In 1957 Vance Packard published The Hidden Persuaders. The book sold over a million copies. Its sensationalist claim was that a small group of ad men (later Mad Men) had devised nefarious techniques to get Americans to buy things, including subliminal messages transmitted faster than the eye can see but which penetrated the viewer’s subconscious. Packard’s chief villain was my father, Ernest Dichter, who was referenced fifty times in the book. Not surprisingly, because of Packard’s book my father’s motivational research business took off, a tribute to how much America’s companies wanted to sell more effectively. But there was no magic to what my father and a few other researchers did (the subliminal messaging claim was untrue); they simply understood that selling was about a deep reach into the hearts and emotions of people. Thus, you don’t sell just soap, you sell how good it feels to be clean. These approaches worked and by the 1960s almost all advertising encompassed a deeper understanding of consumer psychology.
In the new on-line world, unlike the confident days of the 1960s (again, see Mad Men) it seems advertisers don’t quite know what they are doing anymore. They appear to be shooting wildly in the dark, without a solid sense of how to reach their audience or how to measure their reach. For lack of something better they count clicks or page views, neither of which will show whether the ‘clicker’ or the ‘viewer’ read or remembered the ad, much less bought the product or service being advertised. Yet billions of dollars of paid advertising are based on these clumsy metrics. But more important than that waste of money is the danger of alienating the consumer through advertising’s new in-your-face intrusiveness.
Consumers, especially younger ones, have changed. The generations that live and buy on line are savvy about what and how they are being pitched. If advertising is going to work for them an even more subtle and deep reach into their hearts and emotions is called for than what worked in the Mad Men era. Yet, instead of subtlety, today’s on-line ads are blunt-edged instruments; trying to get your attention in any way they can, they are meddlesome, obtrusive and often obnoxious. The boundaries between your space and the advertisers have become blurred and so the on-line user has lost control of when and how they interact with an ad. Besides the possibility that much on-line advertising is ineffective the greater risk is the alienation of potential consumers.
In the days of print or radio and TV ads boundaries were clear; reading or watching an ad was your choice. You turned a page and there was an ad. If you were not interested, you turned the page again to read an article. As for TV, you watched a show and then the show stopped for “commercials.” If you didn’t want to watch them you could walk away or turn your attention elsewhere, if you stayed and watched you were a willing audience. The rules of the game were clear. You did not think of ads as intrusions. You understood that the advertiser’s time was legitimate, just as yours was. You accepted the deal, and if you sensed that you were “targeted,” it wasn’t you personally, but you as part of a zip code or a particular demographic. The New Yorker did not advertise fishing rods and Field and Stream did not carry ads for perfume.
Those were innocent times. Today, your ability to choose the ads you read or watch has been taken away, as has your privacy, through micro-targeting. If you had once spent a few minutes looking at possible flights from New York to Lisbon, for months after you are besieged with pop-ups about hotels or car rentals in Portugal. You’re reading an article in the on-line Washington Post or any of hundreds of blogs or on-line magazines and every two or three paragraphs a pop-up appears - “No more clogged gutters.” Then there are the ads that are disguised as news or stories. You go to Weather.com to see the forecast and there’s a picture of a cat with the caption “Three ways your cat asks for help.” Hmm, you say, wonder what this is about, and stupidly you click only to find an ad for vet services. Stories are ads, news is entertainment, ads are news. Any understanding of human psychology has been lost, witness the jarring incongruity of some ad placements. You click on a news video of the aftermath of a tragic accident and before you’re allowed to view it, you’re subjected to an insultingly chirpy and inappropriate ad for a credit card. Some videos allow you to “skip ad” after 8 to 10 seconds, but most don’t offer you this option, telling you only “ad will end in 30.” And finally, when you have actually made a purchase, you’re hit over the head even harder than before. Say you booked a hotel for two nights in San Francisco, instead of finally leaving you alone, you are now bombarded with new ads for days, as if the hotel believes they can entice you to move in permanently.
Of course, in some sense all selling is intrusion, but not all selling alienates the potential customer. Decades ago door to door salespeople interrupted your life, and stopping at a car dealership to “just look” meant you would be approached by a salesperson. But again, you knew the game and accepted it. It did not turn you off.
Today, seemingly unsure about how to sell, advertisers rely more and more on a scattershot approach - shoot messages off a million times in a million ways and they’re bound to hit something. But as they become more intrusive, as they reduce our freedom to choose when and what we look at, advertisers risk alienating their potential customers. The secret thing about alienation is that it cannot be easily measured. An advertiser will never know about someone who chooses not to buy their product because he or she has been turned off by their ad behavior. Sellers beware.
