The best ad I've seen all week

I had a vision for the day society realized we can weaponize ads against companies we don't like & towards the wellbeing of all

Last week I started writing an open source book about my vision for the best possible future.

I’m not writing scifi, it’s not a fiction thing. It’s a todo list. I’m playing a game of: talk about what I plan to work on to (1) contribute to a better world (2) make lots of money & fame for myself. If someone steals my open todo list, maybe they’ll make lots of money instead of me, but I will still get the world I wanted. Win win!

This post is my first attempt at a chapter of this book, inspired by an ad I saw. It’s a narrative about our world, written from the perspective of a future historian. Everything you read falls into one of 3 categories:

🔮 predictions (what I think will happen/what I want to happen)
🎥 history (has *already* happened/just starting)
🌀 retro-predictions (wrote as prediction but readers pointed out has happened)

An answer key to reveal what is fiction & what is fact is linked to at the end.

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By the early 2020’s, everyone hated ads, and yet they were everywhere.

Things weren’t getting any better, and people didn’t understand why. The reason was very simple in hindsight: it was because ads weren’t actually bad for society.

Ads were in fact critical infrastructure responsible for most things people loved. That was the reason they were so hard to get rid of. It wasn’t because people had no agency, it was because people didn’t really want them gone. People who lived to see this shift were surprised that a better future turned out to be one with even *more* ads, not less!

Historians argue over when exactly this shift happened, when society realized that consumers & companies were all on the same side:

• consumers wanted products & services that improved their life,

• companies made products that consumers wanted,

• BOTH were against those who abused the system to sell things to people who didn’t want it

Once this shift happened, it was unstoppable. It wasn’t a law or regulation, it was a change in culture that gave individuals more agency, gave good companies *a lot* more money, and made all products more affordable & efficient. Win win!

The only people against it were companies that made bad products and relied on paid-for SEO spam reviews to sell to uneducated buyers. But they lost. No one wept for them.

The first ad with positive externalities

The exact ad was never recorded, but it went something like:

This is Gycolic Acid

It exfoliates your skin.

It’s a chemical
just like water is a chemical, and oxygen is a chemical.

It can cost you $40.

or $13

It was just an ad for some skin cream.

Only a few people recognized why this was brilliant: the ad was honest, AND it taught the consumer something true & useful.

Back then, consumers were not very savvy. They didn’t understand why some brand name drugs cost a lot more than others, even though they had the same “active ingredient”. To be fair to the people: this wasn’t obvious. Some brand name things *are* higher quality (like some clothes?). Some are exactly the same.

The brilliance of this ad was that instead of communicating: “buy our product, it’s better”, it explained why. It didn’t ask people to trust this company, it told them true information that they could use to make decisions, not just about *this* company, but about *all* their drugs that they purchase.

The ad that nuked paid-for reviews

The first thing that happened with that skincream ad is that people found the ad and shared it online and talked about why this was a great thing. This gave the company some good marketing & attention, and they made a bunch of money.

Other companies saw this, and decided to one-up with something even more bold. Audio Technica, a maker of headphones did a huge ad campaign that said nothing other than:

We make good headphones

Don’t take it from us, google:

site:reddit.com audio-technica

At that time, only a small % of the population knew this trick, that if you wanted honest reviews, you search reddit posts.

This didn’t create much buzz at first. It wasn’t until the savvy geeks noticed their computer illiterate parents were suddenly not so illiterate that it really went viral.

This was incredible marketing for Audio Technica. It was also incredibly bad for companies that made awful products but were propped up by this consumer information asymmetry. Government regulations couldn’t fix this asymmetry. Consumers couldn’t fix this asymmetry. Other companies battling to educate the consumer is what created a virtuous feedback loop that totally nuked the effectiveness of that shady bullshit.

It was an extremely risky marketing campaign, to be sure. Audio Technica had no control over what people on reddit were saying. But that risk is ITSELF what made the ad so effective. The people thought:

“here is a company that is willing to put itself on the line for independent review, because its products are ACTUALLY good, why the hell isn’t every goddamn company doing this??”

Even the ad exec had a hard time selling this to their team at first, but the CEO decided, “screw it, if we’re not winning by making the best product, what are we even doing here?”

(critics said, the CEO doesn’t care, he’s just doing this for his own personal gain, they’re getting so much good marketing for this! And to be fair, the critics were right. The company DID get a ton of free marketing. AND the average person got more savvy. win win!)

Public archival of ads

When people saw ads that were (1) honest (2) useful (3) genuinely informative, even to the point of teaching their parents something they struggled to explain to them, it raised the bar.

People realized: they were angry! They realized there were a ton of extremely crappy and manipulative ads that no one was talking about. And the reason no one was talking about it? Because it was impossible to search for!

Ads were targeted, so they only appeared to a small section of the population. You couldn’t even share them if you wanted?? The YouTube ad videos were unlisted, or not accessible at all. People started to realize how insane this was.

One particular comment went viral, because everyone supported this, there was no good faith reason not to do it:

Good idea for a new law: if you pay money to run an ad, you must register that ad with a public archive.

Now, for the first time in history, citizens could see not just what ads were targeted at *them*, but what ads were being targeted *at each other*, at their friends, at their enemies, & at subcultures they didn’t even know existed.

The UI looked like this:

ℹ️ Hello! it’s me, the author with an out-of-character message:
Have you caught any of the truths so far in this story?

Out of the 3 big events, we have (2) true (1) fiction

“The day humanity watched itself” - a short film

Publishing all the ads publicly wasn’t enough.

The average person didn’t go out of their way to use these databases to empower themselves. It was frankly too much work, and boring. They had better things to do, like hang out with their friends, and make art.

Someone realized that you could tell a really compelling self portrait of society from all of its ads. This wasn’t a researcher, not even really a content creator, just someone who had learned that all this data was available and that NO ONE was doing anything with it.

They realized that ads are insane, and they have always been insane, but that they tell you something true about society. Like this ad for a washing machine in the 50’s that basically said: BUY THIS WASHER, IT WILL MAKE YOUR WIFE PREGNANT

The ad is the way it is because the man was the one with buying power in that era. We don’t trust the content *in* the ad as true, but the fact that the ad is targeted to the man tells you something concretely true (because companies are greedy, and will put out ads that work on or manipulate their audience).

It was true that people were somewhat easy to manipulate. But this backfired: people *used* this fact to learn about each other & society at large.

The film “the day society watched itself” compiled the most unhinged ads targeted at a selection of mainstream & niche subcultures across the planet. Society had been slowly getting more & more fragmented, which meant companies got more & more bold in their emotional manipulation in advertising.

And suddenly the light came on.
Everyone saw what was happening.
Everyone felt what was happening.

Citizen ads

Corporations had spent decades building an extremely efficient infrastructure to reach very specific target groups of society.

One day people realized: literally anyone can sign up for and get a message across to any other sub group on the planet, for as little as $20.

Someone made an ad that was just a poem. Not a link to their book about poetry, the ad ITSELF was just a poem. It wasn’t selling anything. It was funded by their supporters who thought their work was beautiful and deserved to be shared more to groups who otherwise might never see it. It was a breath of fresh air.

Someone made an ad that was just a survey, not for an academic purpose, or a market survey, but just because *they* were curious. They were curious about people of the opposite political spectrum. People who seemed to be completely against making things better and were always in the way of progress. He sent out this survey, and said he would publish the answers publicly. It was an honest attempt at understanding people from outside their echo chamber.

This person’s questions were very naive; they didn’t really know anything about people on the opposite political spectrum other than what they’ve heard about in biased news sources. But the author learned a lot. And so too did the people taking the survey. The nature of the questions gave them a pretty insightful picture of what the other side genuinely thought of them.

People realized how little they actually knew about those they hated.

There was no happy ever after

None of this led to any kind of utopia.

There were still plenty of scammers, fraudsters, and companies with crappy products doing shady things. But they were on the fringe of commerce, in the same way in ancient times, customers couldn’t trust the quality of expensive furniture until trademark was created and enforced (by the companies & consumers themselves, neither wanted to see low quality knock-offs sold as originals).

The same thing happened here. Society got burnt a couple times when a new company launched an honest looking ad campaign, but it turned out was just a rebrand of an older shady company. That was bad, but it was good: it helped people understand why ghost kitchens are bad for society. Fool me once.

By now consumers knew how to play the game: elevating what they wanted to see, critiquing what they didn’t want, and informing each other. No one was in control of this system. Whatever ads were most true, useful, and beautiful are what resonated most and spread.

The most creative and competent across society were the ones that kept on winning, and they did so because we understood them. They stopped talking down to us. The ones that actually gave a damn and genuinely informed and empowered people were the ones that won.

They did it for themselves, but we elevated them for ourselves too.

Win win.

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Thanks for reading! 🔑 here is the answer key.

This is an open source book, this post already has multiple contributors (thank you

Bistromathtician

for the copyediting & feedback!). I’d *love* for you to contribute. You can:

• leave a comment here, tell me what parts resonate, or what parts you would change

• tell me what you THOUGHT was true and wasn’t, or vice versa, what surprised you? (would be cool to do a poll/survey!)

• rewrite this whole thing & publish your own version. What do YOU think a better world looks like with, or without ads? Does your utopia contain 0 ads? how do people find out about products? etc