My father, Ernest Dichter, and other midcentury “Mad Men” such as David Ogilvy and Leo Burnett, have been largely forgotten. Nonetheless they held sway in the advertising industry from the late 1940s to well into the 1970s. My father’s work in those years—based on his training in Vienna as a Freudian psychologist—helped shift the ground under the advertising industry. Among other things, he pioneered the use of focus groups in market research, and argued that qualitative research methods were more adept than surveys at revealing what people really wanted. Instead of surveys, he practiced “depth interviewing,” open-ended conversations that could last up to two hours. He and his colleagues’ research uncovered the emotional and symbolic side of the relationship between consumers and the products companies wanted to sell. In his work on cigarette smoking in the 1940s, he concluded that the act of lighting the cigarette was an integral part of the experience, the power of fire being mastered. For him ordinary objects had souls, things resonated with primal human instincts, and no product was just what it seemed to be.
Over the decades his research institute undertook work for virtually every major U.S. company from B.F. Goodrich to Procter and Gamble, General Foods to Time magazine, American Airlines to Forest Lawn Memorial Park. He led the “Put a Tiger in Your Tank” campaign for Esso and advised on the marketing of the Barbie Doll. He and his colleagues conducted hundreds of studies in every arena from ice cream to tires, from funerals to candy, from gasoline to prunes. In his work on prunes, to overcome the perception of the prune as a fruit associated with old age and constipation, he advocated calling prunes “the California wonder fruit” and using children in prune ads to give the fruits a different “personality.” For better or worse, he played a significant role in the rise of American consumerism.
Were he and other “Mad Men” of the time alive today, in the era of digital advertising, they might ask, with some incredulity, “Do they realize what they are doing?”
During the last decade, digital advertising has overtaken TV, print, and radio advertising. Almost three-quarters of the $1 trillion global advertising industry today is digital, a figure almost double what it was in 2016, with growth continuing into the foreseeable future. Moreover, advertising executives today would argue that they’ve never understood the consumer better, that digital technology now provides almost unlimited data about what interests each consumer, what they are searching for and want to buy.
Yet this dramatic growth in curated information and ad revenue does not necessarily mean that digital advertising is successful. Unlike the Mad Men days, the ubiquitous and intrusive presence of digital ads in our lives today leads to a paradox: Digital ads may be inadvertently negating their intention to sell the products they advertise.
Simple logic dictates that the only real indicator of advertising’s success is whether it results in increased sales. But connecting an ad to sales (“attribution”) is problematic. Divergent views on the matter are common: An industry-sponsored study reported by the Association of National Advertisers claims that “every dollar of ad spending supported nearly $21 of sales, on average,” while other insiders say that “Ads do not drive sales. Ads drive awareness, exposure and traffic. Ads tell a story.” Did Mr. and Mrs. Jones buy their air fryer because they saw an ad? Because they were looking for one and bought the first one they saw? Because they diligently researched reviews on Wirecutter or Consumer Reports, or because their neighbor suggested one to them? The Joneses themselves may not even be sure what pushed them to the actual purchase. In fact, while the answer to the attribution question isn’t quite at the level of “no one really knows,” it is revealing that most of what the ad industry relies on today seems to be a kind of pseudoscience, using proxies such as the click-through rate, the percent of viewers who click on an ad. A thousand viewers might click on an ad, but the dilemma is finding out how many of them actually bought the product advertised, not to mention why they did. At best, it would seem that the quest for a firm answer to the question of attribution remains elusive.
In the end the industry seems to justify itself using a kind of tautology: “We, the ad industry, sell more and more ads, therefore advertising must be successful.” Indeed, with a doubling of ad revenue since 2016, this would seem hard to argue with. Why would a company pay millions of dollars to place ads if those ads did not increase the sales of the company’s product or service? Well, the answer might be that the ad industry, as long as money is being made, is not immune to magical thinking and blind faith, and simply gambles on the probability that its ads do drive sales.
In the Mad Men days, things were simpler. First of all, consumers were different. We were not yet as skeptical of companies’ claims that their product was exactly what we needed to be satisfied or happy. Secondly, and more importantly, there were far fewer paths available from seller to potential buyer. Products and services were brought to us on billboards, on TV and radio, and in the print media. Today, social media, AI, and the internet in general have exponentially expanded those few paths into scores and scores of ways to get to us; not just digital ads, but commentators and influencers on a multitude of platforms, from Pinterest to Instagram, from Facebook to TikTok. There are countless robo-marketing calls on our phones. Moreover, if in the past we were exposed to ads for only a few hours of the day (the morning paper, a magazine read on the subway to work, two hours of TV in the evening), today ads (and selling in general) are with us every time we look at a screen, which for many is all the time.
In contrast, ads on TV, the radio, and in the print media in the past had a clear “it is what it is” quality; everyone knew that they were there to sell, and they did so by appealing to a multitude of motivational triggers: status, sex, envy, desire, identity, and even the need for mere product information. Most importantly, they were also passive; they were there to look at or not. In magazines like Life or Look, or in newspapers, the ads were usually on the side or bottom of the printed page, or occasionally occupied a full page. The reader could choose to turn the page, or to ignore the ad. The commercial break on TV was as much an opportunity to watch the ad as it was a chance to go to the kitchen for a snack or take a bathroom break. Advertising was an acceptable, even sometimes friendly, presence in our lives, to the point where some slogans became part of our daily speech. Yes, the objective was to sell. But even if advertising wasn’t entirely benign, it certainly did not alienate people or become an object of loathing.
But that is what seems to be happening with much of digital advertising today. Ads are not a friendly presence; our relationship with them has become adversarial. Years ago, historian Daniel Boorstin coined the term “involuntary reception” to describe phenomena like music in elevators, which riders have to listen to whether they want to or not. The way digital ads work today is a perfect case of involuntary reception. You want to pass the time waiting for a flight by playing sudoku or solitaire on your phone? First you have to fight off the ads—click the almost invisible “x” on the top right of your screen? No, that alone won’t do it. You have to click again and wait for a tiny circle to be completed, then you can click “done.” Click, wait, click, wait, click again; finally, the ads, like annoying mosquitoes, are gone. It used to be that when we saw an ad on a printed page, we might be drawn to it, but still we had “agency”; we could choose to look at it or not. Unlike that gentler time, today, because of the in-your-face way ads are placed, many of us feel assaulted by ads. Like the sailors in ancient Greece who had to cover their eyes and ears to avoid the enchantments of the sirens, we force ourselves to look away to avoid being tempted.
It is no wonder that just as we have less trust in our institutions, the world of commerce too is seen more cynically; all companies are a little bit suspect. In contrast, the iconic companies of the Mad Men era were not only largely trusted, they were often admired. General Electric, Westinghouse, Woolworth’s, Ford, American Airlines, Howard Johnson’s, CBS, and IBM symbolized innovation and quality, not to mention the American dream. If we had a problem with one of their products or services, we groused a bit, but we did not hate the company. But now, our relationship with the companies and brands we access, increasingly through technology, is much more fraught than it used to be. Many of us actively dislike the companies we use, aware of their moral failings (Uber’s sexual assault accusations; big pharma’s role in opioid addiction), frustrated with their increasingly non-existent customer service and the automation of every conceivable process, insulted by not being able to speak to them directly, disappointed in the declining quality of their products. Even with the brands we rely on daily for entertainment, shopping, sports—the leviathan Amazon comes to mind—our association is often a resentful one. They, through such means as digital advertising, push on us more and more. And the ads keep on coming. Indeed, there is perhaps no better sign of how intrusive ads have become in the internet age than the practice of asking us to pay money NOT to see ads; a subtle admission that anything with ads is worse than a version without them.
And so, digital ads have become just one more stressor in a hyperspeed era where most of us are overstimulated and over talked-at and where every technology and every media is competing for our attention. All this leads to a kind of dismal dance. We the consumers, and they the advertisers, are in competition with each other. And we, already stressed out and pulled in so many directions at once, are tempted, annoyed, and pissed off, with little recourse. Dulled as many of us have become by the constant assault of digital ads, we tend to accept this as just another thing we have to live with. But there is ample evidence that digital ads do annoy and even alienate a lot of us. Seeing all of this, the original Mad Men would surely be incredulous: “Is alienating your potential customers a sensible business plan?”
In a world where attention is the most sought-after currency, the ad industry naturally feels compelled to compete for it, but its ads’ ubiquity and often heedless intrusiveness can be self-defeating. Perhaps more important, if objects indeed have souls, as my father contended, it is possible that because of the bang-bang machine gun-like way in which digital ads are delivered, the connection to a product’s soul gets lost. And so, much digital advertising risks achieving an expensive contradiction: Instead of turning people on to the advertised product, it turns us off.
