Tag Archives: advertising

The commercialisation of grade inflation

Google is running a particularly fatuous advertisement at the moment, clearly designed to appeal to the heart rather than the head. It appears at the start of almost every YouTube video I watch, so I see it several times per day.

“Local businesses have been there for us this year”, says the actor. “It’s time we return the love. Just leave a Google review! Because Google reviews help local businesses stay strong!”

Isn’t that nice? We may be a big cloud-based multinational but we care about the businesses on your local high street.

Now, almost everything about this is wrong. There’s the basic factual inaccuracy: local businesses often haven’t been there for us, poor things — it’s the online businesses that have kept people supplied while they’re shielding. Au contraire, we’ve often ‘been there’ for the local businesses: I’ve often been going out of my way to try and buy from local shops when it would be cheaper, easier and, of course, much safer to buy online. But that phrase is just an appeal to the emotions, so let’s not take it too literally!

No, what bugs me in the ad is the assumption, of course, that they’re good local businesses and you’re leaving them a 5-star review. Which, let’s face it, almost everybody does these days, and I’m no exception, because who wants to be the bad guy who docks them stars for what might seem like trivial complaints? And so we end up in the ridiculous situation of comparing shops, hotels, cafes etc based on whether they have a 4.6-star average or a 4.8-star one.

In a perfect world, the average business or product would have an average of three stars out of five. And we’d have a nice gaussian distribution around that: things slightly better than average would edge up towards four stars while those that were a bit unimpressive would be down in the twos. Only those that were so exceptional that they couldn’t really be improved in any way would get close to five.

It is, of course, part of life, and the same thing has always happened with A-level results, University degrees and so forth. (I have some nice stories from University colleagues about this, but they had better wait for another time.)

So I’d like to see Google run a new set of ads after this one. “Weed out dodgy businesses by leaving a low Google review! Because low reviews help customers like you stay safe.”

Somehow, I can’t see that happening.

There is another way to make reviews actually useful again, of course: Google, Amazon etc could simply revalue the currency: modify all the reviews so that the mean value was three and the standard deviation was appropriate to have a sensible number of twos and fours. You’d need to do it in a fairly sophisticated way, but it’s not rocket science. And you’d need to make sure everybody knew you were doing it, so that there was no misunderstanding.

I suggest a big advertising campaign: “Google Reviews: now the most useful on the planet!” They could put it at the beginning of all the YouTube videos. And it would get five stars from me.

Untested?

I’m somewhat confused by one of our recent purchases, which proudly proclaims on its packaging that it hasn’t been tested on animals.

Jolly good, I thought. Always keen to do the right thing if I can.

There’s just one problem.

It’s dog food!

What’s more, it’s made of chicken! So it’s made of animals, and fed to animals… but at least you can rest assured that it’s not tested on them. What sort of a daft marketing department…?

Ah well, never mind.

Well, Arden Grange, I can report that Tilly, on being given it, wagged her tail enthusiastically and wanted more. So that’s good news for your marketing.

But I’m afraid this means that it has now been tested on animals, so you’ll need to remove the label.

Viticulture

I’m used to labels on bottles of wine telling me that I should expect a ‘hint of blackcurrant’ or ‘subtle aromas’.

But in Portugal recently I had a (very drinkable) wine from a vineyard whose marketing department had, perhaps, become a little over-excited.

It’s nice to know there are still jobs out there for people with Literature degrees, isn’t it?

If it doesn’t look like your normal food, that’s because it’s bait.

One of the tragedies of the accelerated ‘internet time’ is the speed at which advertisers can discover our weaknesses. It took several centuries for tabloid newspapers to evolve their attention-grabbing headlines with minimal content and maximum emotion. FURY AT VICAR’S CELEB SEX ROMPS. (‘Fury’ is a word which seems only to be used now on the front pages of tabloids and local papers.)

Of course, gentle reader, you and I would never buy a paper with that headline. Despite the temptation, we know in the end it will be unsatisfying. It’s journalistic pornography, appealing to our baser instincts. Resisting the lure is part of our education, our self-control. We laugh as we pass by, at the poor, less-intelligent souls who succomb to this ultimately unrewarding titillation.

But, in just a couple of decades, the web has allowed this process to be refined to an extreme degree. Techniques such as A/B testing enable publishers to play with content, delivering version A to one group of 10,000 viewers and version B to another 10,000 to see which delivers the most traffic/sales/ad-clicks. This can be repeated, like an iterative fractional distillation, allowing the drug to be purified as never before.

The web’s equivalent of the tabloid headline is the link text – the thing that stops you walking past and persuades you to look inside. The process can be applied there too, and we see the results everywhere: links which convey even less information and appeal purely on the gut level. “Three old grannies got up on stage and you’ll never believe what they did next!” “10 things no mother should ever do!” “This one weird tip will transform your sex life!” “The most shocking video you’ll ever see!” They are designed, of course, not to convey information, because if you had any at that point, you could decide whether or not to click. Instead, they just tell you that you really must click, because otherwise you’ll be missing out, and we’ll tell you why once you’ve done so. Because, of course, we get paid by our advertisers if you visit our site, but not if you just read the link.

Now, the tragedy is that, unlike with tabloid newspapers, the content sometimes is worth seeing. The video is amusing, or cute, or whatever, and often was carefully created to be so, because they want you to share a link on Facebook, where, of course, it will be automatically augmented with their carefully-baited title.

A group called Quick Sprout recently published a guide on How to write the perfect headline. I’m not linking to their site directly because the pop-up ads are much too annoying, but you can find it via the site above. Their tips summarise the industry’s discoveries:

  • “A writer should spend half of the entire time it takes to write a piece of persuasive content on the headline…. 8 out of 10 people will read the headline, 2 out of 10 will read the rest.”
  • “The perfect length for a headline is six words.”
  • “Use negative wording: negatives tap into our insecurities.”
  • “Try using this formula: Number or trigger word + adjective + keyword + promise.”

They have some nice examples of this last rule:

  • Before formula: “How to bathe an elephant”
  • After formula: “18 Unbelievable Ways You Can Bathe An Elephant Indoors”

But I’ve noticed a strange thing recently. I’m starting to feel ashamed when I click on links like this, as if I couldn’t resist buying the tabloid; I couldn’t help eating the junk food. I’m actively resisting sites that are linked to in this way, and I have a lower opinion of sites that display the links. Am I alone?

Take the Independent, for example, a once-reasonably-respected UK paper. The bottom of every page now looks like this:

independent_ads

This is a tame set of examples which just happened to be on the first page I looked at, but really! “20 Hot Celebs You Didn’t Know Are Jewish”? We care whether they’re Jewish? They can’t be Jewish because they’re ‘hot’? Come on, Indie…! What are we meant to think of your standards?

So I hope we’ll start to see a backlash against this blatant manipulation. Let’s start educating people that, if someone pops out at you in the street and says, “Come down this alley with me, you’ll never believe what’s at the end of it!’, they may not just be doing it for your benefit.

As the old adage goes, if you can’t tell what they’re selling, it’s because you’re the product. So ask yourself this, the next time you see an irrestible link: Do you feel compelled to click, or are you making the decision?

Because there’s one sure-fire way to know if you’re the product. It’s when you’re the thing being delivered.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser