Online Ads: A Necessary Evil?
By Megha Nair (UG 24), Edited by Rhea Hajarnavis (UG 23)
We’ve all had our patience tested sometime or other seeing ads spring out of seemingly nowhere at the start, end, or — most annoyingly — right in the middle of a perfectly engaging YouTube video, an Instagram reel spree, or even a nail-biting IPL broadcast. These unwelcome and out-of-context intrusions are so pervasive and so taxing on the average viewer that they beg the question — why? Why do companies feel the need to engage eyeballs in such an arbitrary way? Are they getting their message across or simply ruffling feathers on a mass scale? Is there no alternate revenue-generating business model that is more receptive to a watcher’s needs without asking for a premium? And is there an inherent paradox where ads drive away more customers than they lure in? This article seeks to explore some of these questions by analyzing the customer-business dynamic, certain aspects of behavioral economics, the psychology of advertising, and the complicated paradigm of people and profit.
To make any sense of why advertisements exist the way they do, we first need to understand the money flow surrounding their operation both behind closed doors and out in the open. The most rudimentary function of online ads is to increase visibility by establishing a presence where there is most traffic. In today’s day and age that includes social media apps such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and other streaming platforms like Amazon and Hotstar. The idea behind floating an ad, whether we’re talking big businesses or small start-ups, is to get the word out and appeal to the lowest common denominator in hopes that casting a wider net will assure a reasonable catch. In a sense, this is a gamble where those who spend the most stand to gain, inviting many instances of unfair competition and abuse of market position. Here is also where social intermediaries and other hosts enter the picture, filtering out those companies that give them the biggest cut to advertise using their platforms. We see this most explicitly on news websites where ads outnumber articles unless the reader pays a premium to make up for the revenue loss that this privilege entails. Most of us have also directly encountered this on Spotify, YouTube, or Amazon. Such digital marketing is intended to generate conversation, leave an impression and, in the best of cases, convert into direct sales. But ‘conversion’ might mean different things to different companies based on their goals and priorities. For some, getting on a mailing list through ads is considered a win while some subscribe to the more conventional idea of using ads to manipulate user behavior favorably and increase sales. Facebook ads have an ad-to-sales conversion rate of 9–10% on average, which is a little higher than that of Google Ads. Yet, more than 80% of Alphabet’s revenue comes from their Google Ads vertical. These corporate goals are often the motives behind ‘annoying’ above-the-line advertisements that cater to a mass market.
What is it then about ads that companies routinely put their money behind? If most people consider them to be maddening, why are they constantly bombarded with the same? The answer is a little more complicated than one might imagine, and it has to do with the way we — the customers — behave in response to them. The psychology of advertising is more than just a click or a close. The average person might have the wherewithal to resist the urge to spend money on a product simply because they’ve seen a cleverly curated jingle, punchline, or visual on their feed. However, companies often aren’t aiming that high. Some are more interested in exerting a form of soft power that, over time, compels an unassuming customer or two to experiment with their choices. They do this by playing on strong emotions such as fear, love, pleasure, vanity, curiosity, etc and it is very frequently a hit-or-miss modus operandi for ad makers. There are very real and arguably legitimate reasons for the unsolicited presence of pop-up advertisements that annoy us at the best of times. Pop-up ads capitalize on the desire for instant gratification and the inherent fear of missing out on a potentially valuable piece of information. Popping colors such as red, blue, or yellow are also used to give advertisements convincing undertones — purple, for example, is used to show royalty, luxury, and wisdom. These are prime examples of the ‘framing effect’ which is a cognitive bias where people make decisions based on whether a thing is shown as being positive or negative; e.g. a toothpaste ad where the product being sold is presented as better than its counterparts. Phrases such as ‘One Day Only’ or ‘Limited Period Offer’ are read as calls to action to emphasize that time is of the essence and consumers need to act fast if they want in.
Fear is also used extensively in medical and health ads to concoct life-threatening situations if the product isn’t used. Fun and pleasure ideals are used in advertising for beer, theme parks, cigarettes, and specific types of automobiles. Love is another primal emotion that is invoked in jewelry or wedding apparel ads while vanity phrases such as ‘The Latest and Greatest’ or ‘You Deserve’ are designed to appeal to the consumer’s innate sense of pride and well-being. Celebrity endorsements and expert backing are ad hominem tools that often use the ‘halo effect’ to extend positive impressions associated with celebrities to the choices that consumers make. Nostalgia and memories are also exploited to increase the emotional quotient of the ad in addition to its rationality. In today’s world of short attention spans, these shock-and-awe advertisements are often the only way to get the mass base’s attention. Typical online readers only spend 15 seconds on a web page, and it’s the paid-for top searches on Google that get close to 34% of the traffic in this short span. What revenue that might translate to is anyone’s guess.
Still, why take the route of ads as opposed to all else? Isn’t the lasting allure of a platform like Netflix in the fact that it subverts the entire question of ads and has a simple business model where a standard price is quoted for a product? The direct answer to this is just that ads work. They’ve been working well for companies so far, and they’ve been working on viewers too on a subconscious level. While we may, at the outset, look at ads as this major price to pay to do anything online — we’d much rather be wooed by sugar-coated information on the screen than being asked to pay from our pockets for content that has now assumed the importance of oxygen. An ad may hold no particular significance to one’s solo context, but we can rest assured that it has been designed with a very specific target audience in mind. It is simplistic to assume that all ads are unwelcome. Some may be extremely informative and enhancing to a particular group, and corporates don’t mind exasperating many to get to those few. In recent times, we also see a concerted effort to streamline ads based on one’s preferences using AI that deduces information through your recent google searches or idle website-window shopping. Someone or something is always watching and ready to pounce.
This brings us back to what exactly ads stand for, and whether they are necessary or evil or both. The fact is that advertisements either reflect the status quo or push it through the product, which is to say that it is a vital part of the corporate food chain as well as a tool of social commentary. It isn’t entirely removed from our social vices and desires. That said, there is an argument to be made for how much agency a consumer deserves when it comes to buying a product, and whether unwarranted prodding such as that like pop-up ads is excusable in the grander scheme of things. Perhaps customized ads or adequate ad-blockers or extensions provide certain answers, but the ad space is still a grey area in terms of ethics and otherwise. Now that there are whole industries built around digital marketing and effective advertising, one can only hope that they figure out strategies that are driven by variables other than just an abstract maximization of profit. But online ads are here to stay until a better alternative pops up!
Megha Nair (UG24) is an intended Political Science or Psychology major at Ashoka University. She is interested in exploring the role of behavioural science in policy-making and how the two interact with each other in real world scenarios. She has a penchant for putting pen to paper on varied topics, and engages in writing as a way to comprehend complex topics.
