Highlights
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2023-12-04 15:50 Without advertising, our world feels sort of orwellian not, orwellian in the sense of the government runs everything, but orwellian in the sense that it’s gray and drab and generic. In order to understand the impact of advertising and why it has so completely jumped the shark and become a negative force for many people, I want to examine four elements of it.
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2023-12-04 15:52 TV ads got us to stop killing each other, because we all lived in a world where we were all watching the same TV ads. And along the way of running all those ads, the people who ran the ads, who were probably very good, intuitive storytellers, but weren’t particularly good at analyzing what they were doing, came across four rules of thumb.
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2023-12-04 15:52 If you wanted to sell Tide laundry detergent, the sexist thinking went, you should advertise it in the afternoon on soap operas, because it’s women who decide which soap to buy. And that’s how you reach housewives, a term pretty much invented by people who ran ads.
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2023-12-04 15:55 More than once they said it. Isn’t that sufficient? But what we know is that frequency works.
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2023-12-04 16:00 It’s micro media because you cannot effectively reach 40 or 80 million people with one ad the way you could as a matter of course just 30 years ago.
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2023-12-04 16:20 And we have people who claim to be influencers, who are pitching stuff that they’re getting paid to pitch. The next problem is what happens with podcasts, because podcasts don’t have a lot of data that for a really long time, thanks to RSS, there was a disconnect between the person making the podcast and the audience in the sense that it wasn’t a direct connection you subscribed in your RSS reader.
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2023-12-04 16:54 It had surplus, surplus all around. There was a limited number of people selling the advertising and there was plenty of money to create magazines and television shows and radio that people were eager to listen to.