memes

The bane of marketing.

Somewhere, some metric told them that they don't need to make good ads that explain the product. They only need to be as annoying as possible to garner attention, and put their branding on the end to be remembered.

Marketing is about hacking your brain in order to sell you products you do not need. It is horrible and should be banned entirely.

There's a fundamental problem within the marketing industry, that almost nothing that's being sold is something you even remotely need. Economics says that consumers are rational. If that's the case we would almost never buy anything. Marketing exists at odds with that principle.

If you won't buy it unless you need it, then they have to create need with their marketing.

If they're selling you a pen, any pen will write, but this pen will change the way you write! It's life changing! You need this pen, it'll be the last pen you ever buy!

If they can't convince you to need it, you won't buy it.

There's another problem, and that's that we, collectively, are losing our attention spans. The constant access to new media means we never have to spend long on anything, something new is always at our fingertips, and we, collectively, aren't really that patient anymore.

Before you comment on this with some anecdote about how you've only gotten more focused, actually. That's missing the point, in general we're getting worse, not better.

So now ads can't take the time to tell you how great this pen is, really, even if it will change your life, they only have about 5 seconds before you've forgotten about it forever. So they have to be louder, more aggressive, and more pervasive. In whatever breed of tiktok style content you choose, you'll stumble across videos that are blatant ads for a product that make no mention of it. Ads disguised as content, in the modern format. "Hi guys so I just got this pen and it's l1t3rally life changing" over the top of a cool looking pen writing smoothly.

Will it work on you? Probably not, advertising gains take place in tenths of percentage points. You're a smart consumer and never fall for such blatant ads, and for you they have a tactic too. Every single piece of content you consume is just full of ads, subtly conditioning you towards every product on the planet. Because if they don't, you'll keep your old shit that still works and never buy anything.

Because, in the golden days of ads, your metrics were bullshit. You had a print ad and someone said that they sold this many issues and, because of the papers totally not biased market research the told you that for every paper sold, x more people saw your ad. Same with TV and Radio, most numbers around viewers or listeners are basically made up with some fancy statistics.

With the Internet, suddenly you had hard data - your ad has been requested x times. But, that data was always below the fancy print/tv/radio numbers, so the companies had to either push more or reduce prices. That's how they designed more and more intrusive ads like the ones with the shitty hidden close icon. The longer you need to close it, the longer is the "ad viewed" metric. The more you click on fake X buttons, the higher is the click rate or click through rate. Ad metrics have always been a scam and no one wants to change it.

It’s going to depend on age as well

Zoomers for instance will see an ad to download something and they’d download it. Millennials won’t click ads at all but if they see a software ad then they will assume it’s a scam and avoid that software

So if you are making an ad you want to focus on the Zoomer demographic

As far as annoying, look at the type of YouTubers that Zoomers like. They like annoying things

They work enough, and enough is a surprisingly small amount. I imagine most click through rates are sub 1%, but with the right ratio to impressions, that can be a huge uplift to your sign ups / purchases / whatever