The newspaper is dying, shouting about "responsible publishers" and "conscientious advertisers" doesn't change a thing

It's an old joke that the point of journalism is to fill in the gaps between the adverts. And there has always been a tension, sometimes even a conflict, between the newsroom and the ad sales teams that mostly pay the wages of those journalists. Every paper will have a story of how an advertiser pulled copy because of a story, every editor will have witnessed a raging red-faced sales director screaming how that 'scoop' meant that he's lost thousands in sales - "I was that close to a long-term deal" the SD will shout while the editor waffles about journalistic integrity.

Journalists don't like advertising despite (or maybe because of) working in a business that's dependent on those ads for its existence. Journalists also don't like competition for that advertising (especially from things they don't consider to be media let alone journalism). Here in a classic of self-importance is James Mitchinson, the editor of struggling newspaper, The Yorkshire Post:

"I have long been convinced that the indiscriminate nature of the programmatic advertising business model makes it vulnerable to exploitation. It has caused a race to the bottom, with some publishers – not all – and editors gaming the business model with their commissioning decisions, rather than thinking about what is in the public interest."

There are some suppositions here that are worth noting. We get an attack on the advertising business model and Mitcheson talks about "...outlets that seek to commoditise audiences in order to exploit an indiscriminate paymaster..." on the presumption that advertising decisions are in any way indiscriminate when any ad man will tell you that the opposite is true. And it's hard to accept without a wry smile the suggestion that "quality" newspapers just do "honest journalism" and haven't ever been bottom feeders.

We get the sense in Mitchinson's comments, the use of terms like "conscientious advertisers" and "responsible publishers", that he seeks to divide publishing into good and bad - we can see some of his targets clearly in this part of the commentary: "...the hateful, partisan, agenda-driven Goliaths who think nothing of demonising immigrants, legitimising domestic abuse and scandalising the courts...". But who is Mitcheson, or even a "responsible publishers' network", to say what content the public should or shouldn't consume? And why, since Mitchinson thinks the power is in their hands, should advertisers trash their marketing models to suit what a group of essentially self-interested publishers decide is "responsible" or "conscientious"?

What Mitchinson, and so many others, fail to realise is this journalism they lay claim to ("...public interest journalism; journalism done for the betterment of the communities it serves...") only exists so long as people - directly or through advertising choices - continue to consume the product, the content, those editors put before them. And, right now, the eyes of the majority are turned away from local papers like the Yorkshire Post because it offers little they want. Even those "agenda-driven Goliaths" that Mitcheson hates so much are losing customers, struggling to keep advertisers and wondering how much longer their business model ('producing content to get people to see the advertisements') can continue.

It's unclear, other than seeking to create what in other business contexts would be an illegal cartel, what Mitcheson wants to achieve. We hear of "public interest" (as if that's something that can be defined glibly by a bunch of newspaper editors) and "editorial principles" (as if editorial strategies should should ignore economics) but the telling comment lies at the end: "...improve the whole of the internet and make a wholesome contribution to society."

Mitcheson, like most of the traditional media, is fearful of how platforms like Facebook and Google have changed the way in which people consume news (plus, of course, how the advertisers have shifted spending from black and white copy in the Yorkshire Post to animated and engaging promotions online). To counter this, the fearful journalists have created a bogeyman built from fake news, targeted advertising and "toxic" content which they wave at each other, at the government and at the public in the manner of an old fire-and-brimstone preacher threatening his elderly, half-asleep congregation with eternal damnation.

Dying industries, and traditional, especially local, news journalism is a dying industry (and has been for at least two decades), always look to cartels, regulation and the heavy hand of government to protect then in their dotage. This doesn't better the "...communities it serves and therefore society as a whole..." but is seeking moral enforcement in the cause of economic interest, the very thing Mitcheson claims his crusade is directed against. The problem is that this strategy, while it might stave off the last day, doesn't begin to resolve the problem with the regional paper business model. The Yorkshire Post is neither fish nor fowl - not a local paper and not a national paper - has a daily circulation not much over 10,000, and competes for advertising with national and local competitotrs as well as with other advertising platforms such as Facebook and YouTube (or the advertisers own carefully curated website promoted via Google).

Mitcheson wants advertisers to deliberately buy less impactful and effective advertising so as to privilege his particular view of "responsible" journalism but completely fails to make a case beyond the purely emotive "I want to help make the change; protect quality journalism; improve the whole of the internet and make a wholesome contribution to society". It's not for Mitcheson and a few mates to define quality journalism, dictate what is or isn't good on the Internet, or what constitutes wholesomeness in society.

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Silicon Snake Oil (or how data analytics didn't really win it for anyone)

'Twas ever thus....

Cambridge Analytica is not the first political technology vendor to made big, unproven claims about its abilities. But we live in the age of silicon snake oil. There are millions to be made selling gullible investors and clients on mumbo-jumbo.

And right now it suits the political left - in the USA and the UK - to see that 'silicon snake oil' as some sort of darkly sinister plot to undermine democracy. The truth - despite the ever more scary stuff we see from documentaries like 'The Great Hack' - is that, just as ride-sharing disrupts taxi services and Airbnb hotels, social media disrupts the established norms of political communication, norms that said messages from political campaigns to the public are mediated through TV and newspapers.

As Micah Sifry (from who I've taken the quotation above) reminds us:

When it comes to voters’ decisions about their choice of candidate, most forms of paid political persuasion, including TV ads, online ads, mailers, phone calls, and door-knocking, have no discernible effect in terms of changing people’s minds. That’s the conclusion of a careful meta-review of 49 field experiments all looking at general election campaigns, published by political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman in the American Political Science Review in 2018

We told you so (or rather I was told way back in 1982 before all this Internet malarkey existed) - political campaigning is nearly all about finding people who say they'll support you and getting them to vote. We repeatedly told activists - 'don't waste your time trying to persuade somebody on the doorstep - if they're arguing with you they probably won't be voting for you, get a VI and skedaddle' (or words to that effect). Later on we used profiling and targeting so as to hopefully find more people who say they'll vote for us and spend less time knocking on the doors or ringing the phones of people who won't.

If you're one of those people who think some sort of sinister international cabal is responsible for manipulating thick people into voting for things you don't agree with then you are every bit as thick as those people you consider so stupid they had their minds switched 180 degrees by a Facebook ad. What's happening is that data analytics businesses like Cambridge Analytica - "all hat and no cattle" as one Ted Cruz advisor put it - are trying to exploit the fixed belief that our minds (or rather, other people's minds) are peculiarly persuadable by one particular form of communication, advertising. It's true that advertisers spend a lot of time thinking about what message their consumers want to hear but they also know that, in most markets, the money is best invested in reminding your existing customers what a fantastic choice they made. The same goes for political communications.

There's a quite pervasive idea that political communication should take place in a sort of virtual arena where every voter receives the same information. This, we're told is because targeted communications somehow corrupt democracy by giving Mary a message about animal welfare and Steve a message about hospitals especially if Steve won't see the message Mary gets and vice versa. There's a deal of discussion about 'dog whistles' and hints at sinister subliminal messages. As political parties quickly find out, they are just like consumer brands where sustaining the brand and motivating the consumer is the primary function of communication. What targeting does is to allow the party to talk to Mary about the things that are important to Mary and to connect those interests to the party's programme. But the starting point here is that Mary is more likely than not to vote for that party - if she isn't the communication is mostly wasted.

This is why Cambridge Analytica didn't win anybody anything with its psychological targeting - it's not very effective:

The Cruz campaign stopped using its data. Chris Wilson, the campaign’s director of research, analytics, and digital strategy, discovered that more than half the voters CA had identified as Cruz supporters in Oklahoma actually backed other candidates

So next time you watch a slick TV documentary or read a long 'join-the-dots' screed in The Observer or the New York Times, remember that, for all that CA might be sinister, linked to shadowy dark money, what they sold was the data analytics version of the quack doctor's patent cure all.

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Retailing as brand management - an example from Apple

Ira Stoll at Reason reports on a visit to an Apple store:

I was looking for a computer to replace the nine-year-old MacBook Pro on which I am writing this column. I was also considering getting a new phone and passing my three-year-old iPhone SE along to a family member.

I left without a new computer or a new phone, but with a valuable lesson—one that you wouldn't necessarily learn if you spent your time listening to the presidential candidates bashing technology companies. One of the best ways to succeed long-term in capitalism is by treating customers well rather than ripping them off.

I was eyeing one of the desktop computers with an integrated Apple screen, Apple keyboard, and Apple mouse that would have cost more than $1,000 altogether. But the employee at the Apple store advised me I'd be better off just getting a cheaper "Mac mini" and buying the mouse, monitor, and keyboard somewhere else. On the phone question, he said I should go to a Verizon store—it had better deals.

Stoll positions this response as a customer service policy for retail and maybe he's right. I suspect, however, this is part of a larger trend for big consumer brands - using the retail environment as a brand management tool. Apple's high street presence seems to serve two purposes - a place where current Apple customers can get support and a place where people (who may or may not be Apple customers) can browse the company's products with trained people to explain what all the complicated stuff does. Selling you a phone, computer or accessory is pretty much secondary to the positive impact on brand image.

I recall a similar visit to a Bose store in Liverpool. We were looking for a good wireless speaker system (it's sitting next to me as I write this) and had a long chat with the young woman serving us. They didn't have the model we wanted in store but they could get it and have it delivered, "or you might get it on Amazon or a good electronics store". This led to a conversation about how she was paid - "aren't you guys on commission?". The answer was "no", they're salaried - the company had stores primarily to promote the brand rather than as a sales outlet.

In elite retail environments - large city centres, up-market malls and some smaller high streets - this sort of retailing is becoming more evident. From Aaron Renn reporting on the mustard shop in New York's Upper East Side through to the spectacular Johnny Walker House in Shanghai we're seeing the rise of retail as brand management. This development reflects the declining effectiveness of advertising in a world of subscription TV, ad blockers and online news - large advertising budgets are being redirected into paying shop rents rather than for minutes on TV or pages in magazines. Sales don't matter next to footfall and the same principles (how many and what profile) apply to shop rental decisions as applied to TV or newspaper ad choices Whether this is a good or bad thing for the high street is moot - it maybe sustains high rents where otherwise demand would push those rents down (Renn points out that Starbucks couldn't afford the rent round the corner from that mustard shop) but perhaps acts also to push out traditional retailers from up-market environments.

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In which a posh grocery company discovers it sells junk food and McDonalds doesn't.

Chris Snowdon provides an insight into the evidence-free attacks on food advertising:

"...children's 'exposure' to HFSS food advertising has fallen by 37% since 2008 and that the average child sees a mere 11.5 seconds of it per day."

Those people who want to blame a mysterious and mythical thing called the "obesogenic environment" for children being fatter (and in particular advertising) are completely misinformed and, in promoting the myth, are misleading the public.

Doesn't stop 'em though:

Recent early-stage analysis of advertising data for May 2018, also done by the charity, found that on ITV1, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky One, around half (49 per cent) of all food adverts shown between 6pm and 9pm in May 2018 were advertising HFSS products. And that fast food and delivery brands accounted for more than a quarter (27 per cent) of those HFSS adverts.

Now this is truly shocking until you realise that (as one right on company discovered) HFSS covers everything from butter, bacon and cheese to home delivered pizza. And let's also remember that most children aren't ordering take-outs.

The causes of obesity are far more complex than "look at those adverts for junk food" but the media narrative focuses almost entirely on this message. Part of this is because public health people want there to be a convenient scapegoat for fat kids - it is not acceptable to point at parents and say "stop stuffing your kids with snacks and get them running about more". Even though eating too much and exercising too little is absolutely the biggest contributor to the rise in obesity. The poor fat people are victims of evil marketers and sinister food scientists - the advertising sucks them in, they cannot resist.

Of course this is nonsense but it plays to the other parts of the fussbuckets' narrative - snobbery. The "bad" foods are all foods that are enjoyed by the less well off - hence the shock for companies selling to posh folk when they discover that there's a whole loads of HFSS in artisan cheddar and fair trade unprocessed sugar. They thought it was all about McDonald's and cheap pizzas from the freezer shop:

Naturally, we were pretty shocked that a picture of some fresh groceries with a healthy mixture of fruits and vegetables, dairy, eggs and cupboard staples would flout TfL’s new junk food rules. But it turns out that TfL score foods individually according to a nutrient profiling model created by the Government. It’s a pretty crude measure and means that foods you would still think of as junk, like fizzy drinks with artificial sweeteners or low-fat fried foods, could in some scenarios comply with the new regulations.

Proof that anti-obesity campaigns are mostly about snobbish attitudes to "junk food" (defined as the sort of food common people eat) and nothing much really to do with reducing the weight of kids. But it's a delight that the pompous elitists at Farm Drop were really put out:

Last year, the fast-food chain was allowed to run a Happy Meal advert during children’s television and it passed the Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA’s) standards for healthy food, which are the same standards TfL are now using for the junk food ban. According to the ASA, a McDonald’s Happy Meal is not a junk food product because 80% of the mains, and 100% of the sides are non-HFSS. But swapping out sugar for a sweetener or fruit for chips, doesn’t detract from the fact that this is still a fast food company promoting meals with fried foods to kids.

You have to laugh!

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No we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy

Local newspapers are dying. This death is accompanied by a great wailing from the usual sources who argue (without really explaining why) that local papers - even ones that are hardly read at all by the public, even on-line - are "vital to a functioning democracy". The government last year set on Dame Frances Caincross, a left-wing journalist, to look at what could be done to rescue local papers from their impending doom.

Unsurprisingly our journalist concludes that the only solution is state-funded journalism, a new regulator (staffed by worthy lefties like Dame Frances no doubt) and assorted enquiries into the evil that is Facebook (and other monstrous tech giants like Google). It is also unsurprising that, aside from one chap from the Advertising Association, the entire panel of 'experts' advising Dame Frances were journalists or media owners. The outcome of the commission is entirely predictable and won't serve, in any way, to rescue the local press.

The problem is that, despite working in businesses that depend to a greater or lesser extent on advertising, journalists seem not to have the slightest clue as to why advertisers invest their cash in the manner they do. Here's one pretty typical example from Twitter:

I think most journalists know that. They’re at the mercy of hapless publishing giants and similarly incompetent media buying agencies who are so obsessed by Facebook et al that they’ve stopped investing in what’s important.

As you can see journalism ("quality journalism" is the official management term here) is dying because those naive advertisers have been duped by Facebook and Google into shifting their spending there rather than leaving it with publications that nobody reads. Now it's true that marketers, for brand advertising at least, are pulling back from relying on Facebook and Google, but they are not shifting their spend back into print newspapers (magazines are a different matters - take note that the top four TV listings magazines sell nearly 4 million copies every week).

The reason brands are pulling away from social media is that the owners of that media are limiting the advertising's reach by manipulating the algorithms - where once millions of likes meant millions in reach, it now means thousands. Plus, with consumers shifting their attention to other social media, the responsiveness of Facebook advertising degrades - even with supposedly sophisticated targeting Facebook is using a heavy roller to crack walnuts.

There is an old joke about newspapers that the purpose of the journalism is to fill in the gaps between the advertising. We shouldn't forget that most local papers exist because they provided a vehicle for local businesses to advertise. Yes those newspapers did journalism but much of the point for the journalism was to get folk to buy the paper. I recall being told by one former local paper editor about his first assignment as a junior reporter - go to a funeral with the instruction to write down the name of as many people attending as possible. Local papers carried photographs with lots of people in because those people - and their nearest and dearest - would buy the paper.

The stock in trade of local newspapers wasn't "quality journalism", it was births, deaths and marriages, cars for sales, cinema listings, job adverts, sports results, school prize givings and evening classes. The sale adverts from the local department store were just as important (probably more so) than the report of what Alderman Smith had said about the parks department at Wednesday's Council meeting. The paper was a record of the boring mundanities of life in a community - Bradford's Telegraph & Argus has been sharing online some images from the past: football teams, ballet classes, scout troops and girl guides not councillors or MPs.

People still want all these lists, this record of everyday life, it's just that so much of it has moved elsewhere - not to Facebook (although a glimpse through community pages will show that they absolutely capture those everyday events and happenings) but to job sites and car sales sites, to direct messaging and to email. If local papers want to do their "quality journalism" maybe they need to think about how to get back the bread and butter of past times rather than try to blame social media for a demise that was predictable in the 1990s at the outset of the 'world wide web' - long before Facebook or Google came to dominate the world.

It is crazy to see the solution as some sort of state-funded cadre of local journalists producing copy that nobody reads because someone has decided that it is "quality journalism". Instead news media need to turn off the button marked "free" (and it would help here if the BBC didn't crowd out so much on-line, something Cairncross does note) and start expecting the public to pay for news. Most of them won't because they're not really that interested but if the cost is low enough there's no reason why local media cannot work. What we can't have, however, is journalists believing they've some sort of privileged position in society (all the guff about democracy and so forth) and expecting taxes to provide for them.

Oh, and next time we have an enquiry into an area where advertising is central perhaps we should put marketers in charge? What Dame Frances and her advisors have shown us is that they - mostly journalists - really haven't the faintest idea why advertisers make the spending decision they make. And I hope such a panel would conclude that we don't need state-funded journalists, we need content people want to buy.

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Vote Leave's "sophisticated" campaign was the Internet age equivalent of junk mailing

Back in the day we had two sorts of client - ones who paid lip service to the idea of targeted marketing and those who tried to use targeting to improve results. The former - typically financial services businesses of one sort or another - were great clients as what they really wanted to do was shove out their sales message through every available direct marketing medium regardless of any nuanced assessment of responsiveness. Mostly this is because the levels of response that made credit card applications, investment bonds and mortgages cost-effective was very low. This is (for those who remember back then) why everyone got so royally pissed off with the likes of American Express - except us direct marketers, we were making lots of lovely print margin for churning out essentially untargeted material.

The second bunch were much more difficult as conversion to sales, cost per response, cost per new order and so forth really mattered. They used agencies like us because we were (or so we said) at the cutting edge of sophisticated targeting making use of databases, expert systems, geodemographics, psychographics and other of the assorted computer dark arts. We used all those tricks, tests and personalised gimmicks - "Yes, SIMON COOKE, you could already have won FIFTY THOUSAND POUNDS in our preselected prize draw..." - we were the Red Sparrows of marketing. Today we'd probably have strangely coloured hair but back then we were more Mad Men in our dress style.

Recently a bunch of people who, it seems, hadn't realised that careful, targeted marketing doesn't require Facebook, have discovered that those databases, expert systems, geodemographics and psychometrics really do exist and have been used to target advertising by political campaigners. Indeed, today's marketing Red Sparrows have cluttered up UK and US airwaves - besplendid in their best red hair - spinning the same bollocks we were spinning back in 1992. Carefully selected statistics - "using geodemographic targeting has been shown to lift response rate by up to 150%" (from nearly nothing to very slightly more than nearly nothing) - are wheeled out wrapped in words that probably mean little in this context but sound good - algorithm, profiling, psychology. Add to this how we continue to believe Vance Packard's nonsense about secret and hidden techniques used by marketers to trick us into buying stuff we don't want to buy, and you've a recipe for otherwise intelligent people believing that somehow the Brexit vote was all down to this occult science rather than a whole load of people, for whatever reason, really not liking the European Union very much.

What's come out now is some of the detail of Vote Leave's targeted advertising. And, it seems that Vote Leave - led by a man who tells us Marvin's brain is tiny next to his - were the sort of client we loved. The supposedly sophisticated targeting based on cunning psychology and profiling turns out to be broad brush targeting - "older men", "women", "middle aged people" and so forth. Here's a journalist completely failing to understand the entire point of marketing but, in doing so, revealing how simplistic Vote Leave's targeting was:









There's more but this will do. We were told - stern, questioning MPs interrogated visiting "experts" to ascertain this - that the Brexit campaign was uniquely cunning and sophisticated to the point of being sinister. Yet the truth is that they used the same level of targeting sophistication as Amex did in 1992 - not very much at all. This isn't to say that Vote Leave's online advertising didn't work but what's clear from this revelation is that it wasn't targeted at any level below the sort of broad brush demographics - men, women, old, young - that were used to target TV ads in the age of mass marketing. To put it another way, Vote Leave spent a lot of money flooding facebook with ads in the same manner that Amex leaflets flooded through your letter box back in the early 1990s. It wasn't sophisticated at all - for all the talk of physicists - it was the Internet age version of junk mailing, essentially spam.

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Don't burn the platform - social media, ad fraud and regulation

Look I know you don't like advertising (or at least lots of you say you don't) and get irritated by men in ill-fitting suits and bad shirts telling you that "the brand must be a hero" or some such nonsense, but can we stop shooting the messenger please? Advertising is not the reason why Google and Facebook dominate social media, advertising is not the reason why kids are fat (if indeed they are), and advertising is not some sort of sinister manipulative force responsible for all the evils of capitalism. Nope - advertising is just businesses talking to you.

Even the FT, what was once capitalism's leading journal, is at it:

The need to sell advertising is at the heart of the toxic behaviour of many of the social media companies. The online ad market is dominated by Facebook and Google, and appears to be fraught with bots and fraudulent clicks. Hence France, Germany and Australia are all conducting inquiries into online advertising.

First let's get one thing clear, online ad fraud is a problem and one that is more of a threat to the advertising business than to us as consumers (and because of this - it's a threat to Google and Facebook's revenue streams as well):

According to a 2016 report from The Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and WhiteOps, the loss from ad fraud was $7.2 billion in 2015—primarily from bots. To put that into perspective, total spend on display advertising, according to the 2015 report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, was only $12 billion, excluding Google and Facebook.

Note the last part of this - the largest part of online ad fraud takes place elsewhere than Google and Facebook (or for that matter Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth) because these are 'walled gardens' - closed platforms - that control what you and I see. That's not to say there's none of this stuff on Google and Facebook - online advertising (operationally and in terms of regulation) is still in its infancy with the technology options and the creativity of fraudsters running ahead of those policing the system. It's probably more important to focus on the shared interests of advertisers and consumers (neither of whom like fraud) rather than seek to break up, control or regulate the platforms.

One of the issues here is that regulatory regimes for advertising vary enormously and there is very little international cooperation - ICAS (the International Council on Advertising Standards) was set up in 2008 but only formalised with an independent secretariat in 2017 and, as yet, doesn't include China or Japan (the biggest source of on line ad fraud). Moreover, advertising standards regimes have historically been far more focused on advertising content - 'legal, decent and honest' - than on the sort of technological deception that is undermining online advertising effectiveness. This is made more difficult by the fact that much ad fraud is not illegal (or it's hard to prove ill intent):

One of the biggest reasons fraud is so rampant is simply that it’s not illegal. Unlike credit card fraud, nobody is going to jail for ad fraud, and it’s not exactly the sort of activity that elicits a crackdown from law enforcement, which means there is significantly less risk involved. And yet it’s extremely lucrative.

Imagine a bad actor is weighing their options. On one hand there is credit card fraud, which has modest rewards and very high risks. On the other is ad fraud, which is very lucrative and very low risk. It’s a no-brainer.

Partly this is because of online purchasing models (PPC and variants) but mostly it's because governments have focused attention on other online risks (terrorism, pornography, communication with minors) rather than on advertisers getting some of their payments scammed. As the FT observed governments are now conducting enquiries into ad fraud but this has got little or nothing to do with allegations of "toxic behaviour" levelled at social media companies. That makes for a cool headline, gets you (ironic) clicks but completely misses both the problem and the solution. Regulators and governments need to be working with the platforms rather than seeing them as the problem - they have as much interest in dealing with ad fraud as any government.

In calling (foolishly I believe) for a "publicly funded model" to compete with Facebook, the FT and Diane Coyle confuse two issues and in doing so suggest that Facebook, Google and other 'walled garden' platforms are at best turning a blind eye to fraud and at worst complicit in that deception. Coyle further confuses the issue by talking about using "competition powers" to 'break up' Google and Facebook - quite whose competition powers she wants to use escapes me - when the issue isn't competition but public confidence and the lack of effective legal recourse against fraudsters (after all the BBC, Coyle's much-loved institution, enjoys a de facto news monopoly in the UK).

And, to cap it all, the online market is international so requires international responses - setting up some sort of taxpayer-funded mini-Google in the UK simply isn't the answer. Perhaps a thoughtful government (this may already be happening) might consider using the WTO - or some other international body - as a means of looking at how to coordinate online advertising regulation? Google and Facebook are not angels but it is misleading to suggest that they are complicit in online fraud - more than anything they stand to lose out from fraud as advertisers look for different ways to engage online.

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"Aren't all these kids supposed to be fat?" Why the Government's child obesity strategy is wrong

Every lunchtime Parkside school opens its gates and disgorges starving pupils onto the streets of our village. Long queues form outside the chip shop and the butcher - wise locals hunker down until these hungry young people are gone. A day or two ago, someone commented to me about these queues - "you know," she said, "aren't these kids all supposed to be fat?"

Indeed, to listen to the fussbuckets we put in charge of our health services and the media who, without even a glance at any actual evidence, publish those folks' nannying proposals, you'd think that near every child was a barely mobile lard-bucket unable to do anything but plonk before a screen. The truth - at least from watching those queues is that you've got to work pretty hard to find a fat child. I'm sure they're there, just as they were there when I was at school. I'm even prepared to believe that, like the population in general, there are more chubby kids than back in the 1970s (when, incidentally, we consumed more sugar than we do today). But it doesn't look like a crisis to me.

All this hasn't stop a host of fussbuckets, urged on by a couple of celebrity chefs with brands to promote and books to sell, from deciding that they know better - either by targeting so-called "junk" food or else by creating a moral panic about the food industry. At the heart of all this is the idea that parents - especially working-class parents - are unable to resist promotions:

"It is near impossible to shield children from exposure to unhealthy foods"

So says Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Health. Let's examine this little sentence and extract its meaning. Firstly is creates the idea of an 'unhealthy food' when this is an entirely evidence-free assertion - there are no unhealthy foods, only unhealthy diets. Secondly, the statement exploits our innate desire to protect children - "shield" suggests that the child will be damaged by the very act of seeing a chocolate bar, a fizzy drink or a burger. Yet all these things are both pleasurable and healthy, consumed without risk by children and adults most of whom are not obese.

I try to understand why it is that we've created this moralistic stampede about eating? Part of me suspects that it's influenced by upper middle class snobbery about food, typified by David Cameron's old advisors Camilla Cavendish and Claire Foges. But there has to be more - as consumers we look for excuses to explain away what we think are poor choices. The result is the overuse of words like 'addiction' to describe a lack of willpower rather than a pathological condition. Plus, of course, the belief that we wouldn't have bought all that chocolate, eaten all that pizza, stuffed our faces with cake if it hadn't have been for capitalism and its evil minion advertising.

When we see the countline bars lined up by the checkout, we know exactly what the retailer is doing. That shops wants to upsell us, add a little more value to the purchase we're making - essentially free margin. If we succumb, it is not because the retailer has made us buy but because we've made a choice to add that Snickers to our shopping basket. Thousands of other customers successfully ignore the line up of sweet goodies and negotiate their purchase without adding a bag of doughnuts.

This doesn't stop the fussbuckets - "...parents find offers for sugary sweets and snacks at checkouts annoying" says Jeremy Hunt. I beg to differ. If parents really were annoyed then there'd be enough consumer pressure on the retailers to change the practice - that they haven't tells me that parents are only 'annoyed' when some poll asks whether they are annoyed.

The same goes for advertising. It's an easy target. You've heard it said - "if advertising didn't work, they wouldn't spend so much money on it. It's common sense that advertising bans will work." Not only is this a complete misunderstanding of what "works" means for the advertiser but it also raises some profound questions about whether we should ever be justified in banning commercial speech for entirely healthy products. It bears repeating that advertising doesn't act to raise aggregate demand either across the economy as a whole or for individual categories of good (even "addictive" ones like tobacco, beer and sugar).

Advertising works by maintaining or increasing levels of market share - we don't buy bread because of an advert featuring Haworth Main Street to the strains of Dvorak, we might buy Hovis because of that advert. When you see the Rolex advert on the Wimbledon scoreboard, you are reminded of the brand and, when you next buy a wristwatch, might consider that brand. And when Tony the Tiger roars "they're grrreat" in a Frosties advert, he's increasing the chances of you buying Frosties rather than competing products promoted by cartoon monkeys or large yellow monsters. Banning advertising serves no purpose other than to say "look we've done something" and, the more of it we ban, the more we undermine the media that require the advertising to keep afloat.

If there's a child obesity crisis (and I'm completely unconvinced) then we should look at why this is happening rather than lollop about bashing things to make us look popular - sales promotions, advertising, calorie information, cartoon characters. Let's ask some sensible questions instead like:

Why, when average calorie intake in the UK has fallen, are we on average heavier?

What has changed in every day environments that may contribute to this increase in average weight (hint - it's not advertising, checkout promotions, two-for-one offers or cartoon characters as these were all around when we were skinnier)?

What aspects of consumer behaviour have changed over this time - more eating out, grazing not set meals, time-pressured working women?

When we look at the reduction in smoking - in health terms a far more serious issue than a modest increase in obesity - the two factors that seem to be most important are good quality health information (today everybody knows smoking is bad for your health) and price. It seems to me that making food more expensive wouldn't be popular - VAT on food anyone - which is why we have this idea of 'good' and 'bad' foods. The problem is that taxing foods high in fat, sugar and salt either runs the risk of clobbering everything but leaf vegetables and chicken or else leads to substitution (if you can't get your calories from Mr Kipling's cakes, you get them from Mr Warburton's bread).

This leaves us with public information - telling people what a healthy, balanced lifestyle means and allowing them to make choices armed with this knowledge. This worked for smoking, has largely worked for alcohol and could have the same impact on diet. The problem is that a great deal of the anti-obesity campaigns are driven by low carb cranks rather than by seeking a consensus view from dietitians. I suspect, however, that this advice should boil down to: eat regular meals, avoid snacking, have a balanced diet including meat, veg and stodge, don't eat too many sweets. Essentially what our mums told us back in the 1970s.

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Who are these joy-killers who want to ban Tony the Tiger?

Sunny Jim - the original cereal cartoon character here in stuffed toy form

I could launch into a full scale rant at the raft of proposals from the Health Select Committee aimed at combating child obesity - ad bans, mandatory reformulation, restrictions on fast food takeaways and a ghastly, ignorant polemic about the fiction that is "junk food". It is everything we should loathe about modern government, what Chris Snowdon describes as:

...taking a bunch of policies that do not work and piling them on top of another bunch of policies that do not work in the hope that some weird alchemy turns them into more than the sum of their useless parts

Among this "whole systems approach" is the proposal to stop food manufacturers using cartoon characters in their marketing:

Cartoon characters should be banned from promoting junk food to improve childhood obesity rates, a leading group of MPs has suggested.

The Health and Social Care Select Committee has called for a ban on "brand-generated characters or licensed TV and film characters" which are used to promote foods high in fat, sugar or salt on broadcast and non-broadcast media.

It would mark the death of Tony the Tiger and the Honey Monster as represents the worst sort of crass interventionism - annoying fussbucketry that won't make a jot of difference to obesity. I know this because cartoon characters have been used to promote breakfast cereals since Sunny Jim first sprang into life in 1902.

The characters we're familiar with - Coco the Monkey, the Honey Monster, Snap, Crackle and Pop, and the legend that is Tony the Tiger - have all been around for decades or more. Tony first told us Frosties were Grrrrrreat back in 1954, the Rice Krispies kids (originally goblins but, hey, what's the difference) date from 1930 and the Honey Monster began insisting Henry McGee "tell 'em about the honey, mummy" in 1976. Even Coco - a latecomer (succeeding Tusk the Elephant) - arrived on our cereal packets in 1991. None of these wonderful, child-friendly characters has made children fat, all they've done is give children a smile and helped mums' make a brand choice.


Now a bunch of joyless nannying fussbuckets led by the self-appoint Nanny-in-Chief, Sarah Wollaston want to put an end to all this fun because they like banning stuff and want children to have dull lives featuring uplifting, nanny-approved diets that don't involve anything that looks like it might appeal to those children. Yes folks, Sarah and the Fussbuckets want eating to be a boring, unpleasant, state-approved thing rather than any kind of pleasure. And all to deal with an almost entirely fictional obesity crisis.


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Vested interests will always use regulation to protect that interest

From Dick Puddlecote a shocking example of a private business using regulatory pressure to protect its private interests:

The website for Vype e-cigarettes www.govype.com, was seen on 13 March 2017. The home page of the website featured a carousel with four slides. Text on the first slide stated "VYPE PURPLE ePEN STARTER KIT +1 PACK OF PREMIUM CARTRIDGES. FOR £19.98*". Smaller text below stated "*ENDS TUESDAY 28th MARCH 2017. P&P CHARGES WHERE APPLICABLE". The text was next to images of the starter kit, and a link which stated "SHOP NOW>". Text on the fourth slide stated "BUY 5 GET 1 FREE. INCLUDES VYPE PEBBLE CARTRIDGES, ePEN CARTRIDGES & eLIQUID BOTTLES*. SHOP NOW>". On the web page for the Vype Pebble Starter Kit, text stated "The small and mighty Pebble".

This complaint - partly upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority - wasn't from a concerned member of the public or even some shocked anti-smoking campaign group but from Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of nicorette and other no-tobacco nicotine delivery systems. They're straightforwardly nobbling their competitor with this complaint.

So when we're talking about regulations supposedly protecting health or safety, we should always ask for the independent evidence and should further ask who benefits - which private business - benefits. Johnson & Johnson along with other pharmaceuticals with very profitable nicotine products campaigned very hard to firstly get e-cigs banned, then to get them regulated as medicines and then to hobble their marketing and promotion. Not for reasons of public safety or health but purely and simply to protect their business from competition.

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Chair legs and advertising - the return of prurience

We used to laugh at Victorian prurience. You know the stuff about covering up more shapely chair legs in case men got excited at the sight of them. This is, of course, mostly nonsense and perhaps derives from the polite view back then that the word 'leg' was a little bit rude - one should say 'limb'.

Nevertheless, mid-Victorian society was pretty prurient (at least for public consumption in polite society - there weren't a shortage of peep shows and brothels) with women expected to keep their ankles from display, their eyes averted and their arms in sleeves. And when we read of this today our response is mostly bemusement at such antiquated ideas accompanied by reassuring ourselves that we are ever so much more enlightened in these matters than those prudish, hypocritical Victorians.

Seems to me that, to some extent, these moral standards are returning under the guise of a war against sexism:

The German far left-wing party Die Linke has proposed to remove all ‘erotic’ advertisement in the Berlin borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. On advertisement space, property of the borough, no “sexist or woman-unfriendly advertisements” should be displayed. That at least is the objective of a request the party submitted to the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf District Ordinance Committee (BVV).

Now on the face of it this all seems pretty fair. Some will recall the days when cars were sold mostly by draping semi-naked women across their bonnets accompanied by phnarr-phnarr double entendres (like the Victorians covering up chair legs this is also largely untrue) and recognise that sexism is an issue with advertising. These days it's still true that (ceteris paribus) sex sells but also true that sexism is toxic as an advertising approach thereby making using sex a risky strategy.

The thing is that our East German ex-communists go on to say that their proposed stricture applies equally to “commercials for underwear, swimming gear, and sportswear.” Their proposals are essentially that any image of a woman not conforming to the ordinance will be banned - regardless of context or purpose. All of which raises the question as to whether selling a woman's swimming costume using an image of a woman wearing said costume is sexist. It seems to me that such an advertisement could be sexist if, for example, it showed the woman in the costume being leered at by fully clothed men but wouldn't be sexist if it merely showed the woman in the costume.

There does seem to be, on the back of concerns about sexism and gender equality, something of a return to prurience, to a world where images of women looking sexy are limited or controlled on the grounds that men might get the wrong idea (rather than because the images are exploitative in that they seek to draw a false association to the product). We should be a little bit uncomfortable with a world where images of women are covered up so as to protect women from men - it is exactly the thing many women felt liberated from in the 1960s and 1970s and takes us back to those hypocritical Victorian days we giggled at in school.

There is a discussion to have about limits. It should be OK to show a woman using a car in an advertisement for that car (only showing men driving would be pretty sexist after all). And advertisers are going to use an attractive woman as the model. But this is about appeal rather than sex even if, as a little ping of sexuality, a couple are shown driving to the beach in said car. At the other extreme is blatant "sex sells", not just nude models in a engineering supply company's calendar but a partly dressed model selling a male product like shaving cream or a cheeky dairy maid winking while holding out an ice cream.

The difficulty here is that there is that advertising bans (something I firmly believe to be infringements of free speech) are a blunt instrument in the battle against the objectification of women. And only provide support for those who would agree with that Victorian prurience we got rid of a few decades ago - people who really aren't on the side of women's liberation.

It would be a far better approach if we stayed with campaigns like that directed at Protein World's 'Beach Body Ready' ads. This used existing advertising self-regulation and consumer pressure as the means to get the advertiser to change its approach (I appreciate some feel the campaign was a little over-the-top but that debate isn't my point here). Where people argued for public authorities to institute bans - such as that Sadiq Khan has imposed on the London Underground - they move from social pressure to arguing for state controls on an aspect of speech.

Changes in the use of female objectification in advertising over the past few decades have largely come through social pressure rather than government dictat - if anything, government bans toddle along after the social change rather than promote that change. The campaign from Die Linke in Berlin blurs the boundaries between concerns about sexism and a left-wing dislike of advertising or commercial speech. It is also, in their terms, easy and crowd-pleasing politics - there's always a ready support for banning stuff from people who don't approve of that sort of thing.

Today we've an odd alliance between intersectional feminists, religious enthusiasts and old-fashioned puritans, all committed to removing sexually appealing female images from the public sphere. And all these groups, at least in what they say, agree on the reason - men can't be trusted. As a society we need to negotiate where the boundaries lie - it's a short step from not allowing public images of attractive women to blaming short skirts for rape, and then back to a world where, as the song said, "a glimpse of stocking was looked on a something shocking". Enforced prurience does little to protect women (at least if Victorian society was anything to go by) and removing images of women from the public sphere by way of advertising bans marks the return of such a world. We should, as they say, be careful what we wish for.

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Let's ban stuff (or how not to get people's vote)

Today appears to be public health day in the election diary which means that we've proposals from the Labour Party to ban stuff:

"We are going to apply the rules currently applied to children’s TV and apply that to TV more generally, so when you’re sat down with your children, as I do, watching X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent, you’re not going to be seeing adverts for junk food,”

Apparently there is "research that children see the adverts for McDonald’s and hassle their parents to go there". And, of course, parents are incapable of resisting. Like zombies they rise from the sofa at nine in the evening (after Britain's Got Talent with all the wicked advertising has finished) and, as if in some drug-induced trance, take the pestering children to McDonald's, KFC or whatever else was advertised during the latest piece of cash generation for the Cowell empire.

We are, unlike the sort of wise person who becomes a Labour front bench spokesperson on public health, completely captured by advertising, snared by the subtle webs of influence that cunning marketers weave around their products. There is no escape. We are doomed to a life entirely driven by the content of prime time advertising. Like puppets we bounce along to the tunes of neoliberal hegemony as presented by crafty copywriters who force - yes, force - us to consume, consume and consume again.

Research has shown this. That sociologist friend of the Labour Party front bench spokesperson says so and who are we to argue with the author of masterworks whose titles drip with stuff about 'neoliberalism'. Parents everywhere will flock to the party's banner knowing that they will be rescued from their children throwing a tantrum because they've said 'no' to a sugar, fat and salt stuffed snack.

This is easy politics - "for the children" screeches the Labour frontbench spokesperson and the media joyfully laps it up, wraps it in a comfort blanket of "we should do something", and then wheels out all its friends from the public health industry to support the proposals. Action on Sugar, Campaign Against Salt, Fuss About Fat - legions of publicly funded cheery souls pop up on TV and radio sternly explaining how if we banned advertising everyone will suddenly be thin as rakes and healthy as the butchers dog (except we're not allowed red meat any more because that will give us cancer).

Let's get some things clear here.

Advertising does not raise aggregate demand (however loudly kids shout)

People have agency (we don't have to buy stuff just because it's on telly)

Obesity isn't caused by eating sugar (or fat)

Salt is not bad for you (it's an essential nutrient - without it you die)

Obesity - or smoking or drinking - isn't the reason for the NHS funding crisis (quite the opposite)

Banning adverts means less money for TV companies to make programmes you like

Neoliberalism is a word made up by idiot sociologists

Voters are fed up with being bossed around (hadn't you noticed yet?)

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An Evil Marketer comments on data analytics in political campaigning

Back in the 1970s a man called Richard Webber was working at the UK government's centre for Environmental Studies. This, more or less, was what he was doing:

I created Acorn, the first neighbourhood classification system, while working at the government's Centre for Environmental Studies in the 1970s.

People ask how it came to be a commercial application. I had organised a seminar for local authorities to show how neighbourhood data could identify areas of deprivation. Quite by chance, it attracted Ken Baker, a sampling specialist from BMRB. He was a lateral thinker and he came up with the idea that the Acorn tool would be useful for market research sampling.

I meanwhile had realised that Acorn could help predict the households most likely to respond to direct mail and door drops.

Without wanting to come over all geeky, Webber had used census data combined with the electoral register to create a classification of small neighbourhoods (based on census enumeration districts, the base geography for the national census). The principle of Webber's classification is essentially that 'birds of a feather flock together' - people in Manchester who have the same census characteristics as people in Bristol will tend to have other similar behavioural characteristics including, of course, purchasing preferences.

I know you're asking what all this has to do with Brexit (or indeed voting in general). The thing is that, as well as Webber's classification of residential neighbourhoods capturing similarities in terms of how people might respond to different marketing offers, the system also applies to the matter of how we vote. If the 'birds of a feather' principle is correct then similar areas will have similar voting behaviour.

By the end of the 1980s, we were using geodemographics (as Webber's system became known) to combine with proprietary data on customers to refine the targeting of direct marketing campaign, to improve the selection of retail sites and to manage advertising better. Without wanting to overcomplicate, customer address data was given an ACORN code and then profiled using initially a simple index (where 100 = National Average). The indices were reported at the level of postal sector (i.e. BD11 2 or ME2 7) as these were large enough to give the index validity but small enough to facilitate fine grain targeting.

For a targeted doordrop we might then take the top 300 postal sectors and, through the Royal Mail, purchase a delivery of unaddressed mail. Typically, results showed an uplift in response of 2x or 3x depending on the client. Results were less good for targeted direct mail using the electoral register - mostly because a key behavioural characteristic, responsiveness, was not captured in census data. We played other games using expert systems and the early days of data-mining too - it was just a lot slower back then!


The generation of geodemographic systems that followed the original census-based ACORN system (e.g. SuperProfiles, MOSAIC) began to add in other large data sources such as credit data and 'psychographic' survey data - some may recall the retailed questionnaires incentivised with free prize draws that collected this information. Targeting extended beyond shared residential characteristics to details about financial services, indebtedness and preferences around holidays, cars, fmcg products and lifestyle choices (smoking, drinking, gambling, etc.).

Unsurprisingly, political parties began to make use of these systems to improve the targeting of election campaigning especially in areas where they lacked good quality 'voting intention' (VI) data. The same essential methodology was used as that I was using for mail order and financial services companies - a database of VI details was profiles against MOSAIC to provide improved campaign targeting in places with no canvass. This might be used on a national basis to decide which local council by-elections to target or at the constituency level to improve the effectiveness of limited resources thereby allowing the broadening of target seat campaigns.

Which I guess brings us to this conclusion from an article about a marketing analytics business who may or may not have been active during the recent EU Referendum:

Is it the case that our elections will increasingly be decided by the whims of billionaires, operating in the shadows, behind the scenes, using their fortunes to decide our fate?

To appreciate why this is unlikely, we need to go back to how marketing analytics work, which is at the aggregate level. I appreciate, as a marketing professional, how we all want to believe advertising has become like the opening scenes in Minority Report but the reality is that aggregate data really doesn't provide the means to manipulate what we think. Rather, geodemographics, psychographics and marketing analytics enable us marketers to better target those people who are already predisposed to buy our product (or vote for our cause).

The big change from the stuff we were doing with mag tapes and mainframe computers in 1989 is the availability of information from social media (most usually Facebook). Again this is aggregate data - Facebook doesn't sell your details to marketing analytics businesses - but the sophistication of the data makes the targeting of messages all the more precise as does the ability to analyse public profiles without Facebook's permission. But even with this level of analysis, we still haven't 'manipulated' your opinion merely targeted our message more precisely to people more likely to respond positively to that message.

We are right to express concerns about whether the use of analytics has crossed over into misuse of personal data and it appears the UK's Information Commissioner is doing just that. But the likely truth (given it is not in Facebook's interest to share personal data and this is illegal in the EU) is that analytics companies are simply doing just what we were doing as direct marketers 30 years ago - using information to target our messages a little better. Back then it was all seen as a bit sinister ('where did you get my name from...') and nothing has changed except that there's more information, faster computers and social media. You can always find a computing academic (note, not a marketer) do do the full on evil empire stuff:

A rapid convergence in the data mining, algorithmic and granular analytics capabilities of companies like Cambridge Analytica and Facebook is creating powerful, unregulated and opaque ‘intelligence platforms’. In turn, these can have enormous influence to affect what we learn, how we feel, and how we vote. The algorithms they may produce are frequently hidden from scrutiny and we see only the results of any insights they might choose to publish.”

The truth is a deal more prosaic. Marketers ask customers about their lives, social media use and so forth then profile this against aggregate data from various sources to produce targeting information - where geographically or behaviourally we can go looking for folk like those customers we've surveyed. I so want us marketers and ad men to be master manipulators, able to switch your mind at the push of an analytical button or the twitch of an algorhithm. But we're not like that at all, we're not even that good at using big data.

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Why 'Stronger In' lost - the ad man's tale

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In a close political contest and especially one conducted across the whole nation, campaign tactics and execution matter. Which makes this report on the 'Stronger In' advertising and messaging in Campaign very important:

But, without doubt, one of the key problems was that the Remain camp was determined to take a negative stance. MacLennan says his agency was clear on the need for a positive message. "We said don’t try to cower people into submission – encourage them to see the positives," he insists. "We came up with a strategy based around ‘Don’t leave it, lead it’ but they didn’t run with it."

James Murphy, chief executive of Adam & Eve/DDB, says his agency had also wanted to focus on positive messaging, presenting Remain as offering the best of both worlds (inside the EU but with special status): "But that didn’t fit with the prevailing feeling in the camp that the Scottish referendum and the general election had been won by emphasising risk."

So counter to the agencies’ recommendations, Project Fear became the linchpin of what was a confused and disparate strategy. While the Leave campaigners were able to talk up all the good things about quitting the EU, Stronger In’s agenda was almost unrelentingly negative and undynamic.

Now there's a disconnect here between our understanding of what works in political advertising and how we frame more regular brand communications. In simple terms we think negative political messaging - Project Fear - works whereas we believe negatively founded messaging causes long-term brand damage in regular consumer advertising. From an outsider's perspective the 'Stronger In' campaign had a simple (and fundamentally strong) strategy - secure endorsement for 'remain' from respected experts, commenters and celebrities and stress the value we get from EU membership. What seems to have happened is that this strategy was run from 10 Downing Street while the 'Stronger In' campaign team floundered about essentially directionless:

"We were simply called upon to provide creative window-dressing, not political strategy. And because Stronger In had no political strategy, we had nothing to say. Of course we struggled to get our message across, because the real art is working out the message in the first place and we weren’t allowed to help with that."

The Campaign report talks of divisions, suspicions and an inability to collaborate - coupled with the lack of focus that led to 24 people round the table deciding on the execution of strategy. 'Stronger In' had no message besides 'stronger in' itself - there was no effort to try and provide a context or rationale to that positioning, to explain in language people would understand just how we might be 'stronger in'. Instead 'stronger in' was defined in terms of us being 'weaker out' - in other words negatively. And people - or rather the people who mattered, the undecided voters - didn't believe that message or trust those proffering ever more shrill reasons why leaving the EU was bad.

In contrast (and for all its failings of strategy) Vote Leave - perhaps more by luck than judgement - hit upon a message that was both positive and also flexible enough to accommodate the range of views and expectations of people considering a leave vote. "Take Control" they said - positive, telling people they have power and agency, and hard for 'Stronger In' to refute or challenge. Alongside this, the media (and 'Stronger In' who should have known better) embraced the term 'Brexit' meaning that leaving became a thing, had a brand people could use.

There were other mistakes - once Vote Leave had adopted a red and white livery it was pretty dumb of Labour In to produce material in red and white. In the fleeting moment between picking the leaflet from the mat and putting it into the bin or the glimpse of a poster as we drive past, you need to capture attention - it seems that Labour couldn't bring themselves to use Stronger In's blue and white with the result that, at best, a confused message was presented to the voters it targeted.

As the disappointed 'remain' voters emerge blinking into England's watery sunshine, they're beginning - too late, way too late - to construct a positive message about the EU. One about personal links, shared history, economic co-operation and our voice in the world. It might have been a different result if that had been the message prior to 23 June. Instead we got a parade of the great and good spreading doom and gloom and a persistent sub-text that anyone voting leave - or thinking of voting leave - was a narrow-minded, xenophobic, racist bigot. It's really no surprise given this barrage that people took advantage of the polling booth's calm to stick two fingers up at those elites who painted such a negative picture of English voters.

I am, of course, pleased. But it could have been a very different result if 'Stronger In' had actually tried to explain why we would actually be 'stronger in'. And as a former Ad agency Account Planning Director and a pretty experienced political campaigner, it's clear to me that 'Stronger In' had every advantage in this campaign but failed entirely in using that advantage. Whatever the politics of this, 'Stronger In' - perhaps from complacency, maybe from lack of direction, or even arrogance - threw the referendum win away.

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So ads for vaping don't 'normalise' smoking - no surprise (except to nannying fussbuckets)

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We know that the public health fraternity don't know the first thing about advertising, let alone understand how it works. Despite having assortments of higher degrees, the typical public health 'expert' still holds to the 'if advertising doesn't work, why do business advertise' line that's popular amongst thirteen-year-olds and sociology professors (except the latter will add the word 'neoliberalism' into their ignorant statement). Of course the rest of us know that advertising works by promoting the brand rather than the category. We also know that advertising of brands in one category absolutely doesn't promote the use of a different, competing category.

The latest study into ecig and vaping advertising confirms all this and is reported here (although the writer seems also not to understand that ads promote brands not categories):

The major study finding was that neither the flavored nor non-flavored e-cigarette advertisements affected the appeal of smoking to youth. This includes advertisements for e-cigarettes with candy flavors like bubble gum or chocolate. Instead, the study found that flavored e-cigarette advertisements affect youths' interest in trying and buying electronic cigarettes.

Importantly, the study also found no effect of exposure to e-cigarette advertisements on smoking susceptibility or the perceived harm of cigarettes.

The study concluded that: "Exposure to adverts for e-cigarettes does not seem to increase the appeal of tobacco smoking in children."

And, as the author then observes:

Advertising for a product that is being marketed as a more appealing alternative to a different product is going to increase the appeal of that product, not the inferior product. It also makes sense that e-cigarette advertising does not undermine youth's appreciation of the severe hazards of smoking. If anything, one might expect that e-cigarette marketing helps to reinforce the public's understanding of the hazards of smoking, since e-cigarettes are being presented as a favorable alternative to cigarettes.

Even the thirteen-year-olds will get this, I suspect. Will the nannying fussbuckets?

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Shooting the sugar plum fairy. Why advertising isn't to blame.

The headlines from the report into childhood obesity published today will be all about taxing fizzy drinks. A pretty daft idea that targets just one source of sugar on the basis that in one place, Mexico, a 'soda tax' managed to reduce consumption by about 6%. There's no evidence that this tax reduced obesity, which was the main reason for introducing the tax in the first place.

Others will explain better than I can why all this is pretty daft. Not least because childhood obesity is falling in the UK - as the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) reported recently. More to the point, the problem with all this is that there's precious little evidence supporting a link between being overweight or mildly 'obese' and mortality:

There is now extensive and convincing evidence that the greatest life expectancy is experienced by those who are classified as “Overweight”. In addition, there is no reliable evidence that there is any reduced expectancy even in those who are mildly obese (5). It is true that those who are seriously obese do have an increased mortality but the picture changes when the effect of physical fitness is incorporated.

I suspect there's little or no chance of the current government introducing a tax on fizzy drinks - the prime minister has ruled it out more than once and the dissenters to the proposal from the health select committee report were both Conservatives - here's Andrew Percy:

Andrew Percy, the Tory MP for Brigg and Goole who sits on the health committee told the paper Oliver’s suggestion is “patronising nonsense”.

“This is a classic nanny state reaction and it won’t work.

“Slapping 10p or 20p on a can of sugary drink won’t make people change their behaviour.”

However the committee's report makes a whole load of other proposals that target advertising and marketing activity - that shoot the messenger.

Promotional and marketing techniques for specific products or brands have the aim of achieving one main goal—increases in sales. This is achieved through old (eg TV advertising, programme sponsorship, cinema, radio and billboards) and new methods (eg social media, advergames and internet pop-ups), which are designed to influence our food choices by, for example, overriding our established eating habits, and taking advantage of others such as our desire to reduce costs. The intent can be to encourage us to switch between brands or products; or there may be an additional consequence of getting us to buy and consume more.

Now this argument - from Public Health England and unsupported by evidence - flies in the face of everything that we know about advertising, choice and the way communications shape our preferences and decisions. Firstly, it just isn't true that advertising's purpose is to increase sales (I'm taking this to mean increasing the size of the market - to sell more sweets or fizzy drinks rather than more of the advertisers sweets or fizzy drinks). Here's the most well know study into the effects of advertising:

This paper is concerned with testing for causation, using the Granger definition, in a bivariate time-series context. It is argued that a sound and natural approach to such tests must rely primarily on the out-of-sample forecasting performance of models relating the original (non-prewhitened) series of interest. A specific technique of this sort is presented and employed to investigate the relation between aggregate advertising and aggregate consumption spending. The null hypothesis that advertising does not cause consumption cannot be rejected, but some evidence suggesting that consumption may cause advertising is presented.

In simple terms, advertising doesn't create new demand and there's some suggestion that the reverse is true. Indeed advertising effects on demand are persistently weak:

Advertising effects appear to be so weak as to give little, if any, support for the Galbraithian view that advertisers exert powerful, manipulative effects upon the allocation of consumers' expenditure between products.

As a marketing professional this is pretty depressing - we've all watched Mad Men and read Vince Packard's 'Hidden Persuaders' and kidded ourselves that advertising somehow created the consumerist world we live in. The prosaic truth is that, as we knew in our hearts (and those famed ad men of the '50s and '60s knew), advertising is a mirror held up to society and merely reflects the changes in our fads, fancies, preferences and choices. Don't get me wrong, advertising works but not in the way people who aren't marketers think it works.

And if you think about this for a second, it becomes clear. The advertiser has absolutely no interest in promoting his competitors' products, which is what he would be doing if what PHE says were true. And the effects - or objectives - are no different if it's cars, chicken or chocolate we're advertising. Or indeed if the audience is children or grown-ups (although there's some evidence showing children are more believing of ads this still only makes them choose one brand of breakfast cereal instead of another).

The most depressing part of all this - apart from the wholly unjustified attack on sugar as a macronutrient - is that the select committee conducted a review of and recommends regulations affecting advertising and marketing without taking evidence from any marketers. Yet again - as we saw with tobacco, with alcohol and with financial services - the messenger is machine-gunned by MPs who start off with no knowledge of marketing and finish with no knowledge of marketing.

In nearly every circumstance, brand advertising doesn't create new demand. Yet we see again the lie that banning or restricting its use will somehow reduce demand. This simply won't happen. The committee is just shooting the sugar plum fairy.

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Nope, 'food porn' isn't making us fat.

Some 'food porn' what I made

Salivate, dear reader. Salivate. Look at the oil, the cheese. Imagine the flavours as they explode in you mouth, savour the thought of that yolk as it bursts open running down onto the plate. You're hungry now aren't you?

The argument is that, when we see an attractive image of food, blood rushes to the parts of our brain associated with taste. We experience the desire to eat, even if we’re not hungry. According to one of the authors of the review, Professor Charles Spence of Oxford University, this has been measured in brain scans.

“The taste cortex lights up,” he says. “There’s an increase in blood-flow and, depending on the state of the person, or how realistic the image is, it might be triggering restraint mechanisms. You’re seeing it and thinking: ‘I shouldn’t be eating that.’

Apparently the proliferation of food images - each one lighting up the 'taste cortex' - is one of the things making us fat. Or so says Dr Spence:

“What we’re trying to say in this paper is that there are consequences from food porn. It’s a term that hints at the way that it depletes our resources of self-restraint. When we sit down for a meal at home after watching a cookery programme maybe we eat more than we would otherwise have done.”

And so on in this vein culminating in an orgasm of nannying fussbucketry:

Should we be protected, then, from over-exposure to “food porn”? “Should OFM, Delicious and all those food magazines be moved to the top shelf? I don’t think it’ll go that far,” he says, “but I do think government agencies should think seriously about our exposure to visual food cues."

The problem here is that while it seems entirely reasonable for our brains to light up at 'food porn', Dr Spence and his colleagues really don't show any direct link between "eating with our eyes" and obesity. Here from the conclusions to the original article in Brain and Cognition:

Crucially, the question that has yet to receive a satisfactory answer is just what the impact of all those appealing food images is having on the consumption behaviour of those in the Western world who are both flooded with opportunities to eat, and at the same time bombarded with gastroporn.

So all that research hasn't answered the question? Probably because there isn't much of a link. It seems reasonable to use tests of links between food advertising and obesity as a proxy for what Dr Spence and his colleagues are saying:

Based on a reading of the literature, it appears clear that there is no evidence for a direct causal relationship between food advertising and obesity levels.

or:

Despite media claims to the contrary, there is no good evidence that advertising has a substantial influence on children's food consumption and, consequently, no reason to believe that a complete ban on advertising would have any useful impact on childhood obesity rates. Again, Hastings et al. appear to concur with this judgment: 'there is no prima facie reason to assume that promotion will undermine children's dietary health; it can influence it, but this influence could just as easily be positive as negative.'

It's true that there's also a great deal of research that sort of says "children watch more TV food advertising, children are fatter, therefore food advertising is causing obesity". Some of this research has very precise numbers as to the amount of obesity that banning food advertising would prevent even though each time it fails to demonstrate any actual link between the pictures of food and the fat children.

This whole idea - sometimes (and unattractively) called the 'obesogenic environment' - is very convenient if you are an adherent of the church of public health or an enthusiastic nannying fussbucket. This is because is suggests that fatties aren't to blame for their fatness but are victims of wicked advertisers, manufacturers and retailers with their cunning marketing tricks. So instead of sending a message to the obese that perhaps it might be a good idea for them to eat less and move more (and maybe even helping them do this), we send them a message that the reason they're fat is the food industry and its agents in advertising or retailing. Unsurprisingly that message works all too well with calls for bans matched only by an ever more intense panic about an epidemic of obesity.

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Ad-blockers may be convenient but they're not ethical - or unethical for that matter

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It had to happen didn't it. I mean the extension of the long war against commercial communication - advertising to you and I - into some sort of moral/ethical dimension. With the assumption that advertising is, by dint of its very existence and purpose, 'unethical'.

A new ad-blocking tool out today ensures that everyone can consume their favorite content while remaining on solid moral footing. The Ethical Ad Blocker Chrome extension, developed by internet artist Darius Kazemi, will block any webpage that contains ads, replacing it with a crude text page telling users to check out a list of auto-generating websites and non-profit organizations that give stuff away for free.

And the 'crude text page' says this:

Now it looks like Darius Kazemi is making a point that stuff really ain't for free but the reader might not get this. I'm sure most won't understand how looking at sites paid for through advertising without looking at the ads might be unethical.  Now I've no objection to ad blockers - lots of people use them, mostly because they find advertising annoying and intrusive rather than because they want to kid themselves they're living in some cool, hipster, 'no logo' ethical wonderland.

We know there is a free rider problem with ad blockers (by getting the content without advertising you are, in effect, avoiding the fee for using that content) but this is a problem for the advertising business rather than something essentially unethical. And it is the case that some websites - especially news websites - are simply overloaded with advertising making the reader experience unpleasant.

Advertising - and we're celebrating (if that's the right word) 60 years of UK TV ads - is a central part of our culture. I consider that protecting rights to advertise is no different in its essence to protecting individual rights to speak. Of course, just as with speech, I don't have to listen to the adverts and I'm entitled to tune them out (consider how you read a newspaper or magazine to appreciate this 'tuning out'). And we retain the power to punish liars, cheats and con-men.

There is a great deal of ignorance about advertising - from the misplaced idea that advertising increases aggregate demand through to the persistent belief that there is a thing called 'subliminal advertising' that makes us buy stuff we don't want to buy. Plus of course that Nancy Klein rubbish about 'no logo' designed to make wealthy westerners feel righteous while suggesting that none of the world's problems are their fault - rather we get to blame 'corporations' (and particularly the ones we don't work for who own big shiny brands).

It's perfectly possible for an advert to be unethical - it might misinform, mislead or exploit - but this doesn't make advertising unethical. The 'Dark Patterns' site discusses practices that are, at best, sharp and, worst, deeply exploitative (as an aside very few of these practices that have only developed since the web became widespread - but then web marketing is mostly just direct marketing on steriods) reminding us that the process of selling is fraught. And that we should pay attention when we're spending our money.

Advertising is essential. Not just because it pays for news, entertainment and so forth (there are, after all, other models here) but because without it we have no information about what we're buying. We are faced with product choice - unless, of course, your anti-ad stance leads us to Soviet-style empty shelves - but no information allowing us to make that choice. Without advertising our modern world simply doesn't work.

The problem (not the free rider thing this time) advertisers face is how to get information to you when you are a reluctant recipient of that information. Partly because, as you keep saying, too much of the advertising isn't relevant. So advertisers take two approaches - either they seek out new media to get their message, a general message, across or else they try to target that message to the consumers they know are interested in that information. Good practice in the first case leads to the ubiquity of styles, symbols and images linked to a given product - it's brand. And those brands are very much part of the wallpaper of western society: instantly recognisable, friendly and comfortable.

In the second case, good practice focuses on how well we target, screen and interact with the consumer. The idea is that we don't want to talk to people who don't want to buy our product so we try to screen them out. The problem is that there are a load of techniques we know raise response (if you want to learn about these read 'The Solid Gold Mailbox') and some are exploitative, even unethical. And while there are advertising rules plus a self-regulatory body, it still rests with us as consumers to pay attention when we respond to something.

The free rider problem on-the web (which this ethical ad blocker highlights) is a problem for the businesses that operate on the web - if there's no revenue who pays for those achingly cool loft offices and provides the pay allowing the workers in those offices to buy extravagantly priced beard grooming products or designer water. Long-term it's a problem for user - for you and me - because, as we all know, nothing much comes for free. If we beat down advertising the result ('be careful what you wish for') is likely to be less choice, more expensive products and an infinitely duller world.

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