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According to The Guardian, one of world’s biggest advertisers — Unilever — says it will avoid platforms that ‘create division’. It further threatens to take its ad purchases off Facebook and Google, if they cannot reign in hate and protect children. Their chief marketing officer says their online spending sometimes is "little better than a swamp in terms of its transparency".
If this finally is it, I say good riddance to surveillance capitalism.
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How Close are we to Peak Social Media?
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday February 14 2018, @10:16AM
There is a formula advertisers use to calculate how many repetitions it takes to move consumers to action. If we as consumers limit our exposure to advertising, it's entirely possible to keep ourselves below that threshhold number.
I don't know if there are any other cord cutters around here, but since we cut the cord more than a decade ago and installed Adblocker and other ad-blocking plugins on our browsers, our exposure to advertising dropped dramatically. We live in NYC, too, where the relative amount of what advertising calls "Out of Home" (billboards, subway ads, ads in bus shelters, etc) is greater than other places. Without the reinforcement of TV, radio, and other platforms that greatly augment repetition, the OOH stuff seems anachronistic and laughably ineffective.
To me, that's a hopeful sign. The Facebooks and advertisers of the world are not all-powerful. They are quite vulnerable.
Having worked in advertising at the big houses on Madison Avenue and seen the raw numbers for the biggest of the big brands, their core customers number in the tens of thousands, not the millions; so even in the world of Cable TV and mass media your purchase decisions as a consumer always did matter, and your ability to influence your social circle to buy or not buy mattered even more.
So, speak up, and do vote with your wallet. It matters a great deal.
Washington DC delenda est.