How will we defend ourselves from marketing in the future?
Frederic Filloux in the “Monday Note” discusses the Trump digital campaign strategy for the 2020 election.
https://mondaynote.com/trumps-digital-campaign-for-2020-is-already-soaring-d0075bee8e89 - This scale requires Money
Perhaps more scary than the politics is the machine being built to convince us to do what others want us to do (in this case vote Trump in 2020, but this will also be used for making us buy that more expensive car, or which Gym to go to, or where to pray to the prosperity gospel or which gun or hobby to buy.
Briefly he describes the use of a set of principles to persuade:
Continuous marketing - They started for 2020 the day after Trump won the election. It also means both no escape, and cheaper marketing in between key times (political ads are cheaper right now), that continuously tries to build brand, making it harder to fight come the important time.
individual targeting - They made 5.9 million ads, ~700,000 direct connections, “communicating”(emailing, messaging, targeting videos?) to 10s of millions. - The scale is now targeting everyone in the world, who might be able to do what you want. This scale requires money.
Targeting the message to the person. - Making sure they hear the part of the message that is most important to them - based on actually having a pretty good model of what’s important to us.
One can imagine a world not far int he future, where everyone on the planet with an internet connection, has multiple companies and AIs competing to choose what we see, and persuade us to do what they want, and spread their message.
I am not sure but there are medium and long term natural limits to this. The Ads cost money, and competition increases prices, at some point even the presidency of the united states isn’t work spending a trillion dollars, as the payback can’t be that much. But it is worth spending billions, so there is more to happen.
Other natural limits include time: we only have 5-8 hours a day we can devote to the internet, as we still have to eat, sleep, work, shower. I think many of us are already at this ridiculous amount of screen time, so the competition for our eyeballs is now moving to getting our friends for peer group pressure.
The other natural limit is our bullshit detectors, but these are not as good as we think, and we only have enough energy and effort to say no to so many pitches/ads/lies/cons every day. The spread of cons in the world - I think the UK is worse than the US if anything -makes me pessimistic about this, but perhaps the natural limit has already been reached. Still no matter how good the marketing, some products are just not ever good - in this case republicans cutting services to pay for tax cuts for the rich. In the UK this is called austerity, and has destroyed traditional politics in the country, but still has it’s supporters because of the marketing machine.
How can we defend ourselves? (Talking to myself here) We can focus on happiness and cut back on the web, - which is harder than it sounds with the marketing world trying to tell us what will make us happy, and withdrawal from the web is hard, but switching these things off, and making dinner together is a defense that leads to happiness, and not buying things we really were not sure about. Fundamentally, ignoring the bull shit by turning off the source (changing our environment requires much less willpower) is the easy way to be both happier and blini more control of ourselves. Fox news rage can be turned off by unplugging the TV for a month, and people are instantly cured becoming themselves again. We can do the same with Social media - or at least cut back to say - just weekends? Finally, being outside and doing exercise seems to be where people are not channel surfing on their phones, and comes with happiness and health, - so try that too!