I was overheard to have said
Exhumed this from a Facebook comment to repost here:
About advertising, there have been two state changes in the business.
One I unpacked eleven years ago, here: https://dsearls.medium.com/separating-advertisings-wheat… The most quoted line from that one is "Madison Avenue fell asleep, direct response marketing ate its brain, and it woke up as an alien replica of itself." What that says is that surveillance-based online advertising—adtech—is the latest (hopefully final) evolutionary stage of junk mail. Back-burnered is old-fashioned brand advertising, which was aimed at whole populations rather than on followed eyeballs and eardrums. But car and TV makers have been working quietly and mightily to deep-six over-the-air broadcasting so spied-on drivers, passengers, and couch-riders can have ads microtargeted to them as well.
The other is AI, which is making microtargeting sharper than ever.
I wish David Hodskins and Ray Simone were both still around to help us think and talk through all this. They were my partners in Hodskins Simone & Searls, our pretty successful Silicon Valley ad agency in the 80s and 90s. One of our stated purposes was to improve the media environments in which our clients' ads ran. But I think all three of us had misgivings about the business itself. Today I believe that advertising corrupts, and digital advertising corrupts absolutely. It has made lots of money for Google, Amazon, Adobe, Meta, and other companies for which it started as an add-on, and it has corrupted them all. Even Apple is corrupted, or it wouldn't have made IDFA (ID For Advertisers) a hook for robot ad-spies to grab in every iPhone. Yes, it's opt-out, but it never should have been there in the first place. And "Ask app not to track" is also weak shit. "Stop app from tracking" would be the right box to click.
Oh, and Netflix is running ads too now. They're in its cheapest tier. Same with Amazon Prime. How long before ads are in all the premium streaming services?
Leave a Reply