Black Ops Advertising. Mara Einstein

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СКАЧАТЬ from companies like Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix, a site which alone accounts for more than twenty-eight hours per month of viewing per subscriber.²⁷ According to Nielsen, more than 40 percent of U.S. households subscribe to at least one of these types of video streaming services.²⁸ Fewer subscribers mean not only less money for the cable operators, but also for the TV networks that they carry.

      While broadcast and cable television, as well as newspapers and magazines, are struggling, Google—an organization that produces no content—generated $50 billion in ad income. That’s more than twice that of all newspapers.²⁹ Think about that: the one company that spends absolutely nothing to create entertainment or news is blowing everyone else out of the water. And not surprisingly, the only media segment expected to experience increased advertising revenue is digital, which was predicted to grow by 19 percent in 2015 and to outpace TV spending by 2018.³⁰ Do you see how badly this could go?

      From an economic viewpoint it is obvious why this is happening. In the 1980s, before cable took off, 90 percent of Americans watched one of the three major broadcast channels. Reaching prospective customers was easy: make a commercial and put it on network TV. After cable became ubiquitous, broadcasters could still reach a significant audience with its most popular shows. For example, during its run in the 1990s Seinfeld regularly reached more than 30 million viewers. Today, a major hit like The Big Bang Theory only reaches half that number, yet still commands a steep payment for a thirty-second commercial—close to $350,000. Since television networks continued to charge exorbitant prices yet could no longer accumulate large audiences, marketers began to think that producing their own content made more sense.

      Crucially, it was not the mere existence of digital but rather the advent of social media that drove the rise of content marketing. Companies had been able to create blogs and websites for decades. What they had not been able to do was drive people to their sites, or better still, have people disseminate their message for them. With Facebook and Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, companies can get their brand messages in front of consumers at a fraction of what it costs to produce and broadcast a TV commercial. It’s a no-brainer.

      The importance of this decline in advertising dollars in TV and print cannot be overstated. As media companies have become increasingly desperate for revenues, the wall between church and state (editorial and advertising) has come crumbling down, enabling advertising to invade the editorial realm.

      In the past, media organizations would work with advertisers to help them achieve their marketing objectives, while channeling those objectives within defined parameters. Marketers talked with the ad sales people at a magazine or TV network, and PR pros pitched the editorial staff or programming executives, trying to work their way into the editorial space. Yet editorial staff members fought tirelessly against bowing to the wishes of advertisers, particularly in the print realm. To do so was anathema to their journalistic integrity. The best an advertiser could hope for was that their ad would be placed next to content that related to their product. For instance, an ad for Dole Raisins might be placed in a magazine next to a recipe for oatmeal raisin cookies, or better yet, an article about how eating more raisins is good for your health.

      Today, in pursuit of advertiser dollars, almost anything goes. A publication might produce a two-page spread of recipes, or a TV morning show might create a several-minute segment around how to integrate raisins into a healthy diet, both paid for by Dole. It’s not as if executives in TV and print didn’t see this change in the relationship between advertising and editorial coming. But still, no one seems to know how this will net out for legacy media, or what the ultimate consequences will be now that editorial integrity has been forced to utterly kowtow to the market.

      Advertising and editorial become further conflated online, where advertising is allocated to one of three buckets: paid, owned, and earned media. Paid media is like traditional advertising, and might include display ads on a website, like a banner ad or a pre-roll on a video. Paid media also includes sponsorships, such as when a company’s advertising overtakes a website, as well as paid search, like the ads you see on Google. In traditional marketing, paid media would be the foundation of an advertising campaign. Online, though, it only serves to support owned media and earned media.

      Owned media typically refers to the marketer’s website, but may also include blogs, mobile sites, and social media accounts like Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, or blogs on Tumblr. Websites supply information and give consumers a way to buy products; social, as we have seen, helps to create and sustain relationships. Both are meant to drive earned media.

      Earned media is “when customers become the channel”³¹—that is, word of mouth. It can also include PR work performed through traditional media or bloggers. For example, in the case of the banana bunker, there was no paid advertising: Groupon’s continuous posting on Facebook represented owned media, and the press attention and the tens of thousands of shares and Likes were earned media—that is, free advertising.

       BLACK OPS ADVERTISING

      Over the last two years, I have attended conferences, talked to industry insiders, and analyzed an endless number of surreptitious marketing campaigns across a wide range of media platforms. It turns out that the marketing prognosticators were only partly right. While content marketing has become pervasive, it is part of a larger overall trend of the muddying of advertising and editorial: that is, black ops advertising.

      The correlation to combat is purposeful. Marketing has always been framed as contentious and militaristic. Marketers have objectives that they need to achieve: they use a variety of sophisticated strategies to achieve those objectives, and then they operationalize those strategies through the use of tactics. And of course, consumers—that is, you and I—are targets. On the ground, this might translate into setting sales goals (objective), stealing customers from competitors (strategy), and then offering coupons for anyone willing to switch brands (tactic). This is what T-Mobile did, for instance, when they got customers to switch from AT&T by paying early termination fees (ETFs), offering up to $300 in trade-in credit towards a new phone, and not requiring a long-term contract. Thus, by targeting young, budget-conscious consumers, the company was able to increase their sales by executing their strategy of stealing customers from their competition.

      Just as technology has enabled today’s military to move from obvious bombing assaults to covert actions and drone attacks launched from a distance, so too advertising has revised its strategies from loud and disruptive to subtle, camouflaged, and even subversive.³² Red and white Coca-Cola signs, Nike “Just Do It” commercials, and McDonald’s golden arches no longer cut it. Instead, news feeds and social media ads are barely noted as being “sponsored” or “promoted,” disguising themselves as content from someone you know. As part of T-Mobile’s strategy described above, the company provided customizable “Dear John” letters that people could post to Facebook via a specialized app to explain that they were moving to T-Mobile and to specify which cell carrier they were dumping. More than 80,000 people were willing to take the time to fill out the ad—and make no mistake that this was an ad—and post the letter to their news feeds, suggesting that by enabling them to vent their frustration with their existing cell phone carrier, the company had struck an emotional chord.

      Gaming our emotions, tapping into needs, and using those to appear to befriend us is part and parcel of this “black ops” phenomenon. In fact, it has led to a fundamental paradigm shift in advertising: instead of telling us to buy, Buy, BUY, marketers “engage” with us so that we will share, Share, SHARE. It is the ultimate subtle sell.

      Of course, T-Mobile is just one example. Do you share Jimmy Fallon videos or John Oliver’s latest tirade? You are not alone. Millions of people do. Maybe you are a fan of Grumpy Cat. That brand reportedly earned $100 million in the last two years, no small thanks to people sending the furry creature’s angry puss around the Internet.³³ And admit it, at least once you’ve read a listicle like “15 Animal СКАЧАТЬ