Have you heard of The Spinner - founded by Elliot Shefler?

They were in the news back in 2019 just before the pandemic, for something quite eerie.

If you wish to convince someone to quit smoking, stop eating meat, stop riding motorcycles, or stop having headaches at night, but they won't listen to you, these guys claimed to have a solution for it: adtech.

For $29 you can brainwash and manipulate an individual with targeted ads and news feed.

The technique was called "Facebook sniper targeting", and it's apparently technically feasible.

In the 2017 UK election, when Jeremy Corbyn the opposition leader wanted to spend money on Facebook advertising, his team disagreed, but couldn’t convince him.

So what they did was to invest just £5,000 on Facebook ads and target just him. The single person, so he’d believe they were mounting a HUGE campaign.

Why are we talking about this?

So the topic for today was triggered by a Linkedin conversation I was having about Tesla deciding to advertise for the first time in a complete turn around from when Musk said they’d never advertise.

And I ran into a CA who very earnestly said if Brands stopped advertising, they could save the money and give people products at a cheaper rate.

The topic I’ve picked for the week is ‘Why we Advertise!’

That’s a round about way of speaking about Ads, with the extreme scenarios.

Interesting one, but before we go on discussing why we advertise, can you explain to our listeners what advertising is?

We’ve spoke a few times about what is and isn’t Brand Strategy, but rarely called out the difference between advertising and other means of Brand building.

Advertising is any paid communication designed to create recall value for the Brand.

It is not about creating your Brand, but communicating it and creating stickability for it.

So safe to say you’re aren’t tickling any digital marketers with this statement?

Well, I’m not ruling them out.

A common misconception is that advertising will help to immediately increase sales and move market share. But that’s not necessarily true.