From Collective Echoes to Individual Whispers: How Targeting Changed the Ethos of Advertising
Reflecting upon the rich tapestry of human history, one recognizes a narrative with communication at its center. With the advent of each medium comes a new lexicon for encoding the world, reshaping our social fabric. In my last discourse, I explored this lineage, noting how the evolution of media has repeatedly been harnessed to spur material transactions between communicators and their recipients.
As the gears of the modern era began to turn and media production became an industrial enterprise, advertising found itself at a crossroads of identity and intention. The segmented media landscapes—print, initially—beckoned advertisers with the allure of demographics to tailor messages for ears – and eyes -- pricked with anticipation. Yet, going deeper, pondering over the values ascribed to attention and the concomitant quality judgments, one asks: What intrinsic worth is carried by the price of an audience's attention? And how did we start assigning value to one type of audience versus another? To get to that, we must examine just what targeting is.
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The golden age of advertising, bookended with DeBeers’ “A Diamond is Forever” on one end and the unifying chorus of “I’d Like to Buy the World A Coke” on the other, heralded a seismic shift from “just the facts, ma’am” advertising narrative. Creativity and psychological appeal became the stalwarts of the industry. Icons such as David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach eschewed the banal product feature monologues, opting for a symphony of words, sounds, and images to form memorable campaigns resonating with the consumer's core. They recognized a truth that remains: if you capture their heart, they will open the wallet.
The notion that an ad at the right time and place before a singular ideal individual may have been contemplated in the media planner’s nerdery, but it was not a fundamental part of advertising. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t being worked on; it's just that precision targeting did not have any practical means of deployment (apart from the catalogs and Direct Mail).
Data collection became the unseen undercurrent amid this burgeoning of advertising's potential. Both print and broadcast media turned to demographics with the voracity of miners panning for gold. Yet, there exists a dichotomy in this pursuit. Print, a medium that could segment audiences with the scalpel of literacy and interest based on content, and television, a bastion of mass appeal, both sought to understand their audience not merely to sell but to connect—a testament to the profound relationship between content, consumer, and culture.
It's important to note here something to which advertising only seems incidental but which figures in my larger argument for why the depreciation of the cookie might improve advertising outcomes while engendering a more unified cultural moment. In our contemporary musings on advertising, we often neglect the vessel that carries these messages. True, as strategists and practitioners, we dissect media for its communicative efficacy. Yet, we seldom pause to contemplate the transformation of the message and its meaning and how the medium reframes the world for its audience. The literate segmentation of print and the democratizing sweep of television each tell a story of access and influence that advertising plays on and benefits from.
The communications professor and media ecologist Joshua Meyrowitz suggests that print created pockets of 'closed' audiences, gated communities of comprehension. In contrast, television—less demanding of its viewers' intellectual capital—fostered a shared cultural landscape, blending audiences into a heterogeneous mosaic. It also exposed people to realities and modes of being they might not otherwise be aware of. From Walter Cronkite’s “Report from Vietnam” to the sitcoms of Norman Lear, audiences could indulge with little friction in the realities that other people were experiencing. This unity of experience is potent; it shapes our perceptions of social roles and norms, creating a cultural milieu in which a vast spectrum of life is observed and felt.
Meyrowitz posits that television stood as a colossus astride the evolution of mass communication—born from the necessity to sell products as diverse as automobiles and war bonds. Its purpose was clear: to engrain products within the collective consciousness, achieving a mass culture of consumption. Advertising's original motive was not targeted precision but to work in broad strokes, painting desires with the wide brush of commonality and coordinating consent about what was important. It sought to mirror a mass culture, to resonate with the collective rather than the individual. As advertisers vied not for product type differentiation but for brand loyalty, advertising catered to the masses. It was less about engendering diverse desires and more about instilling a common yearning for the same outcomes and the same experiences.
The technological developments of the 1970s shifted this paradigm, ushering in an era of segmentation and targeting, where the advertisement became not a public announcement but a whisper in the consumer's ear. Once titans of the mass market, print and television found themselves grappling with the nuanced dynamics of personal identity and consumer desires.
Yet, for all television's sophistication and print's incisive segmentation, neither medium could harness its technological infrastructure to the chariot of advertising with precision. Direct mail stood as an outlier, a precursor to the hyper-targeted future. The fiscal impracticalities of diversifying print runs and the limitations of broadcast technology meant that mass appeal remained the fiscal lodestone. Sure, specialty print carved out its niche, yet the likes of Time and Life continued their quest to reach every corner of the consumer universe, charging a premium for the privilege (It’s no accident that Life featured a heavy reliance on illustrations, graphics, and photography).
Today's landscape, a fusion of technology, media fragmentation, data collection and processing, and identity, has given rise to a new paradigm where segmentation and personalization have become paramount. Though technologically archaic by modern standards, direct mail was the forerunner of this shift and the source of most modern targeting frameworks, signifying the beginning of the end for advertising's mass culture approach that became the norm in the digital era.
It is a peculiar twist of fate that the industry, once driven to foster mass consumption through mass communication, now champions individuality. The quest for brand differentiation has evolved from competition among products to one of identity, prompting us to question the nature of desire itself.
As we stand at the confluence of this evolution, we must reflect not with nostalgia but with a critical eye on the history of advertising as not merely a chronicle of changing tactics but a mirror reflecting our social fabric. It serves as a reminder that while today's advertising may focus on the individual, it is rooted in a collective ethos—a time when the aim was not to differentiate but to resonate with the whole. And it’s that ethos that the end of the cookie might make possible.
Next week, it’s down the rabbit hole of hyper-targeting and niche segmentation.
