The Role Advertising Played in Turning Everyday Perceptions into Reality #26 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

Advertising used to be fun. My job was to come up with idea’s that people would want to look at. Maybe make them laugh. Anything to attract their attention and go out and buy a product.

Alas that all changed when they figured out that they could target people by what they were viewing on the internet.

It was a far more efficient way of reaching an audience (if a lot less fun)
Now the advertiser could connect almost directly with their customer because they knew what they were looking to buy.

Social media companies copped this and started to employ the similar tactics.

Giving people what they want.

That way they could get the viewer to stay on their website longer. And the longer they stayed on their site the more (programatic) advertising they could serve to the viewer. And the more money they could make.

The trouble is, by only showing people what they want to see, confirmation bias kicks in and they only believe one side of the story when it comes to conflict. What we percieve to be reality has become less balanced.

This causes conflict in society.

Advertising has a lot to answer for.

Total Words

1,263

Reading Time in Minutes

5

Key Takeaways:

  1. With the advent of the internet, algorithms became an effective route to target audiences.
  2. Social media Companies have learnt from this and use algorithms to push content that appeals from like minded individuals. They do this to keep the customer on their website longer so that they can, ironically, view more ads.
  3. This has created a bubble in which viewers see only content that concurs with their own. Their perceptions become reality with little or no room for other views.
  4. Because we spend almost 6 hours a day on the internet viewing content that is less balanced we as a society have become less tolerant of other peoples views, and this is a cause of conflict in the World.

About Donal O'Dea:

I’m an ex advertising Creative Director and have produced a stack of award winning work for brands like Volkswagen, Carlberg, McDonald’s and Bulmers down through the years. In between ads I co-wrote a few books on Irish culture which included ‘Stuff Irish People like’ and ‘The feckin’ book of Irish Slang that’s great craic for cute hoors and bowsies’ I’m now directing shot movies and producing an ‘advertising led’ cyber security programme

Contacting Donal O'Dea

You can connect with with Donal Twitter (x), see his work or send him an email.

By Donal O’Dea

When I started working as a Creative in advertising 40 years ago, our job was to change the way people’s thought about stuff. In a world where most products and services looked and behaved the same the single biggest competitive advantage brands had was its advertising.

If we could favourably change someone’s perception of a product we had a distinct competitive advantage.

In adland- perception was reality.

I think there were 2 TV stations and 2 (legal) radio stations back then.

And it was easy to influence people in the decisions they made.

Very often the advertising was more stimulating than the programmes they were listening to or watching.

So if you told people that a cheap cigar called Hamlet could make everything okay after a bad day (and you told them often enough) you could make them believe, perhaps that it’d be a good idea to take up smoking.

Jump forward 20 years Bruce Springsteen brought out a song called 57 Channels and there’s nothing on. He was right. People were flicking from one channel to another and were less inclined to engage with advertising.

It became harder to persuade people because markets were fragmenting. More TV stations, more radio stations more newspapers. We had to be more strategic about how we targeted the people who’s perceptions needed changing.

If we wanted to persuade people that Carlsberg was in fact, probably the best lager in the World, we’d now use researchers and media planners to identify who the best people were to aim at and then figure the best media to hit them with our message.

It was called ‘targeting’ and it was necessary because people were being exposed to more marketing communications than they could actually handle and an awful lot of advertising is wasted on people who are never going to buy our products.

Jump forward another 10 years and the internet has really taken off. A lot of people have stopped watching Television altogether. This was the era of laptops phones and tablets.

And targeting took on a new life of its own in this digital age. Now brands could look at what you were looking at online and target you with products they feel suits your buying needs. If they saw that you were looking at reviews for, say, a chainsaw, you’d be looking at Chains saw ads for a week. If you didn’t buy it you’d see ads for electric saws. If you didn’t want that…. how about a secateurs?

This was called programatic. And it was run by the computer geeks. They could write code to put consumers who wanted chainsaws in touch with people who made chainsaws. And while these ads could irritate, it was a very clever marketing tool because there was now less waste for the marketeer.

These algorithms were so clever that other industries began to sit up and take note.

Social media sites have taken a leaf out of our book. Instead of pushing ads at us, they push information that they think we’d like at us. The longer you stay on a social media site the more money they make. (Funnily enough, with programatic advertising!).

So if you’ve taken a stance on the Stormont Assembly in Northern Ireland, it’s likely you’ll get fed content that supports that view. Likewise with the way you vote… or your stance on issues on something like abortion.

If you feel something about anything the programming guys will try to target you with content to support that view. It’s all innocent enough. They just want you to hang around a little longer so that you can see some more ads in the background. Where’s the harm in that.

Now here’s the thing. 99% of the Irish population is online. The average daily usage is 5 hours 59 minutes. Business Plus August 2023

Now people are consuming more than just ads. They’re consuming news articles and opinions. And they’re only seeing ads for what they want and seeing articles and opinions that concur with their own.

With the result that a lot of people are now living in a bubble that contains only like minded individuals. People who think the same way vote the same way. Tolerance for differing opinion and voting habits is way down because it doesn’t have a voice in this bubble. And because of confirmation bias these views are unlikely to be challenged.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ever increasing vitriol between the Republican tribe and Democrat tribe in America. It’s become difficult for their elected representatives to find common ground and run the country because the other persons opinion has played such a minuscule role in their media consumption. On each side of the divide there’s a different perceived reality.

These algorithms are causing conflict.

It’s playing a role in the Russian-Ukraine conflict

It’s playing a role in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

And I think Advertising has a lot to answer for.

God be with the day:-)

Reality is Sharing #11 #cong23 #reality

Synopsis:

The article discusses the idea that reality is shaped by our social connections and the influence of others. It argues that we don’t view the world objectively but through the lens of our biases and experiences. Our lives are largely habitual, and change is resisted by our brains, leading to a limited sense of reality. The author suggests that science and technology can manipulate the world but often see it as separate from us. They emphasize the importance of social bonds and shared knowledge in shaping our perception of reality. The article concludes that our experience of reality is ever-evolving, requiring us to adapt to changes in our socially connected world.

Total Words

1,240

Reading Time in Minutes

5

Key Takeaways:

  1. There is no individual sense of reality.  Our perceptions are all based on those that have been had by others and shared with us.
  2. Experience is important, but even more so when put into a social context.
  3. We cannot possibly know everything therefore our knowledge is bounded.
  4. Our sense of reality changes as our information about reality changes. It is Darwinian in the sense that we either adapt or die as we become aware of new knowledge.

About Tom Murphy:

Classics and Philosophy student at NUI Galway.

Contacting Tom Murphy:

You can follow Tom on Twitter

By Tom Murphy

Reality is sharing. Without connection to others and left to yourself in not so short a time you will go doolallly.  You will disconnect from the normal disposition that anchors your perception of reality – how you view and relate to the events going on around you in the environment in which you operate. This new reality is not a different reality in kind. It is something that has come loose and unhinged from normal day activity. We need other brains to make sense of the world.

Without the input of others the world soon becomes nonsensical.

The real world could be defined in materialist terms as the things that exist in our notion of time and space as being objects open to examination by scalpel of the reductionist mindset. A conglomerate of things that are further reducible to their individual parts layer by layer until we get into the quantum world where it seems all bets are off.

This approach of making sense of the world by analysis and reason has served us well over the last five hundred years. It is hard to argue that the advances in technology and medicine have been in the overall sense a good thing. But it is not how we, ourselves, operate. We don’t see the world through an objective lens and we don’t live our lives that way. We live our lives through what we perceive of the world through education and experience. To save energy reliving every event as though it was the first time we apply rules of thumb, heuristics if you will, that serve as a shorthand way to inform us on how to act and react. This means that after a certain age we no longer see the world fresh and new but through a series of preconceptions and assumptions that, while helpful most of the time, are riddled with biases.

We live our lives in a largely habitual manner. We are heavily routinized in our thoughts, actions and feelings. To escape that requires change which is a huge load to be placed on the brain and the brain doesn’t like to do extra work unless it absolutely has to. This narrowness of behaviour leaves us with the lives we lead every day – our reality.

This sense of reality, which is inherently limited, leaves us with the feeling that there has to be more to life. Which in an absolute sense is true. If our perception of the world is limited by our biases, experience and education, then there has to be more.

Science and technology can dissect and utilise the world in myriad ways – sometimes positive and sometimes negative. But the there is always a sense that these two forces are working on and transmuting a world ‘out there.’

We are born as individuals but share many, many faculties with those around us. Curiosity, learning capacity, fear of falling, and so on. This leads to the relative ease of assimilation into our families and culture. While this is highly beneficial in a practical sense it means that we automatically discount or ignore information that does not fit easily into the world view that is being created as we grow up. Therefore, our sense of reality is limited. We don’t know yet, and I doubt that we ever will, all that goes on the scientifically observable universe but what we do know is how to behave in a functional way.

This sense of functionality works to supply us with our sense of reality. Our everyday lives consist of complying with and negotiating with the boundaries that have been set up by other brains. While we might always like the way the world is set up we have to acknowledge that the world as we experience was set up by other people with brains just like ours.

We could argue that Mother Nature is the supreme arbiter of what is real and what is not. Most of us dropped without supplies or a support structure into a barren wilderness would not last very long at all. The world in its natural state is quite deadly to humans. That we have survived thus far is some kind of miracle. But what made that survival possible. It wasn’t the genius of particular individuals, though that didn’t hurt, but the codified knowledge and experience that comes from the tribal mind. We all know that we are highly sociable creatures and need the presence of others around us or life can become exceedingly difficult. This need for others manifests itself in our needs to form ourselves into families and the beyond that tribalism.

You do not have to travel very far in the world to see that there are great many fully bought in world views. Some of these world views are openly hostile the possibility that their world view could be wrong. Fundamental religions are one example. Other world views are open to the possibility of change and development. But even then there is a trade off in the hope that the benefits of new discoveries may improve our experience of reality but not change it in any way beyond the superficial. But most of the people who inhabit these world views accept them as reality – the way the world is. They have their rules for behaviour and for the most part it has worked over generations so why mess with it?

Our reality is human bound and our sense of it changes as we change. But change can be perceived as bad in the sense that it will expose us to new risks, many of them borne out of unintended consequences.

Reality, or more importantly, our experience of reality as formed by our social, familial, and cultural ties is always changing and we will always have to adapt our thinking and the thinking of others so we can, as a social concern, can adapt to the inevitable changes that will occur. In that sense reality is the product of our socially connected reality to deal with reality itself.