Why those socially conscious ad campaigns won’t heal political divisiveness
A Wal-Mart commercial in which a diverse assortment of people carry chairs to a Pinterest-worthy outdoor dinner table. An Amazon ad about the friendship between a priest and an imam. A Heineken campaign in which opposing political views are discussed over beers. Major ad campaigns have taken a turn not just toward confronting hot-button social issues but to addressing our state of political and cultural division itself, and suggesting that consumers step outside of their comfort zones.
This is generally a good thing, and typically helps with brand perception (unless you’re a certain soda brand that hired Kendall Jenner). But there’s a catch: No brand-driven attempts to promote social inclusiveness will really be effective in creating that change until the advertising industry acknowledges and starts fixing the fact that it played a key role in sowing these cultural divisions in the first place. Until then, to use the parlance of our times, it’s just virtue signaling.
What went so wrong? To backtrack a bit, there are two major trends in media consumption that have led to the ad industry’s complicit role in widening the political and cultural divide. The first, unsurprisingly, is the fact that consumers are increasingly, and often unwittingly consuming a digest of news shared by a portfolio of contacts that has been drawn along partisan lines — the digital version of a gerrymandered congressional district. Or, as we call it, the “news feed.” (Though Facebook’s is the most famous, Twitter also uses an algorithm to weigh what users see.)
No brand-driven attempts to promote social inclusiveness will really be effective in creating that change until the advertising industry acknowledges and starts fixing the fact that it played a key role in sowing these cultural divisions in the first place.
This is what took front and center in a 2011 TED talk and later a book by Eli Pariser about the phenomenon of “filter bubbles.” Pariser, who is politically liberal, said that in spite of his attempts to curate a Facebook friends list of people from across the ideological spectrum, Facebook nevertheless prioritized his liberal friends and the left-leaning news they shared. The algorithm was sensing where he was clicking the “like” button and where he was commenting positively. Regardless of how emotionally close he was to his conservative friends, it was the liberal friends whose posts and updates he was seeing.
Facebook’s tactics are, unsurprisingly, profitable. Partisan filter bubbles have everything to do with ad dollars. A 2009 study from Ohio State University — well before the coining of the term “filter bubble” — found that consumers of news spend 36% more time with content that shares their existing viewpoints. This, to a platform, means more potential time spent looking at ads in the process — and for advertisers, that sounds like good news too (pun intended).
This brings us to the second trend at the root of the ad industry’s intimate connection to the cultural divide: The ad industry’s addiction to cheap digital clicks has resulted in dramatically low standards of viewability, transparency, and return on investment, which is in turn easily exploited by fraudsters looking to profit from outrage and partisanship. Mike Shields’ recent epic manifesto about the ad industry’s unrelenting belief in the myth of the “long tail” is a must-read, explaining the faulty logic that has caused some of the world’s biggest brands to pursue digital advertising strategies that have gotten them caught up in one ad fraud scheme after another. The idea that their brand message will benefit from the promises of “long tail” content has led to an extraordinary permissiveness when it comes to transparency and accountability. In other words, their ads are running on low-quality sites where they’re being billed for nonexistent traffic.
Some — it’s unclear how much — of this fraud is in the direct business of misinformation and the degradation of cultural dialogue. Earlier this year Wired published an excellent investigation by journalist Samanth Subramanian into one of the hotbeds of news-feed-gaming “fake news,” in Veles, Macedonia. The entire operation is a fascinating one: in the leadup to the heated 2016 presidential election, young locals were creating entirely fake partisan political news sites that look legitimate, and then sharing links from those sites relentlessly through sham Facebook profiles in order to juice up traffic through the social network’s algorithms.
But these were hardly political operatives at work. Perhaps the starkest finding was that, in Subramanian’s words, the fake news machine in Veles was “an enterprise of cool, pure amorality, free not only of ideology but of any concern or feeling about the substance of the election. These Macedonians on Facebook didn’t care if Trump won or lost the White House. They only wanted pocket money to pay for things — a car, watches, better cell phones, more drinks at the bar.” In short, it was just about the money. And while perhaps these ads didn’t swing a presidential election, they certainly pigeonholed people into tribalistic, outrage-driven digital echo chambers…in the name of selling ads.
The collision of these two trends — algorithm-curated news that shows users news and content that validates their existing beliefs, and advertisers’ blithe financial support for fraudsters looking to game those algorithms — is what has led to the ad industry’s role in stoking the political divisiveness that’s led us to where we are now. In the pursuit of cheap impressions, advertisers became the chief financial booster of the low-quality, questionable “news” outlets that have been so key in manipulating news feed algorithms to pit citizens against one another.
So what can we do about it?
First, there should be no word more important to the ad industry than “quality.” This needs to be at the center of every decision we make. Brands should have zero tolerance for the possibility that their ads might run against content that’s fake, fraudulent, or unaccountable — which, though it sounds like obvious advice, is certainly not the case right now. (As Mike Shields noted, a recent uncovering of a massive ad fraud operation was nearly identical to another that happened three years ago.) The people who are fanning the flames of divisiveness have learned to take advantage of advertising’s lax attitude to quality, and if the ad industry shaped up there would be a good chance this would no longer be able to proliferate in the way that it has.
Second, brands that want to play a role in healing cultural divides can consider additional strategies to social-awareness ad campaigns. Major brands have heretofore chosen to tackle our fragmented digital media landscape by disseminating what once would have been a mass-market message across a smattering of smaller properties — buying into the lie of the “long tail” that Shields eviscerated in his recent editorial. But simultaneously, it can be more difficult than ever for independent artists and creators to find an outlet and an audience. Brands could, instead, flip this fragmentation upside-down and use their status and international reputation to elevate those high-quality, independent storytellers who might not otherwise be heard — creators with the ability to effect social change with more sincerity than a company that’s ultimately trying to sell a product. Thanks to digital distribution it’s no longer necessary for them to rely on broadcast networks or traditional licensing deals; brand collaboration can step in.
And that’s where those brands can actually do some good. It’s what the philanthropic arm of Dick’s Sporting Goods did when it backed and publicized a niche advocacy film about a high school’s football team trying to survive the district’s budget cuts. Brands don’t have to be the arbiters of socially relevant messaging; rather, they can support the storytellers who can push it far more authentically. Rather than exaggerate its own importance — consumers will never truly like ads, after all — the ad industry can use its prominence and access to prime media real estate to elevate the stories that need to be told.
Brands have the ability to burst filter bubbles; it just isn’t the quick, easy, and trendy way to advertise. But with top CMOs estimating that the industry will lose over $16 billion to ad fraud this year, some soul-searching won’t just be the righteous path to take — it’ll be the only way to survive.
