Some of the vendors I have occasionally done business with, appear to have decided they’re going to send me a big email every day for several days, with new “black friday” offers.
I interpret this as online marketing having reached its zero-point, or close to it. If you no longer have anything distinctive, or interesting, all you can do is game your profit margins lower and lower. Unfortunately I won’t get any further announcements from any of those vendors because, with one click on my spam trainer button, they are dead to me.
I wonder how so many online marketers all got the idea, at the same time, to do multi-day marketing pushes. Perhaps someone who despises internet marketers thought, “I will get them to all make fools of themselves at once; it’ll be more fun than the time I got all my friends to wear the same outfit to a party.”
As a brand-recognition exercise, this one’s really good (so they don’t get struck with the spam tag):
Christians have been marketing their brand for millennia, and they even promote it as generally superior to their own. When your competition’s messaging is “their product has been kicking our product’s ass in testing for 2,000+ years” – it’s marketing on the level of Harley Davidson’s “sure, our bikes are big and slow, but they’re also noisy and expensive, and really inefficient.”
Since humans create gods, I suppose it means we’re superior to them. No matter which imaginary deity is held up as “bigger, badder, more forgiving, and has the best hell” the theists are playing a silly form of rotisserie-league divinity. I appreciate the satanists’ culture-jamming and marketing savvy, but they’ve entered into a battle of wits that there’s no honor in winning.
Am I the only one who perceives this one as weird? After criticizing and mocking Black Friday shoppers, the last line “those of us who choose to retain our pride and withdraw from such despairing and savage mobs” should have ended differently. Instead of saying “will shop online” it should have said “won’t shop at all and instead will spend our time doing something meaningful.” I see little difference between a person storming a store or shopping online. If you criticize the first behavior but engage in the second, it sounds hypocritical.
In my opinion, the pre-Christmas shopping marathon is just a bad practice. I have heard arguments that poor people desperately need those Black Friday discounts, yet, in my opinion, Black Friday shopping seems harmful for somebody who is already experiencing financial problems. Firstly, shopping during the sales day when everybody is trying to be the first one to grab some discounted item is bound to end up with people buying things they didn’t even need. Secondly, if you really need some item and you want to save money on the purchase, there are better ways how to do this—buy secondhand, compare prices between various competing brands, buy an older model of this item. Just going to Walmart and grabbing whatever happens to have a 20% discount isn’t the bet way how to save as much money as possible on a purchase.
Also inspired, more like disgusted, by the wave of ads online I recently contemplated how advertising might seem if I had never seen any and suddenly were confronted by one. It would be bright and new, interesting, intriguing perhaps. It would be everything that advertisers want it to be, and everything that the ads we see today are not.
Ubiquity and untimely intrusion, I’m trying to get something done here, has taken the shine off. Several layers of ad blockers and spam filters help a lot. Still … I feel like I missing something.
Things that are quite miraculous are now old hat. I vaguely remember when riding in a car was special. The speed, and lights and sights were all new. Now, driving across town is a chore. It is still special to be able to stuff a key into a hole and propel myself at 100 kph without raising a sweat. Beats walking I guess. Every time I drive my friend’s dogs I get reminded how miraculous it all still is. They stare out the windows enraptured by it all. I wish I could so easily muster that level of enthusiasm.
Then again they act like I’m the second coming every single time I walk up to her door. Is that an eye for the miraculous, or stupidity.
Ieva Skrebele@#1:
After criticizing and mocking Black Friday shoppers, the last line “those of us who choose to retain our pride and withdraw from such despairing and savage mobs” should have ended differently. Instead of saying “will shop online” it should have said “won’t shop at all and instead will spend our time doing something meaningful.”
There, you put your finger right on it! I was uncomfortable in general with the spam but couldn’t identify why; you are right it’s pointless.
Perhaps they could have approached it by saying “give in to despair and come shop like the good meat puppet you are…” but the best way to do the ad would be to flip the whole thing off. “We’re not even sending you a black friday code or trying to get you to shop because we don’t care and every friday is black friday. Now go for a walk, or go set a cop on fire, or something useful.”
lorn@#2:
Then again they act like I’m the second coming every single time I walk up to her door. Is that an eye for the miraculous, or stupidity.
Dogs are natural masters at understanding what is important.
but the best way to do the ad would be to flip the whole thing off
The George Carlin response to voting. :)
Marcus @#3
This hypocrisy was the first thing I noticed about this advertisement. I dislike hypocritical ads, hence I notice it. This is surprisingly frequent in advertisements. The ad starts with mocking other people for doing X. This action is silly, makes them look bad and so on. But you, the target audience of this ad, are better than all those people doing X, you would never do something as stupid as X. Instead you should do Y. The problem? X and Y are extremely similar actions. If you look down on people who do X, then there’s no way how you can possibly be proud of doing Y without being a hypocrite.
And there’s one more problem with this advertisement:
As desperate herds stampede over one another in brick and mortar retail battlegrounds, leaving the scattered and broken bodies of uninsured, near-destitute minimum-wage employees in their wake, abandoning all dignity and humanity for the price of a discounted checkout total
Aren’t you disturbed by the wording here? “Desperate herds stampede. . . abandoning all dignity and humanity” sounds outright nasty, it’s mocking other people. I have a problem with ads being rude and mocking somebody. For various reasons:
#1 It’s just not polite. And I don’t like rudeness.
#2 When you mock a large group of people (in this case: millions of people who go shopping on the Black Friday), you are bound to cause splash damage—even if some of the shoppers really do things that might warrant being mocked, some other shoppers can still be innocent and not deserve being laughed at.
#3 The ad tries to make their target audience feel superior compared to some other group of people. This ad intentionally contrasts “desperate herds” who have “abandoned all dignity and humanity” with “those of us who choose to retain our pride and withdraw from such despairing and savage mobs.” The message is nasty: other people are inferior, but you are superior for choosing our product and buying from us. I don’t like this kind of advertising tactics.
Personally, I believe that Black Friday shopping is a bad custom. I would also be willing to argue about this topic and defend my claim with arguments. For example, buying stuff and throwing it out soon afterwards is bad for the environment. Then I could also argue that people who stand in lines waiting for hours outside in the cold weather for a shop to open haven’t properly done the cost-benefit analysis. They lose time and experience discomfort, price discounts and the small amount of money a person can save generally aren’t sufficient to make all the inconvenience worth it. In my opinion, it is fine to criticize the Black Friday. But it’s not polite to mock shoppers who participate in this shopping marathon.
Well, at least this one would be honest.
I wonder how often people even bother to pay attention to messages in ads and think about what’s being said. I routinely see poorly made ads that are rude towards some group of people. Why do marketers keep on making these kinds of ads? Does offending some group of people really work well when it comes to selling their products?
For example, yesterday I saw an ad for some cleaning product. The husband makes a huge mess in the kitchen. Afterwards his wife cleans it up with the advertised product. The ad was sexist in such a way that it managed to simultaneously be offensive towards both men and women. The husband was portrayed as piglike, clumsy, sloppy, incapable of preparing a meal without messing it up, and also incapable of cleaning the mess on his own. That’s offensive, I assume that most men don’t want to see themselves as piglike. Yet, simultaneously, the ad was also offensive towards women. Cleaning the house is wife’s job. If her husband makes a big mess in the kitchen, she isn’t allowed to tell him to clean it up on his own. After all, it’s perfectly acceptable for men to behave like pigs and make a mess wherever they go, cleaning the house is the wife’s duty. It’s incredible how marketers can get away with offending their target audience.
Speaking of cringe-worthy advertisements, you might like this gem:
https://www.mixmax.lv/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/teltis-pas%C4%81kumiem-2.jpg and https://www.mixmax.lv/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/547355737-1.jpg
These are Latvian advertisements for bottled water, this brand advertise their product as a natural mineral water from a national park. When I first saw these ads, my first association was all those photos of dead birds with plastic trash in their bellies, I was thinking about photos like this one: https://static.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/environmental-problems-pollution-9__880.jpg
Advertising bottled water and conjuring up images of idyllic and non polluted nature felt outright disgusting for me. Moreover, nobody should ever put a photo of a bird in an advertisement for bottled water. I will get the wrong mental association.
Marcus @#6
In the UK Flash market their cleaning products to men and women needing to clean up after muddy dogs.
I believe that the general idea is that they just want you to notice the ad, and that it doesn’t really matter that much whether it’s for positive or negative reasons.
Then there’s the fact that a lot of people making ads are lazy hacks… An interesting variant on that is when you notice a whole rash of ads for different products (often in entirely different sectors) which are extremely similar – obviously they’ve just pitched the same ad to a bunch of different clients.
Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crap) also applies in spades here.
Jazzlet @#8
Well, this one definitely is an improvement. At least dogs cannot get offended by advertisements.
Dunc @#9
When some company makes nasty advertisements, I try to avoid buying anything from them. I wonder if other people don’t do the same.
Of course, occasionally my choices are limited, because I need something, and all the competitors, which are offering this thing for sale, are businesses that are doing something nasty. Then there are also all those cases where an advertisement insults some other group of people hoping that their target audience will be perfectly happy with an ad that offends somebody else (for example, all those misogynistic advertisements that are aimed at a male demographic). Still, despite these reasons, I do think that bad publicity ought to be harmful for a business.
Re: Ieva Skrebele (#10):
Given the topic is advertisments the discussion here is … oddly interesting. Since I have nothing to add directly I’ll just offer my own honest answer to this:
I’d like to think I would do the same but mostly (and ironically) my ignorance protects the offending companies. My video is streamed, my browser equipped with adblock and when I’m out and about I mostly focus on the pavement. The net result is that I am blissfully unaware of current advertising campaigns. This is actually in stark contrast to pre-internet days when watching television was still a regular thing for me. Back then we’d try to identify the current ad as quickly as possible just to pass our wasted time. Today I’d lose that game, and badly.
Unless a company has been nasty enough to actually make headlines I may never know about their shoddy practices. Some examples of companies/products I do avoid whenever possible:
– Amazon, because of headlines, lots of them. (Also I like my local book store)
– Axe, because it doesn’t take much at all to realise their ads are legendarily sexist
– Rayban, because they’ve been spamming me for years and I’ve never even done business with them – which now of course I won’t. Weasily somethingorothers.
And yes, that last one really just made my list by annoying me personally. If they hadn’t my last pair of sunglasses (from an actual factual optician, no less) might have been change in their pocket. Instead I kept telling an increasingly frustrated optician that I didn’t like, these, those and the other ones after squinting at the labels.
Actually I’d consider this a success story for marketing: They’ve made me aware of a company and told me exactly what I needed to know: that I want nothing to do with them. Worth every penny, those ads, just not mine. Well done!
But outside the “big offenses” I
probablyalmost certainly still buy stuff from awful companies because they’ve managed to stay under the radar.komarov @#11
Yes, to some extent this goes also for me. I don’t watch TV, and I browse the Internet with an ad blocker. I do look around while walking around the cities, though. Thus it’s not that frequent for me to notice some bad ad and make the mental note to never buy from some business.
Advertisements are extremely interesting. They are anything but boring. Of course, only when I actually analyze their wording, imagery, messages. But, nonetheless, they can be interesting.
Ads offer an excellent mirror in which one can see all the bad things about humanity; advertisements dutifully portray all our nasty racist, sexist, etc. stereotypes and biases. Advertisements also expose our willingness to insult, mock, and offend entire subgroups of human population. For example, ads that show almost naked women next to some ex$$$$$pensive car owned by a dude. They portray our insecurities (for example, human insecurities about having a pretty body, successful career, the right amount of sex partners, etc.). As in “just buy our product, and you will have lots of sex, friends will admire you, and your boss will give you a raise.” And our desire to feel superior to others; it’s common for ads to say “you can be better than all those stupid masses, all you need to do is buy our product.” Or the silly notion that ownership of some material goods can determine your worth as a human being, that using some product can be tied to your personality or who you are.
Then there’s also the angle about cultural differences. Being a polyglot, I can compare advertisements aired in different countries. The differences between American and European (Latvian, German, French) ads are striking. For example, in US yogurt is advertised primarily to women as a feminine food. Meat, on the other hand, is a masculine food: “Do you want to be a real masculine dude? Then buy our meat products.” WTF? How can you even have feminine or masculine food? It’s food. All people, regardless of their gender, need food; and all of it is just a source of calories and nutrients. These kinds of messages don’t exist where I live (at least they didn’t exist some years ago when I still owned a TV). Here people just don’t perceive yogurt as women’s food. For example, my male sex slave is perfectly fine with eating it. The whole notion that people with a certain gender or personality ought to choose specific foods that “represent” who they are is just ridiculous. Here people chose food based on what you perceive as tasty or based on how healthy it is; food isn’t perceived as a means of expressing one’s personality. Brand loyalty is also less prevalent here. Why stick to one specific brand if competitors are offering the same thing cheaper?
And then there are ads for razors, soap, shampoo, etc. personal hygiene items. I still remember that about 10 to 15 years ago Head & Shoulders aired an advertisement for separate shampoos for men and women. Back then, as a child, I perceived this as silly. Before seeing this ad, the idea of men and women needing different shampoo had never occurred to me. Why would they need separate shampoo? In my family everybody just used one and the same bottle. Now we have come to the point where soap, shampoo and razors are gendered items. Why? I perceive Gillette and Venus ads and brands as ridiculous. Why do men need black razors and women need pink ones? By the way, I use an old school double edge razor, and my soap and shampoo is handmade and bought on Etsy. I just cannot take this crap advertising.
By the way, have you seen this one — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85HT4Om6JT4 ? It’s absolutely hilarious.
Another interesting aspect of advertisements is how they exploit the inherent biases of how human brain works. Just say that something is on sale, and people will grab it. Say that it’s a limited time offer, and they will buy some stuff even if it’s unnecessary. There are all sorts of tricks how marketers get us to buy things we don’t need, and I find the science behind it fascinating. For example, this one https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/magazine/the-extraordinary-science-of-junk-food.html is an interesting article about how junk food was designed to be appealing to consumers.
Ieva, @ #10:
Some people do, some people don’t. The advertisers are hoping that the former group is smaller than the latter, and I suspect that they’re right.
I agree that it ought to be, I’m just not at all convinced that it actually is. There’s a well-known adage attributed to P. T. Barnum: “There is no such thing as bad publicity”.
komarov, @ #11:
Probably not actually Rayban. I have done business with them, and they’ve never spammed me at all (that I’ve noticed – I do have some pretty heavy spam filtering). They’re not the sort of brand that needs to do that sort of thing. They are, however, the sort of brand that are knocked-off on an industrial scale, and those fuckers do spam the entire world. Anybody offering discount Raybans is almost certainly selling fakes, and probably more that 99% of “Rayban” branded marketing on the internet has nothing to do with Rayban themselves. They’re at least as pissed off about it as you are.
Re: Ieva Skrebele (#12):
Thanks for the elaborate reply, there are a lot of good points in there. I’ve seen Mitchell and Webb and always thought that was a pretty succinct summary of the situation.
The few ads I do notice plodding around tend to be tobacco ads (I think we’ve been over this: it’s legal here and really shouldn’t be), which tend to be particularly egregious examples of marketing bullshit. Here’s a happy bunch of people.* Maybe they’re on a beach. Cigarettes are involved somehow. That’s it. The key question I always have for these scenarios is, what’s the point of all that outdoors fresh air if you’re going there to smoke?
The other ads (e.g. bus stop posters) tend to be fairly neutral. Festivals and events or plain “[business] in [location] across the road”, that sort of things. As advertisement goes that’s fine as far as I’m concerned. (They usually manage without the sexism, materialism (money-teism?) etc. you mentioned)
*They’re all young, athletic, able-bodied, etc., naturally …
—
Re: Dunc (#12):
I’m fairly sure bad publicity works as such. The problem is that it rarely sticks for any length of time. That’s where we’re back in the realm of newspaper headlines, which are unfortunately very fleeting. For instance, if we were to learn that facebook executives eat orphans we’d get those headlines and facebook stocks would take a brief, small dip. They’d recover slightly after boilerplate promises about “sensitivity training for canteen staff” and then resume it’s regular rise from then on. That would be the last the public ever heard of the orphan-eating scandal, and it would soon forget about it altogether, save for a footnote on wikipedia.
komarov @#14
Yeah, this one sucks. Where I live, tobacco ads have been banned for about 10 or so years. Thus I got used to not seeing them. Every time I travel somewhere and see tobacco ads, it really attracts my attention. In a very bad way.
This one you mentioned is also a rather common pattern in ads. For example, I remember soft drink ads with the exact same scenario—a group of happy people who look like friends, they are enjoying themselves, doing something fun, and, of course, they are also drinking the soft drink. The hidden message is ridiculous: “Your social life sucks or simply isn’t as good as what you just saw in this video? Just buy our product and it will get better.” Ouch. This message wouldn’t be true even if the advertised product was alcohol. But tobacco or a soft drink? Seriously? Well, the good news about this advertisement script is that at least it doesn’t offend some groups of people (most of the time, it can still depend upon what exactly is seen in the ad). The bar is so low that an ad that is just silly instead of being offensive is already an accomplishment.
By the way, here’s another example of bad marketing—bloatware that is hard to uninstall. Up until recently I was using Windows 7. A couple of days ago I got a new computer that came with Windows 10 on it. And now I’m pissed off and frustrated in my attempt to uninstall bloatware. The problem is that bloatware doesn’t appear within the System > Apps & Features list I would normally use to uninstall a program. Moreover, for some of the apps, I cannot even click on the app shortcut and find the uninstall button. Dear Microsoft, don’t you dare telling me that Xbox, Township, or Minecraft apps are essential for the system to run smoothly. So here I am now, googling for methods how to uninstall all this junk. It looks like I will have to spend some time learning how to use PowerShell, because there simply is no “uninstall” button. I’m now pissed off and irritated. I understand why Microsoft wants to put bloatware on my computer. It’s beneficial for them, they utilize it as a free marketing opportunity—the user will see the blotware, find out that this thing exists, maybe they will even start using it. I was already used to being forced to spend my time uninstalling junk each time I bought some new piece of electronics. But how dare Microsoft remove all the “uninstall” buttons! The thing is, this one is actually bad marketing. Up until now I had vaguely heard that something called Xbox exists. I never cared about this product one way or another. Now I fucking hate Xbox (because it’s so damn hard to get rid of its app), I know for certain that I will never ever use Xbox. Good job Microsoft. Your marketing efforts just informed me that there’s a product I will never ever use. Now I’m also feeling bad about using Windows to begin with. Microsoft is showing down my throat a bad product (or, at least, an annoying one). They are getting my money only because I have no other alternatives (Apple isn’t any better, Ubuntu Linux was cool, and I liked it back when I was using it, but, unfortunately, it is impossible to install CorelDRAW on Linux), so I’m stuck with a product that I really dislike.
Ieva Skrebele @#10
Well the dog in the ads is pretty pissed off that all the mud it had carefully spread over every surface is gone … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndNtXyg0clg
Tobacco advertising has been illegal in the UK since 1965 for TV, and since 2003 for press and billboards, but long before it became illegal for the latter two there was a self-regulatory agreementwith the Government. That led to a lot of more subtle advertising. Benson and Hedges who had gold coloured packaging would transform anything vaguely square into a B&H packet, probably the most iconic being the pyramids. Silk Cut who’s packaging was purple and white riffed on that and the name with the simplest being a piece of white silk slashed to show the purple silk underneath.
As for there’s no such thing as bad publicity it’s certainly not true as Gerald Ratner can tell you. He made the mistake of jokely saying, in a speech in 1991 of the Ratner’s jewellry stores his company owned
The ensuing furore knocked £500 million off the companies share price and almost destroyed it. They no longer trade under the Ratner name, he was ousted from his position as chief executive and “doing a Ratner” is shorthand for that kind of gaffe. For more see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ratner