How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men (newyorker.com) 94
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt of a New Yorker piece: Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They've now been eclipsed by Math Men -- the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. Yet Math Men are beleaguered, as Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated when he humbled himself before Congress, in April. Math Men's adoration of data -- coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless -- has aroused government anger, much as Microsoft did two decades ago.
The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America's newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook.
The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America's newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook.
Comparing apples and oranges? (Score:5, Insightful)
> Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies.
Yeah, but Google and Facebook aren't in the business of making ads for clients, like those advertising and marketing companies almost assuredly are.
Google and Facebook should be compared to newspapers, TVs and roadside billboards.
Companies will still be using those marketing companies to create the content, and then Facebook/Google is where they place the content for eyeballs to see it.
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Re: Comparing apples and oranges? (Score:4, Insightful)
Only because they lacked the technical capability, not because their scruples prevented them from doing so.
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Google are competing with newspapers - and as you've identified, they are beating newspapers handily at their own game due to superior technology.
Google are not competing with Saachi and Saachi, which is whom the article compared them with.
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Re: Comparing apples and oranges? (Score:2)
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'Good journalists'? Where?
You will list journalists that agree with you.
Re:Comparing apples and oranges? (Score:5, Interesting)
Scientific Advertising [wikipedia.org] was published in 1923, and most successful advertising has been run by the "math men" ever since. I remember Darren on "Bewitched", who was an ad exec who came up with a cute slogan to impress the client in nearly every episode. But even in the 1960s advertising didn't really work that way. Instead of nodding and saying "I like it", the client would actually say "Show me the data".
What Google and Facebook change is that they make scientific advertising MUCH easier. Back in the 90s, my company used to run A-vs-B ads collated in card decks to test prospective ads before running them in magazines. It would take months to get results. Today, you can test dozens of ads, and see the results in days or even hours. It is also much easier to segment the target audience, and either give different messages to different groups, or just exclude groups unlikely to respond.
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Yes, but google isn't creating the A vs B ads themselves. Your company would be doing that, and then using Google to get the research, instead of placing the ads in magazines.
So Google has replaced the magazines for your company, but your company are still the people making the A and B designs to begin with.
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It doesn't really matter, what I found interesting, if we declare war on advertising, we effectively destroy some of the largest corporations in the world. So what value advertising to society, what harm, how honest, how fair, how much does it consume and waste, how truthful should it be, should any false associations be allowed, should it ever entertain or only inform, how much more should it be controlled. You have a right to free expression of opinion, you have no right of false claim of fact to defraud,
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Nothing exempts advertising from the iron law of consumers voting with their feet (and fetii).
The expressed preference (for now) of 90% of the consuming public is to have to their purchasing biases shaped implicitly without lifting a finger (over and above the next clickbait bikini), rather than deliberately apply their faculty of reason to a cornucopia of quantitative information that's only ever another finger-click away (at least in outline; some assembly required for a fully-resolved view).
Evolution pro
Re: Comparing apples and oranges? (Score:2)
Google & Facebook are not in the advertising business. They're in the surveillance business.
Tried it, didn't happen (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was doing SEO for a living there were a dozen search engines were analyzed the and worked to get good rankings on. Google wasn't in the top three. In fact, Excite, who had exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, declined to buy Google for $1 million, because Google was nothing compared Excite, Lycos, and Hotbot.
Google did two major things that causes them to become THE search company, beating out many far larger, more established competitors. One was Google Page Rank - ranking the importance of a site based on which sites link to it, recursively. The other difference was they jealousy guarded their viewer data, keeping it in-house, and developed sophisticated new algorithms for using it. They didn't sell it off to marketing companies as magazine publishers always had and Excite and Lycos did. That made them a ton more money, which they were able to re-invest.
If selling off the data were as profitable as keeping it in-house and developing your own advanced advertising algorithms, Lycos would be a trillion dollar company today and Google would be a hobby Sergey had in college.
“Humbled himself”? (Score:5, Insightful)
Zuck did no such thing - he pretty much robotically kept denying specific knowledge of pretty much everything he got asked.
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Zuck did no such thing - he pretty much robotically kept denying specific knowledge of pretty much everything he got asked.
Humbled = Humiliated.
Seriously, install an ad blocker (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, if you haven't done it yet, install an ad blocker.
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Yup. I have a few friends who work in marketing (they're nice people, really). They pretty much all give the standard justification "I help make people's lives better by introducing them to products they want or need."
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I agree that once in a blue moon that actually DOES happen.
But the proper analogy would be to have thousands of shells thrown at me, and one of them contains a small pearl. I'd rather not partake, even if there's a tiny chance of a positive return.
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I worked in advertising 1993 - 2005 and what got me was the how artistic nearly everyone in "creative" thought they were. I mean, a handful of them were decent illustrators and one guy seriously could have worked for a comic book type company but they were the least arrogant and elitist of the bunch.
The ones that worked on television commercials fancied themselves to be Hollywood directors even though the production of actual commercials was totally contracted out to actual production companies. There was
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Most 'creatives', aren't. 'Creative' is just their excuse for being a fuckwit.
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If a woman wants a tech job, good for her, if she's qualified I'll happily work alongside her. If she does not, or she's not qualified, I want her nowhere near my profession; the same applies to men, by the way, before anyone wants to scream "SEXISM!!!"
Bracing for "Offtopic" mods.
The Tyranny of Surety (Score:4, Insightful)
The numbers say this thing will make money, so we will make it. Whoops, the numbers were wrong.
Focus groups said they wanted this thing, so we sold it. Whoops, our questions were wrong.
Consumers aren't buying this kind of vehicle in large numbers, so we'll stop making it. Whoops, that kind of vehicle brought people into the door for the first time and introduced them to our brand.
Surveys say that more movies like this will sell, so we will bat them into the ground until we murder a franchise. Whoops, movies written and produced by people with vision become the greats, that define new genres and cement careers permanently.
You can know you're right, and still be wrong... at least some of the time
Re: The Tyranny of Surety (Score:2)
Misunderstood the Cause of the Anger (Score:5, Insightful)
Math Men's adoration of data -- coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless -- has aroused government anger
The reason for people's anger is not because of their "arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless" it is because they are collecting huge amounts of private data and then are either inadequately protecting it from criminals (Equifax) or those seeking to manipulate elections (Facebook).
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The people != the government. The government isn
False dichotomy -- Math helps Mad Men (Score:5, Insightful)
The NYT reliably misunderstands (ironically their own business): The growth of the Advertising industry over ~100 years has occurred primarily because there is good feedback [justification] for ad campaigns from sales volumes. With the Internet, much more information can be routinely tracked to give much finer feedback (click-thru). Side-stream (private?) data can be used to target ads for 2+ orders of magnitude in effectiveness.
"Math" [AI, neural nets, etc] is nothing more than a tool used by Mad Men who no longer need to use as much judgement [guessing]. Never become so amazed by flashy tools that you neglect the judgement required to use increased power. MBA hubris.
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If you ever meet a liberal, ask them if the New York Times is a liberal newspaper, or not.
When Reagan was President, most people considered the New York Times to be a center-right newspaper that published both liberal and conservative opinions on the editorial page; and their reporting hasn't actually changed.
You moved so far to the right that you think center-right means far-left liburaal, but there is no reason to presume that liberals would start considering right-wing corporatist blah-blah to be "libera
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If a 'liberal' (American 'liberal', not one that's pro-freedom) calls something 'center' anything, it's liberal. They are _blind_ to their own distorted perceptions.
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Derp, derp derp derp derp libraaal
Shut up and get back in the pile. Remember, they tuk yer jerbs!
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Truth hurts. Suck it up.
Zuck is NOT a math man (Score:1)
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If you peel away the propaganda he is just another Mad Man (with their same lack of humility).
Mad Men (whatever that is supposed to mean?) I take it are the charismatic types who used charm and persuasion to be successful in advertising back in the day. MZ is none of that.
Advertising runs the world and it does it badly (Score:4, Insightful)
By itself it distorts the free market against the consumer's interest, and today the mechanism of catching the customer's attention in order to administer commercial propaganda has the effect of promoting the exchange of false or emotional information at a massive level, which can go as far as undermining the democratic process and the pacific coexistence of people.
Advertising is a weapon (Score:1)
Ah a thinking man who sees advertising for the danger it is.
Naive liberals see advertising as just 'messages informing you about the existence of available products'.
That might have been true 100+ years ago, but corporate propaganda is now deeply insidious, working at multiple levels.
On the surface level it is indeed a product. Below this is a tenuous connection to a real human need, and below that consumer ideology itself: The idea that all your problems can be solved by buying things.
When a multinational
Hm (Score:4, Funny)
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This, exactly.
Just bought a radiator for my old shitbox. Found it on-line via Google. Now, every f*cking site I visit tries to sell me the same radiator. I only needed one! It'll be many years (hopefully) before I purchase said item again.
The people that are making the profit on this are the Googles. They are selling garbage, outdated data to advertisers. Or the advertisers are morons for misusing it. Either way, Google just made money by selling something that has lower than average value.
Happiness Machines (Score:4, Interesting)
The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays.
Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses.
He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book,
from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking
by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling
consumer goods.
It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could
be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."
Different replacement (Score:1)
In other words, we've got to end the old marxist narratives and so we can embrace the new marxist narratives.
Guys, it was waaay better back in the 1960's when there were no school shooters, taxes were low, unemployment was even lower than today, women were taking care of because they had excellent husbands, people could bring up Jesus in schools, and Americans had more leisure time.
And if you