Another Ad Rant (w/ Some Love for Nike)

Reading Josh Levin's terrifically funny and insightful ad crit on Slate prompted me to examine one of my abiding passions = Nike ads. Ever since I was a scrawny teen trying to cobble together an identity from the images and words around me, I had some sort of deep emotional connection to Nike ads. To this day, some Nike ads are capable of stirring up my emotions in less time than any video, TV show, or film. Sure, the power of these ads chiefly derives from other people's accomplishments: kick ass music and superhuman athletic performances. In this way, Nike ads are just really well executed mashups, ideally suited to the era of remixes and contextless clips, AND they've got the $ to do it legally by paying the exorbitant use rights for the clips. The critical acclaim these ads garnered only serve to legitimize my connection to material in the most debased of all cultural forms: commercials.

This strong emotional attachment is the effect that all advertising creators hope to forge. And yet, how many pairs of Nike shoes have I bought? Quite a few when I was in high school, but none since then. Price, comfort, and fashion trumped that emotional bond. Is an emotional connection with an ad the same thing as an emotional connection with the product? Is the associative link between an emotionally affecting 1 minute spot and a shoe strong enough to overwhelm my preference for a more comfortable, cheaper, more fashionable shoe?

The larger question is: What is the value of advertising today? Studies have shown that ads (be they 30 second spots or banner ads) work on a sub-liminal level, that most of the time we are not aware of how they prompt us to notice brands in stores or online. Its also thought that by getting people talking about that last Nike ad, Nike remains in the popular consciousness and is thus more likely to be purchased and preferred over other brands. Advertisers and product peddling companies stretch this logic of these links between appealing, memorable, or controversial advertising and product purchase way too far. No one has taken them to task thus far, and no one will have to. There is some link, though its hard to prove exactly how much advertising affects purchase decisions b/c the ads are part of an ocean of symbols and mixed messages about products.

Ads became popular because mass communication (magazines, radio programs, TV programs) were very expensive to distribute. They needed to be subsidized someway. Given the choice between paying high subscription prices for content and tolerating content that was not their choosing (i.e. commercials), viewers would probably have chosen the unwanted content of advertising. In effect, the question posed to the viewer/consumer was "would I pay 1/10th of my monthly salary for content I chose or not pay anything and tolerate some content not of my choosing?" But that equation has changed. It is considerably less expensive to create and distribute content. As more and more of the country and the world gets wired to broadband Internet, these costs will continue to fall. Soon, the consumer may ask him/herself "would I pay 1/1000th of my monthly salary for content I chose or pay nothing and tolerate ads?"

The prevalence of advertising is an artifact of the era of expensive distribution. There are already ad-less websites with business models that understand this: wikipedia and craigslist for starters. Craigslist works by soliciting micropayments from users and wikipedia asks for donations of time, expertise, and money. It would be an interesting economic experiment to see if consumers would be willing to pay small amounts of money to keep a site ad free. Such efforts failed to catch on in the past, but I'd argue that was b/c the amounts weren't small enough ($5-$10 per year seems appropriate to me) and that people don't recognize the true "cost" of advertising.

Most people say that they're not bothered by small banner ads, but I would counter by saying that they didn't choose that content nor is it consistent with the content they chose in terms of its emotional tone, the values it promotes, and its aesthetics. Therefore, it is a kind of cognitive tyranny imposed on the consumers who, though she or he is not aware, have their emotional experiences dampened by the interference of ads. I must stress the point about self-awareness not mattering. Just because you report not minding ads doesn't mean they don't affect your viewing/listening/reading experience in a detrimental way. This would be easy enough to test: show a group of people a show w/ ads and another group the same show w/o ads. If the group who sees the show w/o ads rates the experience higher in terms of enjoyment and information retention than the group who views the show w/ ads, then ads are costly to the consumer even if they are not aware of such a cost or claim to not mind ads.

Ads have costs for the producer (market research, ad creation, ad distribution) and for the consumer (worsened media experience, lost time). Ads have benefits for the producer (more products sold) and the consumer (directed to goods that they benefit from, an occasional laugh). Their costs and benefits change as the cost of producing/distributing content falls and consumers' access to information on various products increases via search technology.

This isn't to say that ads can't be brilliant, like those Nike ads or whatever ads you happen to find funny, moving, or thought provoking. But the creative folk who put together the ads are hampered by having to shoe-horn in a product, and if brilliance happens its more of a happy accident than anything else.

BTW, Levin's cataloging of random images from that one Nike spot is terrific but not exhaustive. Around :49, there's Pete Sampras vomiting and a drawing of two lute-playing jesters. wtf.

Washington Week in Review 2: How Bills Become Laws

We don't have to shrug our shoulders and cynically declare that the inner workings of Washington are too byzantine to understand, though when you get into the nitty-gritty of telecom policy, it can be tempting to reach such a conclusion. That shit seems to be written by lawyers, for lawyers.

How do we combat this cynicism? To quote one of my favorite professors, “start with the obvious.” This is an advantage of being an outsider: you may not have the expertise to really know the specifics and complexities of how things work, but you can see things in a light that insiders have long since lost the ability to see. This approach might oversimplify things, but it gets all the assumptions on the table, gets to the root of what people believe in and where the disagreements are.

I’m making claims about things that are inherently, intentionally obscure. It’s in people’s best interest to not talk about how things really work in Washington. You might never see a documentary about it, but maybe reporters or people who are involved in it write fictionalized versions (or tell-alls) afterward. I have but one keyhole to look through, one story to present.

The government is just another large group of people, albeit with some rules that don’t apply to other groups like families or businesses. People in groups behave in fairly predictable ways.

There’s a lot of speculation about people’s behaviors and motivations on the parts of both activists and legislators. There certainly isn’t the assumption that some people are inherently evil or wrong, which seems to be outsiders’ perspective on politicians, lawyers, and big businessmen. Here, there’s a tacit assumption that politicians, like everyone else, care about their careers above all else. But this isn’t the same as just caring about money. Careers have to do with respect, status, and future earnings. The justification: As long as you have a family to support and you can imagine a rainy day in the future (which isn't that hard to imagine these days), the maintenance of a career is not greed. Its survival.

We need to remember that in most cases, politicians are only going to be in office for a few years, so they ally themselves with certain people (often in an industry). They make sure not to piss off industry people for two reasons

#1 Those industry people can help politicians get re-elected by donating large sums of $ to their campaign. The connection between campaign operating budget and success is well established, but I think it is flawed for the simple reason that it assumes that money = visibility = votes. Yes, there is some connection there, but its grossly overstated by the self-justifying media, in the same way that the effects of advertising are grossly overstated (and what is a politician but another product to be marketed?). It assumes the use and effects of old-school, one-way, extremely costly media and does not take into account word-of-mouth, viral, low-cost media.

Don't get me wrong: one-way media still has more of an impact than the internet, but I wouldn't be surprised if its impact is lessened and its value diminished in future elections. If that gets to be the case, then a certain amount of money will be required to gain some initial name recognition, but from there, more money will not necessarily equal more popularity. Look at the world of music. Yes, most of the people at the top of the charts were products of big label ad campaigns from the beginning. But others are not. Others are just skilled at marketing themselves. Or just plain skilled. This is a function of the falling cost of distribution of information about people's reputations, their talents, and what they believe in. There's no reason why it won't effect politics in the similar ways. Its just more information, just more personalities to package.

#2 Politicians need jobs after they leave office. The stakes are very high. If they decide to legislate in a way that is sympathetic to the industry, they get a very high paying cushy job. If not, they might get blacklisted and not be able to work in the industry at all.

Politicians care about getting re-elected, so they care about votes and what the people think. The will of the people tends to be a very vague concept based on calls, emails, letters to them, polls, etc. None of those have inherent value. They only have value in so far as they reflect that person’s future voting behavior and their ability to convince others to vote a certain way. If you frame yourself as an influential member of your community, then you’re liable to get farther than if you’re just one person. The politicians are concerned with the behavior of the voters, to some degree.

Activists want certain bills to get passed. They’re concerned with the behavior of the politicians. They frame issues by highlighting how many voters in their district want that bill to pass, so that if the politicians want to get re-elected, they should co-sponsor the bill. Also, activists frame the passage of a bill in terms of the bearing it will have on the internal allegiances and hierarchies within the organization of congress. The chances that any bill has to pass depends on who gets elected. That's what makes Washington so interesting and unlike companies or academia (at least in theory, if incumbents didnt' win 4 out of 5 elections): the frequent turnover keeps you from just figuring out how to please one person and instead everything is qualified by who might get elected or appointed in a year or two. There are contingencies for various scenarios, different angles to work. No one really knows what kind of legislation is going to go through 6 months from now b/c no one knows who is going to be the next president or congressperson.

For the activists, it becomes a question of how to frame the issue to highlight the advantages for other people (politicians, voters, people in the industry), to get them to realize that, hey, there’s something in it for them. I keep using the word "frame" b/c, from my POV, that's what its all about, more than truth, more than what's right, even more than money: rhetoric. It is therefore no surprise that there are plenty of lawyers in Washington, being as they are schooled in the art of rhetoric. But why aren’t there more behavioral psychologists? Maybe b/c people would balk at voting for someone with that kind of degree b/c it means they’re skilled at manipulating people, whereas lawyers sometimes do good things for people? Personally, I'd rather have a skilled psychologist fighting for me on the Hill than a lawyer.