You know whose tumblr is good? Keith Gessen’s tumblr is good.

1. Left 4 Dead is really fun. Charles and I have been merrily making zombie heads explode for the last two nights. Thanks, Emily!
2. Pygmalion in a Blanket is extremely, ludicrously funny

We live in a pretty Jehovah’s-Witness-heavy neighborhood, but I mostly don’t mind. Sure, it means the occasional well-meaning pair of Sunday visitors will find me groggily staring at them, potentially shirtless. But that’s mostly their problem — I’m perfectly happy to see them. Besides, you never know when you’ll find yourself wishing you had a few dozen copies of The Watchtower on hand.

The best side effect, though, are the hand-addressed notes I get in the mail, which contain handwritten notes, which contain printed tracts, and all of which contain numerous spelling and grammatical errors. Still, they’re preferable to the ones I used to find placed under my windshield wipers back when I had the car with the awful front-end damage; those would encourage me to seek help for my alcoholism (lucky guesses don’t count!).

Anyway, here’s the latest one I’ve received. In most respects it’s pretty unremarkable, but does make a case for Bible study that I don’t remember encountering before: that it will protect you from zombies and/or ghosts. Possibly also draculas; I’m not sure, it’s been a while since Sunday School.

Look, I don’t know what you guys have against Vince or ShamWow, the revolutionary new absorption concept that is sweeping — well, if not the nation, then at least the parts of it that watch TBS at 1am. But this mean-spiritedness has got to stop. Yes, it’s clear that Vince had been awake for at least 50 hours when that commercial was filmed. And yes, he is an ex-Scientologist who sued Anna Nicole Smith for breach of contract in relation to his failed gross-out comedy movie (the New York Times called it “a monument to ineptitude and self-delusion“).

But what’s the alternative? This is a subject that Charles, Emily and I have discussed at length. Vince may not be perfect — he’s just a human being, as flawed and beautiful as any of us — but at least he has the guts to stand up to Billy Mays and the grasping tentacles of his infomercial syndicate.

Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge Mr. Mays’ impressive achievements. But his time has passed; it’s clear that these days, his heart’s not in it. Worse, his Zorbeez project is a transparent attempt to destroy Vince and the ShamWow, no matter the cost (how else can one explain his proffer of a $60 value for a mere $14.99?!). Doesn’t America deserve a fresh new face to sell us oddly-shaped cooking implements and citrus-based cleaning products? Can we really sanction the sort of anticompetitive behavior that Mr. Mays represents?

I say yes! And no! Respectively! Vince may not deserve your love, but when, every night, his shaking hands remove that headset — in that moment he at least deserves your respect. And your order, of course. Call now.

Guess who I’ve been shopping for this season…

Having spent the last week or so attending to less demanding electronic devices — the Xbox, the DS and the iPhone chief among them — I’m now hopelessly late with this post. But I still find the intersection of technology and advertising to be very interesting, and hope you’ll bear with me even if the holidays have played havoc with the bloggy news cycle.

As soon as I read myself described as “always-interesting” I had a feeling that Tim might not wholeheartedly agree with my predictions about the fate of the advertising industry. That’s perfectly understandable: I am, at heart, a crackpot — one who’s taken the institution of advertising as a personal affront since he was sixteen or so. I’ve mellowed a bit since then, but it’s fair to say that my perspective on the matter is abnormal. I still feel motivated to explain it, though, so let me take a crack at it.

Before that, there’s Jeff‘s in-comments query to respond to. I think that answering it may provide some useful context:

Could you maybe elaborate on your claim that “It’s easy to forget how quickly advertising has evolved…”, because I just don’t see it. TV ads today are pretty similar to TV ads 50 years ago, and print ads look a lot like they did 100 years ago. The technology has improved, but the fundamentals seem pretty similar. Aside from a few horrible attempts at viral advertising in recent years and college bowl sponsorship, what’s really changed?

I should clarify: the old forms aren’t wholly supplanted by the new. You’re less likely to see a 100-word black and white full-page testimonial for a product in Life magazine than in days past, of course. But in general the old techniques persist in one way or another: the billboard; the artless car commercial; the couple yammering on the radio about something or other. Variants of these have and seem likely to continue to remain with us.

But novelty goes a long way toward making an impression, because it’s interesting and can conceal the mercenary underpinnings of the message. Jeff mentions viral marketing as a relatively recent innovation, and I think it’s a great example. There are plenty of others, though: product placement in sitcoms. Infomercials. Scientific papers paid for with industry grants. Some types of service journalism. Exclusivity agreements between college sports teams and apparel manufacturers. There have, and will continue to be, innovations in the field of product-selling, even if they aren’t always self-evident.

But novelty necessarily comes with an expiration date, so it’s an endless battle. We have continually-evolving defenses that let us tune these distractions out. A decade ago I might not have noticed the subtly-placed Aquafina bottle in the medical examiner’s office in The Spirit; now, trained by decades of carefully turned-toward-the-camera product labels on network sitcoms, I couldn’t help but see it. Although I’m sure that its presence still made some small, brand-reinforcing impression, it’s a minute one compared to the success that this technique must have first enjoyed. And, in this case, it was coupled with a healthy dose of resentment at Aquafina for its commercial intrusion into entertainment I’d already paid for.

I think advertising serves basically two functions, which I will, in a grossly unfair act of framing, refer to as its informative and manipulative aspects. First, there’s the informational side: educating consumers about products and services that they might be interested in purchasing, but about which they might remain ignorant if intervention isn’t pursued. That’s pretty straightforward, I think. Not every worthwhile commercial service is interesting enough to prompt unsubsidized media coverage, so informing interested parties of these services’ availability is a useful function that advertising can provide. A listing for a plumber in the yellow pages fits this description pretty well.

On the other hand, there are the manipulative aspects of advertising. These aren’t necessarily bad — they may compel behavior that’s desirable from one standpoint or another — but they’re essentially cynical attempts to affect consumers’ decisions on the basis of criteria other than the fundamental value of the good or service being purchased and its utility to the consumer (in the absence of the commercial message). Coca-cola’s Santa ads are a decent example: they really have nothing to do with the soda’s quality, and are therefore basically an attempt to distort the market for it by using unrelated appeals.

Most ads reflect both of these aspects to some extent, of course. And I don’t mean to imply that this is the only way to classify advertising. But I think it’s a useful way to approach it, so bear with me for a moment.

This brings us to Tim’s response to my assertion that the advertising industry is likely to shrink:

Digital media allows advertisers to be a lot more specific about the users they want to target and to collect a lot more data about their effectiveness. Tom suggests that this is a bad thing because once companies discover their ads aren’t working well, they’ll stop spending money on them. But the flip side is that advertisers can measure when a particular ad is working, and that ad inventory becomes correspondingly more valuable. Even better, better measurement means that the average ad should improve over time. Ads that don’t work can get dropped more quickly, and the ones that perform well can be put on heavy rotation, emulated by other advertisers, and so forth. That can only be good for ad revenues.


Tom also suggests that advertising is doomed because the Internet makes it a lot easier to avoid it. But peoples’ hatred for advertising isn’t inevitable. It’s a consequence of the limitations of 20th century media technologies that required advertisers to adopt “scattershot” approaches to advertising. There was no way to target car ads at the 5 percent of the population that’s in the market for a car at any given time, so the other 95 percent of us had to sit through endless car commercials. But online there are lots of ways to more narrowly target ads at people who are likely to be interested in them. In the long run, as we’ve said before, advertisers are going to have to realize that content is advertising. If you can make ads relevant, interesting, or entertaining, people aren’t going to try as hard to avoid them. Search engines do this by only showing ads relevant to the particular keyword a user entered. Other advertisers have figured out that if they make their commercials fun to watch, people will be more willing to watch them. Of course, it’s hard to predict whether the total amount of advertising revenue will go up or down over the next decade. But as long as people buy stuff, companies will be willing to spend significant amounts of money to influence their decisions.

I think Tim is seriously overstating advertisers’ enthusiasm for being non-annoying — it’s not as if they’ve only now figured out that people don’t like being intruded upon in irritating ways, and are resolving to turn over a new leaf. My understanding is that the efficacy and reported consumer enjoyment of an ad are inversely correlated. Much better to make an infuriating jingle that will force the consumer to mentally recite the word “Garmin” ad infinitum than to, say, cast Tina Fey in a funny credit card commercial for… uh… Amex? Or was it Mastercard? Anyway the ending with the fire extinguisher was funny.

But I agree with Tim, too: I think that the localization functionality he refers to will indeed continue to evolve, and I’m sure it will be a boon. But it’s hard for me to believe that it will really be the savior of the ad industry. Anecdotally, it seems like online ads already target me pretty well, yet almost never earn my clicks. More generally, the role Tim is describing is entirely within the benevolent, information-providing aspect of advertising that I outlined above. But this is also the most straightforwardly-doomed aspect of the industry. It’s now much easier to get more and better information about products and services than it used to be; from Yelp to Amazon reviews to the simple act of searching Google, the utility of deliberately-placed informational advertisements has been seriously diminished. We should consequently expect that aspect of the industry to shrink. If people want information about a product, they can get it. That pretty much leaves the narrow case wherein the consumer has a material need, yet doesn’t know what they want before being told how to get it. But it seems to me that the industry is pinning a huge amount of hope on this relatively minor class of purchases.

To me, this whole argument sounds eerily similar to the one that maintained that the MP3 revolution would ultimately benefit the recording industry because of all the promotional power provided by giving people free access to music. There’s something to this, but the positive effects will almost certainly not be enough to reverse the contraction of a now-unnecessary industry. In a very broad sense, information has gotten much cheaper, and all information vendors should therefore expect the size of their markets to shrink. That includes advertisers hoping to “educate” the public about the availability of their clients’ products.

That leaves the burden of making money to the manipulative aspect of advertising. And I admit, this is more open to debate. But I really do think that when you and I tell ourselves we can filter out commercial appeals, it’s not entirely self-flattery. Sure, we’re subtly affected by that billboard or radio spot or iPod commercial. But we’re less affected than we were the first time, and far less affected than would be someone who hadn’t grown up in an ad-saturated environment. Sure, ads can still warp our opinions. But we’re being constantly trained to ignore them. And I stand by my basic contention that advertising’s set of novel permutations is limited in a way that will ultimately let the consumer gain ground on the manipulations leveled against her. To return to the last post‘s metaphor, we consumers are like increasingly antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. Perhaps the ad industry will develop a miraculous new class of techniques. If not, I think that the importance of that sort of artificial intervention into our natural — and by and large perfectly-adequate — system will continue to decline.

So yeah, I still think that ads will continue to get less effective. The informational function they serve is vastly less relevant in the internet age; the opinion-manipulating function of the industry is a never-ending struggle, but one that, with each passing season, has fewer novel weapons at its disposal. In the face of those facts, how can the industry do anything but contract?

For the last week or so, I’ve had this post of Matt’s flagged in my RSS reader, waiting for a response. In it, he castigates the advertising market for failing to competently embrace the web. Today the conversation continues: Ezra responds to Clay Shirky, and says that, contrary to what Shirky implies, the newspaper’s death became inevitable the instant digital technology was invented. Matt responds, noting, among other things, that newspaper brands will survive (which seems right — if Nuprin can do it, so can the New York Times), and that the papers’ failure to hang on to their classifieds business was a major mistake. I think that brings us up to date (whew!).

I’m with Ezra on this one, and apologize for the amount of overlap that this post will likely have with his own. But I think Matt is seriously understating the crisis facing the advertising industry. Narrowly, there’s the question of Craigslist. It’s a weird one, in that its creators have quite obviously avoided implementing features that would maximize revenue, or even just reported user satisfaction. They could have a slick-looking site, and a huge staff, and a big office in the Mission with polished concrete floors and free snacks in the break room. But they’ve decided not to, and that’s their genius: they realized that classifieds were going to be a race to the bottom, so they decided to get to the bottom first. This is a crucial realization — one that a lot of people involved in similar races just can’t accept.

I don’t think Matt’s right that this could have been stopped, but it probably could have been slowed. Competing on the basis of having fewer features rarely works, and it probably wouldn’t have for Craigslist, either, had the newspapers rolled out competent online options quickly. CL was allowed to build marketshare in an unusual and, in hindsight, inexcusable way. Also, we haven’t collectively reached that proverbial bottom, making CL’s success seem that much stranger. But we’ll get there; if the papers had responded quickly, we just would’ve gotten there at a more languid pace.

But classifieds aren’t the only doomed form of advertising. I think there are reasons to doubt advertising’s viability in a broader sense, too. More of it will inevitably have to be done online as people continue to spend more of their time on the net, but so far that hasn’t been working out very well. For one thing, there are technological ways to avoid online advertising. For another, although various form factors have been tried, the online medium still hasn’t been figured out how to capture viewers’ attention in the way that print and broadcast have — personally, I think the media may simply be innately immune to commoditization, thanks to the aforementioned ability of computers to avoid displaying unwanted information. Third, and probably most troublingly for the industry, online advertisers seem to have made a serious mistake when they offered concrete metrics to their customers. This action was perfectly understandable — the web makes it simple to collect objective data, and it’s easy to see why an advertising client might find the prospect of better stats alluring. The problem is that doing this reveals that advertising just doesn’t work very well.

In retrospect, it should be obvious: to whatever extent the advertising industry is capable of shaping the public’s sense of how to gauge value, naturally they will apply that talent to their own products first. The other advertising media smartly developed captive metrics agencies like Nielsen and Arbitron. But online advertising charlatanism is still in its infancy, and continues to be dominated by primitively objective concepts like “page views”, “click throughs” and “purchases”.

Right now the practitioners of online advertising have not yet succeeded in artificially inflating the perceived value of their product in the way that advertisers working in other media have. Perhaps this will change. I think it might not. It’s easy to forget how quickly advertising has evolved, and how quickly the public has evolved along with it. Although I admit that it’s probably an overly antagonistic framing, I tend to think of the relationship between the public and advertising as being analogous to the one that exists between humans and bacterial pathogens. In both cases the pace of evolution is staggering, but I’m left optimistic that humanity will come out on top.

For one thing, we’re awfully plucky. For another, there are fewer constraints on us. As viewers of advertising, we’re subject to various hindrances that seem to be biologically determined — among others, we’re susceptible to the concept of brands, and we’re keen to see sexy dames, and plenty of em (so to speak). But we’re free to come up with whatever compensatory intellectual constructs we need to help us maintain our senses of iconoclasm and connoisseurship, and our ability to maximize the value we receive for our money. Advertisers face many more restrictions: time, space, cost, reproducibility, risk aversion, various regulations, and, last but by no means least, the simple necessity of crafting messages that are both interesting and at least somewhat coherent from a commercial perspective.

I admit it: I’ve always been an advertising millenarianist. But I still feel a bit bad for them. None of this is to say that advertising will ever go away, but as the pool of novel advertising techniques shrinks and purchasers become more aware of its limited utility, the industry will naturally contract. And that brings us back to newspapers.

Ezra lays it out pretty well; let me do the same with a tedious half-analogy. Once upon a time the cost of distributing information was high. Then technology improved, and if you were able to make a big up-front investment, economies of scale allowed you to drastically lower the cost of getting data out. If you sold information-distribution services at a price in between the old one and your own, newly-discovered cost, you could make a lot of money. Firms flourished, and added premium features to differentiate themselves from their competitors, just like those little sticks of gum that come with baseball cards. The paid information distribution business continued to be lucrative — to get more lucrative, even! — to the point where the quality of the gum could be drastically upgraded. Sometimes even non-gum ingredients were bought up and converted into gum (it just seemed like the most efficient way to distribute them, frankly — look how much gum people were buying!).

But technology kept getting better, and that up-front investment kept getting smaller, and although by now everyone had pretty well fooled themselves into thinking it was the high-quality gum that moved units, that wasn’t actually the case. In fact, a lot of that gum was downright revolting¹.

These days distributing information costs very little, and there’s no minimum order. And people still chew gum, but not nearly so much of it. Hopefully the quality of gum available to them is better than it was, but I think the jury’s still out on that one.

ALSO: I hadn’t read Tim’s post before I wrote this, but he makes a number of excellent points. One thing that’s maybe worth adding: when he says “…the only way to avoid this grim fate is to spin off an independent subsidiary that can pursue new markets without worrying about fat profit margins or cannibalization of existing product lines… I’m not aware of any high-profile newspaper firms that attempted this”, I think the Washington Post may be a counterexample — the Post and their online operations are entirely distinct, and separated by a river. Typically they’re castigated for this decision, and to be fair I’m not sure to what extent the decision (which is now being undone) was made with Christensen’s principles in mind versus more immediate concerns (there wasn’t any more space in their downtown building). Either way, I don’t think WaPo.com was sufficiently independent to really embody Christensen’s model (as I understand it based on Tim’s account — I haven’t read the man’s work), but it’s the closest noteworthy example I’m aware of. Doubtless there were other, truly-independent ventures backed by major news organizations, which are now lost to memory thanks to “making money on the internet” being a very tough proposition in general.

¹ Bazooka Joe Scarborough (discarded gag for alternate metaphor: Kristol Pepsi)

I was remiss in not posting this earlier: a bunch of friends have started up The Internet Food Association, and have been nice enough to ask me (end Emily, and probably other people you know) to contribute to it. If you think you might enjoy hearing me hold forth pretentiously about beer, go subscribe to the feed.

It’s no secret that the newspaper industry is in trouble. Still, give our hometown paper credit for trying new business models. Last week we saw the Post move strongly into the “collectible knick-knack” market. This week? They’re trying their hand at becoming a network security firm / law enforcement agency (this via Tom Bridge.

Snark aside, this really is a pretty impressive accomplishment for a journalist. Brian Krebs’ reporting led directly to a major spam colocation facility getting knocked offline by its upstream bandwidth providers. The result is reportedly a staggering 75% overnight drop in net-wide spam. That won’t last, of course, but it’s still awfully impressive. (Incidentally, this isn’t the first time that the Post has caused trouble for botnet operators.)

Not to diminish Krebs’ accomplishment, but the ease with which this was done — a civilian making some phone calls, basically — also hints at the lameness of our law enforcement agencies’ online efforts. This was a U.S. company that was plainly harboring illegal activity. Krebs spoke to some security researchers who let him know about it, then he called the folks providing the malefactors’ network connections. Those providers said “wow! you’re right!” and pulled the plug. It took time, initiative, and cleverness (the threat of Krebs’ bully pulpit helped, no doubt), but it didn’t take any warrants or indictments.

Meanwhile, the people nominally charged with prosecuting these sorts of crimes are — what? Posing as sexy teens in chatrooms? Fretting about cyberterrorism? It was, admittedly, the Army, not law enforcement, that published the recent asinine report examining Twitter’s capacity for supporting terrorists’ activities. Still, that mindset seems to be pervasive: people just don’t get very excited about going after online criminals who steal money and productivity. Instead electronic crime needs to be blown up into an existential threat — it’s about terrorists! Or hostile foreign governments! Or sexual predators! What it really is is a waste of time and money.

Before the global economy ended and the dollar recovered, there was a lot of talk about why our currency had begun performing so poorly relative to the Euro and the British Pound. Too often ignored in these discussions: how much suckier our currency is. You can hardly blame people for wanting it less.

For example: this is awesome; this is even awesomer. These, though? The best thing you can say for these designs is that the implied alternate history in which all US Presidents were zombies is kind of a funny idea.