Shaping Media/Consumers, One Ad at a Time
I recently tripped on yet another rhetorical caltrop in an online discussion thread, a seemingly off-handed observation that sought to quiet the Sturm und Drang of yet another whiner (this whiner being myself); it was the notion that "advertising has . . . been the fuel for art and entertainment for decades, if not centuries." And while yes, this is technically true, there are reasons-some worth considering, others so powerful that not considering them puts people at peril-obviating the seeming simplicity of this observation.
In a nutshell, I am here proposing that there are good reasons to create ad-free multi-media space, and that those reasons have to do with the negative and deforming effect of advertising itself. This has been a hobby horse of mine for some time, and I thought it might be interesting to introduce this concept with those who might not have considered these issues before.
I'll break down the issues into somewhat separate-able categories to better digest the bits. That said, I don't think that the gestalt of ad-fueled content need be broken to pieces entirely to have compelling evidence against it considered.
The first point is probably the easiest to consider. In his comment, badlydrawnjeff noted that such funding has been a fact "for decades, if not centuries." True; but print is simply different from A/V. The reading eye has an amazing ability to scan and ignore while absorbing written content. Whole swaths of seemingly irrelevant material can be blocked off while the eye seeks the narrative thread, and the ability to go back and track lost threads gives readers the chance to rebuild the narrative voice in, say, a magazine or newspaper.
This is not the case with A/V. The flow of absorption is deliberately interrupted with commercial messages. Interrupting this flow can cause the listener/viewer a dissonant condition, especially if the narrative of the content differs too widely from the narrative style of the interruption. Returning to the narrative can be problematic. We've all seen this flow interruption, probably, while watching old movies on commercial television, where the commercial interruptions are timed by set schedules, not by natural breaks in the movie itself. "And the killer is. . . ." trails off, the screen goes black, and we instead see a woman complaining about difficult to remove dirt in her laundry. Suspense being built by the movie's narrative is shattered.
For that reason, I will posit that, though advertising itself has been around for hundreds of years, only since the advent of radio, movies and television has the commercial interruption been a problem. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.
That cartoon ran in a radio magazine in 1922, alongside an interesting article submitted by the then Manager. Dept. of Publicity, Westinghouse Co., the company who supplied most of the broadcast equipment for the country at the time. He writes:
Let me ask you whether the public will wish advertising to come to them through the agency of radio broadcasting. Remember that this advertising will go right into the home. It will invade the place where the family is enjoying the full benefits of privacy and detachment from business cares. The broadcasting to thousands of homes of advertising information concerning, say: "Things for women and things for men," probably the butcher with his meats; the baker with his bread; the tailor with his clothes, and the grocer with his crackers and cheese-what kind of a home will it be anyhow? You may say you can turn it on at will and turn it off when you want to, but even so, who will want it? How valuable will be the media if the public will not support it? Personally, I don't think they will support it.
Advertising must ride on some service, and in riding on that service it must not destroy the service.
(I emboldened the important bit.)
Again, this was a high-ranking member of the country's radio broadcast equipment chief supply company. In that same year, check out this quote from Herbert Hoover, not yet president: "It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter."
So here we see to prominent voices echoing that "advertising chatter" differs from print ads in substantive ways.
Times have changed, probably with ubiquity. As something is everywhere, the brain ceases to notice the interruptions. That does not mean the interruptions do not take a toll on that viewing/listening brains.
Back to the bullet points, for advertising to be successful-that is, for it to sneak into the minds of the audience and increase the chances that the message will effect a sale-the content it funds must tread on eggshells. There are some fun examples where direct product placement went horribly awry, simply because the product placed in media must never show that product in a negative light. It wouldn't be much of an ad otherwise, right? In The Front, Woody Allen plays a front man for a blacklisted writer, called to do a quick rewrite of a teleplay. It seems the execution of a character in the gas chamber simply won't do for the sponsor of the show . . . a gas company.
An even more laughable example can be found in Sean Penn's Bad Boys from 1983. Poor Sean finds himself in a youth penitentiary, condemned to interact with other young cons and drink RC Cola from the vending machine all freakin' day. It's always RC. In just about every scene. One scene stands out, however. In it, Sean has finally had enough rolling over to the bully. After some provocation, he decides to take action. He grabs his pillowcase. He grabs a fist full of quarters. He marches to the vending machine and feeds it quarters. He grabs can after can of generic cola - not Royal Crown this time! - and stuffs his pillowcase. He waits. The bully approaches. He scowls. He beats the bully bloody with his loaded pillowcase.
And afterwards, I shit you not, he goes to the vending machine, grabs an RC, and goes to his cell to sip and decompress from all the excitement.
While product placements might be easy to mock, what about shows with simple commercial endorsements? Over two years ago I had an idea for a show based on some books I read, Jeff Yeager's The Cheapskate Next Door and The Ultimate Cheapskate's Road Map to True Riches: A Practical (and Fun) Guide to Enjoying Life More by Spending Less. I caught the author at the local bookstore pushing his latest. I have to give him credit; he's made the book tour on bicycle.
Suddenly, it hit me; Cheap Shots, the next big reality show that follows cheap people. Freegans, Dumpster Divers, Scavengers-anyone who can live very well on very little by eschewing the Consume Now! message blaring at everyone all the time.
Just as suddenly, I realized why no show could ever be produced; no one would sponsor it. Really, now, if you had advertising dollars to spend, would you pick a show, no matter how popular, that attracted the kind of viewers least likely to spend money on your products or services?!?
Like I said, I made that above suggestion and following prediction in November, 2010. I was vindicated. It turns out Jeff himself starred in the first episode of Extreme Cheapskates. The Wife™ and I watched that first few shows, until I realized they had chosen their targets carefully. For some reason, they got Jeff himself to display the most disgusting of his tendencies, the very things he himself mocked in his books. In the only other episode I watched, the cheapskate was more of a skinflint, someone who wouldn't buy furniture for his house unless it was free, yet loved to poor over online banks statements of accounts he kept hidden from his family. I guess the tag line of the show says it all: "Zero dollars and zero sense."
I was enraged. My idea for positively-portrayed people getting on well in life with minimum purchases? Torpedoed. Good advise for people living in a post-economic collapse America from people living well and spending little? Launched like a clay pigeon at a shooting range and shattered. One does not question the message of constant purchasing. Only shows that revere purchasers will get aired.
Heck, check out this video of Kathy Griffin mentioning my hometown, as featured in Hoarders! (It turns out there are plenty of good reasons why I moved away . . . and some of them are on the telly!)
Hoarding isn't anti-commercial. After all, that stuff had to come from somewhere.
And anti-commercialism through limiting purchases isn't the only casualty to suffer from this advertiser-weighted paradigm. Watch any commercial local news show. Note the topics. I'm willing to bet that (beyond the non-news of sports and updates on weather) any given broadcasts features prominently:
What's missing? Everything that funders of local news don't want you to hear. Don't believe me? Count the ads in news broadcasts for car dealers, then consider what happened to ABC in 2010:
Toyota dealers in New York state have severely restricted their advertising on ABC-affiliated TV stations throughout the state because of what they consider unfair coverage of Toyota safety problems by ABC News. . . .
A station manager at a New York ABC affiliate said that a member of the dealers group told him they were "pressured" by the Toyota corporation to limit their commercial buys to no more than a 10 percent share in his market because of what the automaker perceived as "biased and unfair reporting by ABC'S Brian Ross related to the Toyota acceleration issues."
Here's a question: Was Ross's reporting "biased and unfair"? I honestly don't know, but do know that it doesn't matter. This ploy by Toyota has been seen for decades. To put a crude point on the issue, if the advertisers decide reporters must all acknowledge that Toyota has a huge penis (despite evidence that the penis is only average in size or, worse, minuscule), the first agency that doesn't gush with envy at the erect member's size and force its reporters to dream on-air about the joy of possibly suckling that cock until their jaws ache and knees bleed will hear the bank vault slam shut and suffer the wrath of poverty.
Whoever has the gold makes the rules about what makes the news.
Finally for this rant, a bit of concern about ad targeting that really should have people up in arms. It's no surprise that advertisers place their pitches alongside shows watched by their prime demographic. The fact that daytime serial dramas were watched primarily by house-bound women who did a majority of the house cleaning led to the disparaging moniker "soap operas" to describe those serials, since they were largely funded by ads hawking cleaning products.
But what happens when the demographic becomes increasingly isolated by choice? People who, for example, watch only certain news shows might feel that buying gold or vegetable seeds to hedge against the uncertain economic future predicted by those certain shows would be a good thing to do. And that's just the television version of the concern. What happens when advertisers are targeting web browsing?
Here, let's consider probably the most common web browser, Google. When you search for a topic on Google, for example, Google takes all of your past searches, all the content of your G-Mail account, all of your Google Earth goofings and YouTube viewings, and builds a composite model of your personality. It then uses this model to guess which of the gazillion hits in its database will most please you-not, let us note, best inform you-and puts those on top of its search results.
This is all well and good, until we take into account that Google has become a kind of encyclopedia of today, a reference. References of fact should be universal, the touchstones of our collective lives we call society. A word might have multiple definitions; but for a dictionary to order those definitions based upon who is looking up the word-or even delete some-does no good service to either the looker-upper or to the society in which that looker-upper lives.
There's something else to consider:
There's another tension in the interplay of identity and personalization. Most personalized filters are based on a three-step model. First, you figure out who people are and what they like. Then, you provide them with content and services that best fit them. Finally, you tune to get the fit just right. Your identity shapes your media. There's just one flaw in this logic: Media also shapes identity. And as a result, these services may end up creating a good fit between you and your media by changing . . . you. If a self-fulfilling prophecy is a false definition of the world that through one's actions becomes true, we're now on the verge of self-fulfilling identities, in which the Internet's distorted picture of us becomes who we really are.
(Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, The Penguin Press, 2011, p. 112.)
This rant of mine is not designed to get people to defenestrate their tellies and radios out the tallest buildings they can find, but merely to remind that what we don't notice has an effect. Remember, effective ads are not necessarily ones we recall, but ones that affect our behavior most seamlessly; and what we haven't been told can hurt us.
That's why I would suggest that people take that into account whenever they watch or listen, and not to tune out the ads, but rather to note them and how these ads might affect the content. Sadly, it's no longer possible to find "public" television and radio in the US anymore. Thanks to Ken, what was public is now largely commercial. (Question: how many ads does it take to make a venue "commerical?" Answer: One.) Perhaps that will change, but I'm not holding my breath.
For those that can, I suggest taking a break from all the ads. If it means turning the ad spewer off, so be it. Take a hike, a long drive with CDs or (as I do) podcasts. When you return, you will (again, as I have) be startled by the intrusion some ads can have but that you never before noticed. It might become a way of life.
A better way of life.
Addendum: In my hasty editing, I left out a key quote I'll now include as a coda, one from Walter Lippmann and written in the mid-1950s. I'll let him have the last word:
There has been, in fact, an enormous conspiracy to deceive the public in order to sell profitable advertising to the sponsors. In involves not merely this individual or that, but the industry as a whole. . . .
The size of the fraud is a bitter reflection on the moral condition of our society. But it is also sure proof that there is something radically wrong with the fundamental national policy under which television operates. The principle of that policy is that for all practical purposes television shall be operated wholly for private profit. There is no competition in television except among competitors trying to sell the attention of the audiences for profit. As a result, while television is supposed to be "free," it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.
(Walter Lippmann, "The TV Problem," Today and Tomorrow, October 27, 1959, I emboldened.)
X-Posted to talk_politics.
In a nutshell, I am here proposing that there are good reasons to create ad-free multi-media space, and that those reasons have to do with the negative and deforming effect of advertising itself. This has been a hobby horse of mine for some time, and I thought it might be interesting to introduce this concept with those who might not have considered these issues before.
I'll break down the issues into somewhat separate-able categories to better digest the bits. That said, I don't think that the gestalt of ad-fueled content need be broken to pieces entirely to have compelling evidence against it considered.
- Owing to the manner in which either are absorbed, ads in and near audio and audio-visual media are different in both type and kind from print advertisements.
- Advertisement-funded media is bound to produce content that does not allow the viewer to question (or even to become overly aware of) advertisements. These restrictions alter the basic, fundamental questions and concerns society can consider.
- Taken to the extreme, advertising in media can create a reality distortion bubble that can leave people so ill-informed as to make even basic decisions about their lives and the lives of others in their societies.
The first point is probably the easiest to consider. In his comment, badlydrawnjeff noted that such funding has been a fact "for decades, if not centuries." True; but print is simply different from A/V. The reading eye has an amazing ability to scan and ignore while absorbing written content. Whole swaths of seemingly irrelevant material can be blocked off while the eye seeks the narrative thread, and the ability to go back and track lost threads gives readers the chance to rebuild the narrative voice in, say, a magazine or newspaper.
This is not the case with A/V. The flow of absorption is deliberately interrupted with commercial messages. Interrupting this flow can cause the listener/viewer a dissonant condition, especially if the narrative of the content differs too widely from the narrative style of the interruption. Returning to the narrative can be problematic. We've all seen this flow interruption, probably, while watching old movies on commercial television, where the commercial interruptions are timed by set schedules, not by natural breaks in the movie itself. "And the killer is. . . ." trails off, the screen goes black, and we instead see a woman complaining about difficult to remove dirt in her laundry. Suspense being built by the movie's narrative is shattered.
For that reason, I will posit that, though advertising itself has been around for hundreds of years, only since the advent of radio, movies and television has the commercial interruption been a problem. And I'm not the only one who thinks so.
That cartoon ran in a radio magazine in 1922, alongside an interesting article submitted by the then Manager. Dept. of Publicity, Westinghouse Co., the company who supplied most of the broadcast equipment for the country at the time. He writes:
Let me ask you whether the public will wish advertising to come to them through the agency of radio broadcasting. Remember that this advertising will go right into the home. It will invade the place where the family is enjoying the full benefits of privacy and detachment from business cares. The broadcasting to thousands of homes of advertising information concerning, say: "Things for women and things for men," probably the butcher with his meats; the baker with his bread; the tailor with his clothes, and the grocer with his crackers and cheese-what kind of a home will it be anyhow? You may say you can turn it on at will and turn it off when you want to, but even so, who will want it? How valuable will be the media if the public will not support it? Personally, I don't think they will support it.
Advertising must ride on some service, and in riding on that service it must not destroy the service.
(I emboldened the important bit.)
Again, this was a high-ranking member of the country's radio broadcast equipment chief supply company. In that same year, check out this quote from Herbert Hoover, not yet president: "It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter."
So here we see to prominent voices echoing that "advertising chatter" differs from print ads in substantive ways.
Times have changed, probably with ubiquity. As something is everywhere, the brain ceases to notice the interruptions. That does not mean the interruptions do not take a toll on that viewing/listening brains.
Back to the bullet points, for advertising to be successful-that is, for it to sneak into the minds of the audience and increase the chances that the message will effect a sale-the content it funds must tread on eggshells. There are some fun examples where direct product placement went horribly awry, simply because the product placed in media must never show that product in a negative light. It wouldn't be much of an ad otherwise, right? In The Front, Woody Allen plays a front man for a blacklisted writer, called to do a quick rewrite of a teleplay. It seems the execution of a character in the gas chamber simply won't do for the sponsor of the show . . . a gas company.
An even more laughable example can be found in Sean Penn's Bad Boys from 1983. Poor Sean finds himself in a youth penitentiary, condemned to interact with other young cons and drink RC Cola from the vending machine all freakin' day. It's always RC. In just about every scene. One scene stands out, however. In it, Sean has finally had enough rolling over to the bully. After some provocation, he decides to take action. He grabs his pillowcase. He grabs a fist full of quarters. He marches to the vending machine and feeds it quarters. He grabs can after can of generic cola - not Royal Crown this time! - and stuffs his pillowcase. He waits. The bully approaches. He scowls. He beats the bully bloody with his loaded pillowcase.
And afterwards, I shit you not, he goes to the vending machine, grabs an RC, and goes to his cell to sip and decompress from all the excitement.
While product placements might be easy to mock, what about shows with simple commercial endorsements? Over two years ago I had an idea for a show based on some books I read, Jeff Yeager's The Cheapskate Next Door and The Ultimate Cheapskate's Road Map to True Riches: A Practical (and Fun) Guide to Enjoying Life More by Spending Less. I caught the author at the local bookstore pushing his latest. I have to give him credit; he's made the book tour on bicycle.
Suddenly, it hit me; Cheap Shots, the next big reality show that follows cheap people. Freegans, Dumpster Divers, Scavengers-anyone who can live very well on very little by eschewing the Consume Now! message blaring at everyone all the time.
Just as suddenly, I realized why no show could ever be produced; no one would sponsor it. Really, now, if you had advertising dollars to spend, would you pick a show, no matter how popular, that attracted the kind of viewers least likely to spend money on your products or services?!?
Like I said, I made that above suggestion and following prediction in November, 2010. I was vindicated. It turns out Jeff himself starred in the first episode of Extreme Cheapskates. The Wife™ and I watched that first few shows, until I realized they had chosen their targets carefully. For some reason, they got Jeff himself to display the most disgusting of his tendencies, the very things he himself mocked in his books. In the only other episode I watched, the cheapskate was more of a skinflint, someone who wouldn't buy furniture for his house unless it was free, yet loved to poor over online banks statements of accounts he kept hidden from his family. I guess the tag line of the show says it all: "Zero dollars and zero sense."
I was enraged. My idea for positively-portrayed people getting on well in life with minimum purchases? Torpedoed. Good advise for people living in a post-economic collapse America from people living well and spending little? Launched like a clay pigeon at a shooting range and shattered. One does not question the message of constant purchasing. Only shows that revere purchasers will get aired.
Heck, check out this video of Kathy Griffin mentioning my hometown, as featured in Hoarders! (It turns out there are plenty of good reasons why I moved away . . . and some of them are on the telly!)
Hoarding isn't anti-commercial. After all, that stuff had to come from somewhere.
And anti-commercialism through limiting purchases isn't the only casualty to suffer from this advertiser-weighted paradigm. Watch any commercial local news show. Note the topics. I'm willing to bet that (beyond the non-news of sports and updates on weather) any given broadcasts features prominently:
- Corruption/troubles/mistakes in government (local, state or national);
- Crime and/or the criminals alleged to do them;
- Traffic/traffic snarls due to accidents;
- Light human interest stuff.
What's missing? Everything that funders of local news don't want you to hear. Don't believe me? Count the ads in news broadcasts for car dealers, then consider what happened to ABC in 2010:
Toyota dealers in New York state have severely restricted their advertising on ABC-affiliated TV stations throughout the state because of what they consider unfair coverage of Toyota safety problems by ABC News. . . .
A station manager at a New York ABC affiliate said that a member of the dealers group told him they were "pressured" by the Toyota corporation to limit their commercial buys to no more than a 10 percent share in his market because of what the automaker perceived as "biased and unfair reporting by ABC'S Brian Ross related to the Toyota acceleration issues."
Here's a question: Was Ross's reporting "biased and unfair"? I honestly don't know, but do know that it doesn't matter. This ploy by Toyota has been seen for decades. To put a crude point on the issue, if the advertisers decide reporters must all acknowledge that Toyota has a huge penis (despite evidence that the penis is only average in size or, worse, minuscule), the first agency that doesn't gush with envy at the erect member's size and force its reporters to dream on-air about the joy of possibly suckling that cock until their jaws ache and knees bleed will hear the bank vault slam shut and suffer the wrath of poverty.
Whoever has the gold makes the rules about what makes the news.
Finally for this rant, a bit of concern about ad targeting that really should have people up in arms. It's no surprise that advertisers place their pitches alongside shows watched by their prime demographic. The fact that daytime serial dramas were watched primarily by house-bound women who did a majority of the house cleaning led to the disparaging moniker "soap operas" to describe those serials, since they were largely funded by ads hawking cleaning products.
But what happens when the demographic becomes increasingly isolated by choice? People who, for example, watch only certain news shows might feel that buying gold or vegetable seeds to hedge against the uncertain economic future predicted by those certain shows would be a good thing to do. And that's just the television version of the concern. What happens when advertisers are targeting web browsing?
Here, let's consider probably the most common web browser, Google. When you search for a topic on Google, for example, Google takes all of your past searches, all the content of your G-Mail account, all of your Google Earth goofings and YouTube viewings, and builds a composite model of your personality. It then uses this model to guess which of the gazillion hits in its database will most please you-not, let us note, best inform you-and puts those on top of its search results.
This is all well and good, until we take into account that Google has become a kind of encyclopedia of today, a reference. References of fact should be universal, the touchstones of our collective lives we call society. A word might have multiple definitions; but for a dictionary to order those definitions based upon who is looking up the word-or even delete some-does no good service to either the looker-upper or to the society in which that looker-upper lives.
There's something else to consider:
There's another tension in the interplay of identity and personalization. Most personalized filters are based on a three-step model. First, you figure out who people are and what they like. Then, you provide them with content and services that best fit them. Finally, you tune to get the fit just right. Your identity shapes your media. There's just one flaw in this logic: Media also shapes identity. And as a result, these services may end up creating a good fit between you and your media by changing . . . you. If a self-fulfilling prophecy is a false definition of the world that through one's actions becomes true, we're now on the verge of self-fulfilling identities, in which the Internet's distorted picture of us becomes who we really are.
(Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, The Penguin Press, 2011, p. 112.)
This rant of mine is not designed to get people to defenestrate their tellies and radios out the tallest buildings they can find, but merely to remind that what we don't notice has an effect. Remember, effective ads are not necessarily ones we recall, but ones that affect our behavior most seamlessly; and what we haven't been told can hurt us.
That's why I would suggest that people take that into account whenever they watch or listen, and not to tune out the ads, but rather to note them and how these ads might affect the content. Sadly, it's no longer possible to find "public" television and radio in the US anymore. Thanks to Ken, what was public is now largely commercial. (Question: how many ads does it take to make a venue "commerical?" Answer: One.) Perhaps that will change, but I'm not holding my breath.
For those that can, I suggest taking a break from all the ads. If it means turning the ad spewer off, so be it. Take a hike, a long drive with CDs or (as I do) podcasts. When you return, you will (again, as I have) be startled by the intrusion some ads can have but that you never before noticed. It might become a way of life.
A better way of life.
Addendum: In my hasty editing, I left out a key quote I'll now include as a coda, one from Walter Lippmann and written in the mid-1950s. I'll let him have the last word:
There has been, in fact, an enormous conspiracy to deceive the public in order to sell profitable advertising to the sponsors. In involves not merely this individual or that, but the industry as a whole. . . .
The size of the fraud is a bitter reflection on the moral condition of our society. But it is also sure proof that there is something radically wrong with the fundamental national policy under which television operates. The principle of that policy is that for all practical purposes television shall be operated wholly for private profit. There is no competition in television except among competitors trying to sell the attention of the audiences for profit. As a result, while television is supposed to be "free," it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.
(Walter Lippmann, "The TV Problem," Today and Tomorrow, October 27, 1959, I emboldened.)
X-Posted to talk_politics.