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How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men (newyorker.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt of a New Yorker piece: Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They've now been eclipsed by Math Men -- the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. Yet Math Men are beleaguered, as Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated when he humbled himself before Congress, in April. Math Men's adoration of data -- coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless -- has aroused government anger, much as Microsoft did two decades ago.
The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America's newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook.
The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America's newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook.
If you've ever worked in advertising, you'll find that anyone who's been there long has developed some kind of internal justification for why it is ok to work in an industry where harassing and annoying people is most of what they do. At my previous company, saying, "We are trying to replace Mad Men" was a common justification. Find an enemy who is worse than yourself.
Seriously, if you haven't done it yet, install an ad blocker.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When I was doing SEO for a living there were a dozen search engines were analyzed the and worked to get good rankings on. Google wasn't in the top three. In fact, Excite, who had exclusive distribution agreements with Netscape, Microsoft and Apple, declined to buy Google for $1 million, because Google was nothing compared Excite, Lycos, and Hotbot.
Google did two major things that causes them to become THE search company, beating out many far larger, more established competitors. One was Google Page Rank - ranking the importance of a site based on which sites link to it, recursively. The other difference was they jealousy guarded their viewer data, keeping it in-house, and developed sophisticated new algorithms for using it. They didn't sell it off to marketing companies as magazine publishers always had and Excite and Lycos did. That made them a ton more money, which they were able to re-invest.
If selling off the data were as profitable as keeping it in-house and developing your own advanced advertising algorithms, Lycos would be a trillion dollar company today and Google would be a hobby Sergey had in college.
Scientific Advertising was published in 1923, and most successful advertising has been run by the "math men" ever since. I remember Darren on "Bewitched", who was an ad exec who came up with a cute slogan to impress the client in nearly every episode. But even in the 1960s advertising didn't really work that way. Instead of nodding and saying "I like it", the client would actually say "Show me the data".
What Google and Facebook change is that they make scientific advertising MUCH easier. Back in the 90s, my company used to run A-vs-B ads collated in card decks to test prospective ads before running them in magazines. It would take months to get results. Today, you can test dozens of ads, and see the results in days or even hours. It is also much easier to segment the target audience, and either give different messages to different groups, or just exclude groups unlikely to respond.
The Century of the Self - Part 1: "Happiness Machines"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
"The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays.
Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses.
He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires. Bernays was one of the main architects of the modern techniques of mass-consumer persuasion, using every trick in the book,
from celebrity endorsement and outrageous PR stunts, to eroticising the motorcar. His most notorious coup was breaking the taboo on women smoking
by persuading them that cigarettes were a symbol of independence and freedom. But Bernays was convinced that this was more than just a way of selling
consumer goods.
It was a new political idea of how to control the masses. By satisfying the inner irrational desires that his uncle had identified, people could
be made happy and thus docile. It was the start of the all-consuming self which has come to dominate today's world."