
I Influenced Three Senators for $477.85 - febin
https://medium.com/@colinsholes/i-influenced-three-senators-for-477-85-c0256e8ba66c
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noobhacker
It's very interesting to see some concrete numbers on political marketing, and
while I don't doubt the author's number, I find his conclusion over-ambitious.

\- The author finds that the click-through rate (20%) is much higher than the
rate he typically sees in his career --> This is evidence of people being mad
about Betsy Devos, and doesn't necessarily say anything about how easy it is
to influence people through ads.

\- The hardest part is to get people to go from watching a video to physically
pick up the phone. The author doesn't (and can't) track this part, so can't
prove his ads' true effectiveness. He "conservatively" estimates that his ads'
audience make up half of the 1400 calls to the North Dakota senator. For this
to be true, the conversion rate from video to physical phone call has to be
70% [1]. I'm not convinced it's this high.

Indeed, if it's so easy to convince people to actually pick up the phone, a
school district or a church can get the hundreds of parents and church-goers
in a day.

[1] 996 North Dakotans watched the ads. The conversion rate needs to be 700 /
996 ~ 70% for his audience to make up half of the 1400 calls to the senator.

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scottybowl
If he wanted to he could setup call tracking which simply routes the call to
the destination. Trivial with systems such as Plivo

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amerine
These hyper-targeting stories are the scariest part about adtech. Every year
the are less cute and more worrisome.

Five hours on here and no comments is also scary.

~~~
jsjohnst
> Five hours on here and no comments is also scary.

I agree it’s scary, but it’s also a Sunday (posted before dawn for the US).
Probably more importantly, the title gives you the impression it’s purely a
clickbait article and not something with more substance.

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jjeaff
And not just Sunday, Easter Sunday.

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salawat
So... I find this... Odd.

So, online marketing seems to be trying to toggle desired functionality out of
large audiences.

Why does no thought ever seem to go into the opportunity cost of redirected
thought?

For instance... Most programmers are quite familiar with the phenomena wherein
one is interrupted, thus losing track of a sizable mental context that has to
be painstakingly rebuilt.

Marketing and advertising seems to be BUILT on exploiting this type of
interaction though.

"Hey! I know you're busy working on that report, but how about a Coke?"

Now, as a society, we've accepted small amounts of this over time as in many
cases, it hasn't seemed that disruptive.

Yet as mass-media has evolved, it is becoming increasingly difficult to tell
what is the first class citizen anymore. The "important/desired" content, or
the ads. As more and more opportunities are created for injecting advertising,
we're seeing a society that seems steered in a direction where our
interactions are being increasingly guided by our reaction to media in the
environment rather than by the environment itself. Other human "agencies"
(translation: businesses) are attempting to replace "human agency"
(translation: self-inspired decision making capability predicated upon
personal experience) itself as the primary means through which one achieves "a
comfortable existence" (translation: living a fulfilling and virtuous life;
living a high Quality existence; achieving self-actualization).

This article paints a picture of one scenario where this type of externalized
agency becomes increasingly problematic.

The American Legislature was DESIGNED to be inefficient. This is easy to see
when one takes preservation of liberty as a starting point, and then defines
the act of legislation as the process by which liberty's definition is refined
and bound in order to preserve the societal superstructure of a state while
facilitating the state's capacity for action and need to evolve over time.

When you apply a highly efficient system for spreading one individual's
viewpoint in an emotionally galvanizing way, one detracts from the built in
inefficiency of the legislative process, enabling faster implementation of
more restriction, but less efficient removal of restriction due to a natural
bias against "rocking the boat" endemic to a large portion of the population.

I guess for me, this raises a couple big questions.

A)Should the output of a legislature be governed by the fact 1000000 people
listened to one guy's five minute blurb and regurgitated it to a
representative, or should it be because a representative granted a staff with
higher access to information has had the time to work through the issue to
figure out the least restrictive way to implement a law?

B) Should marketing/advertisement be looked at more carefully, and possibly
regulated or downgraded to a less protected form of speech due to how easily
it can be weaponized? (I.e. Advertising material being restricted in the types
of claims it can make such as having to be backed by factual publicly
accessible data; Or being restricted in forms and situations in which it can
be employed/consumed)

C) Is marketing/advertising in its current digital forms even desirable?

I'm somewhat disturbed that some of these questions are even seemingly in need
of being asked, but the last decade or two is really quite disturbing when
looked at through the lens of an individual living in a world just coming into
an age of digital marketing and information warfare.

Sorry for the wall of text, but this has been bugging me a lot lately.

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Jordrok
It all starts to make so much more sense once you start mentally replacing the
words "marketing" and "advertising" with the end result they're both trying to
achieve: Mind Control. There are varying levels of insidiousness from trying
to get you to buy a certain brand of dishsoap, to encouraging you to share
more of your personal life on Facebook, all the way up to deliberately
poisoning your worldview with hatred and paranoia a la Fox News. In the end
though, the goal is always to effect some change in behavior regardless of
whether it's in the subject's best interest or not. As a society we would do
well to be much more wary of all kinds of advertisement.

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swerveonem
Affect _

