Online Advertising

Good Tuesday Morning, if there is such a thing, and welcome back! So I just got back from New Orleans and I have to say, the weather up here is not my favorite comparatively.

Speaking of things that are not in my wheelhouse, let's talk about ads. More appropriately, we're talking about online advertising and marketing strategies. Now, I am good at many things. I'm an author, a minister, a crafter, an artist. I can make beautiful things with my hands and my mind. I can sing, play the piano, operate a Class B vehicle, somewhat fly a plane, rewire a house, change the oil in your car, and format a manuscript to look like it was published in New York. I can write poetry, dance, cut your hair, and reassemble machinery. I can even help you do your taxes or pass the ACT.

What I cannot do is marketing. 

I do not understand it. I am terrible at it. Anyone who's read my novels, whether they knew me or not, have begged me for more. Anyone who's picked up one of my handmade boxes tells me they love it and that it's amazing. I can put in 200 resumes and get nothing, but I've gotten a job from almost anytime I had an interview. But I cannot understand how to generate an online presence or a marketing brand to save my life. I don't even follow a faith that believes in proselytizing. 

This week's readings are oddly coinciding with the readings for my Media Ministry class, which covered Storytelling this week. It's odd that it makes me feel irrationally angry to consider a church a "brand" and the congregants as "consumers". Intellectually, I understand that it's just how things work. Even in a classroom you have your classroom culture and your students and parents as consumers. What a hyper-capitalist way to live. The level of science that marketing has become, as the readings prove, amounts to pure brainwashing and programming techniques. It's hacking how we as human beings intake information, and I could write a thesis on the ethics of how far advertising should go. 

One study talked about how they asked whether females responded more to ad choice than men. (source) They disproved it - by their study, women just expected more in general from their ads, but expectations rose from everyone when they had choice of advertising. Is there really a reason to do this experiment? Outside of some questionably gendered concepts, is there really a question that if we put out the effort to make a choice in our intake that we'd expect more out of it? Did we spend money on this? 

The next was on Oreo's quick response to a blackout during the Superbowl, and once again I'm struck with the absolute ridiculousness of the article on it. (source) This isn't some new marketing strategy. Newspapers and journalists have known this one for years - being the first one to run the story gets the readers. It's no different in responsive and clever advertising. Congratulations, they were smart. But they were also lucky. There is an incredible element of luck that runs in advertising and marketing, being the right thing in the right place at the right time with just the right stroke of genius to spark an inferno of fame, glory, or ad clicks. That need for luck can be reduced with planning and certain measured responses, but it's still luck. 

The last article was, as far as I can tell, written in ~2016, so its opinions are slightly out of date for this topic. It's talking about the impact of ad blockers and then-recent anti-tracking legislation on advertising, and introducing the idea of freemium or donation-based models. (source) Due to the age of the study, it bears mentioning that this was still before the gig economy took a huge turn and the advent of Only Fans and Patreon became a market norm. Crowd sourcing has become much more important to content and service creators than would be anticipated by this study, but it does have the point that most major retailers either use an alternate revenue source or, in the case of news, have fallen into line with the freemium or donation-based model concepts. This, of course, is frustrating to students who have a limited amount of articles to work with and falls into the questionable ethics of placing information and news behind a pay wall - should the news, especially the least biased news like scientific studies, be in the domain of only those who can afford to pay for it? But that is not the issue with advertising. 

The truth I took away from this study is that outside of information and news outlets, the return on retail advertising is never more than 7%. On the general scale, the constant pop-ups are ineffective. And we know this - none of us likes ads. We hate them on YouTube before and during our videos. We hate them taking up half the screen when we're trying to read something. We abhor how they get preferential internet speed, loading when the video won't. We want them to do nothing but go away, and we are fairly certain they're spam and will give us a virus if we click on them. I believe that is why brands have stepped back to a more reasonable level, working on Twitter and Instagram to build brand loyalty and equity where it's a customer's choice to interact with them. It makes us feel personally connected, as the Storytelling segments from my Media Ministry class were explaining. Little, emotional stories sell brands. Personally funny or clever advertisements sell brands.

And personally, all of it feels slimy and concocted. Even though I fall for it too. 

This week wasn't terribly hard, but it was really depressing. Between this segment and the one in Media Ministry I am reminded how hardwired we are into captialist marketing thought, and how little any of us can do about it, and even more so how little I understand how to leverage it. Next week we'll tackle Net Neutrality, which is going to be a bumpy ride. So, to cheer up both myself and you, gentle reader, I give you a ferret in a sombrero.

I'll be in tow!