Advertising is poisoning the internet and it’s getting worse
Opinion
We need to talk, writes Nick Manning. The Tai Chi scammers aren’t the only ones preying on our addiction to social media. Why is adland not discussing ways to root out this poison?
The recent IPA Bellwether report presented a relatively rosy hue for marketing spend this year.
It’s debatable how representative that optimistic picture is in an advertising market where the lion’s share of media spend goes to a handful of global platforms without the involvement of agencies. This fact doesn’t feature much in agency-led discourse.
It would be a mistake if such comparatively old-style snapshot measures, such as Bellwether, masked the catastrophic decline in advertising in recent years.
Step away from the self-congratulation of Cannes and from those responsible channels where advertising is well curated and controlled. Put aside the Ritson/Sharp dialogue, no matter how ‘historic’.
Take a look instead at what the public sees every day between waking up and going to bed, not to mention the odd scrolling session during the night.
It’s a day-in, day-out unending torrent of online advertising bilge, much of it crime, and the public are now seeing a lot more of it than the good stuff, to the detriment of the latter.
People don’t know that agencies aren’t responsible for the dreck that fills their feeds.
Performance advertising
It is a fact that advertising funds most of the internet, but poison is mixed into the daily diet in most under-regulated, unconstrained channels.
These are the ones getting the big bucks, getting them from legitimate advertisers but from a growing number of hucksters who are exploiting people’s addiction and vulnerability, while using AI to do so in unprecedented ways.
We can perhaps forgive those advertisers who are after a quick hit and throw enough at the wall to see what sticks. It’s called ‘performance’ advertising, and the people behind it don’t care what the public thinks as long as they get today’s sale, or the illusion of one.
They don’t care about personalisation or the effect on the public, as long as the dashboards flicker.
It’s more ‘performative’.
Everyone knows that this is a zero-sum game as they harvest existing demand and struggle to find new buyers. It’s legitimate but unfortunate.
We’ve also swallowed the ad tech Kool-Aid that would have us believe that personalisation actually exists, and that technology really makes your online ads work harder, while sucking so much ad budget up that they don’t and can’t.
What we shouldn’t tolerate is the rampant scams that have invaded the online advertising environment, and which are irreversibly polluting the water we all swim in.
Crypto schemes are bad enough, but they look amateur compared to the Tai Chi merchants who have inundated my feeds in just about every online channel in recent weeks.
Unless you’re of a certain age (50ish or more), you may not have been assailed by literally hundreds of these ads, now largely AI-generated, promoting ‘Chair’ or ‘Walking’ Tai Chi.
One example among many shows the quality of the user experience:
These ads promise that in 28 days (always starting tomorrow) and with just seven minutes a day, people can lose weight, develop a six-pack and look like a ripped version of their former selves.
I may see up to 10 different versions of these on Instagram in a couple of minutes. No doubt other channels are equally infested, and it’s not a new phenomenon, as the always reliable Reddit shows.
Needless to say, 196 minutes of enhanced sitting cannot make Dad Bod into Sex God, but the ads tell you it’s easy and cheap. Examples of people who have supposedly benefitted are shown.
Also unsurprising is that the front end is innocuous and it doesn’t even look like a money-grubbing scheme. That comes later, tying people into monthly payment plans that make cancelling Virgin Media look like a doddle.
None of their claims is true, and it’s a gigantic, worldwide con as this helpful video explains.
If you only watch one thing today, make it this. And then sit down for a while (without the Tai Chi) to imagine the cynicism of the people behind this scam.
Ironically, we all see different feeds and ads, but in my feed the ad that followed this exposé of these scams was for a Tai Chi scheme.
Yes, it’s YouTube again, presumably thinking that because I’d watched a video about Tai Chi scams that I might want to be a victim of one.
There is almost nothing left to add to any of this, but the level of bombardment I have been subject to is unprecedented and is making me increasingly reluctant to scroll, or open a browser or app.
Maybe this is the internet’s way of saying “you’ve had enough”, like the bartender to the drunk.
But that’s not the point. As the YouTube video shows, I’m not the target audience. They are after the credulous and unsuspicious, the easily taken-in and vulnerable.
They prey upon these people like the crypto vultures, hiding behind a layer of offshore entities scattered across the world. They look innocent enough, almost benign, but the trap is set.
They can book away on the platforms’ self-service tools to their hearts’ content, with no volume constraints, as my feeds testify, at little cost and everywhere.
The ads look different but largely come from a single source in a bizarre twist on copy testing. Let’s see which ad gets the most suckers.
AI has, of course, added a dose of steroids to the whole racket, and the success of these crimes will encourage others, often fake medical remedies that prey on people with serious conditions.
With no protection for the public exercised by regulation or voluntary restrictions by the platforms, the public is at the mercy of these criminals and gangsters.
Blame the dealers, not the addicts
The platforms exercise virtually no control, take the ad money and pretend to both care and do their best.
The Advertising Standards Authority is pretty helpless, as the video explains.
I have called before for regulation to stop all of this, and I continue to believe that the revenue the platforms receive should be levied to create a fund to compensate victims of these crimes.
However, this wouldn’t be needed if the platforms were even remotely interested in protecting the public. Behind the mask of ‘free speech’, they allow their platforms to become magnets for the worst aspects of human behaviour, and restricting one would imply that they accept responsibility and have to restrict the rest.
One hope is that the proposed scheme to limit the use of these platforms by under-16s is the first sign of a fightback.
However, as widely reported, these restrictions place the burden of responsibility on the user, not the platforms, and thus attack the wrong problem.
In parallel, the onus is on users to spot the criminal ads, not on publishers to prevent the crime, and no restrictions on young people will protect the over-50s, some of the most easily taken in.
There is no point in pretending that the advertising industry can do anything about these problems; at this year’s LEAD conference, UK law enforcement appealed to the industry for help.
This has virtually nothing to do with the advertising industry, other than the platforms that participate in the ad industry while busily undermining it.
Maybe the sheer volume of execrable and criminal advertising will make the public avoid these platforms in the future, but they are in people’s bloodstreams and pump in whatever they are allowed to. Which is everything.
The problem is addiction. People are hooked on the platforms and thus preyed upon by unscrupulous advertisers in huge numbers. We shouldn’t blame the addicts (us) but the dealers.
Expecting the public to vote with their attention might be a forlorn hope, but it’s sad to see advertising becoming a true ill for the public and society, even as it can and does do so much good elsewhere when practised responsibly.
Unfortunately, everyone is being dragged down to the lowest common denominator, and it would be helpful if what’s left of the advertising industry were honest about this problem as a precursor to solving it.
Do you discuss this in your daily work? Does it matter to you?
Does the business you work for talk about it, or care?
Did you hear about any of this at any conferences recently, other than the pointless conversation at LEAD?
Do you read about it or listen to podcasts about it?
Maybe it’s time you did, because the poison is taking hold and it’s going to get worse. The Tai Chi and crypto scammers aren’t alone and won’t stop as they drag their bags of swag to the bank.
Wouldn’t it be nice to hear more voices, preferably from big advertisers and big agencies, telling us that they’re going to join the effort to protect the public and lobby for change?
Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?
Meanwhile, the poison will continue to drip daily, with AI helping administer ever more toxic doses that drag the advertising industry down.
Nick Manning is the co-founder of Manning Gottlieb Media (now MG OMD) and was chief strategy officer at Ebiquity for over a decade. He now owns a mentoring business, Encyclomedia, which offers strategic advice to companies in the media and advertising industries, and is the non-executive chair of Media Marketing Compliance.