10 ms·

The death of Don Draper?

122 points by okket 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
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gboudrias 8y ago
Cry me a goddamned river. The evils of GoogleFaceTube are nothing but the logical conclusion of advertising. This is like someone being sad at a faster car than theirs being invented, only both cars annoy the shit out of everyone.
beerlord 8y ago
Its interesting that if you watch Mad Men, this was actually discussed in a show set even in the 70s - that precise targeting and media would outpace any creative work.
tramGG 8y ago
"The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. `What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.`" Advertising has changed. It's no longer on a billboard in your face, but now a virus and fabric of influence in your mind that permeates and multiplies subtly through every medium you consume. Each piece of information collectively assembles inside your brain to fashion and form an opinion. The new science of advertising is figuring out how to put these pieces of the puzzle together so that you organically assemble an opinion on matters favorable to product sellers.
- chairmanwow 8y ago
  You actually make a really interesting point here. Advertising has permeated nearly every segment of media consumption. An interesting example is articles like this, and “reviews” of products that are actually paid adverts where the “reviewers” get kickbacks for every referral that leads to a sale. [1] [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3065928/sle...
  - distances 8y ago
    On the other hand, it's now easier than ever to avoid all marketing in media. In the analog world you couldn't install an adblocker to your newspaper, or purchase a tv subscription without ads, or choose a radio station without ads in between. Now it's all available, and at least my world is almost completely advertisement-free -- except for those paid reviews you mentioned.
    - handsomechad 8y ago
      what about product placement, PR in print media, "native" or content ads. to say nothing of social media "influencers"
      - distances 8y ago
        I wouldn't follow an influencer, though I'm not very representative obviously. I'm quite OK with product placement. Content ads require that they are marked as advertisements, and can then be blocked.
    - pixl97 8y ago
      Heh, I think you're fooling yourself when you say 'all' marketing. The ads now are gamed customer reviews and paid comments.
  - acheron 8y ago
    Another example is when discussion forum “comments” have a link to an article, but actually the “commenter” links to an advertising company’s rehosting of the article.
- dkraft 8y ago
  THIS ONE THOUSAND TIMES OVER. I despise AT&T coming onto my property to tell me how great it is. If it was so great, I'd be praying for it (google fibre) and ZERO advertising would be required. Spend that money on great products, Build a better mousetrap.
eksemplar 8y ago
Is it me or does this article contradict itself throughout the piece? It tries so hard to sell it’s headline, but every point and interview it does paints a completely different picture. You want to sell a da Vinci? Well then you have to make private meetings with potential clients, and, you have to create ads that sell it as iconic. You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you have to sell the story of it being generally accepted as a high quality brand. You want to sell luxury? You have to sell timelessness and trust. Aren’t those things exactly what Don Draper would have done? In general the article skimps over how ads are actually made, and talks mainly in how they are delivered, but that has very little to do with the death of Don Draper. Because even if you’re not always shooting ads at everyone, you still have to tell stories that set you a part from everyone else. It’s only valid point in the subject seem to be that advertisers are no longer in the front of business magazines. Ironically, neither are car manufacturers, except for one, Musk. Who coincidentally put one of his cars in space in a very spectacular PR event that I personally doubt he decided upon because an algorithm told him it would be popular.
- devoply 8y ago
  I think the round about point is that since no one is tuning into the mass media which might build the collective mass culture (or that mass media is changing to target advertising that directly targets individual dreams and desires), that there is a problem in manufacturing mass culture... because culture has become balkanized. So basically you have a problem with individualism taken to its logical conclusion after the century of self, to a century of personalized amplified self which causes society to break down say in 50-100 years. It's an interesting idea, what are the things which bind us together culturally when we really don't have culture, we have commercial culture... we have cambell's soup ads.
- andromedaworld 8y ago
  > it’s headline its headline
- xfs 8y ago
  The article talks about mass advertising. The true story here is the advent of surveillance capitalism in which data-driven behavioral manipulation is the new means of production. You can see a curious parallel in the death of psychoanalysis and the rise of evidence-based psychology and CBT but somehow depression is still not getting better. I don't believe Man is as simple as something to be fully captured by psychographic profiling. Articles like this are precisely the symptoms of the evergrowing decline in symbolic efficiency of the surveillance capitalism regime.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ralston 8y ago
While I agree with the general/intended sentiment of "Advertising is has changed from a bunch of slick white guys in suits, to tech", it might be worth pointing out that Don Draper doesn't _exactly_ have anything to do with what the author is discussing. The author implies that ad tech is ruining _traditional_ advertising, which is true on the Sales side, but have you seen some of the high PPC/CPM ads on some Youtube videos? They still _heavily_ rely on great creative. And let's not forget that Don Draper was the Creative Director - not head of Sales (which would've been Pete I believe).
roman_savchuk 8y ago
>The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla Nope, It’s nowhere near that. The fact that tech media writes a lot about a car manufacturer doesn’t make it the most popular manufacturer in the world and brief google trends research shows that.
- trh88 8y ago
  Where did they say it makes Tesla the "most popular manufacturer in the world"? They didn't.
- rcar1046 8y ago
  Tesla even managed to stand out in this very article when it is only briefly mentioned with multiple comments alluding to this brief mention. I'd say it's quite safely the car industry leader in buzz, if nothing else.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    In this bubble. I think a lot of people here would probably be surprised how many automobile purchasers have never even heard of Tesla--or at least are only vaguely aware it's "that electric car company."
nextweek2 8y ago
Igor Beuker's speach at the Qt World Summit 2017 followed a similar premise. Traditional advertising has gone the way of the Dodo and the Math Men have taken over. https://youtu.be/y6gAUZW4DGE?t=4m23s https://youtu.be/y6gAUZW4DGE?t=4m23s
Animats 8y ago
Note that he talks about a fake ad exec, not the most famous real one of that era, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy worked for the Gallup Poll before he went into advertising. He was into data-driven advertising. "Advertisers who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore the signs of the enemy." The author is attacking a straw man. Ogilvy is still relevant. The author of the article here, not so much.
- tim333 8y ago
  Just last week I was at an unusually good talk by an Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland mentioned in the article. >Rory co-heads a team of psychology graduates who look for "butterfly effects" in consumer behaviour - these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make The talk's on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiB5H18aug&t=1187s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiB5H18aug&t=1187s Recommended if you are in to that stuff.
  - trh88 8y ago
    This was such a great watch, thanks for sharing!
  - pixelmonkey 8y ago
    Also thought this podcast with Rory Sutherland by Farnam Street / The Knowledge Project was particularly good, especially in what the actual value of brand is: https://fs.blog/rory-sutherland/ https://fs.blog/rory-sutherland/
    - tim333 8y ago
      Yeah it was good - similar stuff but more of it. I thought the bit on economics was interesting - that motivating people by paying or fining them is limiting because there's a lot of other factors you can look at if you are creative. (48m)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
cylinder 8y ago
Good news for Germans.
- distances 8y ago
  Please explain a bit what you mean?
tim333 8y ago
>In 2016, Facebook in effect charged the Trump campaign lower rates than the Clinton campaign, because Trump’s ads made people angrier and thus generated more clicks. Nobody took a decision to charge Trump less. It was the logical outcome of the ad business’s core principle: the more attention you win, the more you get paid. Since negative emotions are more likely to win and hold attention than positive emotions, the system has an incentive to spread fear and loathing. Russia’s entire propaganda campaign relies on an advertising model that rewards paranoia and spite. That stuff seems to be quite a problem these days. I was just looking last night at how the Brexit vote was probably swung by a bunch of immigrant fear mongering on facebook in the 2 weeks before the referendum - graph of the polls https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIQI7gXgAAAmbd?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIQI7gXgAAAmbd?format=jpg and one of the ads https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIM5XLU8AAuB7o?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIM5XLU8AAuB7o?format=jpg The details are only gradually coming out - facebook released the ads a couple of days ago and Dominic Cummings the campaign manager has refused a summons from parliament to come explain what happened. I guess we have to wise up to it a bit and maybe change the algorithms to be less hate promoting.
- mcguire 8y ago
  Then there is this: "[In a recent article for the New York Times, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci] found the same pattern on non-political topics: videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism; videos about jogging led to videos about ultra-marathons. The stakes were always being upped. YouTube, she concluded, was a “radicalising instrument”. That isn’t, she says, because YouTube’s engineers are zealots. It’s because Google (YouTube’s owner) is selling attention to advertisers, and its algorithms have learnt that the best way to keep people hooked is to push ever more extreme material on them." It's pessimistic, since by design it can only get worse.
  - tim333 8y ago
    I think it would take some active design changes to improve that but it could be done.
    - 8y ago
bko 8y ago
> Advertising, once a creative industry, is now a data-driven business reliant on algorithms. The implications are deeply sinister – not only for the consumer but for democracy itself. When everything is labeled a "threat to democracy", nobody takes that actual threats to democracy seriously. > These days, consumers are less likely to have favourite brands, since “their favourite brand is going to be whatever Google tells them at that moment is going to match their exact needs”. The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.” Really? I would use Tesla as an extreme example of effective marketing and cult of personality around Elon Musk. Elon Musk is Cindy Crawford. > “When’s the last time you saw an ad agency executive on the cover of Business Week?" Not sure Business Week is really a barometer of what's going on today, but that's fair. However you do regularly see the leaders of these companies, who are the face and effectively the advertising. Not sure if there is a person or team behind their image. > Clients are spending less on the kind of entertaining, seductive, fame-generating campaigns in which ad agencies specialise, and more on the ads that flash and wink on your smartphone screen. Really? I think sponsored content that's actually entertaining is a lot more common now. > Clients only have to decide how many people they want to reach, and how much they want to spend; algorithms do the rest. Wasn't this automated before and the automation was just done by the ad agencies? Why bother hiring ad agencies in the first place > The advertiser might create multiple ads and serve different executions to different slices of its audience. Some companies, such as Cambridge Analytica, claim to be able to target personality types using this method. The more valuable your particular profile is to the advertiser, the higher price its algorithm will pay the publisher to get an ad in front of your eyes. In this way, every scintilla of attention is transformed into money. In the past advertisers often had multiple ads that played in multiple mediums, targeting multiple audiences. And yes, more value mediums (e.g. target market with a more affluent readership) does cost more. Why wouldn't it? This whole article is just a list of complaints and contradictory observations without a central theme or any coherent structure. Marketing doesn't work but is extremely common. Its rampant with fraud but is incredibly convincing. It's a huge turn-off with consumers tuning out but it's dominating our lives
nav 8y ago
You guys should check out - lazyeight.design , we're essentially trying to build the world's first creative agency on the cloud and using a ton of data for project estimates and to calculate our monthly hourly pricing (which changes monthly).
wpdev_63 8y ago
It's scary how targeted google ads are now a days. I was talking about buying a bed to my mother and noticed ads for mattresses started popping up in my ad sidebars. I miss being anonymous.
- braythwayt 8y ago
  “What’s an ad sidebar?” Ok, tongue-in-cheek remark. I left Facebook, block ads aggressively, use DuckDuckGo, and live in the weak sauce privacy of the Apple ecosystem. Since I block ads, I also block a bunch of trackers. But given that I can’t see most ads, I have no idea whether people are trying to sell me mattresses after I discuss beds. For all I know, I don’t live in a house with the shades drawn, maybe I live in a house with one-way shades such that the advertisers can watch me, but I can’t see anything they’re trying to show me. —— If the above is the case, I will still be vulnerable to micro-targeted astroturf stuff. Like bots posing as Members of whatever social media I participate in, dropping brand names in their conversations. Is everyone on Swedespeed really a Volvo enthusiast? If one of them posts a picture of a Trek mountian bike on their roof rack, how do I know this is “organic,” and not an ad campaign? For how long will the above be a pleasant chuckle about a dystopian possible future, and not everyone’s daily “reality?” This is already happening with political discourse, it must be inevitable for commerce.
- Renaud 8y ago
  ublock in browsers, a PiHole at home, ad blockers on your phone, and duckduckgo as your search engine. I'm basically free from seeing online ads and from sharing too much of my life away.
jdo20bbx 8y ago
Modern day advertising owes a great deal to war time “public service” propaganda: https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/commercial-advertising-as-propaganda https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/commercial-advertis... They both invoke the notion that the individual can contribute in a meaningful way through subservient behavior towards goals that are left to be defined by others It’s capture of our nostalgia; securing the reality we feel comfortable with. It comforts us such that we eschew our own search for novel utilitarian answers, leading us to abide government and corporate solutions
kokey 8y ago
I misread the title as 'The death of John Draper?'. This left me rather confused for at least several paragraphs into the article.
inthewoods 8y ago
I disagree with a number of points in this article. "Now, we live in an age in which the intangible haze of soft-sell is no longer necessary, and the battle for market share comes down to the raw strength of your product. “The sun has passed midday on brand,” he says." I don't think this is remotely true - as an example, take a look at the insurance industry (GEICO, AFLAC, AllState, etc). These guys are spending on massively on brand advertising. Now, obviously, the LTV of these customers is huge so they can afford the high CAC that comes with brand advertising. This advertising is pure Don Draper imho. "The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.”" Yes they have a great product - and, at the moment, they have that differentiation and, most importantly, buzz. That will change as the market for electric cars matures - and then you'll see Tesla start to advertise. It doesn't make any sense for them to spend on advertising right now given that they are in the press literally every day (right now for some stuff that isn't necessarily positive). Maturity of market matters. "Clients have even started to question the ad business’s claim to efficiency. The model I described above is a simplified version of a dizzyingly complex system whose details few can fathom, involving multiple companies taking multiple fees. Unsurprisingly, fraud is rampant." If this is true we'll likely see a pullback in digital advertising - or at least a movement to direct buys only on specific websites (vs. network buys). My opinion: digital advertising is proving to be less and less efficacious, with costs going up and results going down. At the same time, we have less and less product differentiation. The result should be more spending on traditional brand advertising. Digital advertising is a channel - and spend to that channel will ebb and flow. In my small world of advertising (B2B SaaS), I've seen digital advertising becoming largely ineffective. Too many companies marketing similar products and services. I would argue, in this world, brand advertising therefore becomes more important. That is, developing a brand is as or more important than product because all the products (in the eyes of prospects) are largely the same. Note that I am not saying product doesn't matter, or that a product cannot differentiate in a specific market (e.g. Slack), but that companies need a distribution advantage to succeed over every other company - and that either comes from the product or brand (e.g. Drift). Now, having said all this, do I think the Ad Tech industry is a mess and that a major shakeout is needed? Yes. Do I think that digital advertising is largely too consolidated with a handful of players (Google, Facebook and now Amazon) - yes. Advertising can be still be great and useful - but Ad Tech needs some help.
IAmGraydon 8y ago
Outright advertising in the old school sense is dead and has been for a long time. Marketing is not. I think this author is deeply confused. Now, more than ever, the perceived value of cheap products is being inflated by brand. Look how much people pay for a can of Red Bull, which offers less volume than a soda and less caffeine than a coffee. Look at how much people pay for Starbucks coffee and Hermès purses. It’s all smoke and mirrors. In many cases, you’re paying more for an inferior product because the brand gods took advantage of your cognitive bias. The example of Tesla is particularly ridiculous to me and shows how little understanding of marketing the author has. Tesla isn’t a no-marketing company that only relies on its good product. What about a Tesla is superior? Not the interior. Mercedes has them beat there. Not the technology - it’s been proven unreliable at best. Not the range - many gasoline cars have better range. Not the price - their current offerings are far higher than an average person can afford. It’s questionable whether they’re even better for the environment than other cars. In fact, Tesla is so good at marketing that they’ve bamboozled the author and he doesn’t even realize it. Elon Musk knows the way to manipulate perceptions, and he’s very, very good at it.
- conanbatt 8y ago
  I think you make a big mistake in using the word 'inflated'. The joy of doing something is configured in our brains, and we enjoy that. Science has shown that we like and are willing to pay more for things merely on the brand. Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!
  - Snackchez 8y ago
    You might have slightly misconstrued the parent comment. To rework your idea: there's a spectrum for the quality of kisses. Some people figured out a way to convince you that their kisses are better than they actually are. Others are likely better, but they don't know how to market themselves, and thus don't get kissed as much.
    - braythwayt 8y ago
      The trouble is that a product delivers a complex set of values upon its user, and all-too-often, when someone sneers that it doesn’t have any value, that it’s “just marketing” conning its users, they are willfully ignoring the values that it confers. I have spent literally my entire adult life listening to people say that Apple products were inferior to PCs, going right back to the days when they’d explain that bit-mapped graphics were useless decoration, and that keyboard shortcuts were superior to mouse interactions, and so forth. It’s clearly true that for some users, in some use cases, a certain product does deliver less value than for others. But ignoring the fact that other people see the product’s values in other ways is a monumentally arrogant and unempathetic way to view humanity. Most people don’t buy caffiene by the milligram or whatever. The label on the bottle appeals to a desire to fit in with other people buying the same label, or to aspire to belonging to that tribe, and so forth. It amuses me that this even needs to be explained on Hacker News: Most people who participate in the threads do so for complex social reasons that are not particularly different than the reasons that some people buy Starbucks, some people buy from an indie shop, and some people hit the Timmie’s drive-through. —- Going back to kisses, consider a blind kiss test. I might say that of three kisses, B was better than A which was better than C. But if you tell me that the kiss from C involved Lauren Bacall... I would rank it higher than the other two immediately! There is no fraud or nonsense going on, I value the complex bundle of values around a kiss from Lauren Bacall higher than two “no-name” kisses even if they are functionally more pleasant in the moment.
siliconc0w 8y ago
So there is 'discovery' which is knowing a solution exists to a solve a need I might have (that I might not even know about). Technology is reasonably good at this. Then there is 'selection' which is picking the 'best' product in a competitive landscape. Here I'm not convinced even Tech has this captured. If I am shopping for cars, for example, I might get a Tesla Ad (they do have a few AdWords) but the technology showing me that AD isn't optimizing for me, it's optimizing for a click-through or maybe a conversion which are different things. Maybe you look at me, my income, my driving needs and say hey - look, maybe you want to go with like a Kia Crossover over a Model S. A Model S would be fairly financially irresponsible given your income. The money saved with a crossover would equal $XX,XXX by the time little Bobby is ready for college. And what about those camping trips? You occasionally drive further than the expected range anyway. Right now if I want to compute the TOC of a Tesla vs a Kia given what I usually drive in a year minus the tax incentives or whatever I'd have to bust out excel and spend a few hours. This isn't sexy. This isn't what advertising used to be, but if they want to do the math for me I'd pay attention to that way more than that I do AdWords.

122 points by okket 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Cry me a goddamned river. The evils of GoogleFaceTube are nothing but the logical conclusion of advertising. This is like someone being sad at a faster car than theirs being invented, only both cars annoy the shit out of everyone.

beerlord 8y ago

Its interesting that if you watch Mad Men, this was actually discussed in a show set even in the 70s - that precise targeting and media would outpace any creative work.

tramGG 8y ago

"The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. `What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.`" Advertising has changed. It's no longer on a billboard in your face, but now a virus and fabric of influence in your mind that permeates and multiplies subtly through every medium you consume. Each piece of information collectively assembles inside your brain to fashion and form an opinion. The new science of advertising is figuring out how to put these pieces of the puzzle together so that you organically assemble an opinion on matters favorable to product sellers.

chairmanwow 8y ago
You actually make a really interesting point here. Advertising has permeated nearly every segment of media consumption. An interesting example is articles like this, and “reviews” of products that are actually paid adverts where the “reviewers” get kickbacks for every referral that leads to a sale. [1] [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-bloggers-lawsuits-underside-of-the-mattress-wars https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3065928/sle...
- distances 8y ago
  On the other hand, it's now easier than ever to avoid all marketing in media. In the analog world you couldn't install an adblocker to your newspaper, or purchase a tv subscription without ads, or choose a radio station without ads in between. Now it's all available, and at least my world is almost completely advertisement-free -- except for those paid reviews you mentioned.
  - handsomechad 8y ago
    what about product placement, PR in print media, "native" or content ads. to say nothing of social media "influencers"
    - distances 8y ago
      I wouldn't follow an influencer, though I'm not very representative obviously. I'm quite OK with product placement. Content ads require that they are marked as advertisements, and can then be blocked.
  - pixl97 8y ago
    Heh, I think you're fooling yourself when you say 'all' marketing. The ads now are gamed customer reviews and paid comments.
- acheron 8y ago
  Another example is when discussion forum “comments” have a link to an article, but actually the “commenter” links to an advertising company’s rehosting of the article.
dkraft 8y ago
THIS ONE THOUSAND TIMES OVER. I despise AT&T coming onto my property to tell me how great it is. If it was so great, I'd be praying for it (google fibre) and ZERO advertising would be required. Spend that money on great products, Build a better mousetrap.

eksemplar 8y ago

Is it me or does this article contradict itself throughout the piece? It tries so hard to sell it’s headline, but every point and interview it does paints a completely different picture. You want to sell a da Vinci? Well then you have to make private meetings with potential clients, and, you have to create ads that sell it as iconic. You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you have to sell the story of it being generally accepted as a high quality brand. You want to sell luxury? You have to sell timelessness and trust. Aren’t those things exactly what Don Draper would have done? In general the article skimps over how ads are actually made, and talks mainly in how they are delivered, but that has very little to do with the death of Don Draper. Because even if you’re not always shooting ads at everyone, you still have to tell stories that set you a part from everyone else. It’s only valid point in the subject seem to be that advertisers are no longer in the front of business magazines. Ironically, neither are car manufacturers, except for one, Musk. Who coincidentally put one of his cars in space in a very spectacular PR event that I personally doubt he decided upon because an algorithm told him it would be popular.

devoply 8y ago
I think the round about point is that since no one is tuning into the mass media which might build the collective mass culture (or that mass media is changing to target advertising that directly targets individual dreams and desires), that there is a problem in manufacturing mass culture... because culture has become balkanized. So basically you have a problem with individualism taken to its logical conclusion after the century of self, to a century of personalized amplified self which causes society to break down say in 50-100 years. It's an interesting idea, what are the things which bind us together culturally when we really don't have culture, we have commercial culture... we have cambell's soup ads.
andromedaworld 8y ago
> it’s headline its headline
xfs 8y ago
The article talks about mass advertising. The true story here is the advent of surveillance capitalism in which data-driven behavioral manipulation is the new means of production. You can see a curious parallel in the death of psychoanalysis and the rise of evidence-based psychology and CBT but somehow depression is still not getting better. I don't believe Man is as simple as something to be fully captured by psychographic profiling. Articles like this are precisely the symptoms of the evergrowing decline in symbolic efficiency of the surveillance capitalism regime.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ralston 8y ago

While I agree with the general/intended sentiment of "Advertising is has changed from a bunch of slick white guys in suits, to tech", it might be worth pointing out that Don Draper doesn't _exactly_ have anything to do with what the author is discussing. The author implies that ad tech is ruining _traditional_ advertising, which is true on the Sales side, but have you seen some of the high PPC/CPM ads on some Youtube videos? They still _heavily_ rely on great creative. And let's not forget that Don Draper was the Creative Director - not head of Sales (which would've been Pete I believe).

roman_savchuk 8y ago

>The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla Nope, It’s nowhere near that. The fact that tech media writes a lot about a car manufacturer doesn’t make it the most popular manufacturer in the world and brief google trends research shows that.

trh88 8y ago
Where did they say it makes Tesla the "most popular manufacturer in the world"? They didn't.
rcar1046 8y ago
Tesla even managed to stand out in this very article when it is only briefly mentioned with multiple comments alluding to this brief mention. I'd say it's quite safely the car industry leader in buzz, if nothing else.
- ghaff 8y ago
  In this bubble. I think a lot of people here would probably be surprised how many automobile purchasers have never even heard of Tesla--or at least are only vaguely aware it's "that electric car company."

nextweek2 8y ago

Igor Beuker's speach at the Qt World Summit 2017 followed a similar premise. Traditional advertising has gone the way of the Dodo and the Math Men have taken over. https://youtu.be/y6gAUZW4DGE?t=4m23s https://youtu.be/y6gAUZW4DGE?t=4m23s

Animats 8y ago

Note that he talks about a fake ad exec, not the most famous real one of that era, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy worked for the Gallup Poll before he went into advertising. He was into data-driven advertising. "Advertisers who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore the signs of the enemy." The author is attacking a straw man. Ogilvy is still relevant. The author of the article here, not so much.

tim333 8y ago
Just last week I was at an unusually good talk by an Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland mentioned in the article. >Rory co-heads a team of psychology graduates who look for "butterfly effects" in consumer behaviour - these are the very small contextual changes which can have enormous effects on the decisions people make The talk's on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiB5H18aug&t=1187s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWiB5H18aug&t=1187s Recommended if you are in to that stuff.
- trh88 8y ago
  This was such a great watch, thanks for sharing!
- pixelmonkey 8y ago
  Also thought this podcast with Rory Sutherland by Farnam Street / The Knowledge Project was particularly good, especially in what the actual value of brand is: https://fs.blog/rory-sutherland/ https://fs.blog/rory-sutherland/
  - tim333 8y ago
    Yeah it was good - similar stuff but more of it. I thought the bit on economics was interesting - that motivating people by paying or fining them is limiting because there's a lot of other factors you can look at if you are creative. (48m)
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

cylinder 8y ago

Good news for Germans.

distances 8y ago
Please explain a bit what you mean?

tim333 8y ago

>In 2016, Facebook in effect charged the Trump campaign lower rates than the Clinton campaign, because Trump’s ads made people angrier and thus generated more clicks. Nobody took a decision to charge Trump less. It was the logical outcome of the ad business’s core principle: the more attention you win, the more you get paid. Since negative emotions are more likely to win and hold attention than positive emotions, the system has an incentive to spread fear and loathing. Russia’s entire propaganda campaign relies on an advertising model that rewards paranoia and spite. That stuff seems to be quite a problem these days. I was just looking last night at how the Brexit vote was probably swung by a bunch of immigrant fear mongering on facebook in the 2 weeks before the referendum - graph of the polls https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIQI7gXgAAAmbd?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIQI7gXgAAAmbd?format=jpg and one of the ads https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIM5XLU8AAuB7o?format=jpg https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DjIM5XLU8AAuB7o?format=jpg The details are only gradually coming out - facebook released the ads a couple of days ago and Dominic Cummings the campaign manager has refused a summons from parliament to come explain what happened. I guess we have to wise up to it a bit and maybe change the algorithms to be less hate promoting.

mcguire 8y ago
Then there is this: "[In a recent article for the New York Times, the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci] found the same pattern on non-political topics: videos about vegetarianism led to videos about veganism; videos about jogging led to videos about ultra-marathons. The stakes were always being upped. YouTube, she concluded, was a “radicalising instrument”. That isn’t, she says, because YouTube’s engineers are zealots. It’s because Google (YouTube’s owner) is selling attention to advertisers, and its algorithms have learnt that the best way to keep people hooked is to push ever more extreme material on them." It's pessimistic, since by design it can only get worse.
- tim333 8y ago
  I think it would take some active design changes to improve that but it could be done.
  - 8y ago

bko 8y ago

> Advertising, once a creative industry, is now a data-driven business reliant on algorithms. The implications are deeply sinister – not only for the consumer but for democracy itself. When everything is labeled a "threat to democracy", nobody takes that actual threats to democracy seriously. > These days, consumers are less likely to have favourite brands, since “their favourite brand is going to be whatever Google tells them at that moment is going to match their exact needs”. The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.” Really? I would use Tesla as an extreme example of effective marketing and cult of personality around Elon Musk. Elon Musk is Cindy Crawford. > “When’s the last time you saw an ad agency executive on the cover of Business Week?" Not sure Business Week is really a barometer of what's going on today, but that's fair. However you do regularly see the leaders of these companies, who are the face and effectively the advertising. Not sure if there is a person or team behind their image. > Clients are spending less on the kind of entertaining, seductive, fame-generating campaigns in which ad agencies specialise, and more on the ads that flash and wink on your smartphone screen. Really? I think sponsored content that's actually entertaining is a lot more common now. > Clients only have to decide how many people they want to reach, and how much they want to spend; algorithms do the rest. Wasn't this automated before and the automation was just done by the ad agencies? Why bother hiring ad agencies in the first place > The advertiser might create multiple ads and serve different executions to different slices of its audience. Some companies, such as Cambridge Analytica, claim to be able to target personality types using this method. The more valuable your particular profile is to the advertiser, the higher price its algorithm will pay the publisher to get an ad in front of your eyes. In this way, every scintilla of attention is transformed into money. In the past advertisers often had multiple ads that played in multiple mediums, targeting multiple audiences. And yes, more value mediums (e.g. target market with a more affluent readership) does cost more. Why wouldn't it? This whole article is just a list of complaints and contradictory observations without a central theme or any coherent structure. Marketing doesn't work but is extremely common. Its rampant with fraud but is incredibly convincing. It's a huge turn-off with consumers tuning out but it's dominating our lives

nav 8y ago

You guys should check out - lazyeight.design , we're essentially trying to build the world's first creative agency on the cloud and using a ton of data for project estimates and to calculate our monthly hourly pricing (which changes monthly).

wpdev_63 8y ago

It's scary how targeted google ads are now a days. I was talking about buying a bed to my mother and noticed ads for mattresses started popping up in my ad sidebars. I miss being anonymous.

braythwayt 8y ago
“What’s an ad sidebar?” Ok, tongue-in-cheek remark. I left Facebook, block ads aggressively, use DuckDuckGo, and live in the weak sauce privacy of the Apple ecosystem. Since I block ads, I also block a bunch of trackers. But given that I can’t see most ads, I have no idea whether people are trying to sell me mattresses after I discuss beds. For all I know, I don’t live in a house with the shades drawn, maybe I live in a house with one-way shades such that the advertisers can watch me, but I can’t see anything they’re trying to show me. —— If the above is the case, I will still be vulnerable to micro-targeted astroturf stuff. Like bots posing as Members of whatever social media I participate in, dropping brand names in their conversations. Is everyone on Swedespeed really a Volvo enthusiast? If one of them posts a picture of a Trek mountian bike on their roof rack, how do I know this is “organic,” and not an ad campaign? For how long will the above be a pleasant chuckle about a dystopian possible future, and not everyone’s daily “reality?” This is already happening with political discourse, it must be inevitable for commerce.
Renaud 8y ago
ublock in browsers, a PiHole at home, ad blockers on your phone, and duckduckgo as your search engine. I'm basically free from seeing online ads and from sharing too much of my life away.

jdo20bbx 8y ago

Modern day advertising owes a great deal to war time “public service” propaganda: https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/commercial-advertising-as-propaganda https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/commercial-advertis... They both invoke the notion that the individual can contribute in a meaningful way through subservient behavior towards goals that are left to be defined by others It’s capture of our nostalgia; securing the reality we feel comfortable with. It comforts us such that we eschew our own search for novel utilitarian answers, leading us to abide government and corporate solutions

kokey 8y ago

I misread the title as 'The death of John Draper?'. This left me rather confused for at least several paragraphs into the article.

inthewoods 8y ago

I disagree with a number of points in this article. "Now, we live in an age in which the intangible haze of soft-sell is no longer necessary, and the battle for market share comes down to the raw strength of your product. “The sun has passed midday on brand,” he says." I don't think this is remotely true - as an example, take a look at the insurance industry (GEICO, AFLAC, AllState, etc). These guys are spending on massively on brand advertising. Now, obviously, the LTV of these customers is huge so they can afford the high CAC that comes with brand advertising. This advertising is pure Don Draper imho. "The brand getting the most buzz in the car industry is Tesla. “What’s different about them? No advertising. Innovation in the car industry is not about putting Cindy Crawford in a TV ad. It’s about building a better battery.”" Yes they have a great product - and, at the moment, they have that differentiation and, most importantly, buzz. That will change as the market for electric cars matures - and then you'll see Tesla start to advertise. It doesn't make any sense for them to spend on advertising right now given that they are in the press literally every day (right now for some stuff that isn't necessarily positive). Maturity of market matters. "Clients have even started to question the ad business’s claim to efficiency. The model I described above is a simplified version of a dizzyingly complex system whose details few can fathom, involving multiple companies taking multiple fees. Unsurprisingly, fraud is rampant." If this is true we'll likely see a pullback in digital advertising - or at least a movement to direct buys only on specific websites (vs. network buys). My opinion: digital advertising is proving to be less and less efficacious, with costs going up and results going down. At the same time, we have less and less product differentiation. The result should be more spending on traditional brand advertising. Digital advertising is a channel - and spend to that channel will ebb and flow. In my small world of advertising (B2B SaaS), I've seen digital advertising becoming largely ineffective. Too many companies marketing similar products and services. I would argue, in this world, brand advertising therefore becomes more important. That is, developing a brand is as or more important than product because all the products (in the eyes of prospects) are largely the same. Note that I am not saying product doesn't matter, or that a product cannot differentiate in a specific market (e.g. Slack), but that companies need a distribution advantage to succeed over every other company - and that either comes from the product or brand (e.g. Drift). Now, having said all this, do I think the Ad Tech industry is a mess and that a major shakeout is needed? Yes. Do I think that digital advertising is largely too consolidated with a handful of players (Google, Facebook and now Amazon) - yes. Advertising can be still be great and useful - but Ad Tech needs some help.

IAmGraydon 8y ago

Outright advertising in the old school sense is dead and has been for a long time. Marketing is not. I think this author is deeply confused. Now, more than ever, the perceived value of cheap products is being inflated by brand. Look how much people pay for a can of Red Bull, which offers less volume than a soda and less caffeine than a coffee. Look at how much people pay for Starbucks coffee and Hermès purses. It’s all smoke and mirrors. In many cases, you’re paying more for an inferior product because the brand gods took advantage of your cognitive bias. The example of Tesla is particularly ridiculous to me and shows how little understanding of marketing the author has. Tesla isn’t a no-marketing company that only relies on its good product. What about a Tesla is superior? Not the interior. Mercedes has them beat there. Not the technology - it’s been proven unreliable at best. Not the range - many gasoline cars have better range. Not the price - their current offerings are far higher than an average person can afford. It’s questionable whether they’re even better for the environment than other cars. In fact, Tesla is so good at marketing that they’ve bamboozled the author and he doesn’t even realize it. Elon Musk knows the way to manipulate perceptions, and he’s very, very good at it.

conanbatt 8y ago
I think you make a big mistake in using the word 'inflated'. The joy of doing something is configured in our brains, and we enjoy that. Science has shown that we like and are willing to pay more for things merely on the brand. Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!
- Snackchez 8y ago
  You might have slightly misconstrued the parent comment. To rework your idea: there's a spectrum for the quality of kisses. Some people figured out a way to convince you that their kisses are better than they actually are. Others are likely better, but they don't know how to market themselves, and thus don't get kissed as much.
  - braythwayt 8y ago
    The trouble is that a product delivers a complex set of values upon its user, and all-too-often, when someone sneers that it doesn’t have any value, that it’s “just marketing” conning its users, they are willfully ignoring the values that it confers. I have spent literally my entire adult life listening to people say that Apple products were inferior to PCs, going right back to the days when they’d explain that bit-mapped graphics were useless decoration, and that keyboard shortcuts were superior to mouse interactions, and so forth. It’s clearly true that for some users, in some use cases, a certain product does deliver less value than for others. But ignoring the fact that other people see the product’s values in other ways is a monumentally arrogant and unempathetic way to view humanity. Most people don’t buy caffiene by the milligram or whatever. The label on the bottle appeals to a desire to fit in with other people buying the same label, or to aspire to belonging to that tribe, and so forth. It amuses me that this even needs to be explained on Hacker News: Most people who participate in the threads do so for complex social reasons that are not particularly different than the reasons that some people buy Starbucks, some people buy from an indie shop, and some people hit the Timmie’s drive-through. —- Going back to kisses, consider a blind kiss test. I might say that of three kisses, B was better than A which was better than C. But if you tell me that the kiss from C involved Lauren Bacall... I would rank it higher than the other two immediately! There is no fraud or nonsense going on, I value the complex bundle of values around a kiss from Lauren Bacall higher than two “no-name” kisses even if they are functionally more pleasant in the moment.

siliconc0w 8y ago

So there is 'discovery' which is knowing a solution exists to a solve a need I might have (that I might not even know about). Technology is reasonably good at this. Then there is 'selection' which is picking the 'best' product in a competitive landscape. Here I'm not convinced even Tech has this captured. If I am shopping for cars, for example, I might get a Tesla Ad (they do have a few AdWords) but the technology showing me that AD isn't optimizing for me, it's optimizing for a click-through or maybe a conversion which are different things. Maybe you look at me, my income, my driving needs and say hey - look, maybe you want to go with like a Kia Crossover over a Model S. A Model S would be fairly financially irresponsible given your income. The money saved with a crossover would equal $XX,XXX by the time little Bobby is ready for college. And what about those camping trips? You occasionally drive further than the expected range anyway. Right now if I want to compute the TOC of a Tesla vs a Kia given what I usually drive in a year minus the tax incentives or whatever I'd have to bust out excel and spend a few hours. This isn't sexy. This isn't what advertising used to be, but if they want to do the math for me I'd pay attention to that way more than that I do AdWords.