My friend, the advertising expert Anthony Tasgal, coined the term ‘the arithmocracy’ to describe a new class of influential people who believe that their superior level of education qualifies them to make economic and political decisions. It includes economists, politicians of all types, management consultants, think tanks, civil servants and people much like me. I do not believe that these people form a conspiracy and I think most of what they do is intended for the common good. However, they’re dangerous because their worship of reason leaves them unable to imagine improvements to life, outside a narrow range of measures. Writing about such people in The Thing (1929), G.K. Chesterton explained: ‘In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”’ A huge cast of well-paid people, from management consultants to economic advisors, earn their entire salaries by ripping out ‘Chesterton’s fences’. Technology companies have partly wrecked the advertising industry and journalism by starving the press of revenue – all under the guise of efficiency. However, they fail to understand that advertising is not really about efficiency – as one expert has put it, ‘The part you think is wasted is the part that actually works.’ Billions of dollars is now spent on digital advertising because it is assumed to be more efficient – you can target people more accurately and the cost of transmission of each message to a pair of appropriate eyeballs is lower – without it being clear that it is more effective. Procter & Gamble recently claimed to have reduced their digital ad spend by $150 million without noticing any reduction in sales – is it possible that digital advertising is actually strangely ineffectual? Advertising clearly has a persuasive power that derives from more than just the information it imparts – but where does its power reside, and what makes a television commercial different from a banner? I can think of four things: We know that a television commercial is expensive to make and the airtime is costly to buy. We know that the television commercial is being broadcast to a large number of people, and that those other people are watching the commercial at the same time we are. We know that the advertiser has limited control over who gets to see that message – in other words, that he doesn’t choose who he gets to make his promise to. If the act of advertising generates any of its persuasion through these three mechanisms, it is plausible that digital advertising may appear efficient but in reality be surprisingly ineffective. Remember my argument against Silicon Valley: an automatic door does not replace a doorman. In recent years, advertising could be seen to follow the same pattern: Define advertising as targeted information transmission. Install technology that optimises this narrow function. Declare success, using metrics based on your original definition of function. Capture cost savings for yourself and walk away. The overly simplistic model of advertising assumes that we ask ‘What is the advertisement saying?’ rather than ‘What does it mean that the advertiser is spending money to promote his wares?’, even though we clearly use social intelligence to decode the advertising we see.
I have heard ad nauseam from many people about how marketing is now a “science”, and no longer an art. That you’ll do better hiring a mathematician to run your marketing department than the traditional marketer.
While it would certainly do good to be able to enforce some efficiency metrics in running your digital marketing, relying purely on measured metrics can be misleading and lead you down a wrong path. You can never consistently measure everything, adopting a different time-frame severely skew your results, and most importantly, this disregards a lot of the human element. Like what the passages says, it definitely doesn’t pay off if one narrows down on certain metrics and forget about the meaning of the act of advertisement.
Pure logic and reason naturally compels you to to narrow down to a few narrow paths of reasoning, and limits the factors that one can consider. Its not a bad thing that we now have all these new ways of measuring the results of digital marketing, that we can adopt certain methodologies and reasoning behind it, but we definitely cannot be logic ideologues as that ends up limiting our minds. If so, we then end up disregarding the many irrational things that make humans the way we are.
