
Why Advertising Works, Even When You Think It Doesn't - waxymonkeyfrog
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/why-good-advertising-works-even-when-you-think-it-doesnt/244252/
======
joshklein
Madison ave ad exec here. They're talking about a specific kind of
advertising, what we would call "brand awareness" advertising. The objective
is, as they say, not to get you to do anything, but rather to shift your
perception (implicitly or explicitly) about a product or brand. Alone, it
doesn't do much of anything. Matched with direct-response, promotions, events,
point-of-sale, etc ... it can be powerful. But this is a tool for mass market
consumer packaged goods and the like, not your niche startup.

Since they have the picture of the Old Spice guy in the header, that's a
perfect example to use. Those ridiculous commercials were not meant to send
you running out to buy deodorant. Amongst other problems with that, deodorant
is what we call a "low consideration" market - as in, you just don't really
think about it. You came up with your go-to brand, then you just stuck with it
because of inertia. You can't convince someone of the functional benefits of
one brand versus another because they're all exactly the same thing.

Those Old Spice spots are meant to have a multi-year effect on your perception
of the brand. How many of you remember that Old Spice used to be thought of as
an old man sailor deodorant? They wanted to move away from that perception,
and in a decade, no one will remember anything except how funky and hip they
are.

I wrote about this campaign when it broke in July of 2010 here:
[http://www.joshklein.net/is-old-spices-viral-campaign-a-
fail...](http://www.joshklein.net/is-old-spices-viral-campaign-a-failure-or-
success)

As an interesting anecdote, Tide has 70% of the detergent market despite
literally being exactly the same box of chemicals as any other detergent.
Except their box is a different color, and they advertised for 50 years so
that your mother would tell you which brand to use when you went to college.

EDIT: It's worth mentioning that this kind of advertising is getting harder
because of something you need to achieve called "share of voice". There used
to be 4 TV stations that the whole country watched, so you could spend enough
money to blast your message into the head of every American. This is obviously
not how the world works anymore - you simply can't reach everyone, and even if
you could, there's almost always a better way to segment your audience and
only speak to the people who care. That's why I work in digital advertising,
and think the TV/Print people don't have great long term prospects for their
industry.

~~~
arohner
Out of curiosity, as a Madison ave ad exec, what do you get out of HN? Are you
technical? Are you here for business or pleasure? What does the HN crowd need
to learn about advertising?

~~~
libraryatnight
Advertising could be considered hacking the brain. ;)

------
vilhelm_s
Apparently, seeing an attractive person look at an object automatically makes
you like it more [[http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/subconscious-
sta...](http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/subconscious-stalking/)].
I guess this is part of the reason ads tend to feature good-looking people.

This makes me want to avoid looking at ads as much as possible -- we are
vulnerable to manipulation in ways which are completely impossible to defend
against.

------
Afton
Also see: source stripping, where we remember 'facts' without remembering
their source.

Slightly OT: I used to think all ads were stupid, and the industry run by
morons. Then at some point I thought that at least some of the ads seemed
clever. At that moment, I realized that I'd shifted, and become a target
demographic. The ads before weren't clueless, they just weren't aimed at me.

~~~
jmjerlecki
This particular quote isn't about advertising, but its something Steve Jobs
said that reminded me of your post.

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy.
The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older,
you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people
exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is
optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the
networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the
truth."

~~~
vannevar
_The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want._

No, the networks are in business to create desire. As a rule, people generally
want what their peers want, so the chief goal of advertising is to create the
impression that everyone wants the product. The very act of putting it in a
prominent place is the first step, since everyone seeing it knows that
everyone else is also seeing it.

~~~
vannevar
In response to the anonymous downvoters, it's quite clear that in a
competitive market, settling for giving the people what they want is
inadequate. You have to make them want what you're selling. As someone pointed
out above, many consumer goods are essentially identical and are distinguished
chiefly by their marketing efforts. And even with Apple's own products, one
might wonder whether the _exact same product_ introduced by say, Dell or HP,
would've been as successful.

Contrary to popular belief, the market isn't a simple system of people with
inherent needs meeting those with products, but a complex web of collective
psychology driven by a combination of the social network and mass media.

~~~
AllenKids
To put it in a slightly hyperbolic yet entirely honest way: I want Apple (or
brand of your choice) to make decisions for me; to tell me what I want and
what I want more; to assure me my decisions are unequivocally right and
indeed, mine. In this my desire for desires is validated, encouraged and
fulfilled.

We need to go deeper.

It just works™

------
Pewpewarrows
It is precisely for this reason that I'm largely confused by Internet
advertising payments. A lot of companies only want to pay out based on the
number of clicks an ad gets. If what this article says is true (and I've come
to this conclusion myself before), then the direct clicks as soon as someone
sees an ad on a web page is largely irrelevant. What should matter are the
impressions over time, allowing that product or service to grow in the
consumer's mind.

~~~
joshklein
Two points:

1 - TV ads are more interruptive; to ignore them, you have to leave the room
or change the channel. Most people just deal with sitting through them. On a
website, you can easily ignore the ad. There are plenty of exceptions in
digital advertising - pre-roll for web video, page takeovers, and other stuff
that is unbelievably annoying, since your expectation as a web user is to not
be interrupted.

2 - It depends on the key performance indicator for the campaign. Certainly,
direct response campaigns want to measure clicks (or purchases/actions - the
closest you can get to the sale, the better). But there are awareness-style
campaigns on the web, and those advertisers pay by impression, not clicks. The
problem is that with networks, you don't know the quality of the place your ad
is running, so an impression is worthless. You'll only pay directly to a
publisher you know is at a certain level of quality.

At a past company, I saw our media buyers put in ads at $170 CPM (cost per
thousand impressions) for a particularly relevant publisher audience. The
advertiser was in financial services, and the publication was uber-niche and
uber-influential.

~~~
dkl
_There are plenty of exceptions in digital advertising - pre-roll for web
video, page takeovers, and other stuff that is unbelievably annoying, since
your expectation as a web user is to not be interrupted._

I don't know if I'm unique, but every single time I'm presented with a pre-
roll ad, I close the tab I started the video in. 100% of the time. I always
wonder if stats on that type of thing are collected and given to the "right"
people. (I'm 90% sure they are not, but I thought I'd ask, since you're an
expert.)

~~~
joshklein
Yes, those kinds of stats are collected. Ad networks, servers, and exchanges
are some of those places that physics phds go when they don't go to Wall
Street or, heaven forbid, academia. We're not at that level, but we do have a
whole analytics department filled with statisticians.

No, you are not the norm; video pre-roll is a particularly strongly performing
media type at the moment. It does radically depend on the audience & creative,
of course. But if you're looking at the rates of a publisher, pre-roll is
going to be one of the higher ones.

------
ddlatham
If all the dollars spent on these sorts of advertisements end up causing me to
spend more dollars on those brands and products, is that a net gain or loss
for me? What about for society as a whole?

If it's a loss for me, what can I do to defend against it?

~~~
joshklein
Relevant reading: "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Cialdini.

If you only ever read one book on this stuff, this is the book to read. It is
framed around the 6 core psychological principles advertisers leverage, with
half the chapter on how to utilize the principle, and half the chapter on how
to defend yourself against manipulation of the principle.

But more directly to your question; I think it depends. Was the product you
just learned about a pharmaceutical drug that will help improve your quality
of life, but that your doctor has never heard of because he left medical
school 25 years ago and isn't tapped into current events in this particular
field?

It's very possible (and I think, correct) to think of advertising as a net-
negative to society. But it does serve the vital function of informing people
about things they should know about. It solves problems of information
asymmetry.

The startup deadpool is filled with companies that were awesome but nobody
knew about.

~~~
benofsky
How is advertising a net-negative to society? Advertising funds many things
which are too expensive to produce by themselves: newspapers, tv, movies, etc.
You may not _like_ it but it makes possible many things which would otherwise
be infeasible.

~~~
joshklein
Some would argue those things you mention are themselves net-negatives. We're
getting into the realm of philosophy, and I don't want to foist mine upon you.
But to explain my comment: some would argue that mass market advertising is
focused on the creation of desire, and that happiness is achieved through
minimizing your desires. Or more literally, advertising is about making you
unhappy with what you already have so you buy stuff.

------
jcizzle
The only "fact" in this article, the amount of money spent on TV ads, was
never supported (read citation). Even if that number is valid, it still
doesn't prove that advertising works. The only thing this proves is that
advertisers can sell - advertisements to companies.

If I were to argue that advertising works, I'd argue that it affects social
proof; no one drives a Mercedes Benz because it is a functionally superior
car. In the American market, products aren't purchased on their functionality,
but on the social class they put you in. (Would argue a similar argument for
non-luxury items, but it'd tl;dr.)

~~~
jerf
If advertising didn't work, than the companies blowing millions and billions
on it would be in a million/billion-dollar sized hole vs. their competition,
and they would be promptly outcompeted, or cut off their own spending. That
they are not is rather strong evidence that yes, it does work, inasmuch as a
dollar in ad spending can bring in substantially more than a dollar in
revenue.

(No, it is not a sufficient counter argument to say that they just spend
because everyone else does; if advertising really didn't work there would no
forces holding it up, and a lot of forces pushing it down. If you flipped a
switch and made it not work somehow right now, advertising would be gone
within a handful of years, if not faster.)

~~~
Vandy_Travis
What if it's not a binary (advertising works/ doesn't work)? In my view, part
of Google's success is they allowed advertisers (as well as self serve
businesses) to better measure the ROI from the advertising. In other words,
for direct response campaigns, the best option pre-AdWords was through TV. But
Adwords really let's you measure your ROI with a granularity not possible with
mailers/tv ads.

So direct response campaigns existed before google b/c there was some value
holding it up; Google just came along and revolutionized it. That's part of
their power from the advertisers POV -- metrics.

Large, nationwide branding campaigns have been effective b/c the entry cost to
run one means they are only feasible to large corporations. And those corps
have the resources to run the market surveys that are really necessary to
evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign. Smaller ad budgets just can't do the
followup efficacy measurements.

I definitely think both direct and branding based advertising works. I wonder
if Facebook's play will be to revolutionize large branding campaigns, while
google focused on the direct response (CPC v CPM, at its core).

------
wccrawford
Advertising absolutely affects me.

But the thing is, it does it both ways.

Old Spice was mentioned here. They came up with interesting, catchy new
commercials. That immediately endeared me to their product.

Other commercials are often (at best) noise or (at worst) insulting of their
own customers. I can't count how many times I've seen what was supposed to be
a funny commercial, and the idiot in the commercial used the product. Your
customers are idiots? Really!? I have never yet bought one of those products.

Not that I bought Old Spice, because I like my current solution. But I did
seriously consider it.

------
dendory
Ads didn't use to affect me, I use adblock and I rarely watch TV. But lately
it seems they find all kind of new ways to send you ads, and I start to
remember ads more. My personal policy has always been the same, if I need
something, and there's more than one choice, if I recall ever seeing an ad
about one company I'll always, always go for the other one. It seems like a
natural thing to do, and I bet I'm not alone in that.

The other day I went to buy a lamp and the store had tons of one particular
brand that advertises all the time. Of course I went right by those and bought
another name I had never heard about, and it turned out to work just fine, and
cost less.

So I guess that's why companies that advertise always puzzled me. I mean
what's the point? Everyone gets annoyed at watching ads, so why would you want
your brand name to be associated with annoying?

I guess I just don't get it.

~~~
nitrogen
I, like you, actively repel the effects of advertising (though I have no doubt
that some of it still influences me to an extent). However, if advertising
really didn't work, then all products in supermarkets would come in colorless
boxes, you'd walk to a touchscreen kiosk and specify your caloric and
nutritive needs, preferred foods, organic/vegetarian/vegan/etc. requirements,
and the kiosk would produce a list of items that met those requirements, along
with prices and an objective evaluation of product quality.

How I wish that were the case! Meal planning and product discovery would be
_easy_. Instead, I eat basically the same things over and over, since as a
bootstrapping entrepreneur, I can't afford to throw away much food in the name
of exploration. If we could get rid of the patent system that killed Modista
(<http://k9ventures.com/blog/2011/04/27/modista/>), and replace advertising
with information, I think my life would be a lot more awesome.

------
Triumvark
> U.S. companies would not invest $70 billion (yes, that's the size of TV's ad
> market) in something they thought didn't work.

Advertisers sell advertising first, products second. It's not implausible to
think they are better at the one that pays their checks.

------
casemorton
Advertising does work, but it also has other issues being overlooked. For
instance, all Geico commercials featuring the Cave Men have made me hate
listening to Royksopp. I don't believe that's an effect Geico or Royksopp
could have anticipated. Be ready for the affects good or bad if you're the 3rd
party in one of these 'viral' ads.

~~~
rdouble
Whenever a catchy "indie" tune hits the top of Spotify, I wonder just how long
it has before it becomes a VW commercial or the ending credits of The Hills.

------
corin_
Did anyone else notice that this article is a pretty poor puff piece? I mean,
don't get me wrong, the points it made are pretty much correct, but it just
did a terrible job doing so.

Through-out the piece, the key evidence that advertising works was an anecdote
that a friend of the author could remember two adverts.

And then, at the very end, almost as if realising "oops I forgot to actually
back up any of this with facts" he adds _"Access to data that proves their
point."_ Oh well that's good to know, I guess that's settled then.

He could have written it in a "this is what they are trying to do" way, or if
he really wanted this "I can show you that it works" then he should have
actually proven it, not suggested it and then waved his hand in the air
muttering "see I told you" under his breath.

------
georgemcbay
Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Unfortunately that little nugget is stuck in my head for life, but I've never
bought the product (nor do I know anyone who will admit to having bought it),
so in that sense did the ad really "work"?

~~~
Natsu
I still get pissed off every time I see homeopathic products (i.e. water sold
as "medicine") in the pharmacy, like that "Head on" stuff. It's worse for some
things like allergy eye drops where the homeopathic part may be written in
tiny print on the package.

If I just wanted to flush my eyes out with water, I'd do that at home for a
fraction of the cost. When my allergies act up, I need eye drops with actual
medicine in them. And that's when I'm the least able to see well enough to
avoid bottles with tiny print.

But Wal-Mart still stocks that crap in their pharmacy. Ugh. Shouldn't they
limit it to medicine?

------
malbiniak
Related: "Ten-Year-Olds Can See Through Advertisers' Tactics"

<http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=083111>

~~~
damoncali
My six-year-old just informed me that the fruit loops ads are full of it. She
said that "they said they taste good, and they DO NOT. They are lying."

My work is done here.

------
majmun
Advertising works in a same way that Nigerian scam works. Because there are
minority of people that give money to Nigerian scam.

~~~
dlss
> Because there are MAJORITY of people that give money to well advertised
> products

FTFY :p

~~~
majmun
My point that I try to make is that "Advertising works" is nonsense statement
(that statement is attempt to advertise itself), and proof given in article
therefore also nonsense, Advertising is not true and false kind of thing.
(works or doesn't work) Nature of advertising is like tricks . it can be
revealed in some moment in time. so advertising must adapt. and it wont work
in 100% of cases and all the time.(Proof: go look at advertisments in 50s and
look them today, notice any difference?) so it is not 1 or 0 like in computers
, but is in scales and dynamic.

