It makes sense to start this category with warning. Marshall McLuhan was most famous for his insight – The medium is the message: it isn’t just the content of a media which matters, but the medium itself which most meaningfully changes the ways humans operate.
But McLuhan wasn’t an advocate of it, he saw dangers beneath the surface as this quote from his participation in the 1976 Canadian Forum shows.
“The violence that all electric media inflict in their users is that they are instantly invaded and deprived of their physical bodies and are merged in a network of extensions of their own nervous systems. As if this were not sufficient violence or invasion of individual rights, the elimination of the physical bodies of the electric media users also deprives them of the means of relating the program experience of their private, individual selves, even as instant involvement suppresses private identity. The loss of individual and personal meaning via the electronic media ensures a corresponding and reciprocal violence from those so deprived of their identities; for violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.”
McLuhan was concerned with the mass media, in particular the effect of television on society. Yet the content is atemporal. I am sure the warning would have fitted in with rock and roll singles during the 1950s or social media platforms today.
I am concerned not only changes in platforms and consumer behaviour but the interaction of those platforms with societal structures.
Interesting interview with author Steve Saxty on how BMW as a modern car brand came into being as the ultimate driving machine and a discussion on what eventually became the 1-series. The brand value of it being the ultimate driving machine actually came from a review by US magazine Road & Track in the early 1970s.
This seems to have parlayed itself into an internal insight at the company and was then manifested in advertising by the 1980s. I remember seeing an interview with an ad exec at the UK agency claiming that it was an insight they had come up with. The truth can be a pesky thing.
The phrase itself worked really well from the small lightweight sporty saloons that Road and Track loved to the large executive models of the 7-series. Whatever your criteria was, BMW positioned itself as the ultimate driving machine.
Bob Hoffman is a long-time ad man and long-time commentator who points out the foibles of technology-driven marketing. His book 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising is a good read for anyone jumping on a plane. Hoffman has recently given away two books in electronic format Inside the black box focuses on the online advertising industrial complex, MKTG STINX takes a broader brush to things.
BBC coverage of GAA All-Ireland hurling final
For a long time BBC Northern Ireland have covered the key GAA matches. But this was the first time that the main BBC network carried the GAA All Ireland hurling final. 3pm I sat down in front the television to watch the BBC with volume down and my Mac playing the RTE Radio 1 commentary through its speakers. This is the same way as I have listened to the game all my life and I wasn’t going to change now. But it was refreshing that I didn’t have to trek out to a pub or fiddle with a VPN to secure video of the game. Cork vs. Clare gave hurling neophytes a great introduction with the winning score done during the last play of extra time.
Thamesmead time’s up
I have a soft spot for brutalism as an architecture style. I put this down to the clinic I was taken to as a small child which was part of a bigger civic centre including a library. It had massive concrete features and overhangs. It was quiet inside, great to climb and play on outside and the overhangs kept the hottest sun away from the massive round windows.
Brutalism felt comforting and futuristic, which was probably why Stanley Kubrick shot key parts of A Clockwork Orange in Thamesmead. But the Peabody Trust are well on their way to demolishing Thamesmead’s iconic buildings.
Zynternet is a portmanteau made up of Zyn and internet. If you’re reading this internet is self-explanatory, the Zyn in question is tabacco-free Skoal bandit type nicotine pouches. Zyn comes in a tin and has various flavours.
According to journalist Max Read, the Zynternet is a kind of 90s to early 2000s sports obsessed ‘lad’ type culture; but in the 2020s. There are shades of ‘white van man’ in there as well.
a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings–mostly but by no means entirely male–has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture.
Despite Read’s definition defining it as a 20 to 30-something thing, the subculture seems to bleed into 40-something Dads and draws on creators like Barstool Sports. They’re less extreme than the Andrew Tate acolytes. They care more about sports and professional golf than they do about current affairs and politics. But they’ll be voting Republican. They like college sports, sports betting, light beers and Zyn nicotine pouches.
The culture has grown prominent on the laissez-faire Musk era Twitter.
Zynternet stretch
It would be very easy to point to the Zynternet audience and draw parallels to the ‘proles’ of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. And then go down a dystopian k-hole.
I’ll leave the last words to David Ogilvy for those despairing about the Zynternet:
You aren’t advertising to a standing army; you are advertising to a moving parade. Three million consumers get married every year. The advertisement which sold a refrigerator to those who got married last year will probably be just as successful with those who’ll get married next year. An advertisement is just like a radar sweep, constantly hunting new prospects as they come into the market. Get a good radar and keep it sweeping.
David Ogilvy
TL;DR if you’re not reaching the zynternet, you’re probably not doing political marketing properly. More related content here.
Content or couture? Balenciaga’s 30-minute dress becomes the flashpoint of the season | Vogue Business – “It feels a little like a fast fashion iteration of haute couture,” says Victoria Moss, fashion director of The Standard, of the swirling mass of black nylon. “This feels at odds with what fashion at this level should be, which is exquisitely made pieces that somewhat justify their extreme pricing.” She adds that many invest in couture to have garments perfectly fitted to their bodies — and made to last for years.
“Is it beautiful? That’s debatable. Is it impressive? Not really. Is it brazen? Absolutely. Is it a meditation on the creative process? Maybe. Are we bored of these kinds of gimmicks at Balenciaga? Clearly not, as Demna’s work continues to be both a lightning rod and a conversation starter. “Call it ‘pret-a-polarize’,” says fashion journalist and ‘Newfash’ podcast host Mosha Lundström. “To my eye and understanding, I see this look as content rather than couture.”
Japan declares victory in effort to end government use of floppy disks | Reuters – yes stories like this are funny because ‘modern’ Japan with its flip phones, fax machines and floppy discs are an anachronism. But there’s a few other things to consider. There might be issues in terms of investment a la the NHS and critical systems that for whatever reason can’t be ported on to modern systems (like the problems had with security based on ActiveX).
Dumb systems also have security benefits, you can’t steal nearly as much data on even a compressed floppy disk as you can on a USB stick.
Interesting use cases for generative AI in China which sounds like a plot line from Ghost In The Shell.
Baidu – World No. 1? – Radio Free Mobile – is Baidu ERNIE really the number one generative AI service? It depends on if the numbers are true. 14 million developers, 950,000 models within the eco-system
China plays down importance of lithography tools in semiconductor challenges – Interesting report from Taiwan’s DigiTimes semiconductor trade magazine: China seems to be deliberately playing down the importance of lithography tools as it identifies the challenges for the development of its semiconductor industry in a recently published dossier.
By the time Media Virus came out, Douglas Rushkoff was a public intellectual with the same kind of cultural impact of Simon Sinek back in the 1990s and early 2000s. I went back to read Media Virus for the first time in decades. The book design feels very dot com, with neon colour details a la early Wired magazine and discordant font use that owed a bit to Neville Brody. There was even the obligatory exclamation mark that said early web like Yahoo!.
Media Virus looked at how stories and ideas became mobile across media and reaching people. Despite its cyberpunk and counterculture styling it touched online very lightly with one chapter looking at how things spread on the Usenet as a glorified bulletin board. About the time Rushkoff was writing the Mosaic web browser had been released and Netscape Navigator was about get published. Rushkoff didn’t address the more prevalent ‘big three’ information providers at the time: CompuServe, Prodigy and America Online.
The book focused much more television and the revolution that video camcorders provided to media production. Power that would now sit in the average smartphone. Rushkoff also covered ‘zines’ self published print publications, ad jamming – defacing out of home billboards to make a statement and even protests. The protests felt very much of the now, particularly with the Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion happenings which gain little support from the general public affected.
With hindsight what comes through Media Virus was that is was less about the future of media and mass media past. Media Virus documented the last hurrah of 1960s counter-culture that probably wasn’t even a youth-led movement but driven by middle-aged intelligentsia that kept doing what it had been doing for decades. It borrowed ‘trade dress’ from cyberpunk, rave culture and gay activism.
The media viri of the book title were largely about transgression, or rejection of norms, which was the negative space of youth culture at that time and can be seen in advertising until the financial crisis of 2008.
Reading about gay community activism by ACT UP around the treatment of AIDS was as much about demanding patient-centricity from healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies, as it was about the disease. Decades later and the pharmaceutical industry is still on a journey to patient-centricity. There is still price gouging for different medications by pharmaceutical companies and commercial entities between the manufacturer and the health system.
Because of the extraordinary measures that the activists had taken, every network news show carried pictures of the event and then took the time to explain the views of these AIDS “terrorists.”
Meanwhile the opportunity to feed back through the media radically changed the “personas with AIDS” self-image. Refusing to be called AIDS “victims” or “sufferers,” PWAs experienced the discovery of their own iterative potential as a turning point in their lives.
Rushkoff like media thinkers up to the late 2000s believed that the media was a threat to authoritarian regimes rather than open to being co-opted by them:
This is why the Ayatollah chose to react to Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses with an assassination edict. A state based in fundamentalist order cannot survive in the data ocean. Ironically, if New York’s Seven Days magazine is correct, Rushdie’s whole saga turns out to be the result of an extremely successful (so to speak) media virus. Rushdie’s agent, the magazine suggests , concerned about initially poor sales, himself sent the Ayatollah a copy of the book, hoping to stir something up. Needless to say, the virus worked.
Media Virus is an artefact of our past, convinced that it is a blueprint for our future. The present reality is much more banal and dystopian than Rushkoff could have realised back in 1994 when Media Virus was published.
This post on the end of culture as inspired by a presentation. Pip Bingemann of Springboards.ai presented at Cannes in Cairns – a marketing festival for Australians who wouldn’t be able to go to the Cannes Festival of Advertising. Pip’s presentation touched with things I had seen about the end of culture and had some interesting points within it. I didn’t agree with a lot of Pip said, some of it was down to nuance, but appreciated the journey that it took.
I have built the main headers around Pip’s slides, strap in for the end of culture.
What’s wrong with advertising?
Bingemann’s presentation as in praise of the disruption that (generative) AI was bringing. The thesis he put forward was that ‘machines’ had already messed up the advertising and media industries.
Advertising became self-service in nature.
There had been a move in online media to relevance over distinctiveness
We became slaves to numbers
Let’s look at those elements first.
Advertising became self-service in nature
Like the technological disruption of banking in the past with:
Postal banking
Automatic teller machines
Telephone banking
Online banking
Meta and Google’s advertising platform democratised media buying. Years ago a guy I have lost touch with used to be a manager at a McDonald’s branch in the west end of London.
Before cellphones became commonplace he had a side hustle. He used the restaurant telephone to phone up the newspapers, to book small ads. The newspapers had advertising sales teams, that he would speak to. He did it once for a friend and then word got around. Eventually, he was calling for businesses across Soho. Premium line suppliers, porn publishers and adult mail order catalogue companies. Eventually they needed the ads to be designed. This work was done alongside creating porn DVD covers and other marketing material.
He built a small successful agency off the back of it based in Soho. The agency remained in Soho until it was priced out by the fund management firms who moved in. Lots of other small businesses did the same for their plumbing business or hair salon. Their adverts would run in local newspapers across the country.
For more sophisticated ads like large print ads, television or cinema advertising; help was needed. This help got the ad ready, made sure that the publication received the artwork on time and in a format that they could use. They made sure that the artwork was presented in the manner agreed. With the likes of television, the advert might have to go through regulatory approval prior to publication.
If you were a larger brand with a national or international campaign, further help was needed in pre-testing and orchestration. Expertise might be needed to access more regulated markets while remaining on the right side of the law.
Technology allowed newspaper type adverts to be easily accessed by both agencies and brands.
TLDR: Advertising has been self-serving for decades, but I will grant that online allowed more sophisticated formats such as videos, colour photos and carousels. AND regulation has been slower to police advertising online, for instance YouTube ads don’t get the scrutiny that TV ads get.
Relevance over distinctiveness and slaves to numbers
The move to relevance over distinctiveness in online media was down to where online media was in the customer journey. It was (and for the most part still is at the bottom of the funnel).
Relevance made sense, particularly in search advertising. The first online adverts such as Craigslist classified and display ads were conceptually similar to their equivalents in the back pages of newspaper advertising. Newspaper ads were served in sections: cars for sale, homes for sale, local businesses, cinema listings, vets or pharmacies with a late closing time.
Search and many banner ad campaigns for that matter are about the last step (hopefully) before purchase. In the old pre-internet world, they would be direct mail or the direct response adverts that used to appear in magazines or the special offers beloved of shopper marketing.
Distinctiveness appeared further up in the funnel building long term memory models through brand building. It was TV advertising, radio jingles, magazine print advertising and billboards that evoked emotion and still evoke nostalgia decades later.
Saatchi & Saatchi for Gallaher
I would argue that the issue is less about relevance at the expense of distinctiveness, instead it’s about short-termist mindsets facilitated by numbers. The media industry is about to double down on this error, with initiatives like the European Programmatic TV initiative. And so I can empathise with Pip’s last point about becoming slaves to numbers. It’s ironic that the PowerPoint-friendly charts used by Google search advertising to explaining its value for marketers took off and drove marketing thinking.
Technology marketing itself came from broken origins and still is basically sales strategies by another name. A good deal of what data is created is based on what technology companies can see; rather than what marketers need to measure to get the balance between long term and short term marketing needs.
This MIGHT BE about to change if marketing expert Mark Ritson is to be believed. He posits that marketing technology start-up Evidenza.AI will provide business-to-business marketers with the kind of insight previously driven by market research, but much faster. From then on he sees it doing a better job at communications and media strategy. I am trying to keep an open mind on this at the moment.
TLDR: Advertising hasn’t become about relevance at the expense of distinctiveness, but instead about short-term at the expense of long-term marketing effects; partly down to technologists having a poor understanding of marketing.
Technology outputs data which marketers paid an inordinate amount of attention to; reinforcing the short term bias. Machine learning techniques now becoming available might turn this around by providing better marketing insight.
Machine learning tends towards the mean
Pip’s presentation went on asserting that machine learning tends towards the mean. Generative AI synthesises content based on what has already been done, which why Pip assumes that everything tends towards the mean. But that depends on how one uses these tools that we’ve been given.
As a strategist, I have used generative AI to knock out too obvious propositions, so I give the creative teams something interesting to work with in the creation of distinctive assets.
Apparently creative teams have been taking a similar approach in terms of ideation.
One thing I’ve heard more than once recently is how creative teams are using LLMs for brainstorms. But not quite how you’d expect… Because these algorithms answer back with the most likely predicted outcomes based on available data, you get the mean. The average. In creative terms that means the well worn “cliches”. So when starting a brainstorm or ideation session, quizzing the LLMs leads to a list of suggestions of what creative teams are generally most likely to suggest. At which point the team knows what NOT to do. The already well trodden ground. The list of the obvious. That also somehow gives a wonderfully smug angle on the use of AI in the pursuit of original work.
TLDR: generative AI will tend towards the mean, BUT that can be used creatively.
Agencies and clients screwed advertising
Pip’s slides don’t necessarily dig into the reasons why this happened. But I can put together some hypotheses and provide evidence that may indicate their validity or lack of it.
Clientside factors
Shareholder value ethos – Shareholder value the way we understand it now can be traced back to the 1960s. While Milton Friedman popularised it in an essay A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, the idea had surfaced years earlier in an opinion editorial published in Fortune magazine. The so-called Friedman doctrine became a lode star for investors and boards including the likes of ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch at General Electric. While this thinking still dominates the tyranny of the quarterly numbers that CEOs of publicly traded companies operate under; it is not the only perspective in the c-suite.
The financialisation of businesses – related to the Friedman doctrine, businesses became increasingly financialised thinking about short term financial decisions. A classic example of this is how post-regulation, legacyairlines in the US have been managed. Another example is Brazil’s private equity firm 3G Capital who managed to destroy billions of dollars in shareholder value with marketing cuts. Financialisation has definitely had an impact, but it varies from company to company. We also see it showing up on the agency side, with the move to using more freelance staff and burning out those staff that they do have. They have a fig leaf of mental health care in their talent acquisition literature, but it’s largely BS.
What gets measured gets done – Google advertising’s success was as much down to it being easy to tell a story about the marketing spend conducted on the platform as it was about effectiveness. The dashboards lended themselves to being easily reproduced in PowerPoint and spoke in the universal c-suite language of line graphs and pie charts. This was really important for Google to survive and thrive in the post dot com bust and the 2008 recession.
Marketing literacy – since before I have gone to college the c-suite was largely marketing illiterate. It doesn’t matter if they are a self-starting boy or girl made good, or minted from an Ivy League business school with an MBA. I have worked with both and they had a similar marketing knowledge level, the only thing that varied was the level of self confidence despite this gap. Neither do the management consultants that they may employ. Which is the reason why the team at 3G Capital were surprised when they cut marketing costs and destroyed brand and shareholder value.
Procurement – practices to systemise purchasing and avoid issues like nepotism and corruption have introduced a muscular procurement function who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Margins across disciplines have been squeezed to breaking point. This has led to a decline in entertainment and side benefits, my LinkedIn feed had advertising folk explaining that the cost of attending the Cannes Festival of Advertising was likely paid through budget cuts in: training, subscriptions for tools and publications and even head count. We might not have had an end of culture, but this is no longer the industry portrayed in Mad Men.
Agencyside factors
Splitting creative and media – prior to the mid-1970s creative and media buying were two departments in the one advertising agency. That allowed the free flow of research between the departments and the creative use of context as well as content. It also meant that margins had to support two management teams. Secondly, the options to best defend margins was in the media-buying side of the house, depending on how integrated into the media technology stack the the media buying agency became.
Change in north star from FMCG to technology companies – the rise of the internet completely changed the nature of marketing. Prior to the internet becoming mainstream, having FMCG experience as a marketer helped your career. In the early 2000s, Google, Yahoo! and later Facebook became the brands marketers wanted on your CV. The difference was that FMCG brands had subscriptions to the likes of the Ehrensberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science. Yet American and British academia saw that most thinking from even the most prestigious schools can be boiled down to being the considered common sense opinion of tenured professors like David A. Aaker and Philip Kotler. Kotler was reportedly not interested in engaging with marketing science as consumer behaviour was too complex and difficult to model.
Relative recent awareness of marketing science. For reasons that I don’t fully understand marketing science is both old and a new phenomenon. The late Andrew Ehrensberg originally founded his Centre for Research in Marketing in the early 1990s and had been turning out marketing science academic papers for decades before that. Ehrensberg eventually moved to His work on the myth of ‘heavy consumers‘ and polygamous brand buying (smaller brands suffering a double jeopardy of fewer people purchasing them, and those that did purchase them, did so less often) was done back in the 1950s for Attwood Consumer Panel (would eventually become part of TNS). Some agency strategists knew about Ehrenberg, such as Stephen King of JWT. Some of this thinking was likely hidden by the decline of market research projects in agencies and the split between media buying and creative. In addition, Andrew Ehrenberg theorised why marketing science had a low adoption outside his center’s FMCG clients, which also encapsulated the gatekeeper role American academics played in overall mainstream academic adoption:
I also realised slowly that our kind of theorising – which at base describes and explains already-established and generalised empirical discoveries and which thus post-dicts them – was anathema to many American academic marketing colleagues. They espoused much more ambitious and complex-looking econometric procedures which never worked in practice, with the recent citation for a Nobel typically not referring to any established empirical patterns
Channels – I don’t know who thought that a video view could be just a couple of seconds, but digital platforms benefited from it. Some of the wisdom from this years Cannes Festival of Creativity was that short adverts don’t work that well as they fail to build memory structures. Somehow agencies, platforms and brands suspended belief to develop marketing campaigns that only made sense in 1980s cyberpunk fiction like Max Headroom. Even at Cannes, platforms like Tiktok believed that they operate like, and a have similar impact to a TV advert…
Research – like most strategists I have found that I am often operating with less qualitative research than I would like. One of the biggest programmes I managed to work on the research for was the global launch of a now famous weight management product. Even then we didn’t do enough interviews around the world to understand cultural nuances in play. I remember reading about strategists in the 1970s spending a good deal of time listening to focus groups hosted around the country. There was a mid-week ritual of taking a drive or a train to a city or town outside London for this research. Social listening has been touted as a possible research for product tracking and can be a useful source of consumer soundbites sometimes.
Testing – hand-in-hand with a decline in research has been a decline in types of testing. Content still gets tested, but brands and agencies didn’t test channels to the same degree. Which is why we’ve had short form ad formats for years, yet the knowledge that they’re not as good at building memory structures doesn’t seem to be embedding into clients and agency teams.
OK, but that’s advertising, what about the end of culture?
Pip claims that advertising is just one part of our world that has been under attack (from technology). Alex Murrell’s essay The Age of Average was cited as the source of this insight. Murrell makes his case on the common looks in car designs driven by developments in aerodynammic design over time, architecture and cityscapes, coffee shop styles, logos, book covers, video game franchises, packaging design and product design.
Part of the reason for the architecture was Le Corbusier and his his function over form theory of design and architecture (modernism) captured in Towards a New Architecture.
Murrell harked back to a time of distinctive cities like Victorian London. However what Murrell’s explanation overlooked was that even back in Victorian times London was becoming ‘standardised’. Chimney pots, bricks, cast-iron beams, windows and even church stained glass windows came out of catalogues. The same designs repeat over-and-over-again. The church stained glass windows went around what was then the British empire. It is a similar situation today. Buildings are made of standardised materials and design tools as we understand more about engineering.
Technology over time allowed buildings to get taller and let in more light thanks to improvements in construction, lifts (elevators) and environmental control. Where things get interesting is when governments and societies make decisions on what they want to keep or rebuild. Shanghai has preserved only a little of the Bund and few of its hutongs. Hong Kong has so far managed to keep some examples of its composite buildings. However once you get to street level you see a distinct evolving local culture despite their apparently similar skylines.
This mix of standardised components bought from a supply chain, improved engineering and regulation has also driven similarities in other products, such as motor cars which Murrell cited as an example. But again those similarities are more about operating at a macro-viewpoint. On closer examination, diversity in car culture and driving experiences start to build clear lines of distinctiveness.
And the car industry for decades has indulged in badge engineering where one vehicle truly does look like another.
Wolesley Hornet
Austin Cooper Mini
Innocenti Mini
Riley Elf
The examples I used above were all based on the Austin Mini. Wolesley was a luxury brand owned by BMC at the time. Italian care manufacturer Innocenti licensed the Mini from Austin until the agreement was cancelled by British Leyland. Lastly, the Riley Elf was a slightly more expensive alternative to Wolesley, both were owned by BMC.
General Motors were the masters of badge engineering using ‘common platforms’ as far back at 1909.
As for the complaints about logo design, books and later the web allowed influential design motifs like Neville Brody’s work at The Face, Arena and The Guardian went around the world, collected in three volumes by Thames & Hudson. His cover designs were in Tower Records stores from New York to Tokyo. Design is an industry sensitive to global influences that you see spread around the world. A second reason for the simplification and flattening of logos is the world that we now live in. Before the web logos only existed in the physical world. Digital brings common requirements:
Works in a website template that can be used globally.
Works in email headers and footers.
Works in a favicon and in a mobile app button.
One interesting point came out when Murrell (and Bingemann) looked at media where there was a coalescence of homage images and content based around a success. But these in turn created their own genres like the sweary covers on self-help books. How is this marking a low point in culture was beyond me.
I thought of genres like the European ‘gallo’ films or the European takes on the western films of which spaghetti westerns are the most well known. A lot of the films were dreadful. In the case of European westerns many of them borrowed a characters name from more successful films. So you saw ‘apparent’ franchises around ‘Ringo’, ‘Django’ and ‘Sartana’.
(Film director Alex Cox published one of the best works on the Italian western film genre 10,000 ways to die. It’s based on his university thesis and a fascinating read, if you choose to jump down that rabbit hole.)
You had a similar experience in the Asian martial arts film industry with countless variations on the the star name Bruce Lee, as the industry coped with the loss of most famous star.
This doesn’t mark the end of culture, but the manufacture of culture. What’s good or great is then strained through the filter of time and changing social attitudes.
As for the cinematic superhero cul-de-sac, there are clear parallels with the end of the western and the New Hollywood movement. This time its distribution in the driving seat rather than a new generation of directors. Like the New Hollywood movement there will be both successes and car crashes along the way and I am largely excited by it.
Bingemann also cites Adam Mastroianni’s essay Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly. Mastroianni hits on what is called a long tail. In scale-free networks with preferential attachments, power law distributions are created, because some nodes are more connected than others – so Taylor Swift will sell more because of the size of fan base she has grown over time. They have been studied since at least 1946 and Benoit Mandelbrot who is better known for his work on fractals was one of the main researchers. Wired magazine touched on it in 1998 when it published The Encyclopaedia of the New Economy written by John Browning and Spencer Reiss and the influence showed up in Wired contributor Kevin Kelly’s work New Rules for the New Economy. So one can guess that the ideas were being thrown around then.
Wired editor Chris Anderson wrote about it in a magazine article for Wired in October 2004, and turned it into a book. Algorithms in online services create bubbles and rabbit holes in different areas and surface media winners like MrBeast. But again culture has thrived despite of popular culture out of sight of the general public for decades will continue to do so. Examples include Northern Soul, punk, the Chicago house music scene, UK garage, grime, drill and donk, the long tail does not mark an end of culture.
TL:DR: Could the current culture eco-system be better? Yes, absolutely. But it isn’t broken in the way and extent that Bingemann believes. We definitely aren’t at the end of culture and it doesn’t need to be ‘saved’ by generative AI.
So what can AI do?
Bingemann believed that generative AI offers society a way out of the end of culture. So presumably it offers a way to enhance and create culture. He believes that it creates, I would finesse this a bit to say that it emulates, synthesises and combines elements to meet consumer instructions – since it is the sum of its training data.
Ironically, Bingemann bases his thesis on how surreal and abstract art represented the ‘death of traditional art’ and reinvented the meaning of art and unleashed a large amount of creativity. Traditional art didn’t die per se, there are still several artists selling realistic pieces including painting and sculptures alongside the ‘new art’ movements.
Generative AI puts tools in the hands of creatives that previously would have meant a lot of work. In the same way that desktop publishing and Photoshop reduced the cut-and-past compositing on layers of glass panels which were then photographed and image retouching done by hand in the past.
In advertising Bingemann sees five opportunities enabled by generative AI:
Move to value-based pricing (presumably based on substantially reduced cost of production). It’s what Huge tried to do with their pivot and what thinkers like Michael Farmer have been recommended. We’ll see what happens when this aspiration meets client procurement teams. I hope Bingemann is right.
Design AI around people. So far the progress has been mixed around this. We have been some companies like Klarna using ‘good enough’ generative AI to automate jobs out of existence. Adobe have taken more of a creative enablement approach. Based on my experience working on ads in the past with collaged backdrops and photoshoots for global campaigns, this could save tens of hours or more in art working.
Embrace the newcomers. Just like social and digital before it, when we had new agencies like Crayon, AKQA and Poke; Bingemann thinks that generative AI is likely to bring new businesses to the advertising eco-system.
Spend 10x more effort developing the next generation. Given that the advertising industry manages to continually churn experienced people out of the industry and no one was found to have retired last year from the industry according to the IPA – this is going to be a tall order. It would make more sense if AI was used to make advertising more representative.
Unite. Clients, agencies and technology. It’s a nice aspiration, but when clients are looking for good enough and efficient content, agencies looking for a margin and trying to put effectiveness in there as well and technology companies trying hold back their natural instinct to suck all the value to themselves, it will be a hard feat to achieve.
Bingemann argues that this is necessary for advertising, but also for creativity and considers advertising’s role to break culture rather than just reflect it. Culture and creativity will exist without advertising. Even during the Soviet Union, there was still creativity, art and culture – both mainstream and underground.
A Final Thought To Leave You On
GZero Media quoting Douglas Rushkoff (of Media Virus fame) on what generative AI means for culture moving forward.
While its not the end of culture as we know it, Springboard.ai are putting out some interesting tools that I could see competing with the likes of Julian Cole, Mark Pollard and others who are filling the ‘how to strategy’ gap for brand planners.
Warped media constructs as an idea originated from a few observations I made. The first was an article by Magic Numbers that examined the distribution of marketing spend across various media channels compared to the percentage of profit they generate. It was based on a piece of research done called Profit Ability 2.
A chart in the article caught my attention. While all channels contribute to profit, some have more comprehensive long-term effects than others. Any channel below (or to the right of) the red line represents a greater proportion of contribution to overall profit returns than the proportion of the marketing budget allocated to it.
Based on this chart: linear television, radio and podcasts and print advertising offer the best value for money for businesses.
What’s interesting is that two out of three of these channels are viewed as legacy media that brands are keen to move away from. When I worked at Unilever, the global media spend for the brands I managed amounted to about 92 per cent on television advertising. Some markets allocated even higher percentages.
The second influence for this post on warped media constructs was a post by Tom Goodwin.
Goodwin spent the best part of a decade working in senior roles for media buying businesses in very technology-centred roles.
It’s only just dawned on me that the reason Traditional Advertising is quite good and Digital ads are uniformly terrible is this.
Media owners always knew they were in the business of selling eyeballs.
Digital media companies think they are in the business of selling clicks.
Our core competence becomes how we see the world.
If you were a traditional media owner , your “job” was to attract , to respect , to inform, to tantalize, to satiate attention and repeat business
If you were a digital media owner, you were a tech company using algorithms to trick, harass, optimize, chase , game, attention by trying out any one of Billions of bits of content , made for free by users.
So while TV companies and traditional media owners are selling attention and eyeballs.
Digital media companies are selling clicks and data that show they create success.
The philosophy of traditional media is actually far more useful for longer term business success with advertising
For MOST companies of any scale, taste and longevity, digital media thinking is entirely wrong
But tech thinking swayed the market , they became so dominant and valuable, and profitable, nobody has the balls to call out how dumb this actually is and how much it’s degraded advertising.
I just wish we could apply the thinking of traditional media , the need to respect , to seduce , to value , to reward human attention , to digital media , because that’s where most people spend ALL of their time.
His post made me wonder about why such warped media constructs were widespread, when the flaws of lower performing media were readily apparent?
What does the data tell us about media?
The Profit Ability 2 research is a robust study of the UK media market. It took data from five media buying agencies looking at 141 brands in 14 sectors. it was based on a three-year media spend (2021-2023) and across ten media channels. Over a third of the brands matched pre-and-post COVID.
Retail media is one area that I would have liked to see examined in a bit more depth, given its rising popularity and ability to challenge generic PPC and online display advertising.
Media that is often the most lionised and championed by media agencies, notably paid social and programmatic display media were outshone by media types that have been declining investment by marketing teams over the past two decades.
This isn’t a new phenomenon as Ebquity research back in 2018, showed that there was a considerable gap between what marketers and agencies thought were effective, versus real-world evidence.
Secondly, this data indicates that brands are not using the channels in the best way for the long term interests of their business. There is also a correlation with declining campaign effectiveness rates.
Why do we have warped media constructs?
This pivot towards warped media constructs has benefited everyone but advertising agencies. And it would be reasonable to hypothesise that agencies chasing incremental growth, enterprise software vendors and consultancies have been leading large corporates up a digital focused route that provides data and efficiency at the expense of effectiveness and marketing ROI.
Agencies’ legacy businesses are fading as the vast majority of incremental marketing spend is directed online. Digital growth is accruing to leading publishers, enterprise software and consultancy firms, while technology enables marketers to do more in-house. Market share loss is already evident in slower organic growth, but trading multiples fail to recognise the heavy dependence on M&A. Fragmentation. Almost 80% of every incremental advertising dollar spent globally accrues to digital. As their legacy traditional media businesses are fading, agencies are failing to capture digital growth, resulting in a lower market concentration in favour of new entrants empowered by technology
Redburn Atlantic (equity research paper): Ad Agencies Marginalised (2016) by Bianca Dallal, Matt Coupland and Mandeep Singh.
Advertising industry commentator Michael Farmer alluded to this change in his newsletter Madison Avenue Insights back in 2020.
Creative agencies have mastered the requirements of integrated campaigns, from TV to online video, websites, Facebook, Instagram, ad banners and e-mail marketing. It’s a pity, then, that this victory is being undermined by agency price-cutting strategies that leave agencies understaffed and underpaid. Senior agency executives need to create winning business practices – they’re losing the business war.
Platforms like Facebook have repeatedly tried to prove that they can substitute for linear TV in advertising campaigns since the late 2000s with varying degrees of success.
The Devil is in the details.
Remember the question about what the data tells us about media? Let’s examine the data in more detail.
One of the key phrases on the slide plotting out the different media sources is ‘full profit returns’. This term is quite important to bear in mind. Consider how these media channels work.
Long-term memory model or brand-building channels
Linear television adverts
BVoD (Broadcaster Video on Demand)
Radio and podcasts
Cinema
Online video
Print advertising
Good brand building content that we are sufficiently exposed to can stay with us for decades and even become part of culture.
Short-term brand activating channels
Generic PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
Paid social
Display advertising
This means that once you have clicked on the ad and gone to a destination, the advertisement has largely had its effect.
The Long and the Short of it
Now if we look at the performance of these media types over full payback, sustained payback and immediate payback we see that each these media channels serve short-term or longer-term goals. Time matters, Profit Ability 2 found that 58 percent of advertising’s total profit generation happens after the first 13 weeks.
If you are a digital-first organisation, or looking at ‘last-touch’ attribution, your measurement is capturing less than 40 percent of profit generated by advertising depending on the marketing mix of the campaign. Your organisation’s marketing culture could be leaving substantial marketing generated profits unharvested with an overly short term focus and less efficient over longer timelines than a financial quarter.
Binet and Field established some useful heuristics for thinking about marketing spend, which can help shape media choices from a macro perspective of brand-building and brand-activating activities.
Immediate payback – profit derived in the same week as the advertising.
Sustained payback – profit derived from week 14 to 2 years of advertising.
Full payback – profit derived over the full 2 year period.
Anything above the yellow line makes a positive contribution relative to the proportion of marketing investment. Linear television works when used consistently and has a long-term impact.
Paid social media is about achieving immediate results, being a very tactical channel by nature.
Print advertising is unique in serving equally well across immediate goals, sustained campaigns, and delivering long-term results.
Each media channel can play its role based on the communication objectives. Their effectiveness also depends on how they work together.
A second consideration is the channel’s reach in the population. Print is interesting as a universal channel for consumers who read print publications, from older Telegraph readers to Monocle magazine-toting hipsters. However, it’s less useful if you’re looking to reach a football-mad teenager. Ebiquity in its analysis of Profit Ability 2 talks about a related concept called saturation:
The study analysed the saturation point for each channel, which is the last point where every pound invested in a channel generates at least £1 profit.
It found that TV has the highest saturation point. Advertisers can increase investment in TV to a higher level than other media and it will continue to generate a profitable return.
Based on immediate payback (i.e. payback within one week of investment), Linear TV advertising on average hits saturation at the highest spend level – £330,000 – nearly triple the equivalent scale of the next largest channel (Print) and over 8-times the scale of Online Video.
Profit Ability 2: The new business case for advertising | Ebiquity
Reflecting on my experience at Unilever: I wasn’t brought in to help digitise the marketing mix away from television because digital was an ineffective channel, but because linear television wasn’t as good a platform for reaching busy young mums as it had been previously. We had to broaden the media mix to reach them, which meant more investment in online video and paid social media. In retrospect, we focused on reach, deprioritising consideration of the communication objectives. BVoD, radio, and podcasts might have had greater weighting if I were to do it again.
This might all change
If a channel became more expensive, you would get less value for your money; it would be equivalent to raising the yellow line. Conversely, reducing the cost of the media would be equivalent to lowering the yellow line.
Cost inflation
Price inflation for larger clients likely endangers cinema, display advertising, online video and BVoD in client budgets first. There may be a strong case at present to allocate more spend to channels that would encourage branded searches, to improve the effectiveness of a reduced PPC spend. Examples of these channels would include public relations, print advertising and television.
Job to be done / payback period
An emergency locksmith will have a very different budget and timeline for marketing return compared to an aftershave brand. The emergency locksmith wants to rank top in local search on mobile devices to get a call-out; they are far less likely to consider brand building and word-of-mouth. The exception to this rule would be at the top of the market, like Banham in central London, which would be providing more of a concierge security service.
Regulation
I have worked with pharmaceutical clients where most of the communications we were doing had to be addressed directly to healthcare professionals. In that case, you have a much more limited palette of possible communication channels.
You face a similar situation if you are looking to market regulated consumer products like sports betting, gambling, alcohol, cannabis and tobacco-related products or vapes. The channel limitations are based on screening off protected audiences or reducing the chance of positive brand attributions. Regulators don’t want smoking to appear cool.
So what’s the best media channel based on our warped media constructs?
It depends. The good news is that all advertising channels analysed in Profit Ability 2 generated a positive payback from advertising when sustained effects are accounted for.
Mediatel: Newsline: Starcom: TV is now twice the price… but not twice as good -“There’s still nothing better than [a 30 second ad],” Dan Plant said on a panel at Future of TV Advertising Global. “Unfortunately it costs twice as much now – and it hasn’t got twice as good at what it was doing. You pay twice as much to achieve the same thing.”
