No. I claimed you lump all blacks into one pot. BlAcks, like whites, are marketed to by class because of the differences in purchasing power.
Context could be clearer but I’ll stand by the comment. Note that the discussion is about how “targets” are chosen, not the subsequent action. I see little to no difference between patrol cops using racial profiling and marketing using essentially private data to target an individual. Both are rights invasions.
How’d’ya figger advertisements are “rights invasions”?
That’s not obvious.
That’s because I most definitely didn’t say that. You and MSC keep misreading what I say and casting it in terms of what someone else said.
First, re-read the title of this thread. I’ll wait.
My concern is with the use of invasive data collection to further marketing efforts, which I akin to an violation of personal privacy. Where we may disagree is that I think such invasions are no less egregious than stop’n’frisk based on racial profiling.
My concerns with “advertising” would fit on a matchbook cover tucked into the book of concerns about marketing excess, especially the new fields of exhaustive data collection coupled with big data analysis for targeting.
If (as other threads have demonstrated recently) you can’t differentiate between advertising and marketing, you’re not likely to get the point because of course ads never affect you. 
I don’t understand how you could come to that conclusion. You responded to a post that said targeting based on race in a way that reinforced stereotypes might be offensive. To that you replied that do so was targeting based on class, not race. To which I posted:
Your post seemed to specifically say that targeting based on race was really based on class even though the post you quoted was talking about hypothetical ads targeted at “African Americans” and “their white friends.” No mention of class. A specific hypothetical about issues with targeting solely on race.
Ultimately who cares? If airing Colt 45 commercials during NBA games, medical product and ambulance chaser commercials during daytime TV, and family vacation ads on PBS Kids sells more of those things, then fine.
What’s Colt 45 to do- advertise to middle-aged white soccer moms? Stupid, and a waste of money. They’re better off targeting a poor urban black demographic, even more so than a poor white or Hispanic demographic.
Ambulance chasers get better results from advertising during daytime TV when their target demographic is watching TV. And the crowd whose kids watch PBS Kids likely have more cash and a willingness to go on family vacations to Riviera Maya or wherever (I only remember that because it was advertised on EVERY Thomas and Friends episode ever, I think).
I don’t see where the problem lies; if the advertisements don’t work, they’ll advertise somewhere else, or something else will be advertised to them. And advertising isn’t hypnosis or mind control or anything silly like that- it’s just a way to try and entice you.
One more time, from the beginning (at least in this thread) - there is a difference between “marketing” and “advertising.” Ads are just one midstream tool of marketing. Arguing that “ads don’t affect me, because I get up to take a piss when they come on” and so forth is completely missing the point - not only of what’s going on in the larger scheme, but in this thread. If you can’t differentiate marketing from ads alone, none of this is going to make any more sense than… wondering why the guys on the field run after the ball since baseball is all about hitting.
The OP’s question is about targeted marketing, as evidenced by the ads he saw. Nearly all of the following discussion is about how it can’t possibly matter to anyone because nobody pays attention to ads anyway. (Or, at least, *smart *people don’t.)
It’s the *targeting *that matters, because of where the targeting data comes from, how it’s processed, and how the results reach you in many more ways than just ads. And yes, I do think it’s one of the most serious issues on the table, despite not having the social glam cache of, say, police brutality.
Could you articulate what you think is bad about marketing?
More to the point, to the targeted person, what is the difference between marketing and advertisements?
That’s like arguing that a weapon system is a lot more than the bullet that comes out. True, but if you’re the target, the only part that ultimately concerns you is that bullet.
General Motors may be marketing to me frenetically, but the only points of contact are seeing GM vehicles on the road, TV commercials, product placement and the occasional print ad.
And I’m just as likely to be a cheapskate as I was 25 years ago, and go buy a used vehicle, instead of going to go by the latest whiz-bang pickup that I’m sure GM desperately wants to sell me.
Well, I think you have that exactly backwards – but I’m curious.
Let’s say that someone has, through remarkable marketing, realized that people like me have no damn interest in seeing a subtitled biopic about a blind sculptor who died in a concentration camp; but that me and mine would totally go see a slapstick comedy with Jennifer Lawrence as an unlucky-in-love nudist. How is that info useful to them unless they actually advertise the movie I’d like to see? And, speaking as a professional smart person, wouldn’t it be wise of me to pay attention to ads, so that I can realize it when one of those ads is for a movie that I’d like to see?
So what I’m asking is, what good is all that marketing if they never actually use it to advertise stuff? And at that point – well, it sure is a good thing I pay attention to ads, because I sure want that Jennifer Lawrence ad to, uh, work on me, right? I mean, it would’ve worked even without that marketing info behind it, just like the other one would is useless either way – but why bother to get that marketing info unless it’s going to lead to an ad for a desired product instead of the opposite?
In conclusion, someone please make that Jennifer Lawrence movie.
You asked for it. (“…you got it, Toy-o-ta!”)
Yes, but only if we have an agreement on some basic terms and ideas. This thread is a museum example of how a question about a particular aspect of *marketing *devolves (quickly) into babble about how it’s all BS because no one pays attention to ads (or is in any way influenced by them).
First, marketing =/= advertising. Advertising is one tool used by marketing, and increasingly, it is not even the most important or relevant tool. To equate the two or be misled by the role and importance of advertising is to fall for the magician’s patter.
Second, I have nothing against marketing, as an industry or in its place. It’s an essential component of business… to a point.
Third, large swathes of the marketing industry do run pretty much the way it’s taught in Marketing 101. The challenges here and in other threads assume I am saying that *all *marketing follows this grand and murky scheme - which is nowhere near true. Companies below a certain size and product value simply can’t make good use of these techniques. There are people who have been in the field for decades who have never used anything like the tools and processes I’ve talked about. They still do work in a world of “craft the perfect message and try to deliver it to a receptive audience” model Don Draper would understand. For quite a few things, nothing more than that model is needed. (Also, the longer someone has been in the field, the more unlikely they are to have accepted or encountered the new techniques, with many of the same arguments thrown out here. Go read the old physicists when they were confronted with the quantum revolution - it’s not an in-apt parallel. The old guard believes in the complex circle they’ve always practiced and even believes the advances in their career have been significant… but really, there hasn’t been anything new under the Marketing 101 sun for a long, long time. Just refinements and the long cycle of different approaches that each work in their turn on a new(ish) audience, regularly boosted by a new technology or two.)
Fourth and finally, when I talk about these marketing techniques, I am almost exclusively talking about their use by the biggest of the big - multinationals, conglomerates, major industries. Purina uses them; a pet food company one-fiftieth their size probably doesn’t. ConAgra uses them; Ben and Jerry’s probably doesn’t. However, as a relatively small number of megas produces most of each consumer good segment, it’s a lot more relevant that Ford uses them while, oh, FiatUSA doesn’t. These revolutionary approaches are used for a good percentage of US brands under megacorp umbrellas; it’s increasingly irrelevant that some percentage of the market in each niche doesn’t.
In a nutshell, these new techniques are sweeping, pervasive, invasive and high-granularity data collection on commercial populations down to the individual level; storage and coordination of this data between collecting entities; and big-data analysis and processing of this data to produce insights not obtainable in useful scale using any other process, again down to very small populations or individuals. Nothing like this existed more than ten years ago, except in the crudest sense. You could collect a ton of data on a small population, or superficial data on a large population, and you could use relatively basic statistical and behavioral analysis to bring a few fairly simple insights into view. While what’s going on now might seem to be that same-old turned up to 11, the old version is tinkertoy models to today’s genetic synthesis. Many orders of magnitude change in several dimensions at once, producing something that has never existed before except in theory.
Those insights are used to target marketing at increasingly fine levels of granularity, something made almost trivial by the present online world. Sure, marketing gurus dreamed of being able to send direct mail targeted by groups of 100, 10, 1, but it simply could not be done except on the smallest scale or with the weakest data. Now it can; for sufficiently valuable goods, whole micro-marketing campaigns can be and are targeted at individuals. (The term “targeting” conceals much, as well; it doesn’t mean going to absurd levels to put a Red Ryder BB gun ad in front of you, yes you! It means crafting an entire campaign to make you think of nothing but that BB gun until you are pushed over the edge to acquisition; using every avenue it can find to reach and sway your opinion. You can’t escape it without living in a sealed box.)
Far more than just this mega-evolution of crunching the numbers and sharpening the darts, behavioral engineering has transformed the whole process. It’s not new for marketing research and implementation to use behavioral science (they’ve been using both “amateur” and professional behavorism for decades) but marketing has become one of the premier fields for the very best and brightest to enter - six-figure starting salaries and corporate respect instead of running rats or teaching undergrads. If you don’t know how sophisticated behavioral engineering has become, this isn’t the place to try and describe it; suffice to say it entered science fictional territory decades ago and the same tools that enable other advances in the statistically-driven sciences have driven behaviorism as well.
All of which adds up an approach that is only superficially like what Don Draper did - which, allowing for computers and modern clothing, is pretty much most peoples’ idea of how “advertising” works. What we have now is a complete revolution in the practice of fostering awareness, interest, desire and acquisition of consumer goods, as complete a revolution as from maybe the crudest, cloudiest x-rays (if not phrenology) to real-time MRI and PET scans. Or more.
None of this is secret, by the way. There’s not a word above anyone well-read in professional marketing circles would disagree with (except, of course, that they’re squeeing in their pants at how wonderful it is). It isn’t, for example, a secret that a certain number of clicks within Facebook produces a sharp increase in the ‘addiction’ to the service; only that exact number of clicks is a trade secret. (Older example: it’s no secret that Coke *has *a secret ingredient, only *what *that ingredient is.) Massive data collection is no secret. Big data transformations are no secret. Use of behavioral engineering in marketing is no secret. (Most social media interfaces are only implemented by coders and designers; the behaviorists drew up the blueprints.) Even the finer and finer targeting is something most of us have experienced. There are any number of recent books that allude to aspects of it, although few have yet put together the really big picture.
It’s a “secret” only because (1) while marketing loves to talk about itself, it tends to wear a kindly ol’ Don Draper face and talk about Marketing 101 verities and basics, not the real inner workings, because (2) they are complex, boring and not much easier to explain to a layman than quantum effects; and (3) one of the continuing efforts of marketing is to deflect interest in itself and (largely through advertising) convince the consumer that s/he is just so darned smart and picky that they know they’re wasting their time even showing them the ad, and (4) the vast majority of consumers buy that line. (Think about just how many products are sold with the premise that you are one smart bastard for choosing it. That effort works on at least two levels, and even ‘savvy consumers’ only grasp one.)
It’s also a secret because what we might call “consumer investigative journalism” hasn’t really caught up with it. Most writers chase the small, easy segments and allude to the bigger picture (then tack on a chapter gently assuring us that it’s really not all that bad, which is hilarious given the Doooom! cover blurbs). The best and most insightful are just now starting to grasp and write about this. (I’ve been here for four or five years, as have a few others, but I’m not a big enough name to crack major markets with such a story. Maybe next week.)
So to specifically answer your question…
The functionally significant level of corporate marketing by the conglomerates and multinationals has begun to use tools and techniques that are not just extensions of “research, advertise, analyze, repeat” but use deeply invasive techniques to bypass consumer defenses, undermine economic judgment, foster desire using deep behavioral triggers, and reduce marketplace options to only those most profitable options. The result is an expanding invasion of personal and family privacy used to shape consumer goods designed and marketed with the single goal of extracting as much wealth from the target population as possible, with little consideration of the collateral and long-term effects. I think that is “bad.”
TLDR? Okay, super-short, hysterical, trump-of-doom book blurb version: You’re being mind-raped by tools straight out of science fiction to make you empty your wallet into their corporate coffers, then beg for more of the same.[COLOR=MediumTurquoise]*
- And no, I’m not going to defend this absurd version. If it’s all you bothered to read, you may nod smugly and move on.
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Movies and entertainment are largely outside of what I’m talking about. As you and others have correctly observed, there’s a certain amount of personal taste that cannot be overcome with even billions in marketing.
With few exceptions and no real change in the forecast, I am talking about the promotion and sale of consumer goods (and some services). Some of it applies, but music and movies march to their own Don & Peggy.
Fine. I can fire that bullet from a Brown Bess (or even a good sniper rifle)… or let a vastly powerful automated system with laser targeting, IR air-current sensing, GPS/GLONASS mapping and topographic data, full access to the history of every evasive maneuver you’ve ever tried, your recorded reaction times and fatigue index and the latest behavioral analysis of how people just like you (all nine of them) are likely to react at this moment take the shot.
Your choice.
Well, that’s – almost helpful.
So it doesn’t apply to music and movies, which you say are a matter of taste, which you say “cannot be overcome even with billions in marketing”. But what else, in your opinion, is also a matter of taste – such that you can throw billions at selling it and likewise fail to overcome it? Like, take literal matters of taste, when it comes to food and drink: are those the “consumer goods” you’re talking about, or are those also firmly in that “cannot be overcome even with billions in marketing” category?
How about political candidates? Is it that I already know, as a matter of taste, which positions I favor on which issues, such that telling me where your candidate stands on them will make me say “thanks for bringing that to my attention; won’t be voting for him, now, will I?” What about – well, look, why should I yammer on and on about possibilities, when you’re right here and can mention what else you think falls into the “cannot be overcome even with billions in marketing” category?
“Mind-raped”? That escalated quickly. Did a market researcher kill your parents?
The big concern is big companies are trying to learn more about me so they can advertise more effectively to me. I don’t care and I don’t see any reason for any sane person to care.
This really is down Apples N Oranges Lane. Entertainment tends to be ephemeral and changeable by its very nature; very few of us watch one or two movies or listen to one album for… a year, or two years or longer. Entertainment almost by its nature demands change and freshness, which depends on certain kinds of appeal, which makes it very difficult to do effective ‘influence’ marketing with. Awareness and appeal, sure - and that’s where things like Disney writing in a male co-lead to an animated production comes in; marketing by prognostication. Movies tend to have a salable shelf life of about two weeks as well, meaning all that marketing pressure has a very narrow target to try and hit. (Home video sale are over a longer period, but not much. I think most movies sell 90% of all the copies they will ever sell within five to six weeks - from memory.)
Products are a long-term matter. It’s worth spending years to get some large percentage of customers to switch to Folger’s, because Folger’s will reap the benefits for a comparatively long time. It’s worth longer, deeper, more patient efforts to get new consumers to choose X and to get Y buyers to try the switch, because the continuing rewards can be immense. Also, kind of duh, Folger’s will still be on the shelf years and years later, still reaping the benefits of that campaign long after it’s paid off and amortized. Continuing success with marketing along these lines, adding a few percent from time to time, is how absolutely dominant products and manufacturers are built.
Changing game, and it’s the hints that variations on the new tools may have put some candidates over the top, including Trump, that are worrisome. On the one hand, it’s like entertainment in that there’s a narrow window and certain fixed prejudices and preferences to work with, but OTOH, races are often decided by relative handfuls of voters. So take that deep well of data and run it through the mega-brain of big data, with an eye to finding who among “undecideds” are only a nudge away from making up their minds… then use highly targeted nudging to make it happen. You can even use the reverse to target those who lean the other way and use “flattening” techniques to disperse their vote or (possibly) skip voting altogether. None of this is even remotely fantasy-level for the tools, techniques and data that are now in play.
And there’s no buyer’s-regret clause on elections, so if the last efforts are a disorienting kick in the head rather than persuasive logic, it’s all the same outcome. Yes, political teams have been doing this for… ever. However, they can now read the electorate with vastly higher levels of precision and target their efforts as narrowly as need be to reach as many absolutely key voters for the buck.
What, you don’t read footnotes?
(ETA: And really needed to quote the whole block to add two lines? Sheesh.)
Missed it. Oh, well.
Which puts it in the same category as many recent revelations:
[ol]
[li]That’s bullshit. Go away.[/li][li]It’s trivial. Who cares.[/li][li]Yeah, it happens, but it doesn’t affect me.[/li][li]WHAT THE FUCK?[/li][/ol]
Four is usually after a New York Times headline that you, your life, your personal economics and/or your career is affected in a way where you should have taken note and cared back in step 2. But enjoy your calm. It will probably start eroding when you grasp what it is you missed.
That’s, uh, interesting, but you’re still not really answering my question.
You stated that, when it comes to some stuff – movies, you said, and music; and I guess you tossed in a catch-all it about “entertainment” – that, oh, gosh, that’s a matter of taste, which “cannot be overcome even with billions in marketing.”
I’d sure appreciate it if you’d just list what else you think fits in that category.
You go on to talk of political candidates – “On the one hand, it’s like entertainment in that there’s a narrow window and certain fixed prejudices and preferences to work with, but OTOH, races are often decided by relative handfuls of voters.” What else do you think involves fixed preferences to be worked with?
I’m just trying to understand your position, here: you apparently think some stuff should be so classified; help me out by specifying what you think fits the bill.
So is your position that all things marketed are equivalent, and any aspect of marketing one thing should be applicable and identical for every other thing? That marketing is a single, universal tool, for cow, countess and clock?
I’ve given you specific breakdowns for “entertainment,” political candidates, and “nearly all consumer goods, including many services.” ETA: This can be broken down in dozens if not hundreds of ways, but the similarities between marketing baby formula, BMWs and frozen pizzas are greater than the differences.
What do you think I’m omitting or failing to answer?
(Irrelevant to the thread: one of the ads currently showing on my box here is “Data Collection: The Ethics Behind the Practice” from a foney-bulloney online university. I am SURE that’s a complete coincidence. No connection at all.)