I'm Mad, Man: A Copywriter Responds to "Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet"
Eric Clemons of the Wharton School of Business recently ripped into advertising. To wit:
“Consumers do not trust advertising. …commercial source[s] have much lower credibility … than the same message attributed to a rating service… ,”
Everyone who creates advertising knows that consumers will not—and should not—give it as much weight as much as they would give to truly independent rating services. This is very different from saying we are untrustworthy. Good advertising knows that it contributes to an information-gathering process. Its job is to spark awareness, clarify positioning, and provide some information. Consumers also know that this information is self-interested. Those of us who create ads are advocates, not arbiters. But when they see an ad, consumers also know who the information is coming from, what their interest is, and where they can find them. So, is an ad really less reliable than the mean-spirited restaurant review left anonymously by a fired waiter? Or the chat room discussion manipulated by the corporate plant? Or the press release camouflaged as journalism?
“Consumers do not want to view advertising.”
Of course, consumers do not want to view advertising, although some merits viewing. If they did, magazines and television network would pay us for ads. The covenant is this: you want cheap or free content so you agree to accept ads.
“And mostly consumers do not need advertising.”
Need is a strong word and we may not need advertising. We also may not need the Wharton School of Business. From what I can tell, we need only handguns, oxygen, and AIG. Certainly, if you rely on advertising as your primary source of information for any purchase larger than breath mints, you’re short changing yourself. Advertising doesn’t so much help us make choices as it helps suggest and dramatize and narrow them.
Clemons references a number of consumer information site. is homework required before every purchase? Isn’t spending time visiting a beer rating site more consumerist than just viewing an ad and buying a damn beer and taking a swig? It’s one thing to spend time researching cameras, but beer? Macaroni and cheese? Shoelaces? Popsicles?
Of course, a paid-advertising, cheap-content model is not right for every way of delivering information and entertainment. We have never wanted ads in books. We don’t want commercials within movies. We are okay with paying for HBO. Who knows how exactly the Internet will evolve? If the Internet forces advertising to be more charming and more useful, great. God knows, much advertising is little more than cultural pollution.
Professor Clemons doesn’t oppose all crafted commercial content, just ads. What offends him is content interruptus: Advertising requires “paying to locate these messages where they will be observed.” Clemons opposes commercial messages which subsidize the creation of content.
Such ads besmirch the free flow of objective, reliable, disinterested information that is the internet. I know, twenty years on, I don’t recognize that Internet, either.
As it stands now, all the Internet is really doing is putting the people who gather information and create art out of a job. There’s a serious case that this is creative destruction. But creative destruction is still destruction.
Unlike Clemons, the decimated New Yorker and the stumbling Washington Post sadden me. I yearn for the bad old world where the New Yorker ads for furs and whiskies allowed writers like Alice Munro and John Updike to live middle class lives and the Washington Post’s department store sale ads enabled Woodward and Bernstein to spend weeks nosing around, chatting up sources. Ads have financed some of our greatest literature and virtually all journalism worthy of the name. Scratch a Pulitzer Prize and discover a coupon for Pop Tarts. When advertising goes away, other things go away, too.
It would be sad if the information age became the death of information age.
