The Decline of Mass Advertising and the Rise of Fake Influencer Culture
The collapse of broadcast TV is a crisis for brands, especially producers of consumer goods. Will synthetic personalities powered by artificial intelligence provide the solution?
I think so, and that is the topic I intend to explore in the next two articles.
Previously in this series of essays, we’ve examined various systems of establishing identity. Most recently, we’ve explored how the two very different systems for product identity have reshaped the entire business landscape, from mass media and global supply chains and big box retail.
The system of product identity that is familiar to the average person is brand-building via saturation marketing campaigns. These campaigns rely upon mass media to reach large audiences at one time. For example, think of the flood of commercials you’ll see during an NFL game when a new car or new phone is introduced.
But the mass branding era is now coming to a close, thanks to changing audience habits and fragmentation. In the two previous articles, I explored the evolution of television and its impact on the business of mass marketing. TL;DR, it’s in decline.
For more than a decade, audiences have been migrating away from traditional free-to-air broadcasting, towards more personalized media experiences, including on-demand video streaming services that are entirely devoid of advertising.
This mass migration of audience caused a steady decline of broadcast TV. The decline, in turn, has diminished the effectiveness of mass marketing and mass branding by reducing the reach and frequency of audience exposure to advertising messages.
I believe that this is a much bigger problem for advertising agencies than it is for TV producers. TV companies will find a way to survive in an on-demand OTT world, but mass marketers might not.
So we’re not really facing a television crisis. TV will be fine. We’re dealing with a crisis for brands and advertisers. These people need an intervention.
Blind Spots in Traditional Advertising
The folks that manage big brands are keenly aware of the fact that television and video are changing, and yet their response to the looming crisis has been slow and uneven.
There is nothing surprising about the demise of broadcasting: the downfall has been coming slowly and inexorably during the past twenty years. What is surprising is the failure by brand managers to anticipate it and to take meaningful steps to prepare for this change.
A fair portion of blame for this lackluster performance can be laid right in the gleaming marble reception lobby of the major advertising agencies who have been unable or unwilling to evolve the way they do business. The old business model of media buying is simply too lucrative to change. The agencies depend upon it. That’s their Achilles heel.
They are not “too big to fail”. They are “too fat to adapt.”
The Mega-Agencies Do Not Innovate
Since the 1980s, four enormous holding companies drove relentlessly towards global consolidation of the advertising agency business, devouring thousands of standalone regional ad agencies in every corner of the planet.
This was a financially-driven process intended to eradicate inefficiency in operations by eliminating redundant back-office functions and support personnel. Greater scale meant greater power to negotiate better media deals.
No surprise, then, that these super-sized firms prefer to cling to the old business model of buying and selling media space rather than go through the painful process of building an entirely new business model that is optimized for the digital domain. But that leaves them ineffective and vulnerable in the only sector that is growing, namely digital media.
Putting the same ads everywhere
The drive for global scale and efficiency left the big agency holding companies with a giant-sized blind spot. They failed to foster the creative and technical talent that understood new digital platforms as an entirely new medium. Instead, the big agencies viewed the Web as just another way to deliver TV-style display ads, and in some ways the advertising on the Internet today resembles exact that: a junkyard of old advertising techniques imported from old media.
Google and Facebook made it easy for the agencies. The two big ad networks grew linearly with every additional new user of the Internet, so they offered the easy path to global reach. As streaming video gradually surpassed text and banner graphics as the primary content of the Web, the big ad networks sent the advertising agency holding companies a seductive message: “Don’t change a thing. Just give us your video spots.”
Instead of promoting innovation and new ways to engage consumers, the Internet giants offered big agencies the chance to repeat the exact same thing they had done for sixty years in television: video adverts. Only this time the delivery of the commercials was “more targeted”.
Old Wine in Virtual Bottles
The advent of digital video made life very easy for agencies. They could make the same product for the exact same customers: they just needed to learn how to deliver it via digital media. That’s why they never mastered the process of creating original native experiences in the digital domain.
Other industries went through digital disruption the hard way, by painfully reworking every step in their business process to accommodate new technology, a new consumer habit and a new distribution channel. The survivors of that process have adapted to continuous incremental re-invention as a way of life. As a result, the survivors in the hardest-hit industries are now lean and mean, prepared for digital survival.
Advertising agencies? Not so much. They grew complacent because they could still eke out a reasonable profit by doing more-or-less the exact same thing they did in the 1980s by treating the Web like another kind of TV screen.
The ad agencies never confronted the same sort of cataclysmic life-or-death disruption that carved off whole huge chunks of the music industry, the newspapers, the travel industry, and retail. These industries saw their revenue model implode during the transition to the digital domain. Those who adapted were those who survived. But advertising has not been put to the test.
As an illustration, consider the collapse of the music business. From 1999 to 2010, the music industry lost 80% of its value. What emerged from that collapse was a leaner, meaner music label that was better adapted to the digital domain. Companies were re-shaped. Overpriced accountants and vice presidents of A&R were jettisoned; the sleazy bullies who ran the labels in the 1980s were put out to pasture. Radio collapsed. Satellite radio was marginalized. CD sales plummeted. Record labels merged together.
The entire music industry was forced to migrate to a digital-first footing… or die. The concept of flat-rate subscription streaming music services is not new: it was well understood in the early 2000s, but most labels resisted it because it was considered an unthinkable heresy to unbundle the album. Now flat rate all-you-can-eat music streaming is well-established and growing profitably. It is the most vibrant sign of resurgence in the music industry and it is driving a creative renaissance in genres and music styles. The industry adapted and survived.
Those same life-and-death forces are now in the process of reshaping the auto industry, banking, health care and government. But not the ad agencies. They are still cranking out linear :30 and :15 spots, just like they did in 1986.
Same product, different platform.
What happened to music probably should have happened to advertising, too. And for a little while it seemed like that might occur. But by 2006 streaming video emerged as the primary form of content on broadband, and the pressure was off.
The agencies got a reprieve. Internet video meant that they could keep doing exactly the same sort of unimaginative advertising that they did in the 1980s… but now they could interrupt us across the web and social and on our smartphones instead of only on TV.
Most of the technological innovation in the advertising industry during the past decade has focused on more efficient buying and targeting of media inventory. These firms continue to buy and sell attention but the quantum unit of attention has narrowed to a single impression upon a single individual smartphone instead of 30 seconds of exposure in front of a broad demographic segment simultaneously.
Sure, the big agency holding companies now employ data scientists and buy-side exchanges for hyper-efficient programmatic media purchasing, but these are mere tweaks on an ancient business model. They are still matching advertisers and audiences. The only difference is that it happens in real time instead of 8 months in advance via the annual TV upfront.
What’s missing? There is no evidence of foundation-level innovation in the entire advertising industry. Particularly, the creative function of the advertising agency is missing in action.
For a couple of years around 2010 there was talk of “engagement” as the new metric of brand-building, but the industry never achieved a solid consensus on how to measure and quantify the value of engagement.
As digital media evolves in the direction of content experiences that are more immersive, more personalized and more demanding of focused attention, and as the old advertising model declines, I expect the concept of “engagement” to make a comeback.
Here’s why. In an on-demand media environment, advertisers will need to persuade us to spend time with their messages instead of interrupting our preferred entertainment and hijacking our awareness for a few seconds, as they currently do. The old technique no longer works.
Yet ad agencies persist in the conviction that interrupting people during their favorite programs can be useful, welcome or significant. It is not.
Interruption advertising is a crude and inefficient mechanism. At the exact moment when a show you enjoy gets interesting, the advertiser interrupts you with not one but six or eight ads of varying quality. This is jarring. It degrades the entertainment experience.
The firms that rely upon such campaigns are maladapted to the digital domain. The advertising business is stagnant, and that’s because old-school advertising is laughably irrelevant in digital media.
Take a look at any news site and you’ll see 75% of the page slathered with display ads, pop-up ads, roadblock ads, and more clutter. Barely a quarter of the screen real estate is left for the actual content. Yet nobody clicks. Nobody even notices these annoyances.
No wonder half of Web consumers have opted to install ad blockers and are migrating en masse to ad-free OTT video streaming services.
A decade or more in the future, I believe that people will look back at the era of mass media and mass marketing that lasted from 1950 to 2020 and wonder how anyone could have tolerated the clutter of interruption ads.
The failure of the agencies to engage creatively with the interactive potential of the Web created a vacuum. The influencers filled that void.
The Rise of the Influencers
It’s an axiom of our time that we live in an information economy, but perhaps it would be more accurate to describe this as an attention economy. When each of us is bombarded by a constant barrage of media messages all day, every day, attention is the scarcest commodity.
That’s why every element in the current digital environment is optimized for garnering and keeping attention.
As the economist Herbert Simon put it: “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”
And this is exactly where the big ad agencies went wrong. When attention is scarce (and therefore valuable), interruption advertising represents a kind of theft. Ads that come between the audience and the content hijack our attention, diverting it towards a different message. The ads literally steal the value in our attention, however briefly. No surprise that consumers reject this.
(Edit: just as I finished publishing this article, an excellent study of the Attention Economy was released on the ReDef.com site. Worthwhile reading here.)
If we are no longer watching interruption-style advertising, what are we paying attention to? In the case of Gen Z, it is something else entirely.
Youtube and Instagram were the launchpads for a type of user-generated content that was initially unclassifiable, but thanks to the relentlessly Darwinian forces of competition for views, has rapidly evolved into something referred to as “influencer media.”
On YouTube, influencer media consists of a real, non-celebrity person talking straight into the camera about something they happen to be passionate about: games, food, raising children, fashion, makeup, whatever. No matter what topic, they tend to begin with the same sing-song style, “Hey guys, today we’re gonna talk about something really important.” On Instagram, influencer media is a mix of video and photos, typically accompanied by text with a tip or some advice, followed by a mess of hashtags.
Who are the influencers? Anyone with a camera, a big mouth and enough wit and originality to garner and sustain the attention of a sizable audience. The best of the influencers have tens of millions of followers. Their reach exceeds that of a cable TV channel in primetime.
These are not normal people.
Influencers are freaks of the digital age. The most successful influencers are a peculiar byproduct of the Attention Economy because they have evolved to garner as much attention as possible.
If we were to trace their lineage, we might conclude that influencers are the misbegotten offspring of the worst of low-grade mass media, the evil love child of a dysfunctional reality TV star and an obnoxious shock jock from talk radio.
This is no accident.
By definition, the people most likely to succeed in a competition to attract audience attention are narcissists. Daredevils who will do anything for views and likes. Obnoxious big mouths who utter shocking opinions.
An attention economy rewards those who are best at getting people to look at them. Relentless competition has bred into these evolutionary survivors of the media glut an unerring instinct for garnering views, regardless of how that happens.
Influencers are engagement monsters. They live and breath audience engagement. They have succeeded spectacularly where the ad agencies failed.
Naturally brands find influencers somewhat irresistible.
But there’s one problem with sponsoring narcissists: they make terribly unreliable spokespeople. That’s because self-obsessed people who lack discretion and boundaries have a tendency to wander off the reservation.
Influencers can be breathtakingly clueless. They bungle client-approved copy, they get into unseemly spats and contrived public fights, they shake down hotels for free room nights, they rig contests and get caught, they breach contracts, they rip off their biggest fans, they get busted by the Federal Trade Commission, they indulge in casual racism, they throw furniture off the 45th floor of condo towers, they kick policemen when they are drunk, they occasionally blurt out hateful nonsense, they deface public artwork, they shamelessly co-opt natural disasters for self-promotion, they use dead people as props, and they sometimes melt down in a mournfully self-pitying manner laced with f-bombs.
All this while they rake in millions in product endorsement fees. Except when those sponsorship deals are fake. Or when they are paid $75K to denigrate rival products with negative reviews.
Wouldn’t it be nice for advertisers if there were a different kind of influencer?
Imagine a new kind of influencer. One who is sassy and provocative and funny and cool… but who never, ever goes rogue. An influencer that can be controlled, manipulated, directed and — most importantly — owned.
Say Hello to Virtual Influencers
Miquela Sousa, a 19-year-old Brazilian-American model, has more than 1.5 million followers on Instagram and deals with the luxury brand Chanel and Prada and street fashion brand Supreme. She has released a series of auto-tuned singles on YouTube and Spotify, where they’ve garnered millions of plays. She’s been featured in billboards from London to Japan for Uggs.
Oh, and one more thing: she’s entirely fake.
Miquela is the most famous of a gaggle of artificial personas generated by Brud, an LA-based agency that claims, unconvincingly, to be developing robotics.
What Brud actually seems to specialize in is generating fake controversy around unreal personalities.
Miquela rose to fame with a phony incident in which her Instagram account was hacked by another artificial personality named Bermuda. This farcically contrived controversy was eclipsed by a more calculated incident in which the virtual female kissed (the real) supermodel Bela Haddid in a Calvin Klein ad. Some decried the stunt as queerbaiting; others celebrated the advent of digisexuality. Calvin Klein Underwear, no stranger to publicity that depends upon contrived outrage, issued a perfunctory lame apology which gave it yet another shot at prominence during the next news cycle.
The advent of virtual influencers is simultaneously weird and predictable. As a trend, it’s emblematic of our post-truth era of non-stop fake news mired in a swamp of alternative facts.
In addition to Brud’s brood, a growing number of virtual personalities have appeared on Instagram, including Shudu Gram, Liam Nikuro, Lil Wavi, the purportedly middle eastern Laila Blue, the bobbleheaded Noonouri, Japanese Imma.gram, Koffi.gram. Each character is artfully calibrated for maximum impact, ie: controversy, culture shock, emotional reaction, phony outrage, spiking the next hype cycle, generating viral buzz, etc.
These are manufactured identities, perfectly optimized to challenge conventions, embody stereotypes, flatter certain vanities and preferences, provoke others, and stir the social media waters. Their very existence generates intense controversy. And as the brilliant minds at Facebook taught us, nothing stimulates engagement as much as controversy: “Angry people click.”
But there’s one more aspect of virtual influencers that warrants a closer look. There’s something weird going on in our culture today: fakeness is being normalized.
We’re gradually being conditioned to accept, and even expect, a heaping helping of bullshit served alongside whatever information we consume. In this aspect, virtual influencers are not a driver of the phenomenon, they are its byproduct.
Cameron-James Wilson, the photographer who designed and created Shudu Gram, points to the blurring boundaries between real and fake, saying “A lot of what we see in media is trying to be less real, with filters and makeup. Shudu is coming from the other direction. She is fantasy trying to break through into reality, and I have plans to help her do so.”
Apparel marketers understand Wilson’s message intuitively because, after all, high fashion is all about impossible aspirations and unattainable desires mingled with shame and surface-level deception. High fashion brand Balmain introduced two wholly-owned virtual influencers, Margot and Zhi, who were designed by Cameron-James Wilson.
For brands that seek to foster an association with the disruptive potential of cutting edge tech trends and street fashion, virtual influencers seem like a no-brainer. Glamour, high style, exoticism without the baggage of history or real world relationships. No embarrassing arrests. No naughty behavior. All the buzz without the rap sheet.
Not quite.
These characters look interesting but they are devoid of, well, … character. Sure, their minders may append all the right hashtags and sometimes espouse LGBT rights and other predictable political stances, but they aren’t very funny, spontaneous or interesting. They just look great. One millimeter deep.
And that’s where KFC’s new advertising campaign comes into this narrative. To me, this campaign is the only glimmer of hope that advertising agencies have a chance to remain relevant in the new world.
The Hyper-Spiritual, yet Blatantly-Branded Influencer Bot.
I’ve been eager to see some mainstream brand, led by a creative agency, dip a toe into the virtual influencer waters. With their latest campaig for KFC, Portland-based Weiden and Kennedy exceeded my hopes. They skipped right past the toe dipping and belly-flopped straight into the deep end. The results are hilarious.
KFC is nobody’s idea of a cool brand, nor is it health food. It’s fried chicken, for goodness’ sake. And Colonel Sanders is a crusty old white dude with a goatee. Or at least, he was…until he got a virtual makeover.
In the new Weiden + Kennedy incarnation, Colonel Sanders is a computer-generated virtual influencer. He’s younger and leaner, sporting a torso tattoo and a newfound spiritual outlook. He touts his “secret recipe for success” as well as a series of faux-inspirational tropes, nattering on about his quest for culinary discoveries and personal fulfillment.
Some frustrated copywriter in Portland must have had a blast ventilating her contempt for the vacuous musings of the typical influencer.
“I may be a restaurant mogul and an international sensation, but I’m still just a kid who loves being in the kitchen. #humble.” wrote the Colonel (or his copywriters) on the @KFC instagram account. “Never lose the things that made you who you are.”
It’s a wicked double parody of the air-headed, self-absorbed Instagram influencers and the superficial but empty coolness of virtual influencers. And it bites the hand of the paymaster, too, by tweaking the outdated Colonel Sanders persona.
The copywriters at Weiden + Kennedy cleverly placed the virtual Colonel in Joshua Tree, on a private jet, hugging a horse, cavorting with a virtual supermodel. All photos are accompanied by the Colonel’s pretentious spiritual aphorisms, a cascade of hashtags and even some brand partnerships with Dr Pepper, TurboTax and others. All manufactured.
Not one pixel of this campaign is real. And that’s what makes it so, uhm, right for our time.
Finally. At least one brand has figured out that engagement with virtual spokespeople can be an occasion for fun and playful hijinks. And at least one advertising agency has figured out a non-earnest way to drive engagement in social media. I consider it the best advertising campaign of 2019.
Bear in mind, so far the virtual influencers consist mainly of photoshopped images and 3D computer generated graphics. The words and scenarios are still scripted by human beings.
What might happen if we merge virtual influencers with artificial intelligence? For that, you’ll need to read my next article. Read it here.
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I am writing about identity — both product identity and brand identity, as well as human identity. The previous post in this series is called “How to Construct a Brand Identity in Minutes” You can read it here. If you enjoy it, share it with a friend. If not, share it with a random stranger and then move away quickly.
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Digital identity is a complex and sometimes bewildering topic. I’m writing this series of articles to help clarify my own understanding, and I welcome your comments, corrections and contributions. If the topics in this series of articles interest you, then why not join me for a discussion in person? I will be the host and master-of-ceremonies for the Innovation Track of GS1 Connect, the biggest gathering of supply chain experts in the world. I will interview the leading experts on digital identity in a roundtable discussion at GS1 Connect on June 19
If you are interested in any of the urgent topics that pertain to digital identity and product identity, such as blockchain for supply chain, business process automation, the application of artificial intelligence to manufacturing and retail, then this is a conversation you don’t want to miss.
This year, GS1 Connect takes place in Denver Colorado on June 19 to 21..
For 30 years, I’ve been focused on designing and launching new digital services. In the process, I’ve grown fascinated with the way we are constructing a digital version of the real world. During my career, I’ve supervised the launch of the world’s first mobile video services, some of the earliest PC games, online games and mobile games, and the biggest live online learning programs in the world. I’m also the author of the award-winning book Vaporized: Solid Strategies for Success in a Dematerialized World which you can read in entirety here on Medium (or if you are feeling generous, you can buy the book on Amazon . Thanks, I love you for that!). Today I serve as the Special Advisor for Digital Identity to GS1 US. GS1 is the global standards body for product identity.
