Don’t #7 — Your product is successful! Let’s make it worse.
I’m sometimes reminded that I am now old enough to feel glad that some entertainers are dead.
I was reminded of this again by a couple of tweets from Alasdair Beckett-King (very funny, worth a follow).
If you’ve read literally anything I’ve written, the fact I was into Bill Hicks in my teens will not be shocking. As much as I’d love to think Bill wouldn’t have ended up that way, it’s very likely he would have. This was a man who was proud of his contrarian status. Listening back to him now, the good bits (anti-commercialism, anti-anti-intellectualism, ability to point out when the media are lying to sell you things) are clearly outweighed by the misogyny and sexual aggression. The odds of Bill Hicks going full-on Alex Jones conspiracy huckster if he was still around are definitely high.
I was never a huge Beatles fan either (Helter Skelter? I Want You? Great tunes! Maxwell’s Silver Hammer? Get fucked) — but whenever I feel sad that a cultural icon of yesteryear is no longer around to share their wit with us, It’s not long before I think of Jay Foreman’s song “I’m Glad John Lennon Died”.
And here’s a thought, imagine if he’d made a guest appearance as a panelist on Never Mind The Buzzcocks?
All his contributions would be painfully bad, and to see him look so past it would be really sad.
He’d always be on Twitter making really racist jokes, oh I’m glad John Lennon died.
I’m fairly sure this discussion came around because Dave Chapelle has yet again decided to voice his opinion on trans issues, to the delight of no-one — but don’t worry, this isn’t why I brought it up.
I mention this because one of the Bill Hicks routines which always stuck with me was his histrionic monologue against advertising. For anyone who hasn’t seen it, it begins with this introduction:
By the way, if anyone here works in advertising or marketing — kill yourself.
Bill laughs, and then goes to great lengths to explain that no, it’s not a joke, he really means it — advertising brings nothing positive to this world, and the death of an advertiser is a net-positive for society. Aged 14, I loved it. I saw what he was talking about — the endless commercialisation of everything I loved, the destruction of anything unusual that didn’t have a clear path to profitability. I swore then to always fight against the horrors of advertising wherever I could.
Naturally, I ended up in a comms and marketing role, desperately trying to justify to myself that because it was comms-focussed, because the word ‘advertising’ didn’t appear in the title, I could somehow avoid the pitfalls Bill had warned me about. You can argue amongst yourselves whether that’s happened. Jury is out, over here.
Now, obviously the world has changed. Obviously the advertising Bill was so angry about (mostly pop stars shilling for Pepsi) has moved on. Nowhere in the world is free from that kind of commercialised approach — but there are degrees of difference. Those of you who live in London — take a note next time you leave the country. Go to Berlin, or Paris, or Zagreb, and notice how many fewer billboards there are. How there are surfaces that are not covered in adverts screaming for your attention. How noisy the world seems when you get back to London and everything seems to be shouting at you.
The line — the concept really — that always stuck with me in Bill’s routine was this:
You are the ruiner of all things good
I’ve known plenty of people who work in advertising who claim that their jobs are important. “People wouldn’t buy anything without us,” they say, “We’re important to the economy” or “We’re just informing and educating people” or “You can ignore us if you like, you don’t have to pay attention”.
So let’s look at that argument for a second. If I’m reading a newspaper, the advert on the page pays for the journalist to write the article. However many adverts you see on a news website, they don’t actively cover over the article do they? I mean, they might make it more difficult to find, but they’re there to support the paper. You wouldn’t put, say, an advert for a pornographic movie on an article demanding less nudity on screen, would you? Or a horror movie clip full of jump scares on a wellbeing article designed to relax you? That would contradict the purpose of the article — the whole thing people are there to read! The whole thing your advert is supposed to support in the first place.
So this, naturally, appalled me.
I don’t use Spotify myself — it’s not just that they don’t pay artists enough, it’s the incessant algorithmisation of every part of culture. I toyed with it a few times, but I’ve noticed that most people who listen to Spotify don’t actually listen to music any more — that is, they couldn’t tell you what they’ve been listening to, they just put on Spotify and it does the rest. They could be (and are) listening to fake generated nonsense. But I’m also aware that it’s the industry leader, to the point where ‘Spotify’ is practically a term for music streaming in the way ‘Hoover’ is for ‘vacuum cleaner’. It has a user base that has bought in wholesale to the system, a UI which everyone is happy to use, and is now making most of its money from paid subscriptions, so it’s pointless for me to argue that you ‘shouldn’t be using it’ (although, for the record, you should buy stuff off Bandcamp. Their streaming app has improved massively too).
No, what’s irritated me most about this advert is the sheer smug idiocy of it. Listeners who use Spotify are totally immersed — they’re lost in the music or engrossed in the podcast they’re listening to. They’re using it to block out the cruel, unfeeling world out there. To create a safe, warm haven, free from the demands and FOMO that society tried to surround us with.
And the advertising team go “Great, how can we destroy that?”
Because that IS what‘s happening here. Spotify users are totally immersed because that’s what headphones do. They help you create your own little world, free of external pressures. Whether you’re in the gym, on your commute, or driving in a car with friends, music and podcast streaming helps you block out the noise of the world around you and replace it with something you can relax into. I know that advertising is necessary for the free tier. When I’ve used streaming services, I know that the end of a song or episode is likely to bring an advert. We know that when we search for a video on YouTube, we’ll probably have to sit through an advert or two before it begins — only then can we fully relax. That’s when we get fully immersed.
You know how annoying it is when an advert comes up in the middle of a video? And not just ‘in the middle’ but specifically designed to appear right before the punchline, or the main attraction, or whatever it is you actually wanted to watch? This may be personal, but I make a mental note right then to refuse to buy whatever that product is. Surely by breaking that immersion, all you’re doing is putting people off of your product?
We can look at Spotify’s aims on their website. Their latest innovations for advertisers include an “audio advertising marketplace that enables advertisers to connect with listeners”, an “audience-centric approach to podcast buying” and their new launch of “the ability to exclude sensitive topics”.
A read of that page does leave me in dismay. I’m intrigued as to what Spotify considers ‘sensitive topics’. They’ve paid a reputed $100m to get Joe Rogan on their platform — a man who has no problem delving into controversial topics — so presumably there’s not much that’s unacceptable? Although, they have also been taking down past episodes of his. It also seems that while Joe made a lot of money, his podcast is nowhere near as influential or as far reaching as it used to be.
It’s almost as if his listeners valued the fact that they could get his podcast on a variety of platforms, and that by making it exclusive to one, he lost one of the things that was making him popular in the first place.
In the same way that YouTube’s move to 2 adverts before each video is starting to make me move to alternatives such as Nebula.
In the same way that sticking an advert in the middle of a podcast I’m listening to without any warning is going to turn me off (again, a shout out here to Blindboy and his Ocarina Pause).
In the same way that if I’m playing a game, and it gives me the choice of watching an advert to gain a power-up or skipping, and I skip, AND IT SHOWS ME THE ADVERT ANYWAY, I’m just going to delete the game.
Still, at least in games the adverts only come at the end of a level. I mean, what kind of idiot would stick an advert right in the middle of a game? You’d ruin the whole flow of playing it, right?
Oh dear.
Don’t is a semi-regular series where I despair over the disappearance of all that is good and pure in the world, and its replacement with in-app purchases.
