Is Advertising Inherently Deceptive?

Greg, I feel like we covered this last October when you wrote a post last year entitled "Google describes perfect advertising", leading me and Jeremy to engage in a heated discussion in a comments, as well as inciting me to write my own rant entitled "Search is Not Advertising".

Links to both:

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-describes-perfect-advertising.html

http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/10/09/search-is-not-advertising/

My argument in a nutshell (excerpted from my post):

Advertising is about selling the user’s attention to the highest bidder. Google has done more than anyone to make that bidding process economically efficient. But any utility that advertising proves to users is a means to an end. Advertising is all about the advertisers, and the advertisers only care about providing value to users in so far as their interests are aligned. Absent alignment, advertisers naturally look out for themselves.

I think in the perfect case of a recommender system, advertisement as such become irrelevant. You'd have a direct mapping between customer desire and product awareness. The onus of sales would be on producing products people wanted rather than the ability to generate awareness for them.

Naturally, that's not how reality actually works, but I think it might be useful seen as one of the extremes of a continuum. The other end of the spectrum is creating a market for things people don't actually want.

The latter sounds like something that's probably not good and the current state of affairs is somewhere between the two. It would seem that if you can admit the way that things currently work isn't evil then the case of targeted advertisement is increasingly less so.

The problem, of course, is that the function isn't entirely continuous. Targeting can, potentially, be used to trick people. It's not so much that tricking people is novel in advertising, but as you learn more about how a person ticks your trickery could be that much more potent.

Very few ads are intended to deceive. Most mass-media ads are designed to appeal to people's subconscious desires -- to be attractive, accepted, secure, etc. -- and to link a product to that desire. Online ads will dominate advertising only if they are effective at making that linkage. Personalized ads ought to be effective at selecting audiences for their subconscious desires by analyzing their conscious choices. See the BBC documentary "The Century of the Self" (on google video), especially segment 3 on the rise of lifestyle marketing, for an example of using conscious answers to infer subconscious desires.

If there is a continuum, it may be from informational ads with conscious appeal, to influential ads with subconscious appeal. Personalized targeting ought to improve the effectiveness of both kinds.

(Note that we may still be squeamish about improving "influential" advertising. It doesn't make subconscious desires conscious, rather it adds a subconscious link to a product -- and thereby makes us willing to buy more of it and spend more on it than if we had not seen the ad.)

About a month later, in the October 12 issue of the New Yorker, Ken Auletta has an article, "Searching for Trouble", that describes a conflict between the COO of Viacom and the founders of Google on exactly this issue, deception in advertising.

An excerpt:

"[You want] salesmanship, emotion, and mystery. [Viacom COO Karmazin said], 'You don't want to have people know what works. When you know what works or not, you tend to charge less money than when you have this aura and you're selling this mystique.' The Google executives thought Karmazin's method manipulated emotions and cheated advertisers."