What if you saw an ad with your kid’s face?
Why we lose when Coca-Cola marketing meets Clinton/Trump
Imagine you are surfing the web as usual, scrolling through Facebook or using Google to settle the argument between your friends about whether or not that old celebrity is still alive.
Lately, your son has been begging you for a tricycle — and as a result, you have looked up a few on Amazon and other places. Having been cookied, you are now being served ads of tricycles, little kids, and other products that relate to what you were searching.
However, this time is different. Looking closely at the ad, you feel a familiar, almost emotional connection. This little boy is especially adorable and he is really enjoying that tricycle. You can tell. You do not know why but you really want to buy it. So you do. Marketing success!
Unknown to you, a new startup has started aggregating all your public social media photos and uses facial recognition algorithms to match them against a large database of stock photos. Using a pixel or cookie, they attach small indexed strings to pair you with a nearest-match stock photo. In the ad that sold you the tricycle, you were looking at a statistically-significant facial pair of your son.
This story is of course a product of my imagination, but it serves as starting point to ask: in striving to find new and innovative ways to personally microtarget, have we degraded the substance of our product? Let me unpack that.
Emotional targeting untamed
Online microtargeting has created a complex environment where commercial marketers can tap into data — hobbies, celebrities, athletes, causes you believe in — and specifically target you with little care for the end product. Who cares if Beats headphones are any good, as long as DJ Khaled wearing them convinces you to purchase them? YouTuber Marques Brownlee does a great job of explaining this phenomenon of how marketing costs (aka partners and pitching to celebrities) overtake research, testing and production.
“Images of movie stars and famous athletes… of elegant dinners and romantic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country — these tell nothing about the products being sold. But they tell everything about the fears, fancies and dreams of those who might buy them.” Neil Postman
The age of selling “good products” because they are “good” died a long time ago. Anyone who has taken Marketing 101 knows there are a few different successful strategies for selling something:
- Logical argument: “you need this because of this.”
- Peer pressure argument: “everyone else has this.”
- Emotional argument: “you would feel good with this.”
- Urgency argument: “you cannot wait, you have to have this now!”
The logical argument is all but dead in commercial marketing. A few large companies, like detergents and other X → Y products still sell you the argument “this will do this for you.” But most others have moved onto pitches that tap into the emotional psyche. Coca Cola or Spearmint do not tell you to drink/chew because it tastes good. They tell you to do it because everyone else is and you will love it.
Selling you your own dreams
In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman explores this “move away from the use of propositions in commercial advertising” that occurred at the dawn of television:
“The television commercial made linguistic discourse obsolete as the basis for product decisions. By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser’s claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald’s commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama — a mythology, if you will — of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claims are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.”
Freeing ourselves from having to defend our products, Postman argues, we can now spend our time learning about our customers and figuring out what each of them desires: “What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy.”
Because in the end, it does not matter if our mallet can hammer a nail effectively — all that matters is that we target athletic folks with sleek, pastel mallets that imbue the buyer with strength and target pop culture folks with gem-encrusted, celebrity branded mallets that make them feel famous.
Selling a human being
So what happens when political advertising starts making headway into this emotionally branded microtargeting? We have already seen some examples of this in the 2012 Obama campaign:
“In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.”
George Clooney was a smart play with few cons other than fleecing a few starry-eyed women out of their money. Granted, there may have been a handful of people who may have been put off by the celebrity play — but, thanks to data, they never had to see it. But what happens when microtargeting gets even scarier and more elusive? What happens when the individual targeting is so personal that it starts to deteriorate the dignity of the product itself (the person running)?
Say a northeastern Congressman running for re-election in a swing district has to broadly appeal to both strong pro-life and pro-choice women. Now, he can do what most politicians do and walk a fine line on women’s health issues or — depending on the medium and method — microtarget to both specific groups a diametrically opposite message. In a given campaign, the pro-life group gets “I am the most pro-life Congressman” video, while the pro-choice group gets the “I am the most pro-choice Congressman” video.
Most will remark that the risk to our hypothetical candidate is too high — but do we not already do this is small ways that no one notices? As media gets more siloed/tailored and parties become more hyperbolic/partisan, it is not outside the realm of possibility that microtargeting could advance to this stage. Split-messaging is already a regular occurrence and the likelihood of members on opposite sides of an issue communicating is increasingly rare.
How to split the baby?
Our jobs are to sell things. I get that. But how often are we lying? And does that affect our brand? Most will dismiss the proposition that marketing is anything more than a tool to sell and argue that ethical concerns do not have a seat at the table. But as marketers, we should strive always to communicate that our product is the best, not just because we are selling it, but because we believe it is the best.
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