Relentless Pressure and Moral Mirroring - Advertising '23

For the longest time advertising was in the business of Persuasion.

“If you’re in the market for a new washing machine, you could do no better than making ours your choice. It has the new, revolutionary Stainaway (tm) rotary arm, and a double sized, stainless steel tub.”

They were innocent days, dominated by the RTB and fuelled by the fact that post war demand was actually outstripping supply across all kinds of categories. People were looking to buy - their first washing machine, their first freezer, their first vacuum cleaner - categories were growing fast and the job of advertising was to get people shopping the category to buy you. VW Lemon was a brilliant example, washes whiter was a more often used technique.

But advertising existed to sell you on the idea of a particular product, at the time you were looking to buy.

Of course boom doesn’t last forever and manufacture doesn’t stand still, and so by the late 70s and into the early 80s supply started to outstrip demand and the job of advertising started to change. ?

The boys were no longer in the yard. Our milkshake now had to lure them in. We abandoned the "of you're looking to buy, why not consider us?" era of persuasion and embraced the dark art of seduction - we moved into the business of making people want to buy.?

We moved from the Age of Persuasion to the Age of Desire.

Aspiration became the big thing, brands started to badge certain lifestyles, consumption become not only conspicuous but defining, you are what you wear after all. It’s an era that gave us Levis & Nike and ideas like “good moms let their kids get dirty.”

And yes it got ridiculous, sometimes knowingly (Flake) sometimes indulgently (Dunlop) - often endearingly (Papa, Nicole, Gold Blend and Boursin).

There was a good life out there, and it was for sale. All you needed was decent credit. They were heady days.

Until things changed again. And this time the change came from technology.

Digital marketing made the promise of being able to hit the right person, with the right message, at the right time, repeatedly, until they gave in and bought. And even better than that it could track how well it was doing in real time, and adjust to optimise all elements of a campaign to improve results on the fly.

We waved goodbye to Persuasion and Desire and said hello to the age of Relentless Pressure.

Crude algorithms served ads for holidays we’d already booked on site after site after site, rotating in something that felt age appropriate along the way “Hey baldy, wanna wig for that trip to Venice?”

Crude offers told us to click now, to click for this one time offer, to click to see what we had won, to click the X, to click. To Just. Fucking. Click.

YouTube made ads unskippable, then made them shorter, then added a countdown so we could get our mouse in position to close the fucking thing at the earliest possible convenience.

Charitably we increased “Mental Availability” - in reality we persuaded people to give us their data then used it against them, hounding them with endless messages from machines set to “sell”

And that’s still happening. Of course it is. But the result of all of this soulless stalking has been people retreating from the product in record numbers. As we skip and block and subscribe our way out of advertising’s way wherever we can, the addressable audience shrinks.

And so we moved on to the age of Moral Mirroring.

It’s not enough that a brand washes whiter, it now purports to have an opinion on white privilege (despite doing fuck all about it) - your soap is anti-fat shaming, your mayo is anti-waste, your beer hates plastic and your washing up liquid is in tears over micro-plastics.

Brands are taking empty stands on moral issues, in the hope of reconnecting with the people they lost through relentless, empty stalking with “buy now” messaging.

And the problem is just how empty those stands are. They’ll stand with the trans community until it costs them a sale, co-opt black lives matter until threatened with a boycott, shout about the need for a woman’s autonomy over her own body until it loses SKUs at at Piggy Wiggly.

I’m being relentlessly stalked, pushed to buy, reminded of each limited time offer - while also being sold whatever moral issue the algorithm has said most represents the most profitable target segment.

And frankly I’m fucking done with it.

I want to know that my butter is fresh and natural and that it originated closer to a farm than a factory.

I don’t mind if you tell me that it’s the butter that hot people use as lube at consensual non-monogamy conferences.

I don’t want to be reminded that I bought butter in the past, that it’s a while since I bought butter, that if I buy now I can get a discount on more butter, or a one off half price butter knife. And I certainly don’t want to know that you’re purporting to be on a mission to cure mad cow disease with 0.025% of the sale of the butter I need to buy in the next 28 seconds.

Persuasion - Desire - Relentless Pressure - Moral Mirroring.

Marketing has become more and more cynical.

We’ve moved from selling product advantages and benefits to pushing the mirage of care.

And nobody is buying.

So what comes next?