Why commercials can be good for you.
The advertising industry doesn’t have to be a nuisance. Instead, it can actually become a vital service for us all.
There’s nothing we like better than hating commercials, and for good reason, too. Digital commercials appear on our screen out of nowhere without our consent, and urge us to press that BIG button that will give us everything we’ve ever wished for. Or — if you don’t want to buy that waxed bacon floss — you just need to locate the miniaturized X hiding somewhere on your screen. No wonder 236 million people worldwide are using an adblock plugin of some kind — and the numbers just keep growing.
Despite all these issues, advertising is extremely important in any society with a healthy and thriving economy. In a world in which new inventions emerge onto the market every day, commercial companies must find ways to inform potential customers about their shiny new wares. The customers can then purchase those services and products, thereby supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. In that way, the advertising industry serves both the public and innovation.
Remember the first (and second) rule of Fight Club? “You do not talk about Fight Club”. A world without ads would pretty much look like this comic: nobody will ever hear about Fight Club or attend it. We must have ads to bring events, products and services to people’s attentions.
But why do they have to be so annoying?
One possible answer is that ads just aren’t fair play. Many commercials, after all, lie to our faces: we see cigarettes being associated with heavily-muscled cowboys, luxury cars with beautiful and scantily-clad women, Coca-Cola with daring, and so on. The product isn’t the focus of the commercial — just the feeling that the seller is trying to arouse in you. As the model, Gigi Hadid, said in an advertisement for BMW vehicles: “This is BMW’s new car, but you’re looking at me now, right?”
Miss Hadid is absolutely right. At the most primitive level of the brain, most men are more interested in beautiful women than in expensive cars. Automakers know that well, and so they try to manipulate that prehistoric calculator between our ears and make it yearn for certain products. They do not ask — “Can this product benefit you?” — but are instead slamming our brain with bright flashes of sound bites — “Look! Beautiful people are using this product, which means you should ,too! Buy, buy, buy!”
This approach has worked well for advertisers in the last hundred years, but in our modern age, people are becoming saturated with enticing messages. No big surprise there: when every second ad comes attached with an enticing human-shaped eye-candy, we fail to notice them anymore. We have become cynical about the products being marketed to us. As a result, we stopped seeing ads as a means of conveying important messages, and began perceiving of them as attempts to maneuver and manipulate us.
And we really don’t like that.
Manipulation-Adverse
I often hear people complaining about their online experiences. For example, they describe how, just after they Googled for lawn mowers, they became flooded with advertisements for fertilizers, garden tools and spare parts for lawnmowers.
Seems like they should’ve been happy, right? After all, this information should be relevant to them. Instead, they’re annoyed. And the same goes for book recommendations, and electronic newsletters. Why? How come people get so upset when they receive messages that are be relevant to them?
The answer is that these ads remind us the truth about the world in which we’re living: a world of radical inequality in knowledge. The ad companies, after all, know everything about us. They watch us from behind our computer screens and the smartphone cameras. They collect information about us from our Google searches and the information that we freely share on Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and many other apps. They construct a psychological profile for each and every one of us, that is sometimes more accurate than the one we would’ve filled out for ourselves. And they hire psychology and business professors to better figure out how to fit ads to different psychological profiles, to maximize the chance that we actually buy the product.
Personalized ads are seen by many today as a blatant display of power. Time after time again we witness how the advertisers’ power keeps growing, and realize that they can peek into our cars, our homes, our beds — and see us digitally exposed and naked. So we hide from our digital masters — we cower away and refuse to look at the merchandise they’re throwing oh-so-accurately at our feet. Which is a great shame, since — as mentioned earlier — ads are critical for the economy, for maintaining innovation and entrepreneurship, and for all of us to find and seize new opportunities as soon as they become available.
So how can we make the advertising industry go back to serving its true purpose, without infuriating everyone and shooting itself in the foot in the process?
That’s What Friends Are For
We all have friends that we know well. We understand their fears and anxieties, their hobbies and passions and likings. For some of our friends, we can even predict what they really need — even if they have yet to accept it themselves: a university degree, a date with a shared colleague, or just a novel piece of jewelry that you stumbled upon in the shopping mall. That’s the best kind of predictive analytics, and one that computer programmers haven’t figured out just yet.
What could be more natural than referring your friends to opportunities they really need?
This kind of marketing, in fact, happens constantly. According to McKinsey, friends’ opinions and recommendations influence about fifty percent of purchasing decisions. Friends, close relations and family members have a dramatically stronger impact on our decisions than do strangers. This effect is so strong that 84% of consumers report that they completely or partially trust recommendations from their family members, colleagues and friends. It seems that recommendations by friends are simply the most trustworthy out of all possible sources.
The thing is, word-of-mouth recommendations are confined primarily to the physical world, where they’re extremely limited in their capacity for proliferation. If you want to be constantly exposed to news about enticing novel opportunities, you must have plenty of friends — preferably the kind that you meet every few days.
There’ve been some reasonable attempts in recent years to digitize and automate word-of-mouth referrals. The problem is, they require costly and complex implementation of software and code and are therefore only accessible to large corporations.
But the great disadvantage of these solutions is that they lack the ability to create a true network effect, because of their technological limitations. Current online referral solutions can only track the last person to recommend a certain product, service or event. Yet, as we all know, the true power of word-of-mouth is when it passes through the human network through referral-chains creating what advertisers like to refer to as “online virality.”
Activating virality in the digital space
The challenge is creating a technology that incentivises people to share useful information with their friends, while minimizing the impact of ‘bad’ actors. This ideal technology would incentivize people to carefully target their messages, instead of simply spamming their friends. And it would also have to to be decentralized, so that it won’t require handing over even more power and information the big (B)Ad industry.
At 2key, we’re developing precisely such a technology. It’s based on two unique technological breakthroughs that allow us to create a new type of information-sharing platform that hasn’t been possible before. The first is a protocol called Multi-Step Tracking that can be seamlessly embedded within any web link, enabling the link to track and record each person who shares it. The multi-step technology also allows the links to act as smart-contracts that automatically reward participants in link-sharing trails that end up achieving sales or exposure.
2key’s platform is blockchain-based, which means that it is entirely decentralized. The links themselves pass directly from one person to another and reward productive participants automatically. This creates the possibility of naturally incentivising proactive online sharing, which is based on the viral network effect of word-of-mouth instead of on central online platforms.
2key’s second breakthrough technology is an innovative incentive model for online sharing that is based on a fusion between game theory and AI. This revolutionary incentive model is also embedded within the multi-step protocol, making sure that rewards are distributed among participants in a way that will encourage productive targeted participation and discourage spamming. Each participant in a successful link-sharing chain is rewarded according to a complex reputation score system that takes into account their place in the chain and their previous recommendations and behaviour on the platform.
We’re combining these two innovations within our new blockchain-based 2key Network, to create a reality in which people are rewarded directly for sharing reliable information with one another. The 2key Network redefines the very concept of advertising, allowing it to return to it’s true role of information-sharing in order to help consumers make more informed decisions.
If you’d like to know more, please visit our website at: https://www.2key.network/
or join our telegram group: http://bit.ly/2HSfZf7
And help us turn this vision into a reality — and make ads cool again.
