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Mental Deforestation
Jan. 20th, 2013 04:09 pmI've been reading Jared Diamond's Collapse and his observations on how societies fail because the early generations take all the "low-hanging fruit" of, say, forests, leaving later generations to suffer the consequences such as soil erosion, and it struck me that in modern societies a similar principle could be applied to advertising and/or marketing.
In the early days, advertising and marketing was effective because it was new. If advertisers and marketers had been shrewd, they would have rationed it – kept it rare and thus maintained its level of impact. It could, in other words, have become a sustainable ecology.
However, societies, and marketing/advertising is the same here, do not work like that. The conviction is that you have to do more. You have to exploit it as much NOW as you possibly can. Advertising was, as it were, the cod of the North Atlantic.
The impact on society can be seen today, although we are not yet at the end. Soil erosion is not complete; the forests are not totally vanished; there are still fish.
But the fish are getting smaller and harder to catch. The response is still the wrong response, to fish harder and more often in an attempt to maintain yield.
In advertising and marketing, what does this mean?
Advertisers are always looking for three things:
(a) new means of distribution (e.g. putting adverts on taxis)
(b) new methods of distribution (e.g., viral marketing)
(c) new targets (e.g., younger and younger children, emerging markets).
When a new constituent of any of these three is discovered by one player, ALL of the others flock in hard and fast. The result is that anything new is "exhausted" quicker than it used to be.
This is not hard to see. When the first poster was put up, it was a means of advertising that offered what seemed like limitless scope. Even today advertisers and marketers are looking for new blank space where they can put adverts.
But the "exhaustion" is of two types. First, you can run out of space (every blank space is used) and secondly, you can run out of impact. The method no longer works because the consumer no longer notices. His brain has become immune to that medium.
It is this that I refer to when I talk of "mental deforestation". Marketing and advertising has reached the stage where the only thing that works is marketing something that the person wanted anyway. Unfortunately (for the advertisers) because people's brains are becoming resistant to ALL marketing messages, there is an increasing chance that a message which would previously have got through, will now be ignored.
In other words, in the old days, you could get people to buy what they didn't want through marketing. But there has been so much marketing and advertising to people that now, no longer can you not get them to buy what they don't want, but also you can't get through the message to them that 'x' is available, where 'x' is something that they actually DO want.
So, if you are in advertising or marketing, is there a solution that is anything other than short-term? Or is the only answer to go on pumping harder and harder for a lower rate of return and a lower period of success (look how the 'viral' marketing as exploited by Facebook already meets consumer cynicism). The evidence of history is not good. Generally speaking societies have never been able to turn back over-exploiting land and the sea until a tipping point is reached. It seems to me that we are still getting into a MORE marketing-driven society (even though the returns are proportionally far less for the effort put in than they used to be). The human brain has not yet completely lost the forest. In addition, as with cigarettes, there are new markets. And there are new methods of distribution just awaiting development. What about adverts that bypass traditional media and which head straight to the bloodstream? When we all have chips implanted in our arms that perform roughly the function that our mobile phones perform today, think what opportunities that will offer to those willing to pay to get their message directly into the user's body.
No, I'm not optimistic. We are doomed, I fear, to suffer increasing levels of input with decreasing levels of return for at least a few more decades. But, I can dream, there may come a time when such advertising, call it blanket or targeted, using any means of distribution that you like, will be given up as a bad job, simply because no-one, just no-one, will be willing to pay companies to spread the message "buy this to be better than the person next to you" or "buy this, because, if you don't, your child will hate you" or "buy this, because, if you don't, you are shit".
__________
In the early days, advertising and marketing was effective because it was new. If advertisers and marketers had been shrewd, they would have rationed it – kept it rare and thus maintained its level of impact. It could, in other words, have become a sustainable ecology.
However, societies, and marketing/advertising is the same here, do not work like that. The conviction is that you have to do more. You have to exploit it as much NOW as you possibly can. Advertising was, as it were, the cod of the North Atlantic.
The impact on society can be seen today, although we are not yet at the end. Soil erosion is not complete; the forests are not totally vanished; there are still fish.
But the fish are getting smaller and harder to catch. The response is still the wrong response, to fish harder and more often in an attempt to maintain yield.
In advertising and marketing, what does this mean?
Advertisers are always looking for three things:
(a) new means of distribution (e.g. putting adverts on taxis)
(b) new methods of distribution (e.g., viral marketing)
(c) new targets (e.g., younger and younger children, emerging markets).
When a new constituent of any of these three is discovered by one player, ALL of the others flock in hard and fast. The result is that anything new is "exhausted" quicker than it used to be.
This is not hard to see. When the first poster was put up, it was a means of advertising that offered what seemed like limitless scope. Even today advertisers and marketers are looking for new blank space where they can put adverts.
But the "exhaustion" is of two types. First, you can run out of space (every blank space is used) and secondly, you can run out of impact. The method no longer works because the consumer no longer notices. His brain has become immune to that medium.
It is this that I refer to when I talk of "mental deforestation". Marketing and advertising has reached the stage where the only thing that works is marketing something that the person wanted anyway. Unfortunately (for the advertisers) because people's brains are becoming resistant to ALL marketing messages, there is an increasing chance that a message which would previously have got through, will now be ignored.
In other words, in the old days, you could get people to buy what they didn't want through marketing. But there has been so much marketing and advertising to people that now, no longer can you not get them to buy what they don't want, but also you can't get through the message to them that 'x' is available, where 'x' is something that they actually DO want.
So, if you are in advertising or marketing, is there a solution that is anything other than short-term? Or is the only answer to go on pumping harder and harder for a lower rate of return and a lower period of success (look how the 'viral' marketing as exploited by Facebook already meets consumer cynicism). The evidence of history is not good. Generally speaking societies have never been able to turn back over-exploiting land and the sea until a tipping point is reached. It seems to me that we are still getting into a MORE marketing-driven society (even though the returns are proportionally far less for the effort put in than they used to be). The human brain has not yet completely lost the forest. In addition, as with cigarettes, there are new markets. And there are new methods of distribution just awaiting development. What about adverts that bypass traditional media and which head straight to the bloodstream? When we all have chips implanted in our arms that perform roughly the function that our mobile phones perform today, think what opportunities that will offer to those willing to pay to get their message directly into the user's body.
No, I'm not optimistic. We are doomed, I fear, to suffer increasing levels of input with decreasing levels of return for at least a few more decades. But, I can dream, there may come a time when such advertising, call it blanket or targeted, using any means of distribution that you like, will be given up as a bad job, simply because no-one, just no-one, will be willing to pay companies to spread the message "buy this to be better than the person next to you" or "buy this, because, if you don't, your child will hate you" or "buy this, because, if you don't, you are shit".
__________
