Does Advertising Work?
Once, I was walking with a friend along Kyanja Ring Road when we surprisingly noticed that there were about two cars every kilometer selling herbal products. In Uganda, the way you start your herbal products startup is by renting a car, buying a megaphone, and recording yourself listing some of the scariest symptoms you can imagine, especially around the sexual ecosystem. "Edagala lyange liwonya..." followed by a list of STDs and other fertility-related symptoms. We obviously laughed them off as a simple hustle, akin to the Nigerian Prince email scam. We argued that those ads don’t target people like him and me. They are preying on vulnerable "idiots"—those who have either not been initiated into scientific ways of thinking, or those whose symptoms are too embarrassing to confess (especially first-time contractors of STDs like gonorrhea), or those who have touched the horizon of science and now believe there is a bigger story than science. These could be people who have suffered from a fatal disease for which science has not yet found the time or attention to create a cure. Or those who don’t think it wise to keep all their eggs in the science basket, so they try the ways of science alongside the ways of their ancestors.
Usually, when I travel, I fear signing my YouTube into the hotel TV because, you know, North Korea, Mossad, the CIA, and all those other intelligence agencies that own countries and want to collect as much data as possible about people so they can control them. So I end up watching YouTube as a guest because, believe you me, Mossad won’t stop me from drifting to sleep with Joe Rogan playing in the background. Now, the problem with watching YouTube as a guest is that you get to see the ads, and I would totally encourage you to watch them if you want to learn about the data advertisers have on the constituency of people who travel and stay in hotels. From my own reverse engineering of these ads, it seems everyone who travels needs to make their skin whiter, younger, and more moisturized for some reason. Or they have a child with a respiratory problem. Or they need guidance touring the area in which they are staying. Obviously, I am only choosing the ads that I don’t normally get when Google thinks I am home. The striking similarity here is that most of these traveler adverts also target different people—people that aren’t my friend and me. Obviously, people who want to look like white people. That is not us. My friend has no children, and my children breathe just fine. Okay, on that third ad, they got me. There is no sophistication in assuming that when I travel, I may want to tour the area I have visited.
Generally, it is easy for me to believe that ads don't work on me. Except on those awkward days when Meta eavesdrops on me and my wife discussing the best tablet options for our sons and bombards our Instagrams with Jumia ads for cheap or secondhand tablets. Of course, we all know they are listening to us anyway even when we switch our phones off, but, still, sending me this Jumia ad has also saved me the hustle, effort, and safety risk of going downtown to haggle for twenty minutes with the Indian shopkeeper just so he can make an extra 5000 shillings off my purchase. But even then, I do what is within my capability to keep my data protected—which, by the way, is a capability slightly above average given that I am a professional data engineer (Senior, even, if such titles don’t bother you) who has worked for companies that process data for institutions as big as government ministries. So there is no way these ads influence me. I also can afford to pay for the ad-free version of YouTube which makes me consume a smaller amount of ads compared to most others.
Does advertising work? A big part of the TV series Mad Men was to convince companies that advertising improved their bottom line. No one knows how it works, but it does, Draper believed. An ad concept is illustrated differently in another TV series, Better Call Saul, where Mr. Goodman’s ads are so effective and direct about whom they target that they almost always yield results.
I think that the showrunners and writers of these near-perfectly performed pieces of American television come up short on their understanding of how advertising really works today. Not that the agenda of any of those series is to teach us about advertising or for them to show off their knowledge of how or why advertising works.
Mad Men is slightly closer to the truth by at least acknowledging that they know it works, but how it works is really just a game of sports betting. Mad Men argues that measuring the impact of the ad on the business's bottom line is a better metric for them than trying to figure out a theory of how information changes minds. This argument is well executed in the fifth episode of Season 5, where Don disposes of the research because he feels it's unhelpful and potentially harmful to their client's image.
But unlike at Sterling Cooper in the 60s, advertising companies like X, Google, Facebook, and TikTok today know a lot not just about you, but also about what science can confidently confirm regarding how information changes minds.
But still, despite great improvements in computing, neuroscience, and energy generation, science doesn’t know enough about how information changes minds to fully justify Goodman’s luck with his return on advertising.
Yes, ads do work. But not how you think they do.
I don’t have a sweet tooth, so I don’t suffer the kind of appetite for sweet things that most people do. Because of this, I don’t particularly like soda. I also think the amount of sugar in one serving of a soda like Coca-Cola is poisonous and can be fatally so if consumed regularly over a period of time. But when I go to visit an auntie, I will quickly accept a soda over lecturing her on the science of calories. If given a choice, I won’t pick a random Kigowa soda if the options include a familiar brand like Coca-Cola. When a university kid who is going to have sex for the first time has to choose which condom to buy at the pharmacy, he will quickly pick the brand that advertises in his hostel hall over others that don’t.
Advertising relies on the fact that a significant number of human decisions are unintentional. And that rather than calculate the most efficient product for their needs, most people would rather rely on heuristics. And what is one way of influencing someone's heuristics other than to bombard their environment with information that puts you in a good light? If I am hungry and unsure about where to eat, I am most likely to rely on the best-branded poster on the wall that also gives the impression that it is within my economic means. So KFC and CJs litter our streets with their logos. But, you see, everyone gets hungry, so you can justify KFC ads. Is it not better than someone dying of hunger because they could not find where to eat? But not everyone gets Gonorrhea; at least, I haven't. But when one does, will they go to the weirdly branded Eco-Pharmacy with the blue posters and flat 5600K lighting from the roof that makes the place look so sterile? Or the guy who described your symptoms to you on your way to class word for word for a whole year before you even knew you’d need gonorrhea medicine?
This is what X, Google, Meta, and TikTok know. They are not trying to influence what you eat for dinner tomorrow. At least not yet. They know enough about you and others like you to be able to predict with some precision what you’re going to be like at some given time in the future. Based on your bio data, social media interactions, searches, among other data points, including your bank balance (which they glean from your email notifications from the bank), they know with a certain precision that you’re likely to be overweight because you’re drinking so much Coca-Cola and eating so much at CJs after getting your first decently paying job. So they start showing you ads for fitness apps. Initially, you laugh about it and say, "These guys know nothing about me; this must be a generic ad they send all of us who have eluded the algorithm." But 15 months down the line, when the food and drink have caught up with you, you start to worry about the easiest way to lose weight. But guess what your mind, at this point, can guess is the easiest way to lose weight? The app in the Google ad that had the description: "This is the easiest way to lose weight."
They are not targeting you today. They are targeting who you’re going to become. This echoes the old wisdom of George Orwell: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." This does not end with just selling you oily chicken and sugary water; this extends to shoes you don’t need, up to and including ideas you’d never tolerate. And very soon, the line between predicting, planning and controlling can start to blur.
When you innocently go on X and scroll through so many tweets with the assumption that you are only consuming what you want and are ignoring what you don’t want, you’re being advertised to. Those tweets you think you ignore? You need to read them first, assess them, before you can decide to “ignore” them. And that is what idea-advertisers are counting on. Remember, they’re not trying to change your immediate next decision; they have made a prediction on who you’re most likely to be at a certain time in the future, and they are trying to make sure that if you come to a situation in that future where you have to decide on one thing or another, the micro-information you’re ingesting right now will influence you to choose in their favor. A lot of this is simple propaganda from governments, churches, and other political institutions. This is fair in a sense, since in a marketplace of ideas, the better ones are more likely to flourish. But what makes the whole social media ecosystem unfair is the power the actual platform(the ad agency) has over what you can see and what you don’t get to see. Of course, protecting you from what is likely to traumatize you is a good reason for such power, but if—or let’s just face it, when—this power is abused, then we end up in a world where Orwell was right.
It’s not just an abstract fear; we saw a stark local example recently here in Uganda. A post appeared on X from a high-ranking military official, the Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), no less, reportedly taking credit for the abduction and torture of an opposition leader's bodyguard. The post even chillingly boasted of 'teaching him Runyankole,' a remark loaded with tribalistic undertones and a euphemism for further brutality.
When such statements surface, and the platforms that host them—those who control the algorithms—remain largely silent or seem slow to act, it deepens that unsettling question about their role. Are they merely neutral conduits, or does their inaction or selective amplification make them complicit?
What can you do about advertising?
I am going to start by stating that we may be too deep into the hole to fight advertising entirely. But I think there are ways to make small changes.
Learn the algorithm that is feeding you the information you consume. You don’t need to be an advertising expert to start reading some articles and books about advertising. My favorite is
Alchemyby Rory Sutherland.Get off centralized social media. This is not expected to be an immediate decision. But there are some decentralized alternatives to places like X (and I don’t mean Threads). (Here are a few suggestions for decentralized alternatives: Mastodon is a popular federated microblogging platform; Bluesky is developing a decentralized social networking protocol; Farcaster is another protocol focused on user-owned identity; and Nostr is a simple, open protocol for censorship-resistant global social networking. Each has its own characteristics and varying levels of user adoption.) These are obviously not as good because the network effect and the technology are what make social media work. But still, checking them out and trying them out can give you a good sense that it is not all doom.
Work as a content moderator for your own timeline. This means putting a bit more effort into consuming social media than you usually do. Block, report, unfollow, and mute whenever necessary.
Post dope stuff. Don’t play the game, no matter how good you think you are. You will lose. You’re not playing against the others on your table; you are playing the house. Post only that which you’d like to consume if someone else posted it.
To Be Continued.
I am writing this as a follow-up to a previous post that I wrote about how X is terrible. Please read that next.
Great information, very well written, intelligent and thoughtful 🧐