Grappling with the Weirdness of Advertising
A review of advertising imaginaries
The Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan Senate Bill introduced last year, aims to make online political ads subject to the same kinds of funding disclosure requirements that apply to traditional media such as television and print. Concern about online political ads is growing, even amongst ordinarily regulation-averse social media platform companies. New legislation for political ads could be a first step in a deeper, and deeply necessary, reassessment of how advertising and sponsored content function in American society: while the Honest Ads Act represents a sorely-needed rethink of political advertising rules, it only addresses one type of influence campaign in the United States, and leaves many other types unacknowledged.
While the Honest Ads Act represents a sorely-needed rethink of political advertising rules, it only addresses one type of influence campaign in the United States, and leaves many other types unacknowledged.
Essentially, the Honest Ads Act seeks to close a loophole. Back in 2011, Facebook’s legal team sought clarification about the rules for online political ads from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), as Quartz reporter Heather Timmons has documented. Facebook argued that online “electioneering” spots (ads about candidates or referenda, in other words) should be treated something like bumper stickers or button pins, where space is too limited for funding disclosures. The FEC debated the issue, but ultimately took no action. Facebook’s argument stood unchallenged.
The push for increased transparency in online political ads is a welcome development, given the chaos wrought by divisive online messaging in the 2016 election. But many have observed that closing the political advertising loophole fails to address bigger issues with how social media platforms’ advertising systems function — more specifically, how they can be used for online influence campaigns of all kinds.
Many recent concerns about online influence campaigns track back to online political advertisements, including the divisive messages seeded into Facebook groups by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), and, in addition, Cambridge Analytica’s work with the “Make America Number 1” Super PAC. In 2016, just under $10 billion was spent on US elections advertising (for context, the yearly overall ad spend for the US regularly tops $100 billion).
However, some sponsored content that was designed to influence the 2016 US election fell outside the FEC’s jurisdiction — many such campaigns did not mention a candidate, or voting, at all. The IRA did not place “electioneering” ads. Instead, IRA workers made social media posts about hot-button issues in US culture and paid a relatively small amount of money to make some of those posts more visible to targeted slices of users on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. A recently released trove of such posts shows that racial conflict, not candidates or policies, was “the Russian operation’s go-to wedge,” as New York Magazine writer Chas Danner put it.
The IRA’s use of platforms’ promotional tools reveals an uncomfortable implication: if elections-related advertising is political propaganda, then ordinary advertising and promotions can be thought of as the propaganda of everyday life.
The IRA’s use of platforms’ promotional tools reveals an uncomfortable implication: if elections-related advertising is political propaganda, then ordinary advertising and promotions can be thought of as the propaganda of everyday life. Social media platforms serve up myriad persuasive messages every day from a variety of actors, including soda companies, nonprofit organizations, and grassroots groups. Jacques Ellul (1965) called advertising, among other forms of cultural artifacts, sociological propaganda: a “diffuse…general climate” that “produces a progressive adaptation to a certain order of things” [1]. A few decades later, media historian Michael Schudson put it plainly: “advertising is propaganda, and everybody knows it” (1984, p. 4) [2].
To some degree, reframing advertising as propaganda is a matter of semantics. Nonetheless, using a charged term like propaganda in place of advertising reveals the latter term’s remarkable neutrality. Advertising is now at the center of several public controversies, all of which have implications for the functioning of democracy. It’s worth questioning whether advertising is a neutral force, and it’s worth asking, as many Americans in the twentieth century asked, what place mass and personalized persuasion campaigns have in society.
Nonetheless, using a charged term like propaganda in place of advertising reveals the latter term’s remarkable neutrality.
The controversies around Cambridge Analytica (and SCL, its parent company) demonstrate some of advertising’s messy entanglements in the present moment. Concerns about online influence campaigns extend past the limits of the FEC’s jurisdiction and into the purview of other regulatory agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which enforces non-electioneering advertising regulations. In 2011, for example, the FTC charged Facebook with allowing users’ information to be shared after telling those users that their information could be made private. In response, Facebook came to an agreement with the FTC that it would refrain from deceptive claims and take certain steps to protect users’ privacy. Now, in light of the Cambridge Analytica/SCL scandal, Facebook could face FTC penalties in the trillions of dollars.
Events like the IRA and Cambridge Analytica/SCL controversies help explain why the Honest Ads Act is necessary but insufficient. It’s one of many attempts to determine what legal protections ads need — and what legal protections from ads the American public needs. The undercurrent of both questions is an uncertainty about what advertising is good for, and what sets it apart from other kinds of communications. We’ve grappled with these limits before.
The commercialized Internet, and the combination of social media and customized advertising, have transformed the business of media in the early twenty-first century. A century earlier, American business was transformed, historian Alfred Chandler argued, by the emergence of a modern, bureaucratic corporate order [3]. Schudson comments that the early twentieth-century modern corporate order Chandler theorized included the technologies of mass production; the administrative structures of the corporation, including marketing departments; and the advertisements by which consumers learned about the new mass-produced consumer branded products [4].
The new “big business” at the heart of the modern corporate order was powerful: so much so, that its power led to a range of Congressional legislative measures designed to reign it in [5]. These measures included establishing new regulatory agencies such as the FTC, founded in 1915. Its impact on advertising was initially minimal. The FTC could intervene when big businesses’ advertising was found to be unfair to smaller competitor companies, but the agency offered no remedy (yet) for advertising that misled or deceived consumers.
The first major regulation of ad content came in the 1930s, amid mounting consumer pressure to regulate false and misleading ads. Advertising historian Inger Stole [6] has documented how Congress acted in 1938, putatively to reign in deceptive or misleading advertising — but heavy industry lobbying led to a toothless regulatory environment. As Stole explains, outright deception in ads was outlawed under 1938’s Wheeler-Lea Act, yet “puffery” — including vagueness, hyperbole, evocative language, and subtle implication — was defended by lobbyists as a form of harmless sales patter, and was thus permitted. In other words, the Wheeler-Lea Act marked a boundary of permissible persuasion.
The framing of sales puffery as a harmless marketing technique for most of the twentieth century set precedents for today’s implicit norms around commercial persuasion.
A briefly empowered FTC took steps toward stricter regulation of advertising claims in the 1970s, but these were swept back in the early 1980s through defunding and legislative curtailment of the agency’s jurisdiction, as advertising historian Molly Niesen has chronicled [7]. The framing of sales puffery as a harmless marketing technique for most of the twentieth century set precedents for today’s implicit norms around commercial persuasion. On this point, Stole highlights a long-standing contradiction: advertisers characterized puffery as harmless and ineffective; yet, advertisers often incorporate vagueness, evocation, implication and hyperbole “because they know it does indeed work” [8].
This contradictory set of claims resembles recent claims about microtargeted advertisements on social media platforms: look no further than Facebook, where CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially dismissed claims of Facebook’s influence on the 2016 election as “crazy,” even as his company reportedly showcased its success in influencing past electoral races. Facebook seemed to be saying that targeted advertising works well enough that companies and candidates should pay Facebook to help them do it; but also to be saying that it doesn’t work well enough to require legal restrictions.
In the boundaries set by the Wheeler-Lea Act, and in the notion that sales puffery is simultaneously harmless and effective, the FTC formally permitted a certain degree of persuasion in the name of salesmanship and a thriving consumer economy. This approach to commercial persuasion has implications for democracy.
Today, the platform companies under fire for facilitating targeted persuasion campaigns on their systems in 2016 are being called to respond publicly to lawmakers’ questions. Yet, in their public statements, representatives of the platform companies are incentivized to try to meet the expectations of a range of stakeholders, from lawmakers and publics to shareholders and clients. Social media platform representatives’ public statements to lawmakers in recent testimony here in the US and overseas have been rife with language that carefully omits or makes opaque the workings of persuasive technologies. One wonders whether some of this careful language is rationalized as public relations gloss or harmless puffery. Similarly, former Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix made public comments about his former company’s persuasive techniques — comments that, as Tamsin Shaw recently pointed out in the New York Review of Books, must be taken with a grain of salt because Nix’s presentation is ultimately “a sales pitch.”
Revisiting Stole’s account of landmark advertising regulation underscores that the rules and distinctions that emerge from heavy industry lobbying of regulatory agencies are often paradoxical. The Wheeler-Lea Act purported to outlaw deceptive advertising, yet permitted sales puffery that skirted the boundaries of deception.
Industrial lobbying power, combined with regulatory agencies’ mandate to set actionable distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable advertising, resulted in rules that were workable despite being, on closer inspection, absurd. These absurd-but-workable distinctions were created to fit the affordances and industrial configurations of traditional media forms. Today, the very different affordances of social media promotions, and the different commercial relationships the undergird them — different technologies of production, different organizational forms, and different understandings of what it means to be a worker, to name just a few — may be helping to collapse these distinctions altogether. The question of what protections ads themselves deserve, and to what degree people deserve to be protected from ads, is ripe for reconsideration.
Notes:
[1] Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, p. 64.
[2] Schudson, M. (1984). Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books, p. 4.
[3] Chandler, A. D. (1977). The visible hand: The managerial revolution in American business. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
[4] Schudson, M. (1984). Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society. New York: Basic Books.
[5] John, R. R. (2010). Network nation: Inventing American telecommunications. Cambridge: Belknap Press.
[6] Stole, I. (2000). Consumer protection in historical perspective: The five-year battle over Federal regulation of advertising, 1933–1958. Mass Communication & Society 3(4), 351–372. For further reading on puffery, see Hoffman, D. A. (2006). The Best Puffery Article Ever. Iowa Law Review 91, 1395.
[7] Niesen, M. (2015). From Gray Panther to National Nanny: the Kidvid Crusade and the Eclipse of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, 1977–1980. Communication, Culture & Critique 8, 576–593.
[8] Stole, I. (2000). Consumer protection in historical perspective: The five-year battle over Federal regulation of advertising, 1933–1958. Mass Communication & Society 3(4), 351–372, p. 367.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Tarleton Gillespie, Joan Donovan, Alex Rosenblat, and Patrick Davidson for feedback on earlier drafts of this post. Thanks to Robyn Caplan, danah boyd, and the Media Manipulation team at Data & Society for discussions that helped shape this post. Finally, thanks to the Communications team at Data & Society for production support.
Caroline Jack, PhD is a 2016–2018 postdoctoral scholar at Data & Society and incoming assistant professor specializing in critical studies of technology, media, and persuasion at UC San Diego.
