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Good! Thank GOD it's come to this. Let me share with you an old adage: "Good advertising is no more expensive than bad advertising: but at least it's good."

Good! Thank GOD it's come to this. Let me share with you an old adage: "Good advertising is no more expensive than bad advertising: but at least it's good." Don't approach this as a way to influence and convince users. Advertising should entertian, teach, engross, delight, the full spectrum of the human condition. After all, isn't that what your product is - something for humans? A part of people's actual lives? I think if you approach advertising correctly you will find that it is your chance to be something more than lines of code or a manufacturing contract: it's your chance to be human.

tptacek 14y ago
That's a nice sentiment, but it doesn't actually address his concern. Even if he tries to make "good advertising", if Reddit happens to disagree, he'll get shellacked by the site's users; he'll be worse off than if he had just flushed the money down the toilet. People with experience with Reddit advertising seem to be confirming some of his suspicion downthread.
- logicallee 14y ago
  I'm not sure it's possible to make "good advertising" targeting reddit that "reddit disagrees with". do you think I'm begging the question when I state that advertising targeting reddit is only good if reddit likes it? (I don't think I am, because there could be another definition of good based only on whether it converts anyone at all - even if 100% of the viewership including the converted can't stand it.)
  - nialo 14y ago
    The problem isn't that it's possible to make good advertising that reddit disagrees with, it's that making advertising that's good in this context is either difficult or risky or both. And that trying and failing is worse than just burning the money spent on the advertising.
    - logicallee 14y ago
      I don't get the sense from this thread that there's any push to make something that Reddit likes, though. There's a push to make something that 'works' or 'goes over'. It's easy to make something reddit likes: start by trying to generate non-advertising content and see if you can get that to float, then move on to advertising. No one here talks about the general content Reddit likes, because people in this thread don't seem to care. The fact that I had to spell out that "good" means "in the context of Reddit", i.e. "something Reddit likes" rather than some objective artistic assessment of what's good already shows what I'm talking about. Basically, if I wanted to advertise on Reddit I would start by trying to integrate myself in that community. Same as HackerNews. If I wanted to advertise here I wouldn't question the prevailing wisdom here - I'd regurgitate it and say obvious things to get modded up. It's not about "lowest common denominator" - it's about respecting people as people rather than as a captive eyeball. Likewise if I were making youtube pre-clip advertisements the #1 metric I would care about isn't conversions: it's, "can I be good enough and on the same frequency as my audience that they see I respect them enough for them to continue to watch?" The Dove advertisements are a good example of advertising done right. It's not "objectively good" - objectively, it's very, very bad. The before/after pictures don't ressemble each other because they were detailed precisely enough: noody mentions "and her hair is 7 inches long with a part forty-five degrees to the right, and she's smiling" whereas the other one is ""and her hair is 7 inches long with a part forty-five degrees to the right, and she's sad". But that's exactly what the pictures show. So, objectively it's terrible. It's faked. But in the context we're talking about, it's very, very good. I saw tons of articles written about it, because it's simply that good. On the other hand, the satire that I play in my head for that clip - where the women's own descriptions result in the guy drawing one giant circle with a downturned sad-face, and the descriptions by those who have met the person result in one giant circle with an upturned happy-face - that is in my opinion an awesome caricature of the Dove sketch artist campaign. But in the context we're talking about it wouldn't be veyr good.

tptacek 14y ago

That's a nice sentiment, but it doesn't actually address his concern. Even if he tries to make "good advertising", if Reddit happens to disagree, he'll get shellacked by the site's users; he'll be worse off than if he had just flushed the money down the toilet. People with experience with Reddit advertising seem to be confirming some of his suspicion downthread.

logicallee 14y ago
I'm not sure it's possible to make "good advertising" targeting reddit that "reddit disagrees with". do you think I'm begging the question when I state that advertising targeting reddit is only good if reddit likes it? (I don't think I am, because there could be another definition of good based only on whether it converts anyone at all - even if 100% of the viewership including the converted can't stand it.)
- nialo 14y ago
  The problem isn't that it's possible to make good advertising that reddit disagrees with, it's that making advertising that's good in this context is either difficult or risky or both. And that trying and failing is worse than just burning the money spent on the advertising.
  - logicallee 14y ago
    I don't get the sense from this thread that there's any push to make something that Reddit likes, though. There's a push to make something that 'works' or 'goes over'. It's easy to make something reddit likes: start by trying to generate non-advertising content and see if you can get that to float, then move on to advertising. No one here talks about the general content Reddit likes, because people in this thread don't seem to care. The fact that I had to spell out that "good" means "in the context of Reddit", i.e. "something Reddit likes" rather than some objective artistic assessment of what's good already shows what I'm talking about. Basically, if I wanted to advertise on Reddit I would start by trying to integrate myself in that community. Same as HackerNews. If I wanted to advertise here I wouldn't question the prevailing wisdom here - I'd regurgitate it and say obvious things to get modded up. It's not about "lowest common denominator" - it's about respecting people as people rather than as a captive eyeball. Likewise if I were making youtube pre-clip advertisements the #1 metric I would care about isn't conversions: it's, "can I be good enough and on the same frequency as my audience that they see I respect them enough for them to continue to watch?" The Dove advertisements are a good example of advertising done right. It's not "objectively good" - objectively, it's very, very bad. The before/after pictures don't ressemble each other because they were detailed precisely enough: noody mentions "and her hair is 7 inches long with a part forty-five degrees to the right, and she's smiling" whereas the other one is ""and her hair is 7 inches long with a part forty-five degrees to the right, and she's sad". But that's exactly what the pictures show. So, objectively it's terrible. It's faked. But in the context we're talking about, it's very, very good. I saw tons of articles written about it, because it's simply that good. On the other hand, the satire that I play in my head for that clip - where the women's own descriptions result in the guy drawing one giant circle with a downturned sad-face, and the descriptions by those who have met the person result in one giant circle with an upturned happy-face - that is in my opinion an awesome caricature of the Dove sketch artist campaign. But in the context we're talking about it wouldn't be veyr good.