Re: [projectvrm] Multifunctional Advertising

[Chris Savage < >]

Sylvain,

Thank you, this is very helpful.  I will ponder a bit more.

I have mentioned, perhaps on this list, my sense that there is a 
"tragedy of the commons" effect going on among those who would sell me 
stuff.  Just like in the Garrett Hardin story where each shepherd looks 
at the common field and thinks, "Oh, letting one or two extra sheep from 
my flock graze won't hurt anything" -- and they collectively end up 
destroying the common field, so too does the collection of folks who 
want to sell me stuff look at my attention and desires and wants.  
"Surely," each one says, "one more commercial/pop-up/print 
ad/email/billboard/etc. won't hurt anything.  And who knows?  Maybe this 
is the one that will sell something."  But the result is a whole world 
of customers who find each marginal ad to be an intrusion that they do 
their very best to program their brains to ignore.  (In that sense it's 
an arms race. Advertisers do stuff.  Customers learn to ignore that 
stuff, at a small but non-zero cost in terms of brain cycles.  
Advertisers do other stuff to avoid the "ignore [x]" algorithms that 
customers have trained their brains to execute.  Etc.)

In economic terms this suggests that there will be diminishing marginal 
returns to any given entity's "ads" (writ large across media).  This 
would lead to two paths:

(1) Large (but, if my "tragedy of the attention commons" view is 
correct, increasingly short-lived) returns to something reasonably new 
and interesting.  This might be the discovery of social media (e.g., 
Groupon, Living Social, Facebook) or even the impact of a wonderfully 
produced, clever, compelling Super Bowl ad; and/or

(2) An increasingly desperate effort to lower the cost of ads so that 
the decreasing marginal return to them is still sufficient to cover the 
lower cost.  Hence the glory of ads on the Internet. Cost/ad is tiny 
compared to print, TV, radio, direct mail, etc.

But neither addresses the basic, underlying problem of saturating 
people's attention and mind-share with stuff that people are actively 
training themselves to ignore.  The logic of advertising in today's 
world, therefore, is essentially parallel to the second law of 
thermodynamics.  Ads are entropy.  Or, in information theory terms, ads 
are noise -- even if any single ad could be construed in some contexts 
as signal.  That is, from the perspective of customers, at any given 
time, the vast majority of ads are noise, and, therefore, as ads 
increase, whether in number (see #2 above) or in compelling-ness (see #1 
above -- since the compelling-ness of an ad does not correlate, 
particularly, to its usefulness to me in terms of identifying stuff I 
want to buy), the signal-to-noise ratio that people encounter as they go 
out hunting and gathering for useful data goes way, way down.

Does any of the above make any sense?

Chris S.



On 2/17/2013 8:14 AM, sylvain willart wrote:
> Chris,
>
> Here are a few resources and comments
>
> > 1.    It seems to me that when we talk about "advertising" and/or
> > "marketing" there are several different things going on at once, with
> > differing levels of intrusiveness, annoyance, and usefulness.
> yes, of course. From a scholar viewpoint, "advertising" is a part of
> "communication", which is a part of "marketing". The intrusiveness /
> annoyannce / usefulness deals with two different things:
>   - the content of the message
>   - the media
>
> > 2.    On the one hand there is purely informational advertising.  I'm going
> > to go buy new DVD player later today.  There's a brand I've heard is pretty
> > good.  Right now I would affirmatively welcome information about which
> > vendors within a 10-20 mile radius have which brands and models in stock, at
> > which prices.
> This point is about content and media together. You heard from a brand
> because the company made some king of "product communication", or
> perhaps "corporate communication" (the later talks about the
> performances of the company and the brand without mentioning a
> specific prodcut, like "Bose, dedicated to innovation")
>
> If you would like to have vendors information, this looks like more
> direct-marketing: the message is not dedicated to an 'audience', but
> rather a specific person, you. And the message is thus tailored to
> your situation (geographic situation in taht case, but could be
> specific to your purchase history)
>
> > 3.    On the other hand, there is stuff designed to stimulate desire for
> > some product.  Some of it is blatant and some of it is subtle.  But on the
> > whole I don't want my desires to be stimulated by some third party seeking
> > my money as a result.  That may be the world's oldest economic activity, but
> > it still leaves you feeling, you know, kinda cheapened.
> stimulate desire for some products is the very one goal of marketing.
> Companies are more or less successfull in that matter, and, yes, some
> are more subtle than others...
> I don't think you can really escape advertising and marketing. But if
> it lets you feel cheapened, this means you are at least aware of it,
> and among the smarter. One of the things I find most unfair is that
> less rich and less educated people are the most sensitive to
> advertising.
>
> >      a.    But of course it's not quite that simple.  In matters of fashion,
> > for example, there is a very fine line between "needing information" --
> > which in that case, is needing information about what is fashionable and
> > cool -- versus having one's desires stimulated.  (I'm thinking of something
> > like Vogue, which someone else mentioned recently, where the ads
> > simultaneously reveal and shape perceptions of what's cool, and what,
> > therefore, people will actually want to buy).
> Fashion is an all different matter. It mixes sociology of groups
> (there is a very good writer on this topic, but it is in french, he
> wrote a book called "sociologie des tendances" - "sociology of
> trends/fashions"), and a variant of Veblen effect (economic
> explanation of the demand for luxury products)
>
> > 4.    Then there's the whole issue of intrusiveness of presentation.  In
> > every medium there is something that, to me, marks the line of "OK" versus,
> > "This is just too f**king much!  Stop!"  In magazines, e.g., its the use of
> > multiple "blow-out" cards.  I mean, really?  You're going to make me pick up
> > the damn card after it falls on the ground and put it somewhere before I
> > throw it away?  Online, it's pop-ups, pop-unders, and that abomination where
> > you get to the site (the NY Times is horrible about this) and there's some
> > add along the top that expands to take over half your screen (and distorts
> > the location of the text) before it disappears again.
> this latter deals with the medium. Historically, media planning is the
> first topic in marketing where sholars and practitioners developped a
> quantitative modelling approach (back in the 50's media firms hired
> engineers to do the maths). for long, the only way to deal with media
> planning was the "reach", the "target audience", the "cost for
> thousand"...
> Those metrics are very well explained in Sissors book:
> http://www.amazon.com/Advertising-Media-Planning-Seventh-Roger/dp/0071703128
> and if you feel like digging into the maths:
> Advanced Media Planning , Rossiter & Danaher, Springer ed
>
> More recently (80's), and with the development of "direct-marketing"
> (sending a message to one specific person with specific medium like
> mail, phone, and then e-mail, websites), some scholars began to raise
> the issue of intrusiveness. A good book on that topic could be
> "Permission Marketing" (Godin, 2000), and "Why CRM doesn't work"
> (Newell, 2003).
>
> Last year, a paper appeared in "Journal of Marketing" (the best
> reknowned journal among the world of marketing scholars), it is
> entitled "Enough Is Enough! The Fine Line in Executing Multichannel
> Relational Communication" (Godrey, 2011), and deals with the
> surrabondance of messages and repetition through different media.
> There are some econometric analysis, but the discussion is easy to
> follow. Link to the full paper:
> http://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&ved=0CEgQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgvoss.cox.smu.edu%2FRelationalCommunication.pdf&ei=Cc0gUYfiA8-4hAf-1YDgAQ&usg=AFQjCNHSeTSoKt7XTLy1pzt-5hbZLfdeJQ&bvm=bv.42553238,d.ZG4
>
> >   My reaction is akin
> > to that I have to a particularly aggressive and smarmy salesperson in a
> > clothing or whatever store.  I walk in to look around a bit, and they are
> > totally in my face with, "Can I help you with anything?  Can I show you
> > what's on sale?"  As if I am incapable of exercising my own agency and
> > asking them to tell me about something if I'm interested, or where to find
> > it if I don't see it.
> >
> > 5.    Weirdly, from this perspective, I like reasonably subtle product
> > placement (mocked, e.g., in The Truman Show).  I'd rather see that all the
> > cool folks in some spy movie use Macs and all the bad guys use Dell, or that
> > all the cool guys drive Fords, or whatever, than have someone run up to me
> > in some store and pester me about what kind of computer or car I want.
> Product placement in movie, even if it is a long-lasting practice, is
> very new to the analysis of media planning. It is actually quite hard
> to compute the effect of product placement (because of the release on
> DVD, then on TV...). There is a team of scholars in Tilburg (NL)
> working on that topic from an econometric perspective.
>
>
> > A bit of a ramble.  Sorry for that.  But my question, again: has anyone done
> > any notable (or at least readable) research about these different dimensions
> > of the advertising/marketing phenomenon?
> A lot of research is being done on those things (I conducted one
> myself for companies who start to gain interest on those aspects of
> communication/advertising)
> Usually, intrusiveness is showed in papers with qualitative
> methodologies (interviews, focus group...)...
> Many such papers appear in "Journal of Advertising Research" for
> example, but also in more general marketing journals (with primary
> focus not necessarily on advertising)
>
> > Thanks,
> I just re-read this message before posting, and I am not sure if my
> answer is complete, but the subject is very large, and fast-evolving
> right now...
>
> > Chris S.
> Sylvain
> (PhD in marketing...)