You’re right, but at its core, it’s still segmenting your market and aiming tailored materials at each segment.
At any rate, there’s nothing dirty about it- if it’s not already being done to us in various, much more mundane commercial settings, it soon will be.
I’m personally skeptical of the ability of marketing to force someone to buy or do anything; all it does is encourage something you wanted to do all along- like the women who have one drink and are showing their boobs; they’re not drunk, they just have an excuse.
Right: it’s what was going to happen sooner or later once the processing power was high enough, and the true reason the social networks became worth billions, since they were the feeders.
That people may have expected it to be put to use to sell SUVs rather than to sell campaigns would be just a failure of imagination.
Consider this, bump. Suppose you’re buying a car that you need for work and family purposes. Need, not whimsically want; getting up and walking out is not really an option.
The salesman is a telepath and can read your every thought. He can catch every doubt, every desire, every whim, every trace of strength or weakness, and put those cards into play on the fly.
What chance do you have of “winning” that negotiation? Of even staying within your self-set limits for spending and choices? Of ending up a lot closer to what the salesman wants you to buy than what you thought you were going to buy?
That’s what these new marketing tools and models are like. It’s not yesterday’s ads and gimmicks turned up another notch or given a new coat of paint - it’s something almost wholly new, playing elements that vaguely resemble older consumer manipulations, but with infinitely more sophistication and completely grounded in data-driven behavioral engineering. It’s… laparoscopic joint repair, not a shiny-new and super-fancy way to do battlefield amputations.
I think this is pretty overwrought, and well into conspiracy theory territory.
Speaking as somebody whose work tangentially touches and sometimes helps create the brains of smarter and more targeted marketing campaigns, real marketing / advertising is nowhere near this, and likely never will be. And this is for a company with an annual marketing budget over $1 billion, so it’s not like budget or lack of info is a problem, and we have many teams of Phd-level statisticians and data scientists, so it’s not like brainpower is an issue.
Yes, segmentations can get ever more granular and the amount of personal information people put out there is both terrifying and inadvisable - but this level of “we can control your every thought and move with the right keywords, fonts, and spokespeople” thinking is just silly.
If anything, marketing and advertising have become LESS effective over the last decade or so, not due to lack of skill or customer information or budget on company’s parts, all of which have undoubtedly increased, but due to macro-level changes in media consumption and channel preference. Summarized broadly, nobody watches commercials any more in an age of Netflix and DVR’s, and nobody pays attention to physical mail, email, or online ads due to varied combinations of saturation, spam filters, and ad-blockers.
So how exactly are you proposing we control society’s (or even a chunk of society’s) every move, given that in aggregate we the people making up society see many fewer commercials, mostly block online ads, have spam filters on our email, and throw physical junk mail in the trash without reading it?
Sorry you think so. I was told the same thing when I brought up other topics in the last few years that are now Of Course Everyone Knows That - like widespread cell phone sweeping and monitoring, and complete consumer tracking through rewards cards and memberships.
There are probably many thousands of people who consider themselves high-level marketing experts who have never really outpaced the Marketing 101 concept of what they do. The present revolution is quantum physics to newtonian, and like all such major changes, the old guard often goes to its death (or just retirement) refusing to believe the new paradigm.
Worked much with fMRI? What big data platform do you work with? Any Ph.D.s in Behaviorism in your company (who have never worked outside of the corporate world)? Or just 21st century takes on Don, Peggy and the guy who ran the IBM machine? Because the latter still very much exist. But they’re increasingly representative of the static end of the industry that keeps trying the same things and (as you say) getting poorer and poorer results… because Marketing 101 is Chaucerian BS in today’s world.
That you think any of these tools is anything but the feeblest blunt weapon, or has been for the last decade or more, indicates how behind the times your viewpoint is. I’m not dissing you. I know the marketing industry and many people in it. A good percentage can and do say just what you do… because the coming changes are incomprehensible to their view of how the field works. Newtonian.
I’m very willing to be educated, and would appreciate it sincerely if you did so - if nearly all current marketing channels are naught but the feeblest, bluntest weapons, what do you consider to be the laser-guided drone-fired missiles and 2020’s style Death Rays of the marketing world today?
And how, when, and where are the messages getting in front of people with enough regularity and intensity to actually alter behavior on a mass scale? Educate me.
I would also be curious if you could point us to a few companies doing marketing in non-feeble, non-blunt ways - I ask because if there are indeed extant methods that are noticeably more effective (and “noticeably” here I’d say driving 50% better returns on average in a consistent and 12-month enduring way, which is about the lift you can get on a really great segmentation), it is literally worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, to the Fortune 500 and probably even a handful of individual companies, and I would expect any company or organization using them to powerfully outperform their industry in the next year or two.
If your contention is that the techniques exist, but are solely in the hands of private organizations using them only for political rather than financial gain, I would argue that the multiple hundreds of billions dollar payout they could get partnering with Fortune 500 companies is a big enough incentive that that’s simply not realistic.
First, you’ve sweepingly misquoted me. I never said “nearly all channels” - I countered your listing of the oldest, most shopworn tools in the bag. DM? Really? That stopped working when Reagan was still in office.
Are you able to separate advertising from marketing - really see them as two distinct things? Or, like most current practitioners, is the delivery of the “message” the focus of the game, and the work just crafting the perfect message to deliver?
List the last three behavioral-engineering-centric professional articles you read.
And again, you’ve missed either my point here or those I’ve made in many other threads. Of *course *F100 has these techniques. (Not sure it gets as far as F500; the lower ranges of that are still on the level you’re presenting, using re-re-re-polished versions of Don Draper approaches.) It’s that these techniques are now being used to political ends… with the immensely powerful tool of “news” added to the arsenal, something consumer good marketing can only use in the most selective way.
Jumping way back to this in light of the direction we’ve gone - you do realize that Facebook was *designed *(in its later, public iterations, once revenue and advertising became paramount) to be addictive? That FB has strong data on exactly how many clicks within the system it takes to “addict” a new user? (And that that number is as closely guarded as Formula 7X?)
So refining that interactive addiction by feeding targeted streams of irresistible BS is just that, refinement. The change here is that it involves reality and news, not product sales and consumer goods. A door has opened. It’s not unlike the one in Doom, IMHO.
It’s like those people that say there’s this guy who found a cure for cancer (all of it) but Big Pharma is suppressing it, the reality is that pharmaceutical companies would be stampeding towards it to be the first to get it.
I actually never mentioned any techniques at all, I only talked about channels. This is because techniques are a red queen’s race, always having to change and get better just to stay in place relative to your competitors, but your real bottleneck is your channels.
At the end of the day, no matter how smart your targeting and how informed your customer segmentation, and how on-topic your message is to that segment, you have to get something in front of the customer based on those things to alter their behavior, and that’s the bottleneck that all marketing and advertising has to get through. Those things are channels.
Channels have faced steady declines in penetration and addressable sizes in nearly every venue over the last decade, for the reasons I mentioned.
You mention “news” as a new channel for driving political outcomes, but news faces the same problems - declining viewership, more homogenous segments, declining trust, and decreasing consumption. Touting it as the harbinger of the coming apocalypse still seems a bit overwrought to me.
I’d like to see some reliable stats about how many people block ads (I’m not sure if such statistics even exist) but I suspect that it’s not a very high percentage. A lot of people just use their browser software or phone as it comes without installing blockers, etc.
Regardless of that, what’s being discussed here isn’t just ads, or at least not something that is recognized as ads.
On FB, for example, if I can trick you into “friending” me or “liking” my group, I can then “share” memes and article links with you, and when I share something I can share with everyone on my friends list, some subgroup of those friends, or even one individual.
If I then buy the right data from FB, I can fill your feed with memes and links tailored to your interests.
If you’re a religious and social conservative who works for an oil company then I feed you information about how climate change is a conspiracy by atheist scientists to distract you from the secular gay agenda, etc.
If you’re a liberal who supported Sanders in the primary then you’ll get things trying to convince you that “Killary” has a long list of murders under her belt, along with a host of other evils, and that any decent intelligent person would either vote for Stein or withhold their vote in protest.