You Are A Victim Of The Ultimate Advertising Problem
The ultimate advertising problem is an overabundance of useless inventory online. In order to understand this you have to demystify the internet, servers, websites, the phrase “social media,” and you have to be willing to reevaluate your preconceived notions about how things are done today. Rather than believing in something that never existed before, I’m asking you to remind yourselves of something that already was.
It is not a matter of nostalgia, nor competitive squabbling that led me to this ultimate advertising problem. The fact is that traditional media cannot become corrupted in quite this same scale, and by the end of this article you will understand why.
What’s In A Name?
You may call it “COVID-19,” and think of it as a biological pathogen. A virus. Or you may confuse it for a disease caused by some other viruses. For the purpose of advertising, it is not important what COVID-19 is at all. You can believe it is the most lethal force Earth has ever seen. Or you can think of it as nothing.
Google does not think about the human toll of a virus. Nor can Google predict how lethal a virus might become. The indexing machine is not designed to provide analysis on what is or isn’t misinformation either. It is designed to match user search criteria with predictive algorithms to display what that user is looking for. Did you know that Search volume on Google is dropping dramatically right now?
Does that mean people are literally not searching for as much anymore, as if they know everything?
No.
Novelty Lost Its Novelty
The ultimate advertising problem has clogged the internet with more billions of instances of a single word than ever before in history. You think there is a lot of hate speech on the internet? Compared to the word COVID-19, nothing else exists – at least so far as indexed websites on the open internet are concerned. Don’t believe me? Look for yourselves.
Google, “COVID-19” and see how many indexed results appear. Then Google literally anything else including: God, global warming, white supremacy, Trump, Biden, Putin, Hunter’s laptop, nuclear war, slavery, rape, incest, the life of the mother…you get the picture. Bigger than any political, economic, humanitarian, religious, or other matter in history, is 1 word: COVID-19. But COVID-19 did not ultimately end the human race. It was not the most important event in human history. However, the collective trauma of the last 3 years has made this hard to say, or see.
Getting Back On Track Will Take Real Sacrifice & Effort
But again, from a purely advertising perspective, “the COVID-19 pandemic” was a trending story. Like Y2K or the George Floyd riots. A very long covfefe. Remember “the boys in red hats” incident? How long before “the January 6th insurrection” is old news again? Think of any click-bait nonsense from this modern era of reality TV trash journalism. The problem that Wall Street analysts, stock brokers, money managers, and others are having in figuring this out is that none of them understand the basics of Google’s advertising product portfolio. Too many people are incentivized to allow it to carry on, too.
Google sells a bunch of different advertising products, but most people only know about Search. Some people think about YouTube in this conversation, which is also important. But there is another section of their ad business which may make up a disproportionate amount of their revenue compared to how they report their revenue. That segment of Google’s ad business is AdSense. AdSense is a plug-in on websites which Google populates with ads so the website owner doesn’t need to sell their own.
Many of the world’s biggest publishers are funded by their own AdSense revenue. There are other businesses which provide similar services – monetizing website traffic. But Google is the biggest. Yet the Search traffic is going down, which is leading to fewer website visitors, since people were being directed by Google (using their own curiosity) to get to websites which Google also serviced with ads in many cases. But after 3 years of clogging the arteries of the internet with fatty COVID-19 stories, things broke.
Disrupting The Disruptors
Something that nobody every thought would happen – internet traffic finally slowed down. What else did you expect? After being online 24/7 for 24 months people got fatigued. Even if Zuckerberg is right (he’s not) about the Metaverse, there was nowhere to plug one’s self in to an alternate reality when the world looked like it was definitely ending back in 2020. So people had to figure out something else: in reality.
As Phillies fans mourn the loss of the World Series, I think this is a great time to remind people of something that will explain the COVID-19 problem in the online advertising inventory. When major sports championships are played, both sides produce victory merchandise. If you spend time at resorts in tourist towns across the world you sometimes actually see these things on people on the street. The hats and t-shirts of sports teams that actually lost their championship get worn by people elsewhere. Yes, I’m telling you that somewhere in the world, millions of “2022 World Series Champions Phillies” merchandise got dumped. They’re perfectly good as an item of clothing, but useless for celebrating any real victories.
That’s what’s all over the internet. Nobody wants to advertise their brand against COVID-19 anymore but our newsrooms are broken. Politicians are broken. The capital markets are broken. We are in this endless cycle like the last groove on a vinyl record, spinning around & around & around & around. With millions of people still wearing gear from a game they lost. If the COVID-19 ultimate advertising problem is not cleaned up, it will destroy Google forever. Another indexing apparatus would need to get built, too.
Perhaps Google’s founders & employees actually built a platform so good that it is set to destroy itself as a consequence of being corrupted by unproductive commands. The stock value of Google and its connection to others on the S&P got conflated with the actual value of a Search engine, internet indexing service, and website publication based advertising. Without untangling those things, Google will go under within the next election cycle. There are plenty of new things in the world.
Google just doesn’t get it anymore.
Mid-Terms Will Prove This More Than Anything Else
I mean how much do you need to search to know what a Republican’s platform will be?
Or a Democrat’s? Have you heard either political party actually surprise you recently, with respect to what they believe? Of course not. You know what you think of “the other side,” and they never fail to not shock you – no matter how many times the word “shocking” is used in a headline. Of course, the word “shocking” had been labeled by Google engineers as some kind of sure-to-be-clicked word, which it certainly seemed to be. But that only worked (even as click-bait) under the conditions people believe published articles with words like that. From back when the news industry had the public trust.
These days the only way to gain trust in the public is to provide them information that they can use to ascertain the truth with, themselves. That’s different than reporting facts. There must be some stance or position. You could call it a bias if you like, but a bias does not inherently cause or determine some inaccuracy. Blaming bias is a lazy, cheap excuse for people who don’t know how to refute anything.
The ultimate advertising problem will persist so long as human beings are unable to admit they were wrong. This is not something that is routinely calculated in the equations for companies like Google or Meta and the like. They have PR professionals and lawyers teach them how to communicate in ways that will do no harm to the brand, stock, or legal liability. But none of that improves a search engine or indexing company or advertising platform. All it does it pass the buck and sweep under the rug.
The ultimate advertising problem can be solved simply, but that doesn’t make it easy.
