The hard sell

New wind projects a good first step for government - but big challenges remain

Securing more renewable generation is only part of the challenge - the variable nature of wind and solar means Britain needs the ability to store that excess power.

A puff piece for wind projects, but there is no need to read beyond the admission of intermittency and storage problems - it can't work as claimed and it won't. 

The nature of the problem is repeated further down, but the lethal nature of intermittency remains vague, which of course it has to - this is a puff piece. Something people need doesn't have to be sold this hard. Something they certainly don't need has to be sold good and hard. 

Really, the hard sell is the big clue.

Why are TV ads so infantile?

Every now and then we catch one or two TV ads as we try to fill the odd hour with something worth watching. We don’t usually find anything, but that’s another issue. The problem with TV ads seems to be that you have to switch off something in order to watch them. We switch off the sound, but I’m thinking of something else in addition to the sound.

To my mind we need to switch off our critical faculties if we are to watch TV ads without being constantly annoyed by them. Otherwise almost all of them would come across as too silly and infantile not to be annoying. Often very infantile with gormless adults bouncing around with delight in the way that only children are supposed to do in real life.

Advertisers may have some subtle reasons why silly ads are memorable and therefore effective, but I suspect it isn’t so. Surely infantile brand association isn’t what they are after. Not my field but banging out simple brand recognition and nothing else would presumably be easier.

TV ads seem to be all about mixed marriages too. Rather more of them than we see in the general UK population anyway. Of course we are familiar enough with ads projecting an entirely unreal world. We are also familiar with that unreal world being a heavily dumbed-down version of our world. Now the dumbing-down has a political message too.

You will never be allowed to grow up – buy stuff and live with it. That does seem to be the message.

A few of my targeted ads

A tale for the weekend

source

During the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, an unusual study was carried out by two American academics, H Louis Nightly and Fred Skrase. Nightly was a flamboyant psychologist who came to minor prominence in the nineteen sixties on the back of a series of provocative public statements about drugs culture. This phase did not last longer than it took Nightly to get himself noticed and by the mid-sixties he had switched his attention to the consumer society and the psychology of spending.

Fred Skrase was a more traditional and less colourful academic statistician with a taste for lateral thinking. He was a moderately successful writer of books on popular science in which he often presented semi-serious demonstrations of improbable statistical relationships between such things as traffic congestion and the phases of the moon.

Nightly and Skrase first met one evening in 1965 at the house of a mutual university friend and although the two men had quite different temperaments, for some reason they hit it off. They got talking about their respective specialties and ended up discussing the effect of consumer society on the health of the average American.

Out of this casual conversation came a research project which was to be a definitive study of the consumer society they saw growing up before their eyes. Although Nightly and Skrase were academics, their research was not pure academic research because Nightly somehow managed to arrange for it to be part-funded by a large advertising agency, which was unusual even in those days.

Nightly and Skrase carried out an exhaustive examination of the health records of about 12,000 people over a five year period from 1966 to 1971. They also got each subject to fill in a detailed questionnaire on the spending patterns of their household. After an enormous amount of work, mostly carried out by Skrase, the two researchers claimed they had found a definite correlation between the general health of their subjects and the number of durable goods bought by the subject’s household.

The more durable goods bought by a household and the more expensive the goods were, the better the general health of the household. Also, there was a more strongly significant health correlation with goods bought for cleaning purposes such as washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Other household durables such as TV sets and electric toasters had a less significant correlation with health.

Of course, as soon as Nightly and Skrase found these correlations, they immediately made the obvious conclusion - a more healthy household is generally a more prosperous household which simply spends more on durable goods. However Nightly and Skrase had a way round this by taking advantage of a feature of their times – breakfast food competitions.

They were able to show that if poorer households acquired durable goods by winning them in competitions, then they had the same general level of health which they would have had if they had paid for the goods like a more prosperous household.

For example, a poorer household might get lucky and win a washing machine or a freezer, or even a car in a breakfast food competition. At that time these competitions were very popular and Nightly and Skrase were able to compile enough data on poorer households to be statistically valid. They concluded that there was a valid relationship between spending on durable goods and household health even if those goods had been won in a breakfast cereal competition.

Even though this study was based on a large sample population, the research was not greeted with enthusiasm. Nobody seems to have accepted that spending their money on household goods would improve their health. The advertising agency was not impressed either. Somehow by 1971 a belief in the consumer revolution had faded and the agency did not use the research they had paid for and seem to have written the idea off as a failure.

So the world was never exposed to ads claiming that buying a new washing machine was good for your health, even though Nightly and Skrase appear to have made their case. The two friends never followed up their work so now it sits on dusty academic shelves as a little-known slice of oddball consumer research which nobody ever quite believed in spite of Fred Skrase’s solid statistics.

Shortly afterwards Fred Skrase left academia and went on to found a modestly successful computer software company on the back of the personal computer boom, while Louis Nightly tried and failed to interest health insurance companies in a scheme to give away vacuum cleaners with their health insurance policies. Nightly tried to argue that the cost of the vacuum cleaners would be more than offset by reduced health insurance claims due to the beneficial effects of owning a brand new cleaner, but insurance companies were not convinced or interested.

A tale for the weekend is fiction

I’m sure nobody found themselves believing this story even though it is intended to be vaguely plausible. As a spot of weekend relaxation I invented Nightly and Skrase to make two related points which we all know.

People prefer plausible fiction to the complexities and uncertainties of analysis.

Media folk know it, so they prefer it too.

Three Mercedes ads

Via Mercatornet we are treated to three Mercedes ads where the cars are barely seen. All is emotion, soul-searching and glutinous modernity. The three ads are called.

Grow up: “Be a good parent”
Grow up: “Settle down”:
Grow up: “Start a family”:

The second and third ads are here and here. Meanwhile the Telegraph treats us to another, more familiar angle which may help us to explain what must be a substantial advertising spend.

Germany’s biggest car manufacturers shares plunged in early trading as investors digested allegations about decades of collusion between Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler.

Investors dumped the shares after reports, which first appeared in the German press late on Friday afternoon, claiming the companies may have secretly worked together on technology, forming a cartel that could have led to the “dieselgate” emission scandal.

The allegations come just days after Daimler recalled more than 3m of its Mercedes Benz cars for work to lower their emissions. The week before, Audi - which is owned by Volkswagen - recalled 850,000 vehicles.

Frantic Times

Round here everything goes eerily quiet in hot weather. During the recent spell we spent a large chunk of our time sitting in the garden, mostly in the shade and often with a beer. Retirement eh? I love it.

Meanwhile the mainstream media seem to be increasingly frantic in what feels more and more like a doomed battle for relevance. Hysteria rules but is anyone listening and more importantly, are their advertisers likely to remain on board? When will their advertisers give up on shouty newspapers nobody under fifty reads anyway?

The impression is partly explained by a series of major news stories from Brexit to Trump to the Grenfell horror, but not entirely. Great changes are abroad which are not encouraging. 

Back in 1952  Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth wrote a science fiction novel called The Space Merchants. 

In a vastly overpopulated world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge trans-national corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and by far the best-paid profession. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market. Some of the products contain addictive substances designed to make consumers dependent on them. However, the most basic elements of life are incredibly scarce, including water and fuel. Personal transport may be pedal powered, with rickshaw rides being considered a luxury. The planet Venus has just been visited and judged fit for human settlement, despite its inhospitable surface and climate; the colonists would have to endure a harsh climate for many generations until the planet could be terraformed.

Pohl and Kornbluth's fictional world is dominated by vast advertising agencies where governments are merely clearing houses for business interests. I read it decades ago when to me it seemed like an ingenious but fanciful attack on rampant capitalism, a product of its time. It doesn't seem like that now.

When we remind ourselves that the old mainstream media are struggling to survive in a world dominated by the colossal reach of social media and vast internet advertising businesses. When we add in global elites with no ties to time or place, when we add the growing power of international bureaucracies and their willingness to direct human behaviour - 

Well then - with a few modifications Pohl and Kornbluth's ghastly fictional future seems somewhat less fictional.

Just for show

Life stripped of its illusion and its seeming becomes a rather deadly thing to contemplate.

Theodore Dreiser - The Genius (1915)

The other day while checking the weather forecast on whatever Ceefax is called these days I stumbled across a TV programme showing clips of people working in a laboratory. Something nefarious was going on in the world outside and lab folk were dutifully proving evidence to show just how horribly nefarious it was. BBC nefarious that is.

At the sight of a working laboratory I came over all nostalgic for a minute or two. I always enjoyed lab work and recall a number of occasions where promotional cameras invaded our domain for a disruptive hour or two. As one might expect, the folk behind the cameras are only interested in things that move, bubble or just look techie. The person at the bench tends to be a senior scientist finding out if their rarely-used lab coat still fits.

I remember one occasion where our laboratory had been chosen to supply some promotional images. To set the scene we were asked to set up a row of bottles containing coloured water just for the camera. As for the science, the PR people had brought along a blonde model to do that. Her job was to wear a pristine lab coat and pretend to do something scientific for the camera. I’m sure she was pleasant enough, but somehow she managed to convey that sense of vacant prettiness models are so good at.

The final result was just as artificial as it usually is. Anyone with any kind of technical background must see the artificiality. Scientist peering at a tube of liquid, heating it up over a Bunsen burner with the flame set incorrectly to make it visible to the camera. A reflux extractor set up to extract lots of nice clean nothing. A robot injector system selecting the next sample vial - it usually runs overnight but just for the camera we’ll make it do something harmless.

One is left wondering why things are done this way, why the artificiality has to be so obvious. Perhaps it has to be so because it is expected, because promotional artifice is normal and realistic is not. Expectations have to be met and we have wandered too far from reality to turn back now.

The power of marketing

Reminds me of the EU for some reason. 

If it ain't broke - fix it.

If it is broke - don't fix it.

Internet ads

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An attempt by Facebook to defeat ad-blocking software has been in the news recently. So far it is not going too well. I use uBlock Origin as an extension for Chrome. Works well. I don't use Facebook and that seems satisfactory too.

Branded Dreams - The Future Of Advertising

From YouTube

"The real question is not: How many ads do we see? The real question is: What do we have to do to see no ads? And the answer is: go to sleep" (James B. Twitchell) 

We see ads everyday and everywhere. They have become part of our life. While some people try to avoid seeing ads, advertisers keep finding new ways to reach us. However they are unable to reach us when we sleep. Our dreams are the last safe and ad-free place so it seems. But what happens when advertisers have the possibility to enter our dreams? Based on recent developments in brain science and technology this might be possible in the near future.