8 Reasons Advertising Doesn't Work Anymore

advertising it's the second oldest profession and anyone in advertising with any sense of perspective stress drinks like Freddy rumsen these days because as much as advertising's up in your face and as much as you complain about that you don't realize the truth you don't realize you're kicking advertising's ass like never before and why would you do that you big meanie advertising is about happiness don't you like happiness sure it's also about a direct assault on every human being possible it always has been outdoor ads for runaway slaves in ancient Egypt campaign ad graffiti at Pompeii Chinese people using bamboo flutes to sell candy 3,000 years ago they all operate on the same basic pitches advertisers used today using either a hard or soft sell McLaughlin ting you right in the heart strings and appealing to the same two forward-looking emotions fear and hope that have driven dramatic storytelling since before bill Shakespeare so is mine eye enthralled to thy shape and you know admin put product every place they can one of them put product in front of you before you saw this but you may not know the Internet you're using right now is stalking you with Pete cam belly and creep of t1 Atlantic writer measured that and in a 36-hour period his movements were tracked by a hundred and five different ad companies and he's a web savvy Ginsberg tight a trashy lyrics and browser game websites Joe at aol.com wanders into probably invites so much illicit tracking somebody in rushing guesses fingerprint hat size and favorite tattoo song which is all of them yes advertising siz American as apple pie or baseball or endless proxy war which describes the advertising process perfectly because this is a two-sided conflict and every time you face a banner ad for a browser game starring chess team medieval pinups that's a sign you milord are driving every ad man in existence to drink more ice you've consumed so much advertising already new ads have to entertain you as well as content does to move the needle that's why the Superbowl commercial breaks are now auditions for a nightmarish flavor dust SNL that advertisers struggle isn't new by the time real-life Don Draper finish busting a whiskey addled not an excitement about think small or it's toasted the viewing public consume that ad got bored of that ad and left on working another long ass the suitcase night trying to make a 30-second piece of content that's cooler than the Twilight Zone and funnier than Dick Van Dyke even though it has two star chef poo bottles over time that cycle got quicker then the internet kicked it up to few dsl speeds so every occasional actually clever idea got oversaturated and imitated so the company realized they spent millions promoting funny deodorant stud but can't hold on to those fans because they didn't do the even harder alchemy of leveraging meme into money maybe they even wasted a huge social media opportunity and only put out 23 tweets during that entire campaign a tweet quota any of those execs own kids crushes in a lunch period the ultimate iteration of add originality x' death race comes from the dawn of the internet the very first banner ad came out in 1994 and had a click-through rate or CTR of 44% it was new it was exciting it was as sexy as that madman lady who they throw in Mad Men's commercials too because hot damn lip bite wolf-whistle jaw drop but today that CTR number on banner ads is double-oh-seven as in 0.07% and remember that's in spite of a hundred company legion of doom monitoring our browsing habit and serving up ads to fit them today the one sexy banner ad isn't even old lady hot anymore and I say that with the utmost respect for miss Blankenship because if an ads not delivering happiness through pretty girls or fresh ideas or shiny new tech you skip it like a 4th grader in the 90s and you have more ways to skip it than ever before if you can afford cable you can afford DVR TV's lovely [ __ ] you too what's left of the world's Ogilvie or you can cut that cord and get the only shows you ever watch anyhow ad-free we're just pirate TV and movies right no ads there except for some porn and mackeeper pop-ups which are too smutty and deep web to keep any legitimate ad exec and cobb salad even if you obey the man and watch ads the system measuring you is buggy as hell the method depends on a tiny viewing sample measured by outmoded people meters everyone agrees it doesn't work and it's only still a thing because there's money in pretending this is 1955 and are you a human being which is to say do you like song well ad-supported music is either too antique to survive or has to price itself so cheaply it's going out of business even though it's exploiting its artists with cybernetic abandon or if you listen to podcasts Apple owns 89 percent of that market and their apps skip 15 seconds button kills any and many of the only port companies that sponsor all podcasting for some reason let's print is dead or dying billboards kill property values and their marketing impact it's fuzzy mobile ads are the pop up yes pop ups in the history of I don't want to say pop-ups again but pop ups if you go in the opposite direction with something beyond subtle like product placement it'll put your product in front of people but is there any call to action or does the viewers see it and think yes products exist even the newest Dada trick is already obsolete its native advertising which can totally bring your reader to a sponsors product like one time and from then on those readers know you trick them and will get their content elsewhere unless they never cared about content quality in the first place because if people want bad content great content or Schmidt Minh brand baloney they will get it they've always been able to and they have more options than ever before that means the viewing audience keeps scurrying into tinier and tinier niches splintering marketer reach and letting fans enjoy few or 0 ads they have their fun and they're tasty Schmidt Minh bran ballon and if those ads do reach the viewer they don't leave a real impression they can't disguise their craft stuff they lack the smooth moist tang of Schmidt Minh bran below ok ok this is this is not a branded video anymore I I don't want to pimp it and I own the company ok did you did you know we did you know we can't call it a meet or a solid look viewer listened listener the world's change and you won there's more ads on more platforms than ever yet they just slide off you like you're made of Teflon a product no one knows how to sell you anymore the next time Budweiser snapchats you an insta pin remember it just shows they're desperate you're a genius and that you've probably even got the smarts to run your own business if you [Music] yeah yeah well it already already says it's a quasi maid on the package so no no they can't they can't make us change they can't make us change the packaging they can't we printed a ton of that we can't I did not get into the Ballona business to sell Bologna sh hey thanks for watching the video I hope you share this with your friends and they share with their friends and so on and so on and we get a real virus of a Content going so please subscribe and then click the like button if that's there or your current platform and time periods equivalent of a like button to thumb up or like a okay or just the word yes click that and then in the comments just let us know what you did today however mundane I promise you at least a person will be mildly interested

Channel: Cracked

Views: 1,795,733

Rating: 4.8180456 out of 5

Keywords: Advertising (Interest), Kate Upton, Mad Man, Advertising, Click Rate, cracked, cracked.com, sketch, comedy, funny, spoof, humor, parody, Sketch Comedy (TV Genre), Satire (TV Genre), Television (Invention), ads, sex, commercials, fear, hope, ad men, Pete Cambell, Don Draper, Superbowl Commercials, Spot, click thru rate, pop up ads, apple

Id: GcGVbo57bAU

Length: 6min 43sec (403 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 23 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/polysyllabicusername]

This is the wrong message IMO. Adverts can still be damaging. People should not let their guards down by thinking they are smarter than the advertisers.

[u/jcwitte]

"If you work in marketing or advertising, kill yourself."

-Bill Hicks

[u/Indon_Dasani]

This is almost all just one reason: Advertising arms race is saturating the economy. People only have so much give a damn to give to the sum of all advertisers, and too many people want a cut of that pie.

[u/Ligaco]

Oh well, now my YT feed is going to be full of Cracked.

[u/[deleted]]

When do people start to understand that the point of banner ads on the net is not to get users to click on it. Banner ads want to put the product/brand in front of people; they want it to be seen, just like real life banners. The click is desirable, but a bonus.

[u/fotoman]

The last 30 seconds was the more ironic thing I had seen in a few days, esp related to what the main video was all about.

[u/Nikolasv]

Cracked.com, the source, is a low quality humor site. The video itself was not only factually lacking it was unfunny. Theonion on the contrary in its satire gets at deeper truths.

Advertising does work very well on most people. Most people want to just be part of the herd. Advertising starts the momentum that creates the trends that the unwitting human herds desperately try to fit into. If it didn't work companies wouldn't advertise and there wouldn't be so many useless products and everyone's homes would not be full of more consumer goods and trinkets than they could manage or mentally catalog. My mom for example loves to shop sales, and instead of telling how much she spent, brag about how much she saves.