1.

Persuasion, Media & Messages

Advertisers have message features that can increase persuasiveness.

- Reciprocity: Feel obligated to give something back

- Scarcity: People want more of things they think they are less of

- Authority: People tend to follow the lead of presumed experts

- Consistency: People like to be consistent with things they have previously done

- Liking: People prefer to say yes to those that they like

- Consensus: Especially when uncertainty is high, people look to others actions to make a decision

Persuasion is not only in rhetorical techniques… many physical world aspects nudge people toward
certain behavior. Signs sidewalks… Commercial spaces to guide people.

Persuasion goes digital

The medium has big influence on what is communicated. “The medium is the message” (Famous Quote).

Affordances

A chair affords sitting a keyboard affords typing… (Request Demand Allow Encourage Discourage Refuse)

Affordances in digital tech are much more flexible and adaptable

New media has affordances that give advantage over traditional media

1. New media interactive:

- One way flow of information in traditional media
o New media allow to interact
o Can inspire trust and implicit acceptance of information, this makes the tech
“disappear”
2. New media are persistent
- Info in new media is accessible whenever needed
- New media tools can interact with us over and over without getting tired
3. New media are anonymous (sort of)
- Perception of anonymity lead us to entrust it with very personal info
- Enable forms of persuasion not possible in the “real world”
4. New media involve lots of data
- Huge databases
- Personalized content
- Even possibly used for surveillance
 5. New media are personal
- Our devices are important and valuable possessions
- Customize the media and spend hours a day in them
- Extensions of ourselves
6. New media are adaptable
- Same message can be repeated over and over in different contexts
- Most persuasive and most effective option for designers
7. New media are scalable
- Quick implementation of design decisions and updates
- Difficult to predict cascading effects and difficult moderation
- Vulnerabilities
8. New media are pervasive
- We are always online
- Finding place where there’s no tech is difficult

Adversarial Systems

Goals of ad tech are: Maximize engagement, collect data, and generate profit

Dark Patterns:

Design decisions that are made to nudge people into doing something that they don’t necessarily want
to do. Dark Side of persuasive design.

How adversarial ad tech can harm:

Physical Harm, Emotional Harm, Societal Harm

Why adversarial tech?

Engagement, Data, Automation and Scale, Profit, Inaction/Neutrality, Reckless speed and disruption.

2. Changing landscape

Anything can be media anything that transmits a message

Types of media: Visual or auditory, synchronous (direct) asynchronous (the message delays (books)),
quick or slow, one/few or many.

The network structure of the audience matters.

Gatekeepers: In order for a message to go to a lot of people someone had to approve it. Sense that
media can be filtered with expertise.

Algorithms: Decides what goes on your feed. (Recommender system) Firstly used on ads.

Affordances: “Afford” by guiding behavior in certain ways.

- Things that pop up for you to see or share

- Block, Be friends, share
- Encouraging and discouraging.

Conditions for affordances:

- Perception: What does this button do (label , color) (lots of commonalities between social
medias)
- Dexterity: Do I actually have the skills to use this feature.
- Legitimacy: Who is allowed to use this feature. (Illegal for certain apps in certain countries)
(Privacy)

History of Media + Ad Tech

40s:

- Most media was person to person or radio or magazines, newspapers, mail.

- Big murals and billboards
- Some broadcast tv (only 3 channels)
- AM/FM radio
- Movies
- Boom in mass production after WW2 that increased competition in the market. (Advertising
more respectable as an industry.
- Beginning of collecting data stages, mailing lists, catalog order histories.
- Beginnings of modern era of advertising.
- Very little segmenting or targeting. (Segmentation to wealthy or women or poor)

70s-80s

- Person to person
- Print
- Billboards and posters/flyers
- Cable/Satellite TV
- Movies
- Development + Expansion of audience research
- Development + Expansion of mass media channels promote more niche brands.
- The golden Age of Advertising
80s-90s:

- Consumer video games

- Early websites
- Early search engines
- Invention and growth of the internet leads to beginning of digital ad
- Space was negotiated with suppliers for a flat rate based on predicted viewership + interest
- Invention of cookies… tells the website you’ve been there before
- Pricing moved to pay-per click model not scrolling down

2000s-2010s:

- Modern websites
- Modern search engines
- Social median
- Online video
- Early mobile
- Data companies becoming super important
- Search engine marketing (SEM) Google mainly
- Most of the content in the media was made by professionals before
- Now more user generated content
- Video marketing online
- Advancements in computer hardware
- Big data advertising (Data that cant fit entirely in a personal computer)
- Streaming services became popular (Netflix pioneered the recommending system space)
- Rise of privacy issues and ad-blocking

Late 2010s

- Phones get really fast

- Wearables (watches)
- Video streaming services
- Algorithmic content curation
- Virtual/ augmented reality
- VR/AR
- Big expansion of programmatic advertising
- Fingerprinting (allows advertisers to even further target ad)
- More concerns about privacy invasion
- Adblocking
- Better ad standard created guidelines for acceptable types of digital ad
- Platforms selling data to highest bidder
- GDPR (General data privacy regulations) in Europe
o No such thing on USA

Death of the cookie:

 - Major browser started to block the third-party cookies
- Chromium the largest browser by user base, is discontinuing third party cookies
- Google came with an alternative (FLOC) Federated Learning of Cohorts

Media and Tech have evolved… the content is much more personalized. Hyper personalized network has
a lot of more different affordances

Uber Airbnb: Industries that are dominated by tech companies

3. The digital economy

Economy based on digital economy technologies. An economy that would not exist without the internet.

Drivers of the digital economy

- The internet: This enables firms offer goods for sale and enables consumers to browse for goods
that they need.
- Algorithms: Firms can use the processing power of computers to make decisions on output,
prices and how to reach consumers
- Digital Payments: Credit cards, apple pay, loyalty points, loyalty cards. Bitcoin, and other
cryptos. Cashless society.
- Sensors + automation: Increasingly the digital economy relies on AI, mass use of electronic data
and automated technology.
- Social Media: Connected to each other in a scale we were never before. Recommendations
about businesses.
- Commtech: Electronic communication enables very cheap near-instantaneous communication.

Redefining Industries

Traditional Economy can be easily understood by the division of labor in different stages of the
production-consumption cycle.

In a digital economy, digital technologies support, reshape and redefine, and often disrupt traditional
economic activities

Digital enables changes to physical economies (shipping, logistics)

Are we dealing with an entirely new industry or an old industry redefined.

Physical economies have physical limitations

- Products are assembled from raw materials that have to come from somewhere.
 - Products can´t be in two places at once. Transport is slow and costly.
- Services and intellectual activities are performed by people, typically restricted to experts, also
geographically limited.
- Digital economies have “digital” or conceptual (data) products
- Can be sold repeatedly with no “cost of goods sold”
- Moved around almost instantly

The long tail

- “Scale free” distribution of goods and services allows products with smaller audiences to be
profitable
- Less constrained by geography and space, and easier to find an audience
- Central mass market there are an infinite number of niche markets
- In digital economies, distribution requires huge amount of centralization (amazon)

Network Effects

- The scale free networks enabled by digital technology also create other effects.
o Concentration of influence/resources
o Extremely fast information spread at low cost
- Increasingly, the value of a product is tied to how it leverages and manipulates networks

Direct Network Effect: Facebook

- The more users you have- the more value for existing users

Economies of Scale: Walmart

- More sales volume-lower cost of production

Network Effects and the Economy

- Network effects mean value is allowed to accure much faster among those who already have it
while being removed from those who don’t
- Enables more and more production from fewer companies employing fewer people
- Automation can supercharge network effects, further unlinking macro from micro-level, and
increasing inequity.

Network Effects and Centralization:

- Network effects produce very rapid concentration of wealth

Redefining “Labor” and “Jobs”

- Digital economy has created many new ways to make money, but also has a number of issues
- Gig Economy: Short term contract-based or independent work. Often enabled by digital tech
linking supply/demand. (Uber)
- Sharing Economy: Selling short-term access to privately owned goods or services. (Airbnb)

Working under the Algorithm

- Modern shift workers frequently have work schedules dictated by algorithm that take into
account sales volume, season, even worker productivity.
- Working anything but 9-5
- Workers often don’t get notified until hours after having a shift.

Redefining Currency

- Vast growth in digital ways of exchanging currency

- Rapid developments in non-governmental currency (Airline miles, store credit, card rewards)
o Decentralized virtual currencies
- Fluctuate in value much more than traditional currencies, and more difficult to regulate.
- Transactions increasingly linked to data collection, and used for targeting

Digital Economy and Covid

- Pandemic has sped up transition to a more digital economy

o Growth in remote work
o Centralization more industries
o Explosion in online commerce
o Internet enabled coordination and virtualization of events

Redefining Advertising

- Traditionally, advertising agencies sold media space/ time as measures of audience attention to
the advertisers
- In mass media, primary strategy is to broadcast information about goods and services to the
demand side
- Advertising services focus on producing creative and persuasive messages, and on placing them
where they should go.

Old Model: Advertising-Broadcasting

New Model: Advertising-Matchmaking

In traditional, ads typically costed a set amount based on channel or event popularity, and by geographic
reach.

- Smaller companies could advertise locally or in off hours

Cost for online ads is much more complicated, and cost structure created downstream effects

PPM: Pay per mille (number of impressions)

PPC: pay per click

PPE: pay per engagement

PPV: pay per view

PPI: pay per install (specialized apps)

4. The digital Advertising Landscape

The average American spends 9.8 hours per day using digital media.

- Exposed to more than 5000 brands.

- Only about 12 of these encounters make an impression

Different ad tools provide different benefits for advertisers depending on goals and target audience.

Types of digital ad

- Traditional ad mostly consists of print, video or audio

- Digital ad can encompass all of the features traditional ad has. But adds in new characteristics.
- Biggest difference: DATA. Digital ads are built based on data and often are designed to collect
data.

Display: Most common form of digital ad

Search: Synonymous with google, amazon searching

Mobile: Can have characteristics of display or search (location component involved)

Conversational: Last 5 years… AI chatbots…

Social: Promoted posts on social media

Content: Content creation

Video/Audio: Ads on youtube

Display:

Banner Ads

- First type of digital ad

- An image placed on the screen usually an interactive element like button or link
- Contain motion, video, or even games
- Pricing model started like traditional ad. Quickly evolved to PPC or PPM

Pop Up/Over/Under Ads

- Ad is associated with but separated from the underlying content

o Pop up to cover the content
o Pop over and block out the content in the same window
o Pop-under, where the a is displayed when the window is closed
- Overwhelmingly disliked, blocked by ad blockers.

Targueting in Display

- Behavioral
o Ads are displayed on a programmatic auction slots based on viewers previous behavior
o Can be previous browsing behavior or purchases
o Requires some form of tracking of the user across sites (cookies)
- Contextual
o Ads are chosen for a particular slot
 Not because of the person but because of the site.
o Usually just involves a demand side platform
o Can be static or dynamic
o Does not require tracking the user

First Banner Ad: AT&T and cost $10,000-Click rate was 44% (huge)

Search:

Placing ads on search engine

- Can be based on the keywords that were entered

- Increasingly based on profiling data

Sponsored search – changing the items that appear in the search itself. Typically has to be marked for
regulatory reasons
Search engine optimization (SEO)

- Tweaking a page to appear higher in searches

Search engine marketing makes up almost 40% of total digital ad spend

Google takes about 80% of profit. (Bing Amazon)

Mobile:

Quickly becoming the dominant form of digital ad

Similar to display advertising, but with some additional features

Geotargeting-presenting ads based on a user’s location

- Can be based on cell towers, gps, wifi

- Increasingly fine grained. Now can serve ads based on location in a building

Push notifications

- Alerts based on a trigger. Can be location based, time-based

App ads

- Ads placed within apps.

Videogame ads are especially prominent. Watching ads to get special items.

Mobile phones also collect data and pass it to advertisers.

Conversational:

Conversational commerce

- New form of ad using chatbots

Can use speech to text voice recognition, natural language processing or other tech

Smart assistants like Siri, Alexa, google assistant

Most prominent text platforms are Facebook messenger, WeChat, and apple business chat.

Social Media:

Using social connections in order to post or promote ad.

Promoted posts
 - Pay a social media company as an advertiser to put your content to the world

Influencers and eWOM

- Paying or otherwise compensating opinion leaders to generate buzz

Flair

- Newer for of social media ad. Face filters hashtag emoji

Content Marketing:

Generating content in order to promote a brand, or to serve ads to people who might be interested in a
brand

Inbound

- Anticipating what people who might be interested in your product might want or need and
generating that content.

Branded Content

- Creating content for a target audience, or sponsoring content creators

Affiliate Marketing

- Paying people to post links to your content

Native Advertising

- Creating ads that look like content that would be on the site normally. Can look like news
articles, social posts.

Video/Audio:

Similar in many ways to video/audio ads in traditional advertising, bit with some new features

Pre-roll

- Ads that play before a video

Freemium

- Services that play video or audio ads on afree tier but can also remove ads

Social Video

- Embedding video ads in social feeds

Video advertising is currently extremely controversial

Metrics are still evolving, with very public scandals involving inflated or false viewership metrics on
Facebook.

Digital Ad Strategy

- The types of digital ads that are best to use depends on a number of factors and research is
almost always required
o Who is likely to purchase your product
o How much is that market interested in your product
o Are the pre-existing opinions about your product or brand
o Are there other companies selling similar products
o What do your competitors strategies look like
o History of your market
o Answering these questions can help brands create buyer profiles, understand risk, and
know what types of advertisements are likely to succeed
- Success is always defined by GOALS

Goal #1: Aquisition

Increasing actual customers (sales), and/or potential customers (leads).

Most straightforward and easy to measure goals

Metrics: Sales quantity…

Strategy: Highly actionable ads and landing pages with strong call to action (CTA)

Goal #2: Nurturing

Customer nurturing

Very fer people who encounter a brand online actually engage further

Customer nurturing involves building relationships with potential customers before they are ready to
convert

Metrics: Previous exposure

Strategy: content marketing, retargeting, cross-channel

- The decision journey:

o The type of info that can nurture continued contact and engagement with the brand
depends on where a person is in their decision journey
o Many different models of decision journey
 o Presenting content at wrong stage of decision journey can be frustrating and off-putting.

Goal #3: Loyalty, Upsell

- After purchase digital ads may be used to help build loyalty or encourage continued purchase
- Strategy: advocacy programs, social media share sheets, follow up surveys and contacts

Goal #4: Branding

- Sometimes digital ads are used just to build awareness and to reinforce brand image
- Up to 30% of ad for companies lile unilever and proctor and gamble are spent on digital brand
management
- Important to build consistent image

Current Trends:

- Personalization and DTC

o Digital marketing strategies are increasingly focusing on intent-based marketing and
nurturing potential customers in the decision journey.
o Even big brands are creating direct to consumer (DTC) storefronts
o More customization offered by big brands as well
- First party data
o With google killing off third party cookies, ad platforms and agencies are scrambling to
offer new solutions for generating useful data
o Also improves brand image re: privacy and invasiveness
o More direct, and through market and user experience research
o More than 60% of recently surveyed companies said that they are focusing more on first
party data.
- Cross-platform
o With huge growth on OTT platforms, video ads are increasingly being merged into
programmatic infrastructure
o Digital ads spend on video increasing drastically and being linked into existing
campaigns.
o More data tools to sync content across different platforms
- Focus on content
o Increased focus on building flexible pipelines of branded content
o Beginnings of using AI to generate and target specific content
o More immersive and rich content, and adapting content to scale across different screen
sizes
o Increased collaboration with influencers and celebrities.
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