Category: Consumerism

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.

Muttering in the Rabbit Hole – The Right to Print Arms?

Photo by XtremerX.

Rick Kelly, in this article on TechCrunch, takes techno-centric paranoia to the next level when he fires away at legislation nobody has yet proposed to regulate future possible applications of 3D printers. Strangely, Kelly cites some of the very serious potential hazards — like the ability to make a functioning firearm! — with this technology but proceeds to dismiss any such consequences as secondary to any anticipated attempt to consider even thinking about maybe just possibly regulating their use. Seriously? As full-grown adults, we’re meant to imagine a scenario in which a twelve-year-old can make himself an assault rifle or some crystal meth with a printer but think, “Nope. Any attempt to address that will necessarily infringe on our basic freedoms?”

Still pimping the victory over SOPA as a win for free speech, Kelly proposes, “Either we allow for the ambiguity that freedom and unregulated 3D printing will bring, or we enforce far-reaching laws that may decrease liberty without changing results.” This is one of the most consistent dichotomies fostered by those too distracted by shiny tech toys — that all laws pertaining to cyberspace and technology can only ever be both ideologically overreaching and functionally useless. Perhaps the best example of a law that could arguably fit this profile would be Prohibition — overreaching in principle and useless in practice — but even the 18th Amendment did not result in actual restriction of freedom so much as it fostered profitable and violent criminal enterprise.

In the broadest sense, Kelly merely describes the well-known price of living in a free society — that freedom means unpredictability. Nevertheless, we do find ways to balance this risk in order to avoid complete chaos. The expectation of privacy in virtual space does not apply to those who would use the technology to do harm in physical space. That courtesy is not extended to would-be terrorists, child pornographers, or human traffickers to name a few; and yet I see no restriction of my personal freedoms as a result. Moreover, Kelly and those who think as he does would do well to remember that when a government agency has reason to stick it’s nose in someone’s business, it will likely do so with the cooperation of Web technology companies and without passing any new laws. So, rather than focus on symbolic victories over imaginary tyrants, why don’t we have a grown-up conversation about what we might be willing to do about the real twelve-year-old printing the very real assault rifle?

Techno Utopians II – Culture

If we define culture in the context of pro-piracy utopianism as described in Part I, then we’re really talking about movies, TV shows, music, and fiction literature. So, the first distinction I would make between these media and that which we’ve defined as information is that these are technically luxury goods, to which there is no natural right.  In the U.S., we generally agree that there is a natural right to information, and there is plenty of precedent for this assertion, but there is no inherent right to a particular volume of entertainment media in any of its forms.

The techno-utopian seems to want to conflate information and entertainment when it is convenient to make idealistic statements like the one quoted in Part I — “Imagine all the world’s information and culture…” and so on.  And while I agree that information and culture are interdependent and intertwined, this does not mean, for instance, that one’s right to know what Congress does without a cost barrier also implies a right to download Coldplay to one’s iPod without a cost barrier.  It’s patently absurd to compare these two actions, which is why I’ve separated what we’re calling culture from what we’re calling information.

As with information consumption, the consumer is still bound by linear time.  So, one truly avid consumer, whether buying or stealing, cannot consume all the culture there is and still function in normal life.  This is one of the fallacies of the digital age in general — that more is inherently better or even pragmatically accessible.  We have about 20 times the number of TV channels we had in the 1980s, but that doesn’t automatically give all viewers more time to watch TV.  And this limitation doesn’t reduce exponentially when technology affords us anytime/anywhere access.  I use Netflix streaming to catch up on stuff I haven’t seen or to re-watch favorites, and although the technology affords me the chance to increase my consumption, that time still finite.

With regard to time, the techno-utopian also tends to lump all cultural media into one big pile and fails to consider the time/cost investment relative to each medium.  Clearly, one can consume music faster than TV shows, TV shows faster than movies, and movies faster than books.  So, if we’re taking a utopian view and envisioning a well-rounded consumer digesting a diversity of media, then the time limitation becomes even more pronounced, which means the cost barriers are actually lower for the most culturally engaged consumers.  And to be honest, is that who we’re really talking about?

Still, the techno-utopian wants to assert that there are artificial barriers to access created and/or enforced exclusively by large corporate entities (Big Media) to the sole purpose of profiting from mediocre works while stifling innovation in the creative arts.  An oft-repeated sentiment is summed up by this quote from one critic on this blog:  “Record labels and movie studios are businesses out to make a profit. They don’t care about art, they care about sales.”

Setting aside the fact that all businesses large and small have to care about sales, or they’re not in business, this statement is really a component of the “junk food” argument used against Hollywood and the record labels. Folks like this commenter point to media like $100 million tentpole movies and corporate rock as overpriced, high-profit, low-value culture that somehow stands in the way of better work.  One problem with this position from a cultural standpoint is that, like quality information, the market doesn’t necessarily want “better” movies and music. One of the strongest examples of film directing I’ve seen in years is Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). Most viewers wouldn’t know why she’s done such a solid job, but the truth is very few people will even see the film because it deals with a serious, painful subject; and the general sentiment among viewers remains, “I want to go to the movies to have a good time.”

“But,” says the techno-utopian, “the more access Ramsay has to the global audience, the more likely she is to find an audience for her less-mainstream movies.”  Perhaps, but if that audience is exclusively watching her work for free, she won’t be making her next film.  More to the point, though, it seems that pirated work pretty well reflects the tastes of the paying audience.  According to TorrentFreak, the Top Ten most pirated movies of 2011 include eight films that can be called “tentpole,” with Fast Five and The Hangover II coming in First and Second respectively.

Speaking as a lifetime snob and student of all cinema, I’m hard-pressed to see how free access to these particular titles is a prelude to a new cultural enlightenment.  Were there overwhelming data indicating that the digital generation’s tastes are radically more sophisticated than mainstream content, then some of these utopian attitudes might have merit; but this does not appear to be the trend.  Not surprisingly, it seems millions of people still want Twinkies instead of tofu, but the techno-utopians want to justify stealing the Twinkies on the grounds that it’s just junk food.  This isn’t fertile ground for cultural growth so much as adolescent shoplifting.