taken a quiz like “Which ‘Peanuts’ Character Is Your Kid?” If you passed along these three items, then you promoted Geico, Best Buy, or All laundry detergent, respectively.
Detecting these and other types of corporate missives online is becoming increasingly difficult. Online there are no time or space limitations, no cues to let us know that we are watching a sponsored piece of content. Demonstration videos like Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” that show everything from marbles to magnets being whirled in a blender appear to be entertainment, not commercials. Similar demonstrations appear on blog posts or are recommended on Twitter. In their early incarnations, these might have both been legitimate endorsements. Now, however, whole industries have built up around getting bloggers and celebrities to promote products. Agencies like Izea and Ad.ly contact potential endorsers asking them to write or tweet about a product—perhaps a recipe with Tabasco or a celebrity endorsement of an insurance company—and pay them for doing so. Beauty bloggers are notorious for this practice, but it happens across a plethora of categories on sites and in social media. While these covert endorsers are legally required to say that a sponsor is paying them, the reality is that many of them do not, or they note it in the legal fine print where no one will ever read it.
In short, marketing has become about engagement, about getting us to spend increasing and inordinate amounts of time with a brand—often without our knowledge. To do that, companies create content that’s made to look like news, made to look like entertainment, made to look and feel like anything but marketing.
The question to ask yourself is this: if you knew it was an advertisement, would you give it more than a split second of your time?
Black Ops Advertising shines a light on this increasingly widespread phenomenon so that we do not waste our time with advertising that has nothing to do with us or tries to sell us a point of view without acknowledging its underlying bias. We seem to be well on our way to an advertising-augmented world where our relationships are monetized and where news is not just entertainment but also full-blown corporate puffery. How many more times will we be enticed to watch what we think is a legitimate news event, only to find out that we’ve watched an ad? I suspect more than we can guess, especially since marketers are looking to Red Bull as their “best practices” prototype. And while we are watching fake news, real newspapers continue to fold and television revenues continue to decline, which in turn has led to advertising being inserted into all manner of content both on and off line. As the blending of church and state becomes status quo, we should not be surprised to see oil companies espousing environmental benefits and food companies suggesting that processed anything is good for you—all without an advertising disclaimer in sight.
But so what? After all, advertising has long been invasive and manipulative, even flat out trickery. Most practitioners argue that these new types of advertising are an improvement over other forms because they provide benefits for consumers. In theory, after all, we should only be receiving advertising for products and services we want or need, rather than seeing unnecessary commercial clutter. It is also less intrusive than traditional marketing messages because we do not have to stop to interact with it. It occurs in the natural flow of our day. And the ability to find out about a product and buy it immediately has become as simple as hitting a button on your mobile device.
But the costs, both for consumers and for society as a whole, far outweigh these benefits. First, the traditional line between church and state (editorial content and advertising) has virtually disappeared, and with it the symbolic cues that enable us to know when we are engaging with sponsored content. Second, word-of-mouth marketing (WOM), in putting the focus on individuals and personal relationships, is creating a world where marketers try to become our friends and monetize our existing friendships. Third, as companies become adept at data
analytics, corporations control what information we see (and perhaps more importantly, what we don’t) both in terms of content and in terms of the products and services we might want to buy. Fourth, the type of content produced is being driven by the tracking and manipulation of data, and thus popularity determines what gets published and supported. Rather than scientific achievement or artistic talent or information the electorate needs to fully function in a democracy, “Likes” and tweets and followers become the currency of importance. And finally, we—all of us—are being manipulated to spend time with technology, to interact with friends, and to always be “on,” even when this is to our physical and mental detriment.
Media philosopher Neil Postman famously noted that any change in technology comes with a Faustian bargain. In explaining this rule, he said, “Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A new technology sometimes creates more than it destroys. Sometimes, it destroys more than it creates. But it is never one-sided.” As we increasingly live online, we give ever more power to the players behind its workings. We have traded privacy and identity for convenience. We have traded genuine face-to-face relationships for Twitter followers and Facebook “friends.” We are lost in a corporate Neverland populated with pretty pictures and entertaining videos . . . and increasingly, we don’t even know it.
1
In a YouTube video called “Marc Ecko Tags Air Force One,” two hooded graffiti artists spray paint the president’s private plane with the words “Still Free.” The video was shot at in the dark of night, and the images are shaky and grainy, suggesting that the camera is hand-held and shot by an amateur. Adding to the “authenticity” is the lack of audio save for periodic heavily-exerted breathing, coming either from the cameraperson or from the graffiti artists after they jump over a barbed wire fence and sprint to the plane to avoid detection from the military guards who protect the area. The video ends with an exhortation to find out more at stillfree.com.
Many who saw the video were appalled. Spraypaint the plane of the President of the United States? How utterly disrespectful. It could never happen . . . or could it? The responses on YouTube show people’s confusion, with comments running the gamut from “it’s a fake” to “this was a video game promotion” to “it was real moron.” In fact, it was a fake. The video was produced by hot New York ad agency Droga5—it’s been named agency of the year seven times—and as founder David Droga put it, the video “was done 100 percent to exploit news channels . . . I knew the average news network would want to believe it was real.”1 This is what cutting-edge marketing is today: a tool to get people talking by any means possible, be it confusing the consumer or junking up the news with over-the-top PR trickery.
Marc Ecko said he created the video and website to protest graffiti laws throughout the United States. Maybe he did, but that’s hard to swallow, given that an advertising agency produced it. Rather than protest a policy, this short film portrayed the fashion designer as cutting-edge, hip, anti-establishment. These attributes marry well with his brand and with the new age of advertising, which puts products and brands into unexpected places doing unexpected things. In this new marketing model, social media, experiential marketing, stunts, and public relations take precedence over traditional, straightforward sales messages.
Marketers have turned to these types of murky tactics in response to advertising avoidance: consumers’ ability to circumvent commercial messages, whether that involves flipping past a commercial or paying for subscriptions to services like Netflix or Amazon Prime. As more content goes online, we have increased our use of ad blockers, like Adblock Plus, Blur (formerly DoNotTrackMe), Disconnect, and Ghostery.2 Already more than half of all Americans record TV shows so that they can skip past commercials, and the number of people watching online to avoid ads is rapidly increasing. We unsubscribe, unlike, or stop following brands that we once opted into 91 percent of the time.3 “There’s a growing realization that we’re being trained to be blind
