How to Write About Advertising

If you want to write an article about advertising and have it blow up overnight – the comments section rife with equal parts cynicism and dismissal – there are two ways to do it.

The first is to denounce some sort of massive shift in the internal culture of ad agencies. Something drastic like “media planners are now redundant, digital savants are the new media drivers” should do the trick. Or you could just recommend that agencies stop advertising altogether and deliver a purely consumer-centric model where the product doesn’t matter so long as your content is being adequately engaged with on a digital platform.

The second way is to repackage a universal truth of human behaviour as some grand insight that will serve as the core strategy for every piece of content made in the coming year. This is usually some variation of “consumers will share content of their own volition provided that it’s bite-sized and gives them a tingle in their cold, dead hearts.”

A textbook example of repackaging something psychologists have known for decades.

Or you can claim that X% of consumers are ‘aware’ of a product or service based on a probably non-representative focus group and watch the executive circlejerk that ensues.  

Because when you start to source your behavioural science from mainstream advertising sites (as opposed to behavioural science research), it quickly becomes obvious that marketers fall into one of two camps when describing the average consumer's relationship to advertising:

1.) “Consumers are mindless passive sheep that can only be awakened and engaged with through clever use of disruptive technology.”

2.) “Consumers are hyper-aware, anti-capitalist, critical thinkers who are constantly analysing the authenticity of brands to drive their purchase decisions.”

The thing is that both of these schools of thought contain some truth, but are widely exaggerated to drive traffic. Most people reading such articles respond with either “I’m nothing like that!” or “Wow! I’m exactly like that!”

Either way it doesn't matter, because everyone agrees with you.

Clever articles provoke both responses. That way, everyone can shout into the endless void of the comments section, and everyone can come away feeling like they’ve had their say despite somehow being angrier than before.

These are the types of articles that get shared because they provoke such an emotional response. Any piece of writing that encourages people to examine themselves by claiming that certain behaviours are 'true of all people in X group' are far more likely to be remembered.

The strategy is not too far off those personality quizzes that routinely cycle through everyone’s Facebook feed. If you tell people something about themselves they want to hear, or conversely, tell people something about themselves they perceive as completely and utterly false, it’s probably going to get shared.

Kill me now.

Nothing makes the digital generation feel more heard than formulating an opinion to every conceivable facet of human interaction and posting it on every goddamn social media account they own to the delight and admiration of their supposed fans.

And in some form, this is true of all people. We want people similar to us to agree with us. We want to feel like the thoughts we have and the opinions we hold are okay in the eyes of those we look up to. This is the universal truth.

This is why every Mumbrella opinion piece that falls into one of the two categories outlined above is followed by a barrage of smug scepticism in the comments section. People share them because they’re ridiculous, but they’re still getting shared.

The obvious way to stop these kinds of blatant pop-psych articles circulating is to ignore them completely. That way, the articles that do build on solid behavioural science and consumer psychology can permeate through the bullshit and drive better advertising overall.

At least then, reading the latest ad news in the morning can feel less like a slap in the face, because right now it reads as: "Welcome to the 21st Century. Fuck you." 

a.ce