The necessity of messaging without manipulation | Digital Letterpress: Part 15
We live in an advertising and/or media-centric world where messages are meant to influence and sometimes manipulate audience members. Whether images, stories, etc come from marketing campaigns, political campaigns, or news media, manipulation is often the tactic being used, which is a shame. Products, messages or people relying on manipulation must do so because their content isn’t strong enough to inform, educate, or grab audiences’ attention on their own merits. Advertising should be about information-relay, not a decision made because of an underhanded arm-twist.
Perception is power. Even more so, the ability to control perception is power. With the rise of modern technology and its effects on modern advertising, we must decide what constitutes solid marketing and manipulation. Are we okay with companies using secret tactics in order to garner our attention like referenced in “Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing.” This dissertation presents a situation where a company hired attractive actors to create “organic” marketing situations. The company new a representative wearing one of their t-shirts would not be trusted as much as a “real” person, so they tried to produce that on their own.
Does that not feel a little underhanded? Was the product not good enough to sell itself in the hands of a company representative? As such they had to resort to essentially lying to their potential audience base in order to present the product. How many other companies, organizations, etc do this? How often are we presented a script, something to sell, something that will peek our interest in a completely contrived way?
In addition to that type of manipulation, our perceptions are often shaped not only by the things we see, but by the things we don’t. With the use of technology, programs and algorithms often control what information we have immediate viewing of. Even as neat and helpful as Google’s search engine is, its algorithms shape the results one gets when “Googling.” A quick glance at its own explanation of its search process shows that it filters so many things in order to give us a tailored internet surfing experience. One on hand, this is neat, right? But on the other, when thought about, this might be a bit concerning. If it can control what information I see on the first page of my Google search, who is to say that it won’t go a step further and stop showing results for anything the company doesn’t want to show. I’m not accusing Google of anything foul, mind you. I use its search engine literally every day. But I just want to take a moment to analyze how interesting it is that we rely on a machine that literally spoon-feeds us certain information while pushing others to the back of the search results.
The example of Google is just meant to show how our perceptions (our view of the information around us) can be so easily molded and contrived. An example that falls closer to the advertising home is Amazon. I have referenced the Independent Publishing house Sterling & Stone previously in a blog post. A frequent topic on their podcasts and/ or blogs is that of helping authors “get seen” on Amazon. Why do authors have to work to get seen? Due to Amazon’s suggestion algorithms, those numbers determine what customers see on product pages that show one what they might find interesting. The machine on the inside of the website generates what it believes you want to read next. As such, authors have to fight to make their books fit into that math machine so as to show up in potential customer’s suggestions feed.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Netflix, etc use similar systems to feed to us what they believe we want to see, read, and consume. Isn’t that thought a little concerning? When put in those terms, it’s hard to deny that our perceptions are being at least influenced by these systems created to entertain us, market to us, or feed us content.
On top of all that, the advertising showing up in your news feeds, email, search engines, etc is individually crafted by your likes, dislikes, search history, and location. Are you finding that small ads that show up as “suggested” on Facebook hit really close to home? It’s because the numbers on the inside of the program know what you were searching on Amazon the day before. A few weeks back, I was reminiscing with my on the fond days when we would watch Josh Bernstein’s Digging for the Truth on the History Channel. As such, I of course Googled the program to read up on what eventually happened to it. I wound up looking at a series boxset on Amazon. Not even two days later, it was popping up in my newsfeed on Facebook. That is modern advertising in a nutshell. Is that scary? Is that too much and over the line?
Like I said earlier, we must decide what is manipulation and what is good, solid marketing.
I think at the end of the day, the important thing to remember is to always be mindful of what is being shown to us. Especially today, we must be cautious to be sold on everything we are shown. The news media isn’t necessarily innocent here either. One would be wise to examine the types of stories we’re shown and the types of stories we’re not shown. It’s easy to be persuaded to believe or think whatever the t.v. screen sells us. Democracy of advertising and media (although it can present its own set of problems) actually alleviates some of manipulation that media outlets and advertisers performed in the past. Because individuals can review products and be seen by the masses, potential consumers can receive an unbiased, unmanipulated message. Their choice to buy the product strictly came of the merits of the product itself and possibly the endorsement of a trusted reviewer.
The moral of this entire story is that we should be mindful of the types of advertising we’re presented with. Since we’re the consumers, we ultimately control what succeeds and fails, so we shouldn’t let manipulative or invasive marketing tactics control us if we don’t want them to. We should, in the end, not be simply controlled by a system or algorithm.
