I decided to stop doing those blog posts where I pontificate about
how the world should be. Because reading those back, they even annoy me.
And the ones that annoy me the most are when I start yapping about
politics. I mean, please, like the world needs another shrill, ignorant
opinion on that.
Well, maybe just one more. Don’t you think it’s strange how
often people vote for somebody
they don’t like? Elections should be simple, shouldn’t they? We
vote for whoever we want to win, and the popular choice prevails.
But in practice, you often have an incentive to vote “tactically.” For
example, if you’re electing the US Democratic nominee, there’s no
point voting for your favorite candidate if he or she has no chance of defeating
the Republican nominee in the General Election. You should only vote for
someone who can ultimately win. So now your vote has
to not simply express your own preference, but be modified by
what you believe everybody else prefers, too.
Anywhere there’s plurality voting, you can’t safely vote for your favorite
candidate unless you’re confident enough other people will too.
Otherwise, you’re smarter to vote for your least-hated candidate
with a practical chance of victory. (Or
vote swap.)
Now, in my experience, any time someone expresses an opinion they don’t
personally have, but think others do, it’s a terrible opinion. For example, I’ve seen it
produce some pretty ugly book covers. And I’ll ignore it
in any reader feedback I get on my story drafts. People who try to
guess what other people want end up settling on the dullest,
most conservative, and uninspiring choice available, even if none
of them personally prefer it.*
I get that there’s no such thing as a perfect voting system.
Some
are more warped than
others,
but, okay, it’s
surprisingly
difficult to create a fair, practical voting system.
Still. How disturbing is it that on top of every other form of corruption
inherent in the political process, it can be completely reasonable for
you to walk into a ballot room and vote for someone other than who you
want to win?
(* That’s one of the reasons Hillary got so close to Barack. There, I said it.)
Surely advertising is the world’s most inefficient industry. Here are people
who will plaster a bus with a
ten-foot-high pop-out poster of a giant on the off chance it will encourage
you to have your carpets cleaned.
Let’s walk through this process. For the ad to work, you must (a) notice it,
(b) pay sufficient attention to absorb its message, (c) attach sufficient credibility
to not immediately dismiss it, (d) retain that message until you enter a purchasing situation
relevant to that product, and (e) find the message so persuasive that it alters
the purchasing decision you would otherwise have made.
The chances of this are infinitesimal. And so advertising spams. It makes five hundred
uninterested TV viewers sit through a 30-second spot in case one of them is in the market
for a new SUV. The amazing part is that this is actually cost-effective. Advertising is a
half-trillion-dollar industry that makes commercial sense even though most of its
output is wasted.
Far more sensible would be if advertisers could restrict their ads to people likely to
respond to them. They’d save bucketloads of money; we wouldn’t have to sit through ads
for products we wouldn’t buy in a million years.
This yawning gap between the present state of the advertising industry and one
that isn’t completely freaking insane means there will be change.
Market segmentation has always been a big deal in marketing, but it’s getting huge.
Marketers are ravenous for information about you, and they’re building
immense data stores. These will enable them to tailor their messages to you—or,
at least, to your market segment. In the short-term, it’ll mean more relevant ads,
Google-style. Next, I think, comes more persuasive ads. That’s when they change
not the product being advertised, but the message: playing up its green credentials
if you’re environmentally conscious, its patriotism if you’re nationally minded,
and so on.
Lately I’ve been thinking about my ideal state of advertising. And I don’t think it’s no
ads at all. I would prefer no ads to the tidal wave of irrelevant ads I get currently,
but in a perfect world, I do want information about products. Specifically, I want
unbiased recommendations from people I respect and admire. That basically means
friends and select celebrities. I want this to be “pull” information: I don’t want
anyone randomly coming up and yakking about their amazing new phone. But
if I’m thinking about a new phone, I’d like to be able to see what people with whom I identify
think. I would like to browse through a list and see that Wild Pete has a
Nokia but it sucks, Wil is wedded to his Motorola, and Stephen King knows
where you can get a good deal on an iPhone.
The closest thing I’ve seen is Facebook. It’s all push—I get recommendations and links
thrown at me whether they’re relevant or not, and almost entirely they’re not. But
still, it’s socially-based purchasing advice. I think if Facebook had been smarter—if
they’d remembered their success comes from giving people complete control over their own
information, and hadn’t
tried
to wrest it back—they could have built the most effective, highly-targeted advertising
platform in the world. Maybe they still will.
Until then, I’m skipping TV ads on my PVR, blocking them on the web with my browser,
and listening to commercial-free internet radio.
