Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The death of Don Draper?

newstatesman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 78 posts

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#51

Post by siliconc0w »

So there is 'discovery' which is knowing a solution exists to a solve a need I might have (that I might not even know about). Technology is reasonably good at this.

Then there is 'selection' which is picking the 'best' product in a competitive landscape. Here I'm not convinced even Tech has this captured. If I am shopping for cars, for example, I might get a Tesla Ad (they do have a few AdWords) but the technology showing me that AD isn't optimizing for me, it's optimizing for a click-through or maybe a conversion which are different things. Maybe you look at me, my income, my driving needs and say hey - look, maybe you want to go with like a Kia Crossover over a Model S. A Model S would be fairly financially irresponsible given your income. The money saved with a crossover would equal $XX,XXX by the time little Bobby is ready for college. And what about those camping trips? You occasionally drive further than the expected range anyway.

Right now if I want to compute the TOC of a Tesla vs a Kia given what I usually drive in a year minus the tax incentives or whatever I'd have to bust out excel and spend a few hours. This isn't sexy. This isn't what advertising used to be, but if they want to do the math for me I'd pay attention to that way more than that I do AdWords.

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#52

Post by Snackchez »

amorphid wrote: post #49
conanbatt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you make a big mistake in using the word 'inflated'. The joy of doing something is configured in our brains, and we enjoy that. Science has shown that we like and are willing to pay more for things merely on the brand. Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!

I usually buy brand name over generic stuff because it is quantifiably better to me in some way. Cereal that tastes better, garbage bag doesn't rip, etc.

I've found there are interesting exceptions out there:

* Pringles are the worst kind of Pringles. In fact, No Name makes better Pringle type chips

* Glossettes are also not as good as the Walmart brand glossette equivalent.

I've been compiling a list with friends of such examples where the brand name product is objectively not as good as some knock off.

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#53

Post by nolliebs180 »

cauthon wrote: post #46
jessaustin wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those connotations? As someone who has had the misfortune of drinking Stella, I speculate that Europeans challenged themselves to make something even nastier than Budweiser, and they succeeded.

Stella has a higher end reputation in the States, vs what I believe to be a Budweiser type reputation in Europe. Similar to the disconnect between PBR's marketing in the US and Asia (although PBR is the other way around)

Then I stumbled upon Budweiser in Prague and had a brew from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser_Budvar_Brewery. We were desperate for a real Czech beer and some food, saw that Budweiser logo in the window and were dismayed. Yet the food menu looked good, so we went in, read about the 800+ yr old Budweiser so ordered one. It was a wonderful, dark, malty brew. Loved it! My expectation of Budweiser in Europe is much higher now.

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#54

Post by ghaff »

Animats wrote: post #18

Note that he talks about a fake ad exec, not the most famous real one of that era, David Ogilvy. Ogilvy worked for the Gallup Poll before he went into advertising. He was into data-driven advertising. "Advertisers who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore the signs of the enemy." The author is attacking a straw man. Ogilvy is still relevant. The author of the article here, not so much.

A lot of people who don’t do it for a living assume that advertising, design, marketing promos and the like are created by a bunch of creatives sitting around a conference table and going with whatever strikes their fancy. But there’s a lot of data, focus groups, A/B testing, etc. The data’s imperfect and there’s certainly still a creative process but it’s not just a bunch of art and English majors winging it.

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#55

Post by conanbatt »

amorphid wrote: post #49
conanbatt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you make a big mistake in using the word 'inflated'. The joy of doing something is configured in our brains, and we enjoy that. Science has shown that we like and are willing to pay more for things merely on the brand. Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!

I usually buy brand name over generic stuff because it is quantifiably better to me in some way. Cereal that tastes better, garbage bag doesn't rip, etc.

They are better because of the brand association, not in spite of it.

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#56

Post by sokoloff »

nolliebs180 wrote: post #53
cauthon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stella has a higher end reputation in the States, vs what I believe to be a Budweiser type reputation in Europe. Similar to the disconnect between PBR's marketing in the US and Asia (although PBR is the other way around)

Then I stumbled upon Budweiser in Prague and had a brew from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser_Budvar_Brewery . We were desperate for a real Czech beer and some food, saw that Budweiser logo in the window and were dismayed. Yet the food menu looked good, so we went in, read about the 800+ yr old Budweiser so ordered one. It was a wonderful, dark, malty brew. Loved it! My expectation of Budweiser in Europe…

Czech Budvar is fantastic. I don’t think it’s broadly available across Europe though.

Similarly, Heineken is very much worth trying in the Netherlands. I’d never drink it here in the US.

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#57

Post by braythwayt »

Snackchez wrote: post #50
conanbatt wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you make a big mistake in using the word 'inflated'. The joy of doing something is configured in our brains, and we enjoy that. Science has shown that we like and are willing to pay more for things merely on the brand. Its like saying that all kisses are the same, its inflated that you want it from a specific person!

You might have slightly misconstrued the parent comment. To rework your idea: there's a spectrum for the quality of kisses. Some people figured out a way to convince you that their kisses are better than they actually are. Others are likely better, but they don't know how to market themselves, and thus don't get kissed as much.

The trouble is that a product delivers a complex set of values upon its user, and all-too-often, when someone sneers that it doesn’t have any value, that it’s “just marketing” conning its users, they are willfully ignoring the values that it confers.

I have spent literally my entire adult life listening to people say that Apple products were inferior to PCs, going right back to the days when they’d explain that bit-mapped graphics were useless decoration, and that keyboard shortcuts were superior to mouse interactions, and so forth.

It’s clearly true that for some users, in some use cases, a certain product does deliver less value than for others. But ignoring the fact that other people see the product’s values in other ways is a monumentally arrogant and unempathetic way to view humanity.

Most people don’t buy caffiene by the milligram or whatever. The label on the bottle appeals to a desire to fit in with other people buying the same label, or to aspire to belonging to that tribe, and so forth.

It amuses me that this even needs to be explained on Hacker News: Most people who participate in the threads do so for complex social reasons that are not particularly different than the reasons that some people buy Starbucks, some people buy from an indie shop, and some people hit the Timmie’s drive-through.

—-

Going back to kisses, consider a blind kiss test. I might say that of three kisses, B was better than A which was better than C.

But if you tell me that the kiss from C involved Lauren Bacall... I would rank it higher than the other two immediately! There is no fraud or nonsense going on, I value the complex bundle of values around a kiss from Lauren Bacall higher than two “no-name” kisses even if they are functionally more pleasant in the moment.

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#58

Post by mcguire »

yellowcherry wrote: post #40
kristianc wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You want to sell a da Vinci? Well then you have to make private meetings with potential clients, and, you have to create ads that sell it as iconic. That’s sales, not marketing. You wouldn’t bother to create ads for a Da Vinci, as the pool of people with the means to buy one is so small and the process of buying one is so convoluted. See also jet engines. > You want to make people buy your brand of beer? Well you h…

As the article explains, they did make ads for the Da Vinci. Several, in fact. To make it "iconic", they built up the brand. The ad that's just looking at people looking at it is brilliant, really a work of art on its own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsEAJkTP0-M The effort that went into selling that painting is one of the more fascinating stories of the last year.

Specifically,

"Before Christie’s sold Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi in 2017, it staged high-profile public exhibitions of the painting around the world, and made an expensively produced video to showcase it – in effect, an ad. On the face of it, all this activity was a flagrant waste of money: almost nobody who consumes the marketing for a da Vinci is in the market for it. Christie’s salespeople knew all the potential buyers personally. They can, and did, visit them in the privacy of their penthouses.

"Yet Christie’s realised that those buyers would pay an extra few million for the privilege of owning a painting that was “iconic”. This isn’t some quirk of billionaire art collectors; it’s human nature. We value things more highly when we know that others value them."

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#59

Post by handsomechad »

distances wrote: post #29
chairmanwow wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You actually make a really interesting point here. Advertising has permeated nearly every segment of media consumption. An interesting example is articles like this, and “reviews” of products that are actually paid adverts where the “reviewers” get kickbacks for every referral that leads to a sale. [1] [1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.fastcompany.com/3065928/sle...

On the other hand, it's now easier than ever to avoid all marketing in media. In the analog world you couldn't install an adblocker to your newspaper, or purchase a tv subscription without ads, or choose a radio station without ads in between. Now it's all available, and at least my world is almost completely advertisement-free -- except for those paid reviews you mentioned.

what about product placement, PR in print media, "native" or content ads. to say nothing of social media "influencers"

Re: The death of Don Draper?

#60

Post by mcguire »

eksemplar wrote: post #25
ptr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a very interesting blog post with probably hundreds of comments here on HN. Though if it fails more often “than a roll of a die,” doesn’t that hint at some predictive power? Maybe I’m misunderstanding.

Well maybe. There are some pretty big differences in how ML is traditionally applied and how it's used in the public sector where we focus much more on an individual level and have a much lower tolerance of errors. Right now the predictions we're getting of ML are so terrible they might as well be random. That's terrible, because we're not trying to determine if we can sell you X, we're trying to predict how likely y…

I would really love to hear more about this.

"Imagine we scored you as a likely alcoholic because people with a case history like yours indicated a high risk of alcoholism. So we start taking preemptive measures and the entire system grinds into gear, partly trying to prevent you from falling to the bottle but also preparing for if you do. You really wouldn't want to interact with a public system that's put the wrong label on you, trust me."

That's exactly the sort of specific example that is missing from the stories about ML doing things like encoding existing biases.

Post reply on HN