Advertising Has too Much Swag

I really like the crypto alternatives to advertising. While Medium has more or less banned crypto publications from its ecosystem, you have to wonder at the authenticity of its transition from Ads to a monetarily incentivized paywall.

Here’s the thing, the Western internet is more or less ruled by the referral traffic of mobile advertising of Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Amazon, etc…

Meanwhile, according to Forrester, automation will reshape the agency workforce and the creative process where 2020 is expected to be a rough year in how consumers trust Ads even less than they did in 2019.

This is also because of how Facebook hacks democracy through political Ads that aren’t liable to fact-checking, integrity checks and adequate moderation. Meanwhile, Facebook is being probed by the FTC and others for its monopoly status.

People don’t just hate ads, it creates an internet that puts profits ahead of people and corporate social responsibility that leverages artificial intelligence and algorithms in a way that hurts society more than it helps. Google, for example, would not be able to pay for its “DeepMind” other-bets projects without the incredible ad-revenue it gains each quarter.

AI is thus being weaponized on the back of Ad-revenue and that’s a model of Silicon Valley that is profoundly screwed up.

Some people think people don’t mind advertising, they mind how we deliver it. Thus the outcry championed by Elizabeth Warren against Facebook political Ads that disrespects our intelligence with Ads that fall into hate speech and misinformation.

Consumers are tracked for their data in new invasive ways and ad-blockers, banner blindness, and Ad-irrelevance proliferate our increasingly digitally native population. Gen Z for example, spend substantially more time on mobile, binge watch streaming shows more to the point that Netflix is even considering a faster speed for consumption.

The demise of Facebook as a trusted community for users, hasn’t stopped it from getting into the news with 200 publications seeking to jump through its hoops (yet again!) for more traffic in a News Tab.

Clearly, something is profoundly broken with the Western internet’s Ad-structure of platforms being algorithmic aggregators for traffic. It’s all related to the dominance of digital advertising in calling the shots in terms of the big tech companies that were able to create monopoly platforms for users including Google, Facebook, Apple and now Amazon. Amazon is aggressively pivoting into advertising as well.

An advertising-based internet is a centralized internet. When Medium championed its own publications on its front page (to the detriment of indie creators) and culled crypto and blockchain publications, it basically went the way of advertising platform ethics. Silicon Valley group-think and consensus rules the day.

For years consumers and people have sought more control over their data and how they interact with brands. The algo-first internet has failed us not simply in terms of privacy, but internet freedom.

People want information about brands and products, but more and more, they want it on their own terms. This is why Ad-blocking and banner blindness is so common among GenZ, they are in some respects ad-immune and this has serious ramifications for the agencies and advertising industry moving into the 2020s.

From a broken algorithmic PR to the failure of content marketing to remain thought leadership directed, I think I can speak for a huge chunk of the global population when I say what we don’t want is the constant interruption of advertising. So here’s the catch, it’s everywhere and it never stops. Companies that spend their time looking at how to captivate, instead of capturing their audience, will be the companies that people want to hear from.

That sounds a lot like real marketing, instead of the easy-route of brunt-force spend on mobile Ads. But how can real marketing occur on an internet where Google (search), Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Amazon, and LinkedIn algorithms predetermine and centralizes the majority of referral traffic? When the channels obscure the message, how information is shared by brands is being corrupted. This is the point where we are with the Advertising industry in 2019.

Tiffany Hsu in her New York Times pieces makes many familiar arguments in the history of advertising. Yet she doesn’t go far enough to suggest that the platforms need to be broken up for the internet to be reformed, advertising needs to be better regulated.

People don’t just hate advertising, the influence of advertising is hurting how technology is impacting people. Advertising isn’t just a legacy idea of how to reach consumers, it’s dangerous warping how the internet is evolving.

In that light, I guess we have to give Twitter some props for banning political ads recently when Facebook wouldn’t. 

Nobody likes ads, even when they are contextually relevant, smart, infrequent and don’t take away from what we chose to watch. Nobody on Twitch or YouTube actually wants any part of them.