Mental hygiene in an age of AI targeted advertising

A commenter to an article I just read, wrote:

Almost wondering if this is the onset of the death of democracy and its replacement by ad-campaigners who believe the voting public can be persuaded to go with anything provided enough fake propaganda is thrown at it. Is this modern democracy?

This triggered me to write something that I've been mulling over for a week or several in odd moments. So I replied

The ad campaigners don't believe; they know. 70 years of experience under their belts and now social media have handed them the tools to begin to really target advertising. It's still playing the odds but upping the likelihood of responses they hope for.  Our difficulty as populations subject to this is how to think about our own agency. We're too used to thinking of ourselves as in control and not sufficiently aware of subliminal and unconscious drivers. 'Of course, I'm not persuaded by advertising'. Well, maybe not directly but over time background opinions shift, we tend to mirror or move towards what we perceive 'people like us' are thinking/approving/accepting. It's a long game, but then the Murdoch press have being playing it for what? -30 or 40 years? Add to that the new toolbox from the people who take up the market slack from Cambridge Analytica. We all need to learn how to practice mental and emotional hygiene in a advertising age.

I think too that we need to find a way to talk in popular discourse about the fact that advertising does in fact change minds or influence opinion without making it sound like someone who does respond is an idiot and doesn't know their own mind. It's clear that statistically, advertising and targetting it does work but it's not 100%. Certain percentages of people are likely to follow up certain kinds of advertising and to be influenced by certain messages relayed and spun in certain ways. We need to find ways to enable people to be more aware of how this happens and to step up our out-smarting smarts. Many have got quite good at spotting 'crude' and direct sales pitches. We now need to get good at spotting and discounting the subtle.

Somewhere in all the comments in the Times article you can find the originals. Times is paywalled, but you can see a couple of articles a week free.

Interactive Advertising Sony Moves

I'm trying to decide how I feel about this. Check it out here:
Sony wants a future of interactive advertising, patents transformation of ads into games | Digital Trends:

Here's a bit from the article if you just want to dart to the heart of the matter:

using the PlayStation Move, the PS Eye, and the DualShock controllers. One shows pizza being ordered directly from an ad by selecting a large “Buy” button with a PlayStation Move controller. Another has a viewer jumping up and yelling “McDonald’s!” at their television screen to continue watching whatever show had been playing previously ... another visualizes consumers choosing between an action-oriented or romantic commercial to pass the time between actual television.

I think that what disquiets me is the androgogy of it: by forcing active involvement and thus engagement it forces attention and to some degree, I suspect, greater awareness of the product. But, on the other hand, what subversions of it will people come up with; will they/we learn to be even more ironic or sarcastic when engaging in this semi-forced way (not fully-forced because we could always just not do it). And if we subverted, took the mick, engaged ironically or subvesively, would that actually mean that the advertising became more ineffective? What opportunities for adbusting code and digital graffiti?

And would that start a re-subversion race in the spirit of Hebdige's Subculture: with constant bricolage being co-opted by the commercial and so on round the cycle?

Baby scan Jesus

I'm not sure what to think. Mainly because I've been working on an art-piece with a baby-scan Christ at the heart of it .... Now I'm worried that people will think I've ripped it off. Ho Hum.

ChurchAds.Net | Christmas starts with Christ: "Baby-Scan Jesus, which has been enthusiastically received by church leaders."
To Reach a Nation (Hodder Christian paperbacks)

Beggar your neighbour! -The insidiousness of

This ad really got under my skin and not in a good way. The reason is the way that it illustrates and in a sense sanctions or renders unproblematical the notion that happiness may be a zero-sum game: my happiness is increased or bought at the expense of your envy or unhappiness. I think this may be insidious because it legitimises a view of the world where we see happiness or, rather, the things that may contribute to happiness as in short supply and so if we are happy then that means somewhere else someone else has not to be (there has been another seriess of tele ads about similar 'balances'). This could be a slippery slope to accepting gross injustice and inequality ("someone's got to be poor and unhappy, so why should it be me? Alternatively, why shouldn't it be me that's the lucky one: blow the other poor sod.") and it also seems to be relating strongly to the Yin-yang/Force view of the world: it's all about balance. And that latter is only a step away from cosmological dualism; good and evil are equal and opposite forces.

I could say more, but I won't just now as I'm due to help with a Storytelling project run by our church in a local school ...

Advert signif - Free hosted at iimmgg.com

Scant comfort for atheist advertising

While I did think about mentioning how unimaginative the ripostes were from some of the Christian community (and you'll find them here: Let there be adverts: Christians hit back at the atheist bus | Media | The Guardian) I was most struck by this: "Last month the Advertising Standards Authority received almost 150 complaints that the atheist bus campaign was offensive to Christians, and that the 'no God' claim could not be substantiated.
However the ASA ruled that the campaign did not break the advertising code, concluding that the ads were an 'expression of the advertiser's opinion and that the claims in it were not capable of objective substantiation'. As such, it said that it was unlikely to mislead or to cause widespread offence."
Did you get that? the atheists were told that their claims are not capable of objective substantiation. Oh yes: the ASA reckon atheists hold a faith position too.
Just thought you'd like to know.

WWF-UK: small victory over greenwash

This is important in a small way. "Today, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld WWF's complaint against an advert placed by Shell in the Financial Times earlier this year, which suggested that oil sands were a sustainable energy source. The ASA - the independent body responsible for regulating UK advertising - branded the advert 'misleading', due to its ambiguous use of the word 'sustainable'."
And there is a WWF advert to go with it which you can find here.
WWF-UK: Shell's oil sands greenwash won't wash with the ASA:

being real about market distortion: big pharma

One of the big arguments about the possibility of patenting genes is to do with incentives to develop technologies. Well, no doubt there is some of that. But we should be wary as the perhaps unsurprising results of a study into relative investments in research and marketing by big pharma companies shows that probably about twice as much goes on the latter as the former. "the study’s findings supports the position that the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is marketing-driven and challenges the perception of a research-driven, life-saving, pharmaceutical industry, while arguing in favour of a change in the industry’s priorities in the direction of less promotion,"
Now I know it's complicated, and I'm not calling for easy answers, but I am saying that we should be real about the possible distortions.
Big Pharma Spends More On Advertising Than Research And Development, Study Finds:

The story of stuff

Introduction in easy terms to externalities or how it is that we don't pay the true costs of the stuff we buy.
Commended. Go see.

Downloads

Advertising works

... just not directly: but the ad industry's instinct for attitude modification through clever use of imagery in relation to oblique desires seems to be borne out by this piece of research. "Adolescents attending schools in neighborhoods where alcohol ads litter the landscape tend to want to drink more and, compared with other children, have more positive views of alcohol"
And it seemed to me that the research seems to hold out hope for those of us who think that good attitudes modelled and talked about (not lectured at, though) while growing up may have good effects, "Prior research has shown that adolescents' intentions and attitudes about alcohol generally predict their later behavior"
ScienceDaily: Outdoor Alcohol Ads Boost Kids' Urge To Drink: