Black Ops Advertising
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From Facebook to Talking Points Memo to the New York Times, often what looks like fact-based journalism is not. It’s advertising. Not only are ads indistinguishable from reporting, the Internet we rely on for news, opinions and even impartial sales content is now the ultimate corporate tool. Reader beware: content without a corporate sponsor lurking behind it is rare indeed.Black Ops Advertising dissects this rapid rise of “sponsored content,” a strategy whereby advertisers have become publishers and publishers create advertising—all under the guise of unbiased information. Covert selling, mostly in the form of native advertising and content marketing, has so blurred the lines between editorial content and marketing message that it is next to impossible to tell real news from paid endorsements. In the 21st century, instead of telling us to buy, buy, BUY, marketers “engage” with us so that we share, share, SHARE—the ultimate subtle sell.Why should this concern us? Because personal data, personal relationships, and our very identities are being repackaged in pursuit of corporate profits. Because tracking and manipulation of data make “likes” and tweets and followers the currency of importance, rather than scientific achievement or artistic talent or information the electorate needs to fully function in a democracy. And because we are being manipulated to spend time with technology, to interact with “friends,” to always be on, even when it is to our physical and mental detriment.
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“There is no need for advertisements to look like advertisements. If you make them look like editorial pages, you will attract about 50 percent more readers. You might think that the public would resent this trick, but there is no evidence to suggest that they do.”
—David Ogilvy, founder, Ogilvy & Mather
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Purina is able to engage with Laura and other consumers like her because they scan the Internet in real time looking for mentions of cats and dogs—an activity known as social listening—and determine how they can insert themselves into the conversation. Did Laura buy Purina? I don’t know. But she did become a brand ambassador in response to some brief corporate attention. And it didn’t feel like marketing, either to her or to the followers with whom she shared the tweet.
Undergirding all of this one-on-one interaction is big data—large stores of information made available by digital technologies—a topic we will cover at length in Chapter 5. For the moment, bear in mind that media and marketing companies track our every digital move. Put a pair of shoes in an online cart, decide not to buy them, and just wait for the image of those flats to follow you from website to website and from computer to cell phone to iPad and soon to your smart TV, a technique known as retargeting.18 And by now, you likely know that the Google results you receive in response to searches are not the same as the ones your spouse or child or business associate sees. This is because as you roam the web, you leave trails of data for marketers to analyze—and to sell to others—in a never-ending attempt to persuade you to buy even more consumer goods. How you have moved around the web determines not only the ads that you see, but the types of sites that will make it to the top of the Google results. It isn’t merely Google that uses your information to serve their business needs: Netflix created “House of Cards” using viewership data from their site (more on that later), Pinterest is the social media equivalent of a consumer focus group, and I could go on and on. The list of sites that use our information to garner information is virtually endless.
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