James Fallows wonders if the decline of newspapers is one effect of a much larger trend: the decline of advertising. He quotes a reader:
The real problem is, advertising is dying. It’s just pulling down newspapers along the way. Next up: TV, radio, and Google.
Advertising isn’t cost-effective, the reader says. This is becoming increasingly clear. Companies can no longer justify the expense.
I would bet a lot of money this is wrong. Advertising isn’t dying; it is moving to a more differentiated personalized form, as has happened in dozens of industries. Jane Jacobs wrote about this in The Economy of Cities: the historical flow is from artisanal production to mass production to differentiated production. An example is software. Long ago, programs were written by individuals: artisanal production. Then came software produced by large companies, such as Microsoft: mass production. Now we are entering the age of highly individualized software. The usual term is open source but open source software is enormously customizable. For example, some Tsinghua students made a version of Firefox specifically for Tsinghua students. Internet Explorer will never be as easily customized as Firefox. Which means, according to history, IE is doomed.
Fallows’s reader is wrong for another reason: The central role of advertising in human evolution. Language was the first advertising. Single words served to say (a) you had something to trade and (b) you wanted something. This is how and why language began — it facilitated trade. Language was so successful as advertising that lots of other uses evolved on top of that use, just as newspapers and magazines do a lot besides carry advertisements. Human evolution, in my view, is the story of how we became occupational specialists; by increasing trade, advertising was central to that. In the form of language, it’s been a huge force pushing evolution for the last 100,000-odd years. Given that longevity, the probability it will disappear in the next 100 years is very low.
The language evolution theory makes a prediction. Words can easily be used (a) to announce you have something (“toothpaste!”) and (b) to ask for something (“toothpaste?”). The first is push advertising; the second is pull advertising. We don’t hear much about pull advertising. But the current imbalance — huge amounts spent on one, almost nothing on the other — doesn’t make sense. Historically, both work. We use language both ways, including a lot of pull advertising. Surely most people say what they want (“I’m hungry”) more often than they say what they have to trade for it. (In China, some peddlers, such as the father of a friend of mine, do spend their day saying what they are selling.)
Based on history, I predict the imbalance will be corrected; pull advertising will become much more important. Not a brilliant prediction because it is already happening. Searching online for something you want, e.g. via Google, is a form of pull advertising. Guru.com, where you post a job you want done and wait for bids, is another example. An example that doesn’t yet exist is a free concierge-by-phone service. You call them, they help you buy something.
Seth,
This reminds me very much of Walter Benjamin. If I recall, (the class was several years ago) about 70 years ago, he predicted the advent of the internet and blogging by analyzing the industrial development of books in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In their early days, books were works of art created by scribes, extremely expensive and nearly impossible for the common individual to obtain. With the advent of the printing press came massive publishing houses, mass producing copies of books for those who were interested. Benjamin theorized that the natural evolution of this was to individualize production, basically describing the internet.
scribe => publishing house => internet
In industrial terms, it means:
artisan production (one “authentic work,” no duplicate copies) => centralized production (one “authentic” work, many duplicates mass produced) => decentralized production (there are no authentic or duplicate copies)
For advertising, it means:
“book.” => “book!” => “book?” “book!”
And in terms of flow of information, it translates to:
simple => top down => bottom up + top down
Newspapers aren’t the only organizations in decline. The recording industry and video rental industry are also struggling, thanks to new methods of communicating goods like Netflix and iTunes. The recording industry is doubly hit, as even individual artists don’t really need them anymore. If you want to get your name out there as a musician, just make your own page on Myspace and watch the numbers fly. A few friends of mine were able to tour Europe that way.
A side effect of this, I think, is also an influx of variety and wider spread of wealth. For example, instead of having 5 or 6 sponsored superstars/multimillionaires touring the world, now you have several thousand regular stars making a decent living and doing what you want. At least this appears to have been true for my friends.
Advertising will never die, but industries that cannot or fail to adept to this new environment will fail. By refusing to adapt to the internet, the RIAA essentially dug its own grave.
Does this sound accurate?
Craigslist seems like a great example of the pull advertising. Google and others on the internet are trying to interpret our search requests as indirect pull advertising (looking at baby names? You might be interested in this ad for cribs).
benetta, when I was a grad student I hired someone to make the graphs in my scientific publications. Now I make my own publication-quality graphs using R. Another example of a job disappearing is the disappearance of milkmen. I think that’s basically what’s happening to the recording industry. They are no longer needed to connect A (data, milk) and B (publication, milk drinker).
Then there is the scalper. S/he walks around the venue asking for tickets (pull) but actually wants to sell (push).
Advertising is surely moving from one medium to another. Calling it dying cannot suit and its transformation for sure.
Google and others on the internet are trying to interpret our search requests as indirect pull advertising (looking at baby names? You might be interested in this ad for cribs).