His explanation of "cultural imprinting" stuck out to me:
> In a way, cultural imprinting is a form of inception, but it's much shallower than the conventional (Pavlovian) account would have us believe. An ad doesn't need to incept itself all the way into anyone's deep emotional brain; it merely needs to suggest that it might have incepted itself into other people's brains
This is loosely connected, I know, but it reminded me of the "impostor" story from A Scanner Darkly. Had a hard time finding the text on my own, but luckily another user had already posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27049625
> ERNIE LUCKMAN ... this guy appeared on tv, claiming to be a world-famous imposter. He said he'd posed at one time or another as a great surgeon, a theoretical submolecular high-velocity particle research physicist, a Finnish novelist, a deposed president of Argentina...
> BOB ARCTOR He got away with it? Never got caught?
> ERNIE LUCKMAN See, the guy never really posed as any of it. He only posed as a worldfamous imposter. Turns out he just pushed a broom at Disneyland, until he read about this actual world-famous imposter, and he thought, I can pose as all those things, then he thought, hell, I'll just pose as an imposter. Save a lot of time, a lot easier. Made almost as much money as the real imposter with books and movie rights.
"For Google's Security and Privacy Month, we are honored to present the real Frank Abagnale, Renowned Cybersecurity And Fraud Prevention Expert, Bestselling Author & Subject of Catch Me If You Can.
His transformation from one of the world’s most notorious con men to an international cybersecurity expert trusted by the FBI has been mythologized in film and literature – but the takeaways he shares are the real deal." ...
I am pretty stubborn. And I stubbornly believe that advertising is a bane of society and has been for far too long.
But then I recently was pointed towards https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf8mZVmof2g by twitter. It's a 2 minute ad I don't regret watching, and it has changed my opinion a bit.
If a company wants to spend $x million on paying artists, I find that a worthy thing to do.
Somehow, if I imagine how Coca-Cola would have spent the same money to make a generic "<sports personality> praises product in an extremely generic manner" ad, 95% of the money would have gone to the celebrity.
I don't know why to me, that makes a difference. Maybe I am just baffled by actually enjoying an ad.
The relation between advertising and art is a bit similar to that between war and technology.
>If a company wants to spend $x million on paying artists, I find that a worthy thing to do.
If the US army wants to spend a few million on "search and rescue" drones that might also seem like a worthy goal. But just like military money is ultimately spent to kill people (ahem, "project force"), advertising money is ultimately used to manipulate people. One could even argue that if the "technology" to do this is genuinely beautiful art, that exactly makes it worse.
I realize I'm exaggerating a bit with this comparison, I don't mean to hammer on you while you gave a helpful counterexample :)
The world is not black and white. One good example of X does not make X good, whether X is ads, sugar, pain, or whatever. But you can look at X as a whole and decide whether it is a net good or not. And you can always make exceptions for particular types of X.
In France there was this TV series called "Culture Pub" (translates to "ad culture"). It used to showcase some of the better ads, talk about them etc. I remember it being a pretty cool watch.
That video was great btw. Definitely a high quality ad. But like others said, one good example doesn't a good industry make. (Or like I said in a recent previous post: The ad industry can burn)
And frankly, that last-second transition to a product placement was pretty off-putting. It would have given me a weird taste in my mouth if you hadn't told me it was an ad from the get go. But this might be a cultural thing, too.
If you want examples of great ads, I really like Jay Foreman's goofy sponsorship sketches on YouTube. Here's a video to get you started:
I'm 100% the wrong person to ask about that since I have a personal intense dislike of soccer and fast cars.
If I saw this out of context (not comparing it to the CalorieMate ad), I'd shrug it off as very vanilla, flavorless, and forgettable. But then it is at least 10 years old, so I can't say what I would have felt in 2011.
After viewing it while remembering the CalorieMate ad, it made me cherish that one even more. Maybe this is just personal preference, but I feel a lot more connection between the music and the action, and a lot more connection between the characters in the anime than the POV protagonist in the Nike spot.
It gives me lots of "4-out-of-10 Hollywood adaptation of a 9-out-of-10 Japanese movie that completely misses the point" vibes.
Actually my half baked comment led me to search out the credited director's and animator's work. The director mostly makes Music videos and commercials anyway! The animator made some interesting anti-discrimination works for MOJ in the past.
The task of "making a consumer aware that a product exists that they would be interested in purchasing" can be valuable to the consumer. The problem is that since it's a task currently being performed by the sellers of specific products, their incentives are not aligned with those of the consumer. So you get the current nauseating mess of creepy targeting or scattershot non-targeting, and it gets thrown in your face in passing, instead of at a time and in a way that you've chosen.
Pay-to-get-attention could in theory still be a meritocracy where good products make money and thus can pay to get advertised more - but in practice it's more a matter of who raises the most money from investors, or incumbents using their past success to out-market the scrappy newcomers with a better product but smaller war-chest.
I think there's still a big opportunity here, in creating marketplaces or similar that are closer to true meritocracies, where the best products get recommended, that put the wants and needs of the consumer first, where avoiding "noise" and "false positives" from the perspective of the consumer is a top priority. The problem is that the obvious monetization of something like this is to start compromising the integrity and trust you've built up and amplify those willing to pay, and we end up back where we started, with yet another Google, Facebook, Yelp, Trustpilot or similar.
> Pay-to-get-attention could in theory still be a meritocracy where good products make money and thus can pay to get advertised more
Would good products need advertising though? Maybe at the beginning, but once they reach a critical mass of users, word of mouth and "organic advertising" (for the lack of a better word - think legitimate reviews, blog posts, etc) would take over and stop the need for paid ads, meaning that conventional advertising platforms return back to being a cesspool.
Indeed, the core problem is that "making a consumer aware that a product exists that they would be interested in purchasing" sells much less than "convincing a customer that their life would be su much better if they only bought this product"
First off, advertisements definitely do work via simple association. Humans use liking as a heuristic for virtually all decisions (we decide in favor of things we like), so increasing liking increases purchases fairly reliably. A warmth appeal like a Coke ad with smiling faces will reliably create an association between Coke and positive emotions just because that's how humans are wired. If you activate two concepts together, you link them. This is just how humans work and is the basis of most of cognitive psychology. Many, many things make sense once you start to see things in terms of co-activation and priming.
I think the article has aged much better than that comment, given the recent replication crisis in science. Unless I’m misunderstanding, much of the published research into priming and the like has turned out to be heavily exaggerated.
The article’s theory of cultural imprinting nicely explains why advertisers pay a premium for Superbowl ads. Unless you assume that not only consumers, but advertisers are highly irrational...!
A warmth appeal like a Coke ad with smiling faces will reliably create an association between Coke and positive emotions just because that's how humans are wired. If you activate two concepts together, you link them.
I don’t think that part is a tautology; it’s a specific theory, once thought to be very generally true, now thought to be possibly-partly true.
I’m inclined to agree with the article, that it’s overly simplistic. People aren’t 100% rational, sure, but they also aren’t quite as trivially swayed as that theory assumes.
I think "manipulating behavior" would be a more neutral and correct way to put it. This way, it highlights how some people will reject every ads because they value freedom and independance more than usual, while some others won't mind as long as the ads are useful to them.
Advertising is corporate propoganda. Often quite effective in all kinds of ways, but that doesn't change the fact that it's supposed to distort markets. We're just so used the status quo that we can't imagine an alternative. Imagine billboards had positive and encouraging messages.
The article called it "cultural imprinting", but I've been calling it "prestige marketing" for decades. Humans seek prestige above all other things once their basic needs are met. Given alternatives, the choice will always be the option signaling to others the highest prestige the user can afford. And by "afford" I mean the combination of finances and social credit of the individual selecting between the options.
Indeed, most ads are not here to push you to buy something as much as to remove barriers to buy it:
- make you know or remind you that the product exists: removes the barrier of ignorance.
- show it in a context that is not bad for the product or the company or make the product consumption looks like something normal: removes the barrier of social pressure.
I think the article does a good job of establishing that this type of "cultural imprinting" is real, or at least that marketers seek to tap into it. But I don't know that it finishes the job of showing that "emotional inception" is not also something advertisers seek to do. The bedsheets example claims that sheets aren't advertised because they lack conspicuous social consumption. But I see adds for obscure consumption products try to establish an emotional context all the time:
- Pest control services saying "protect what's yours" establishes the idea that your home is a fortress and you are duty bound to exclude all intruders, be they people or ants.
- Financial institutions and advisors referencing their hundred year history to establish comfort, confidence, surety. You could claim that these are factual assertions of a superior product but they tend to have too much emotional context for me to think the ads aren't also trying to "incept" you. Otherwise why always use an older, gravely voiced, white, male Sam Waterston type instead of someone else?
- Laundry soap wants to be breezy, relaxed, calming. Basically exactly what an overtaxed mother/homemaker wants to experience, and might be missing when in a hurry to get the grocery shopping finished.
The above examples are all common in that they identify some anxiety in the mind of their primary audience and then try to counter program against it. There's a direct association to the product "working" but also a wider association that they're trying to leverage:
- Your house will be pest free (because you are a good protector and provider)
- Your financial future will be secure (because you are a prudent and responsible decision maker)
- Your laundry will be immaculate (because you are a skilled and confident homemaker).
Maybe this is still tapping into the "how I want to see myself and be seen by others" vibe of "cultural imprinting" but it's definitely at a different layer than "because other people observe me using the product".
I have trained myself, over decades, to treat anything I have seen advertised as fundamentally crappy. For any advertised product, another one 30% cheaper does the same job better: each has a choice between spending on quality, on undercutting competition, or on ads. If I need something, I look for one that did not choose the last.
Things advertised most heavily identify exactly what you need least.
It has worked out pretty well. I only wish I could get other family members on board.
Most things that are overpriced end up piling up at thrift stores. So, name brands there can be OK.
Even though I understand that differentiating a strictly pavlovian conditioning with "cultural imprinting" might be interesting, the two proposed modes are still extremely similar. A "cultural imprint" is useless unless it eventually evokes a feeling in the customer. The only difference is that the "imprint" works by extra steps.
The article makes the exact opposite claim: the cultural imprint does ot need to evoke a feeling in you, you just need to believe that others are associating the product with a certain image (to which the company hopes lots of customers will want to identify).
As the article argues, this also makes it more difficult to escape: you have no control over what others are seeing.
The big difference is that the imprinting mechanism favours widely shared experiences (like prime time broadcasting) over targeted advertising.
I suppose the ultimate combination would be targeted advertising inserted into broadcast streams, to fool you into thinking it’s a shared experience. That already happens with the sideline billboards at big sporting events.
Very interesting! Tangentially I've worked a lot with video streaming, and one technology that there was a lot of buzz around was to splice personalized ads into regular linear TV broadcasts. Basically it replaced the original broadcast ads with personalized ones, completely seamless and unnoticeable. I don't know if it was ever implemented, but it sounds like it would tap into the same mechanism that you propose.
My theory is most of the hate for ads is by people who just don't spend money and aren't ever the target audience for them. So they feel grouchy and left out.
The target audience for ads is more than likely thankful for them. There is a lot out there, it is good to be told about the bits of it that make life better.
It doesn't explain the vast majority of ads. Most ads you've seen are for products you - and everybody else - knows about already. They aren't informing anybody of anything.
We also don't see this behavior in advertising strategy. It's not an irregular campaign trying to reach unique individuals. Instead, you tend to see the same ad over, and over, and over in a short period of time. Companies are often extremely transparent about this kind of behavior.
This is not anything like the behavior you would find if ads were at all attempting to merely inform people about a product.
Disagree. People simply hate their TV programming / browsing being interrupted. Then comes the privacy/security/resources concerns, at least for the online ad experience.
I spend plenty of money and hate ads with a passion. There are good ads. Doubly so if it's an ad that appeared when I was searching for something I want and the product advertised fulfilled the expectations.
The problem is that the vast majority of ads does not fall into this category. They are actively trying to make you want something and manipulate you into buying things. We can't have nice ads, because the system almost invariably falls into a local minimum of plastering everything with carefully crafted ads that play into people's reptilian brains. The sociopathic and amoral part of adtech will invariably drown out the ones who try to play nice.
Perhaps I'm too jaded, but I just can't see how to change the status quo outside of strong regulation to break apart the existing adtech oligopolies. Unfortunately, even that is a gargantuan task because said adtech oligopolies wield incredible lobbying and political power.
And therefore I hate ads and hate what the adtech industry has become. We vilify the military industry, the oil industry, the finance industry and countless other industries who have often downright negative value contribution to society. And yet the adtech industry is still somehow innocent in the public eye, even though they are just as corrupt as the rest, it's just that the damage they are causing is more insidious.
My theory is most of the hate for telemarketers is by people who just don't spend money and aren't ever the target audience for them. So they feel grouchy and left out.
The target audience for telemarketers is more than likely thankful for them. There is a lot out there, it is good to be told about the bits of it that make life better.
I can see that. I don't feel like I'm the target audience of almost every ad that I see, but once in a while I read blog post or news blur about some tool and knowing that tool is out there make my life easier.
That's more promotions than actual ads, but I don't think I would have been less positive had these been actual ads.
I think there is a line that can be drawn between promotions and ads. There is typically not much lying/exaggeration involved in promotions. If it explains what it does and how it does it, it's typically much more honest.
The public can be informed of 'what is out there' without ads. Word of mouth, trusted review/digest media that would attempt to do an honest comparison of offerings while avoiding conflicts of interest.
The only things ads may be good for are for funding things that might otherwise have required explicit payments.
> In a way, cultural imprinting is a form of inception, but it's much shallower than the conventional (Pavlovian) account would have us believe. An ad doesn't need to incept itself all the way into anyone's deep emotional brain; it merely needs to suggest that it might have incepted itself into other people's brains
This is loosely connected, I know, but it reminded me of the "impostor" story from A Scanner Darkly. Had a hard time finding the text on my own, but luckily another user had already posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27049625
> ERNIE LUCKMAN ... this guy appeared on tv, claiming to be a world-famous imposter. He said he'd posed at one time or another as a great surgeon, a theoretical submolecular high-velocity particle research physicist, a Finnish novelist, a deposed president of Argentina...
> BOB ARCTOR He got away with it? Never got caught?
> ERNIE LUCKMAN See, the guy never really posed as any of it. He only posed as a worldfamous imposter. Turns out he just pushed a broom at Disneyland, until he read about this actual world-famous imposter, and he thought, I can pose as all those things, then he thought, hell, I'll just pose as an imposter. Save a lot of time, a lot easier. Made almost as much money as the real imposter with books and movie rights.