I was wrong about ad reform

The Nudgestock conference sponsored my trip to the beautiful town of Folkestone, England—to be wrong about ad reform.

What I did was point out the ad medium/brand mismatch. I did say that personalized advertising is optimized for the needs of deceptive sellers, and doesn’t carry the signal that legitimate brands need. Right so far.

But here’s where I messed up. As an Internet Optimist, I assumed that the highest-reputation brands would seek out advertising media better suited to costly signaling.

But that’s not what was happening, if I had been paying attention to other trends.

Brand decision-makers did take steps to deal with the problem that a higher-reputation brand doesn’t benefit from an advertising system optimized for lower-quality sellers—but did it the other way around, by cutting quality and/or service and burning brand reputation.

Remember John Moschitta Jr., the fast-talking manager from the FexEx commercial? “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

You can’t do that kind of cultural imprinting advertising in a personalized medium. So I figured that FedEx would keep bugging their agency and the rest of the ad system to give them an ad medium that could. Because sending something FedEx was different from sending it some other way. Anyone else remember the feeling of dropping a package off at FedEx on time and then just not worrying about it? They would have needed an ad medium that gets that across. (A good brand is like a miniature version of Pascal’s Wager: you spend extra money in order to avoid catching hell for not choosing it.)

But I was wrong. What happened instead is that now sending a package FedEx is more like “when it maybe, kinda, has to be there whenevs.” The brand changed to fit the available advertising, not the other way around.

Go back to other brands that did some memorable advertising, say Levi’s 501s, and the story is similar. A vintage pair, if you can find them, will outlast the new ones. Why did Levi’s change material used for 501 jeans? Can I buy old ones new anywhere?

Anyway, where I went wrong is that instead of the clients making the ad business clean up, scam culture spread out to normal businesses too. It’s a rugpull economy out there.

Bonus links

Turning an Old Phone’s Motherboard into an RC Plane Controller by Maya Posch. The smartphone was bought used for $23, with the default Xiaomi ROM overwritten by LineageOS to get a more lightweight and up to date Android installation on it.

Even more ads are coming to Google search, Google says by Matt Binder. (You still have to block these, at least according to the FBI. Winners don’t click search ads)

We Must Kill Windows For A Just Future by Chris Person. They will extract rent from you and your employer at every plausible juncture and give you garbage in exchange. You must accept in your heart that Windows is a lost cause.

No one paid me to disagree with Jonathan Haidt. It was teenagers who taught me that he was wrong. by danah boyd. And when it comes to internet-enabled predation, the biggest risk is not teenagers using the latest social media site. The biggest risk is single moms using online dating apps. Pedophiles seek out these women to get access to their children. It’s sick. But no one wants to hear that. They want to focus on the digital tools young people use….Truth be told, I’d have no problem if certain social media platforms would be banned for everyone. I think that many of the products in this space have devolved into garbage.