causes society to break down say in 50-100 years. It's an interesting idea, what are the things which bind us together culturally when we really don't have culture, we have commercial culture... we have cambell's soup ads.
The article talks about mass advertising. The true story here is the advent of surveillance capitalism in which data-driven behavioral manipulation is the new means of production.
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.
I just have missed that, reading the piece. I wonder how well that’s working out though. I work in the public sector of Scandinavia, and we’re doing various tests on ML and it’s honestly turning out to be really bad at predicting anything.
It doesn’t always fail, but it fails more than rolling a die.
"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.`"
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.
You actually make a really interesting point here. Advertising has permeated nearly every segment of media consumption. An interesting example is articles like this, and “reviews” of products that are actually paid adverts where the “reviewers” get kickbacks for every referral that leads to a sale. [1]
On the other hand, it's now easier than ever to avoid all marketing in media. In the analog world you couldn't install an adblocker to your newspaper, or purchase a tv subscription without ads, or choose a radio station without ads in between. Now it's all available, and at least my world is almost completely advertisement-free -- except for those paid reviews you mentioned.
Another example is when discussion forum “comments” have a link to an article, but actually the “commenter” links to an advertising company’s rehosting of the article.
While I agree with the general/intended sentiment of "Advertising is has changed from a bunch of slick white guys in suits, to tech", it might be worth pointing out that Don Draper doesn't _exactly_ have anything to do with what the author is discussing. The author implies that ad tech is ruining _traditional_ advertising, which is true on the Sales side, but have you seen some of the high PPC/CPM ads on some Youtube videos? They still _heavily_ rely on great creative. And let's not forget that Don Draper was the Creative Director - not head of Sales (which would've been Pete I believe).
>The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla
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.
Tesla even managed to stand out in this very article when it is only briefly mentioned with multiple comments alluding to this brief mention. I'd say it's quite safely the car industry leader in buzz, if nothing else.
In this bubble. I think a lot of people here would probably be surprised how many automobile purchasers have never even heard of Tesla--or at least are only vaguely aware it's "that electric car company."
So there is 'discovery' which is knowing a solution exists to a solve a need I might have (that I might not even know about). Technology is reasonably good at this.
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.
It's scary how targeted google ads are now a days. I was talking about buying a bed to my mother and noticed ads for mattresses started popping up in my ad sidebars. I miss being anonymous.
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.
Readit News
>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.
https://fs.blog/rory-sutherland/
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
Just curious, do you disagree with this?
Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!
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.
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.
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.
Deleted Comment
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.
its headline
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...
Dead Comment
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.