Category: Advertising

Are digital-age tools creating more advertising-immune consumers?

Photo by KV Mithani

I heard this statement on NPR last night about millenials and brands in context to food products, but it seems to be the prevailing wisdom based on several articles like this one that indicate the millennial generation is less likely to be brand loyal than previous generations. Most analysts cite economics — that millennials generally can’t afford to be choosy right now and are therefore driven by price more than other considerations. But I have to wonder if something else is not at play. Is it possible that while the gurus of Web 2.0 have made gazillions promising advertisers that they can segment the market into digestible, predictable, accessible little data points, that the very tools they’ve built to achieve these goals also foster a consumer who is more immune to advertising and branding? I don’t know, but if we think about millennials as consumers, it’s entirely possible.

The first obvious reality about the next-gen consumer is that he’s media saturated to the point of ADD. It is well understood that this demographic consumes both entertainment and advertising in an asymmetrical, fragmentary way; and while many theories and experiments have emerged to “cut through the clutter,” as advertisers fervently hope, it’s entirely possible that the clutter is winning. In fact, the explosion of Web 2.0 applications and social media environments has fostered a marketplace that advertisers may wish, at least for some time, that they had not pursued. The bottom line when it comes to effective media buying is knowing where your consumer is (e.g. dutifully watching Seinfeld on Thursday at 8:00pm), and it’s tough to build a relationship between a consumer and a brand when that consumer is everywhere and nowhere at any given moment. It’s advertising according to Werner Heisenberg.

Also, thanks to the digital age, I personally believe millennials are gaining a media intelligence that is different from those of us born, say, in the early days of color television. Even the least sophisticated ten-year-old growing up with YouTube as the norm very likely has a meta-intelligence about the workings of communications that is both conscious and unconscious. If so, this makes her a much tougher nut to crack with traditional advertising and media tools. Plus, the new tools have the potential to dissociate the advertising from the brand even further than in pre-internet models.

Remember the “Where’s the Beef” campaign? Award winning. Funny. A cultural icon. And it didn’t move the needle on Wendy’s market-share one bit. Making entertaining ads that don’t translate into sales is a perennial challenge for advertisers; but now, the landscape is even more complicated with so many advertisers chasing the dream of “going viral.” On the one hand, we now have a market in which a TV spot for instance can be so entertaining that people will watch it on purpose and even share it through social media. “Cha ching,” thinks the media buyer. “That’s reaching more people for free!” But the same tools for this kind of diffusion can also disconnect the advertisement from the brand, spreading the message so far outside its intended targets that it can even result in a net loss. Just because something goes viral doesn’t mean it won’t invite comments like, “Great spot. Laughed my ass off. Worst product ever!” Because let’s face it, the Web brings out everyone’s inner troll at least a little.

Regardless, relationships take time, and this is just as true for consumer/brand relationships as it is for interpersonal ones. And one thing that cyber life and social media certainly does not foster is a greater investment of time into the messages, comments, memes, videos, news items, and mundane gibberish that updates every second of our lives. There is certainly opportunity within these models to build brand loyalty — P2P is a powerful way to market — but it’s entirely possible that businesses will have to work harder to offer real value in order to maintain relationships that can theoretically be broken with a single tweet. Brand identity alone may be losing some of its sheen for the next generation; and the marketing promises of Web 2.0 make me wonder if advertisers aren’t trying too hard to grasp every grain of sand.

For Whom the Search Trolls

Photo by Ross Williamson

One of my main topics of interest with regard to the Internet is the notion of what my friend, the writer Jeff Turrentine, calls “epistemic closure.” Let’s face it:  when it comes to information, it’s all too easy to find evidence out there for just about any bias or belief we can name; and I am far from the only person to ask what effect this has on our political process.

It seems self-evident that an environment like Facebook is generally an echo chamber when it comes to socio-political issues, and I do believe this plays a role in maintaining, if not increasing, balkanization.  After all, it’s hard to find a more potent ideological brew than a peer group armed with quips and clips that favor one’s established politics.  Additionally, social media tends to increase the number of headlines we see without necessarily increasing the volume of in-depth reporting we read.  While this may not matter much in a macro view (i.e. whether we’ll vote democrat or republican), it does matter a lot more in the day-to-day micro complexities of governance; and I would not be surprised if the 140-character attention span we’re fostering aggravates the tendency to adopt associative political positions. The fact that any given issue can generally be placed in either a blue or red column is not necessarily good for us citizens, but it is a boon to most marketers, especially now that news and entertainment have irrevocably mated to produce a mutant child as yet unnamed. And that brings us to the matter of search engines.

This video from the founders of an alternative search tool called DuckDuckGo touts a small study they’ve done indicating that Google’s personalized search can have a negative impact on our democratic process, precisely by providing the aforementioned epistemic closure. In other words, their initial research shows that Google has enough data about each of us to tailor results on a polarizing term, say abortion, to deliver what we most likely want to find.  Of course, DuckDuckGo has something to sell, but that doesn’t make the question they raise invalid.

This article by Gregory Ferenstein at TechCrunch addresses the issue dispassionately, concluding that more research is required to determine whether personalized search really has any effect on people choosing to seek out information they need, regardless of whether or not it’s what they want to hear. Scientifically, I’d have to agree with Ferenstein; but anecdotally, my instincts lean toward the hypothesis offered by DuckDuckGo.  Multiple times a day, both conservative and liberal friends post articles from news aggregators that sound just a little too spot-on to be taken at face value; and in fact many of these stories are full of holes and editorial hyperbole.  Stepping back and watching the posts roll by, I am reminded to consider the question of who benefits from all these collisions that seem to cancel one another out like particles and anti-particles.

And so, the big-picture concern is this:  a very tiny consortium of corporations, much smaller than the consolidated media conglomerates, own the revenue streams generated by our online activity. In fact, for now, one corporation owns almost all of search and ad service on the Web. So, if it is in the interest of advertisers to narrow rather than broaden our paths through cyberspace, and this winnowing can be made to look like a service to us users, are we in danger of having our perspectives constricted while being sold the promise of limitless access?

Keep in mind that as users we may want the world at our fingertips but that the brass ring for marketers is the targeted advertisement.  While there’s no question that a search for a local merchant or restaurant is more convenient when Google uses contextual data to second-guess what I’m looking for, there are other circumstances in which sorting based on my profile feels just a tad invasive and manipulative.