Why you can't ignore them, no matter how hard you try.
Alicia Jenkins is 24 and doesn't plan on getting married anytime soon. But she says it's rare that her Facebook feed doesn't have at least one advertisement for "ethical engagement rings," wedding dresses or honeymoon packages — she helped plan her sister's wedding last fall and just returned from her best friend's engagement party — so now Alicia has been effectively placed in the wedding registry hell category of Facebook's advertising partners.
This is the reality of advertising in 2013. Online advertising has quickly transformed from mass media irrelevance to pop-up annoyance to heavily targeted, eerily personal advertisements thanks in part to two of the largest intimate information banks: Google and Facebook. Between the two, Google generates almost 30 billion ad impressions each day compared to Facebook's seven billion, and those numbers are only increasing, raising concerns about whether we have the ad literacy or cognitive ability to keep pace with the future of advertising.
The targeted and social advertising techniques employed by Google and Facebook aren't necessarily a bad thing — more relevant, less intrusive advertising arguably makes our lives simpler and easier. But as Google and Facebook continue to refine their use of two of the most exhaustive data sets on human behavior, our cognitive limitations may become even more apparent. As advertisements become entangled with advice from a good friend and tap further into this realm of things-you-never-knew-existed-but-always-wanted, the data giants continue to forge ahead while the human brain's ability to process information remains largely the same.
Put simply, the brain is not built for advertising. When we see an ad, we don't think, "Who sent that ad? Why? What is their motivation?" Clifford Nass, director of the Communication between Humans and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab at Stanford University, says. "Humans are not built to scrutinize the sources or the causes of information," he adds, which seems problematic. We might be better at doing this after the fact — recognizing these targeting efforts by Google and Facebook — but at that moment, we're not thinking about why.
In understanding how the brain processes information — any information, not just ads — researchers often draw on the The Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing, or LC4MP, a theory used to explain our limited capacity for cognitive processing. LC4MP essentially says that for any type of message our brain is doing three things simultaneously — encoding, storing and retrieving information — and that we have a finite amount of resources that get split between the three. To make things even more complicated, this information digestion happens automatically or can be controlled — and you don't get to "choose" which one your brain is going to do.
Consider a difficult task, like doing your taxes. It's costing you a lot of resources to focus on all the confusing rules and requirements, make sense of it by remembering what the hell you did last year (retrieval), and successfully memorize any new legislation or breaks for next year (storage). You're at the limit of your cognitive capacity. If someone walks into the room and says your name, it will elicit an automatic response and you'll be forced to give resources to encoding the "Hey, are you doing your taxes? Ugh that sucks," whether you wanted to or not. By default, your brain will borrow from the storing and retrieving processes — meaning that anything you were doing at that time is effectively gone.
"Encoding is what we think of when we 'pay attention to something'," says Robert F. Potter, director of the Institute for Communication Research at Indiana University, where researchers devised the LC4MP model. In terms of the effectiveness of an ad, encoding is the most important process, says Potter. This is where the automatic versus controlled processing happens. If the message evokes an orienting response — something novel or unexpected — in the brain (like the friend whispering your name) then automatic encoding will occur. On the other hand, when we consciously choose to pay attention to a message, that's controlled processing — and this is the most effective way to store, and later retrieve, a message.
Advertisers "want automatic encoding to happen," says Potter, in order to bypass the part where you decide whether or not you're going to encode the message. However, just because you've automatically encoded something — a product or a brand — doesn't mean you're going to remember it or later be persuaded by its message. Advertising is about developing a relationship with a brand, but the first step is always getting your attention. "If you're Orkin [pest control], you better have a picture of big old cockroach up there," says Potter, "because your brain has evolved to automatically encode it as a negative image." Negative encoding, from an advertiser's perspective, is still better than no encoding at all.
Google collects information about user activity and search history across the entire web, while Facebook's data is based more on what a user shares — interests, experiences, friendships and relationships. Because of the differences in the information they have about their users, and what people are doing when they arrive at Google versus Facebook, the companies' advertising strategies are slightly different.
Google currently employs two main advertising programs: search and display. With its Search Engine Marketing (SEM), advertisers can bid for space in any of its search-related spheres — general search, maps, images, etc. — using their AdWords to select key words or phrases that people might use when they're searching for a product or service through Google. SEM ads are generated based on a "quality score" — an algorithm that weighs the relevancy of search and an advertiser's bid to create the secret-Google-advertising-sauce that "unfortunately, we [Google] don't really have anyone that can address this," a Google spokesperson told me in an email.
Display ads are still generated from this quality score, but they are based on context and not what someone is searching — their interests, the websites they visit, age, demographic, etc. Advertisers can purchase ads that follow people across Google's Display Network— "a group of more than a million websites, videos and apps," reads the support page. In the display network, advertisers can choose specific sites or types of sites where they want their ads to appear, in addition to the certain times of day and the audiences they hope to target.
Facebook, on the other hand, must approach advertising from a wholly different perspective because its users aren't typically in buying mode. "They face a slightly harder task than Google," says Catherine Tucker, an associate professor of marketing at the MIT Sloan Management School. "When you arrive at Google, you are in the mood to find information about stuff — the mindset we want when people look at ads — but Facebook has to try and understand what kind of advertising works best when people are passive observers of ads."
While advertisers who partner with Google can bid for the biggest, flashiest ads on the web, Facebook's social advertising approach is much subtler. Advertisements can be camouflaged as 'Likes' within a user's newsfeed, or discreetly placed on the side of the page as a "sponsored story" — like the bottle of lube Amazon paid Facebook to have Nick Bergus share with his friends and family. There are a couple different variations of these kinds of social advertising techniques on Facebook, but for the most part its strategy is about engagement through friends and "Likes." Last summer, Facebook announced the Facebook Exchange, its version of Google's re-targeting that displays ads on Facebook for things people did outside of Facebook — and it might be getting even better at it than Google.
Regardless of how Facebook's ads are generated, Tucker's study Social Networks, Personalized Advertising and Privacy Controls, part of an MIT working paper, found that the success of Facebook's advertising comes not from knowing the movies or music an individual user likes, but knowing which friends they look to to discover new books, movies or music. "It wasn't using social to personalize content, it was using social to improve targeting," she said.
Whether an advertisement is inherently social or all-too-personal, and whether it appears on the newsfeed or while browsing the web, the end goal for both Google and Facebook's advertising partners is to get their message through to you and have you remember it (without disdain). Advertisers want to push the brand; it's not just about buying things.
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