On Advertising

In one of Malcolm Gladwell's books he makes an effort to convert best-estimates of historical fortunes into a common currency. In this way we can see Carlos Slim Helu's massive $70 billion fortune or Bill Gates $65 billion or even the $19.5 billion made by Spain's Armancio Ortega last year alone are really not as astronomical as they seem. Don't get me wrong, they are insultingly huge accumulations of personal wealth but compared to the great robber barons of the era immediately following the American Civil War, they are not that impressive. Both Rockefeller and Carnegie had personal fortunes bordering $300 billion, more - according to the sources Gladwell sites - than Cleopatra or any of the Roman Emperors. But if we look at the list of the richest people we see, unsurprisingly, they all had products to sell. Helu's product is telecom (more of a service than a product but still something we can easily understand paying for). Rockefeller's fortune was based on oil, Carnegie's on steel, Gates on software. Still, the most impressive fortunes, those accumulated most quickly and by the youngest billionaires are only superficially in software.

Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos, while not as famous as some other internet-tycoons, is worth an astounding $27 billion. Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are both worth around $23 billion. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is worth around $20 billion. While these people technically sell internet services, their astronomical worth is generated by the hypothetical potential value of the information they collect about their users, if and when it is sold to advertisers. In fact, it seems like the best way to get (incredibly immorally) rich is to be able to advance the cause of advertising.

This strikes me as very strange indeed. Amazon's advertising works. They recommend books to me and I occasionally buy them. But that is value for Amazon, not any third party advertiser. Google's advertising (in the sense of the "sponsored links" that appear on the sidebar) never works. I have only ever clicked on one of those links and that was purely out of curiousity. The closest I come to buying things from Google is using their search engine to get product recommendations (or directions to a physical store). And Facbook? Forget about it. What am I going to buy? A cheater kit for Farmville? Still advertisers must know their business better than I do.

Yet it seems to me like if you want to get rich, you might want to make something people can buy. Like a product or service. When tech writers talk about the enormous power of the servers Amazon, Google, and Facebook possess to generate wealth, they mean people are going to pay them for access to that information. And the people who pay are advertisers. I don't know if I am so out of touch with the realities of modern economics I am suffering from compound ignorance (I don't even know what I don't know) or whether tech writers have skipped everything about the economy that does not involve a better way to sell things. Seriously, these people talk about the mega-servers as if they will soon control every aspect of our lives through their control of advertising.

I respect advertising - in the sense I am aware it has a profound effect on human actions. I respect it like I respect radiation, not like I respect Salman Rushdie. But isn't this assigning too much power to an inexact science? If someone (or some group) invents a really cool product like, say, a generator the size of a canned ham that can power an average household forever and all it gives off as waste is flowers and cute pictures of kittens - isn't advertising power going to be beside the point? Because I'm buying one.

There is a cynicism to the value technologists place on advertising; a special kind of cynicism that is demeaning to both products and people. The basic tenet is there are categories of things and within each category every unique example is essentially equal (the presumption being "equally shit") and people can be swayed into buying one particular example of shit from each category by advertising because we lack the critical apparatus to differentiate any other way. There is a limited sense in which this is true - the trends in beers or jeans or various other temporary "must-have" objects. But in another sense it is just insulting. There are categories of things I take seriously (another way of saying I am interested in them). These include fountain pens and other writing implements, watches, men's cases (brief or messenger), furniture, etc. In each of the cases advertising actually plays a negative role. I lust for a pre-WWII Sailor 1911 fountain pen. I have never seen an advertisement for one and if I did I would want one less, not more. To be clear, I'm not entirely sure such a thing exists. Fountain pens prior to WWII have more give in the nibs - they are more flexible and consequently "inflect" the lettering more. I also know the Sailor 1911 is widely regarded as the best "writer" - the most comfortable to use. When Sailor started making the 1911 is something I could easily find out and I think I might have already but I forget and, at the moment, don't feel like looking it up. This might seem like the perfect place for advertising but it isn't. My initial statement still holds: I would want one less if I saw it advertised. I love Charles and Ray Eames lounge chair and the more times I see them in design magazines the less I want one (and more I consider a chair by Adrian Ferrazzutti instead). Advertising works on mass sales, not on what some people call "objects of desire". Unless you really desire a new pair of Dockers.

There is a lot of fetishism that advertising seeks to build upon but in many cases the effect is paradoxical. A commodity can't be both artificially scarce and advertised. It doesn't work that way.

No matter how successful advertising gets at finding precisely the right product for me, there will always be a reaction. I think of this as the "fuck you mechanism". I have experienced it most frequently in conversations with friends and family. It is also known as "truth hurts syndrome"; someone will tell you something about yourself you know to be both true and something you should have seen for yourself and the response is almost never, "Gee, thanks."

Perhaps I am being arrogant. Maybe the entire world economy can be reduced to the point people and the products they buy are largely irrelevant compared to the massive power (and value) of the mechanisms that connect the two. But I find William Gibson's "Hubertus Bigend" and his speculations on advertising much more entertaining and informative than I do those of people who actually understand the technology in play. What makes Bigend both interesting and frightening is he doesn't rely on algorithms and massive data - he does straight to personal manipulation. He inserts himself (through his agents) into the lives of others in a way big data can't.

Still, advertisers can't take 100% of the profit of selling actual things. So I don't understand how the makers of things will ever be relegated to second-class capitalists. It seems to me like the financial world is, at the moment, more interested in the pronouncements of the Great Oz than they are in the man behind the curtain.

Post 2007 crash the Onion ran a headline, "Enraged Public Demand New Bubble to Invest In". And I think they found it.