The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast, where we take a deep dive into geek culture, tech evolution, and the impact of the past on today’s digital world.
The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast
S1E8 - Barnum Would’ve Loved the Bots: The Rise of Agentic Advertising Part 1
Step right up and join Marc and Renee in this captivating episode of The Nostalgic Nerds Podcast where they embark on an exhilarating journey exploring the interplay between the magnificent world of P.T. Barnum's 19th-century circus and the high-tech realm of modern digital marketing. With a shared passion for technology and culture, our hosts unpack the evolution of marketing from the dazzling spectacle of the circus to the sophisticated algorithms that now dictate the digital advertising landscape.
This is just the first part - next episode we get into the modern era and look to the future with AI and agentic marketing. You though Google knew too much about you??? Just wait until the bots start crafting hyper-targeted advertising JUST FOR YOU.
Join Renee and Marc as they discuss tech topics with a view on their nostalgic pasts in tech that help them understand today's challenges and tomorrow's potential.
email us at nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Nostalgic Nerds podcast, where we explore
Renee:technology, culture, and the history that has shaped the world we live in today. I'm your host, Renee, and I'm here with Marc. Say hi, Marc.
Marc:Howdy.
Renee:And today we're going on... That wasn't high, but... Yeah, okay. It's fair. Today we're going on a fun and unexpected journey from the American circus to the cutting-edge world of modern marketing. That's right. We're connecting the showmanship and spectacle of the circus with today's digital marketing tactics. Trust me, it's going to be a wild ride. Let's rewind the clock a little and see how marketing has evolved from the glamorous spectacle of the circus to the slick digital campaigns we see everywhere today. All right, let's start with the American circuit, which hit its peak in the mid-1800s, the circus was the ultimate form of entertainment in America, especially with famous names like P.T. Barnum and his greatest show on earth. But what made the circus so successful, it wasn't just the acrobats, the animals, or the clowns, although all of which were incredibly important to the spectacle, right? It was about the marketing. The circus was an absolute spectacle designed to grab attention and build anticipation. Barnum was a master marketer. He didn't just have a circus. He had an experience, something that people couldn't get anywhere else. He knew how to make the impossible seem irresistible. And the way he used advertising was revolutionary for its time. P.T. Barnum was one of the first to use bold, colorful posters to attract crowds. Think of it though, Marc, like you're a little kid who lived in the middle of Kansas, right? And when you go and you see the outside where they put all of the lithographs, right? They're as big as your parents, and it's a strong man or a bearded lady. Right. Like, but they were huge. They were they were like human size. If you're a little kid, imagine that. Imagine that. This is the time 1870s. This is the time before moving pictures. This is the time like this is it. This is American entertainment at its finest. It was revolutionary. Right. He knew he could get people to talk about his circus. They'd be lining up to see it. And let's not forget how he used larger-than-life claims to get attention. He marketed the circus as something extraordinary, often promising to show things like the eighth wonder of the world or freak shows with the world's tallest man or the sirens of the seas. He was a master of hyperbole. It wasn't just a show. It was an event. He was a master of hyperbole. And this is where we see the seeds of modern marketing tactics, getting attention, building curiosity and creating a sense of urgency. Real quick, before I hand it over to you, Marc, I mean, my favorite story about P.T. Barnum is how he used to sue himself. Right. So he would anonymously. He'd be like, come see a man eating chicken. And they'd be like, there's no he'd file a lawsuit that said there's no such thing as a man eating chicken. And he'd be like, you know what? You don't think it's real. Come and see it. everybody come see it tell me i'm wrong like it's for real come see it and if you would show up like 5 000 people would show up they would all pay a nickel they would sit in this room and then the curtains would open and it'd be a man sitting in a kitchen chair in his underwear and a white beater t-shirt eating a bucket of chicken because it was a man eating chicken right and everybody was like oh he fell for it and then they would like go enjoy the circus like that was it that was pt barnum in a nutshell the dude loved disinformation he loved it misinformation and he loved playing it to the point where he could get you to come 75 miles to see a man eating chicken and it was just a man eating chicken the.
Marc:Oxford combo strikes again right yeah you know i think i was just thinking about the posters of the print just the printing And I was watching this YouTube channel where they restore old posters and they're, you know, the linen-backed and all that. It's really cool stuff. But, you know, the cost of those, there were probably three-color, four-color posters.
Renee:It was the first time three-color lithograph was ever done. And, yeah, it was horribly expensive because they were so big.
Marc:They were just such big posters. What are you going to print that on? You know, the plates and the printing, like, that's a real expense. Right. We'll have to go through, like, you know, printing technology at some point. But, I mean, that's really expensive.
Renee:Yeah.
Marc:Like, even now that would be expensive. Freaking plotters and stuff. Yes. Anyways. You know, the thing that strikes me about Barnum is that he wasn't just selling tickets. He was selling an experience. And that's exactly how we think about brands today. The I met a brand marketing woman years and years and years ago. And the way that she explained it to me was, you know, we want the brand to elicit an emotional response. And I think that that was like I hadn't really thought about it at that point, you know, being in tech and stuff. But she was a brand marketer for, you know, MasterCard and, you know, the whole priceless thing. She had worked on that campaign. And, you know, some of the other brands that she had worked on, they were, you know, iconic.
Renee:Think about that ad campaign, though, remember? Because I don't know if you're listening to this and you don't know what we're talking about. MasterCard did this campaign. And it was this idea that it was $52 for baseball tickets. You know, $28 for hot dogs. Now, you're paying $28 for two hot dogs, right? You're like, $28 for hot dogs. You know, $8 for a beer, $3 for a lemonade. Spending an afternoon with your son away from work is priceless. So, yeah, you just dumped $300 on your MasterCard for a baseball game. But you know what? It's priceless because look what you got.
Marc:That's right.
Renee:Right? It was a very manipulative ad campaign. Like, hands down, horribly manipulative.
Marc:Super. Yeah. Super manipulative. But you know what? That was... And this was, you know, ages ago. This was probably 2012 when I met her. But it made me think about that brand experience. And MasterCard was not selling the ability to buy baseball tickets. They were selling an experience. And that experience was a priceous afternoon with your kid at a baseball game. So I think, you know, that's what Barnum was doing. And the best brands, they're not just logos on a product. Like their environments, right? We step into them. Disney doesn't sell you a theme park ticket. It sells you magic, right? It's the happiest place on earth or happiest, you know, whatever. Nike doesn't sell you sneakers. It sells you a feeling of victory, right? And like Nike, the literal, you know, god of victory. And Barnum understood that 150 years ago. He built his whole world around the circus with posters and hype and the lawsuits that you mentioned against himself just to make sure people were talking. I wonder, like, did he settle with himself out of court?
Renee:Right, right. And they would let him file these frivolous lawsuits. He had a team that would go 30 days ahead of the tour, right? So these guys are like they start 30 days before everybody else. And that's all they're doing. They're putting up posters at a city that he's going to cross on the train route. And so once the intercontinental railway system goes in, like that's all he needed. Now it's coast to coast. He can go anywhere he wants in between. Right. And he would do this crazy thing like he would cut a deal with the railroad companies. And then the railroad companies would do this thing where they would sell a cheap ticket and you would go to the you would it would stop right in front of the circus. And you had a ticket and you had your rail ticket back home. And that all cost a discounted price. And then that's how people came. And he could get people to come, whether they walked, took the car, took the train from 75 miles away. That, that, that's unbelievable all by itself. They would roll into a tiny town. Everybody in the town would come and that would be fun. No, he rolled into the middle of nowhere and said, everybody come to me. And they did. He was like Gaga on the Vegas residency, right? Like I'm standing still. You all come to me. Right. And it's amazing. He did it 150 years ago. Right.
Marc:Yeah. No, and I think that's, you know, the, if you think about the technology he had at his, at his disposal, right. Paper printing, you know, newspapers, you know, the trains, you know, transportation. I mean, it's all, it may have been, you know, pretty important at the time, but you think about it now, like that's, like, it's pretty rudimentary, you know. And it wasn't the tech. It wasn't the tech, right? It was his approach to using the tech.
Renee:There it is. He adapted to every single thing that was thrown in front of him. What, a train? Oh, I'm going to build my own train cars. We're going to put all the cars on it, and we're going to take it where we're going to go, and we're going to go across the country. And if that means he actually went and negotiated with all of the train companies, which at the time there's like three, right? He goes and talks to them and says, we want to use your rails at night because we know you're not doing anything. You don't pay people to work at night. We're going to move at night and we need you off the tracks. And they're like, oh, OK. Like, who says OK to that? Like every time they were given a chance to to move it all forward and make it all bigger, like they did it. And they took no prisoners in doing it. So maybe that's the lesson here. Right. But on the other hand, I will say to current marketers, no. How about that?
Marc:No, don't do it. Don't. Yeah. Be careful. Be careful. You know, do you think do you think Barnum was did he invent FOMO, fear of missing out? Did you think he invented that?
Renee:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it is a couple of things. Right. At the time in the 1870s, when this is all starting out, we're still pretty agrarian. Right. And people had horses and they had livestock and stuff like that, but they didn't think of them in the way of entertainment. it. They pulled a plow, right? Or your cow was milked. It was functional. It certainly wasn't for entertainment. I think when you take those same people and you say to them, sit under this big top, watch these people do crazy things and watch them do it with the animals that you know and love. I think that's an interesting thing where it really was escapism. So fear of missing out. Yeah, I think you were like if you didn't go to see the circus and that's all anybody was talking about, you missed out. And I think you didn't want to do that. And you certainly didn't want your kids to miss out on that. That was a big thing back in the day. And they could draw 10, 12, 14,000 people under a big top. That's crazy. I want to talk about how Barnum used to do all this. He clearly does not have a man-eating chicken, yet he would tell everyone he did. Yeah, he invented guerrilla marketing. He sent people ahead to file lawsuits against him. He had like newsletters where he would say outrageous stuff, just outrageous stuff. So people couldn't wait to come see it. Right. I mean, if this lunatic were spouting craziness and he's like, and I'll see you Thursday, of course you'd show up. OK, let's fast forward. Yes. Let's fast forward to the 20th century because we're going to have to leave P.T. Barnum not far behind, mind you, just a little behind as we go in into the world of advertising as it begins to shift. We saw the rise of radio and television, a new era for reaching mass audiences. Marketers started using those same tactics from the circus, but now they had access to visuals and sounds. They could not only tell you about a product, they could show you what it could do. TV commercials were the new spectacle. Think about the classic ads we've all seen, like the Coca-Cola Christmas commercials. Or those big emotional Nike ads. Just do it, right? These are just selling products. They were creating a feeling. Marketers took a page out of Barnum's book. They weren't just selling a product. They were selling an experience. Ads started to tap into emotion, just like the circus used to tap into awe and wonder. The goal was to create an emotional connection with the audience. TV spots didn't just focus on the features of the product. They focused on how the product made you feel. Just like the circus wasn't about the details of the performance, but about the magic of the experience.
Marc:I had a little thing on LinkedIn talking about ads and TV ads, so we'll get back to that. But before we jump into TV, I do want to talk just to touch about advertising technology we use today online. It actually mimics and looks more like that old school print media than it does with television. And, you know, newspapers and magazines had subscription and, you know, they had audience demographics, ad place inventory. We were talking about directory advertising earlier. Even CPM-style pricing. It was already a publisher-subscriber ecosystem, but paper-based rather than technology broker systems. The internet basically lifted that model wholesale, layered in tracking and personalization, and called it digital advertising. So in some ways, TV is kind of a detour. We'll talk about it, but we'll have to come back to the models that online digital advertising are because it more closely mimics that, The DNA of modern online ads looks more like print than it does television. But television is fun and cool and has its own technology to go along with it. Do you think, thinking about those two mediums, do you think print has better targeting than TV or vice versa?
Renee:Yeah, no, I think TV is about mass communication and print is about personal communication, right? So in a lot of ways, I subscribe to that paper, right? I have the LA Times dropped off at my front door every day, right? And in that, I've chosen that to be the newspaper I'm going to read. I'm going to have it drop. I might do the Sunday New York Times if I want to get a more, you know, rounded view of what's going on. But for me, it's like, that's targeted. That's targeted. like I I have interest in that in that writer and in that news source and so I'm going to read that right and so I think in that and that subscription might be a million and a million and a half it won't be 30 million right it'll be a million right because that's how many people are close enough to get the paper and that's why there were so many newspapers because everything was local right like there weren't the USA Today was the only national newspaper we had so yeah everything was local so I do think it was better at targeting TV was just about mass communication the most targeting you could do was to say Saturday mornings were little kids. And so all your advertising would be for little kids. Other than that, it was a crapshoot, right? If you had a bunch of people who were watching true crime or ER or whatever, like, or friends, yeah, that's a certain demographic and you could lay your advertising within that demographic, but that was it for your ability to customize that. You're done. Like that. Yeah.
Marc:I think that the whole Nielsen, you know, mechanisms, all of that stuff, that the way that we talk about demographics today is, It comes out of that TV era, not for the print, you know, not the print,
Renee:You know, you knew your subscription base, right? Because you knew them. You were mailing to them every week or that's right. Like you knew who they were. But TV, you're right. It was different. And you were really you were relying on the Nielsen families. They were just people who had boxes on their TVs and it would track what they watched, how long they stayed on the channel. Everything that happens today through streaming, all that data that we have about us.
Marc:Oh, I know.
Renee:Right. They had the same thing, but they had it on a limited number of families who got compensated for that to be a Nielsen family. And then Nielsen would come and install a bunch of stuff and take the data away once a month and then publish it back to the entertainment industry. It was such a scam. It's not even funny. Like, that was a true scam back in the day. Like, give me your data and I'm going to sell it back to you. Like, it was a scam.
Marc:Yeah. Well, we can go. Yeah, we can talk about data and selling some other time. I think. Yeah, I think that's that makes a lot of sense. I think print media, print advertising is simultaneous with Barnum and the circus and the sort of event-driven advertising and marketing. But it also has a history before and a history after as well as we come into kind of mid-century and that transition to television. But I think that that key difference that we talked about there is reach. You know, the print is about the targeting, yes, but the TV is mass scale. I think that's, you know, that's that technology shift again, right? Print, as you said, USA Today was the only national newspaper, right? I couldn't get the New York Times in Los Angeles until very late, you know, in the 20th century. Yeah. And I think that, you know, ad dollars started flowing more towards the mass audience, you know, probably because the effectiveness of it, but also that reach. And I don't think it was so much about tactics, you know, being different. They, you know, or it wasn't that they were new. It's the same sort of playbook, just supersized. Technology didn't really change the fundamentals of marketing. It just widened the audience. The circus out of town square, printout subscribers, TV had millions of living rooms all at once. And you know what? Okay. So my kids, you and I grew up at a time when you would sit down at a certain time at a certain week, you know, a certain day of the week to watch something.
Renee:Television was a collective experience. That's right. That went across like state lines and country lines. And it was collect. When you were watching Seinfeld, you were watching it with 7 million other people. And you talked about it the next day at work. We don't have that anymore.
Marc:The closest thing recently in recent times has been HBO and Game of Thrones or, you know, these once a week. Man, we couldn't get enough. Yeah, Tiger King.
Renee:We wanted to talk all about that for months. Yeah.
Marc:But even that was like, okay, yeah, it drops at a certain day, right? But it's not, you know, 8.30 p.m. on Thursdays.
Renee:Yeah. It's not must-see TV. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.
Marc:Yeah. When I was talking to the kids about commercials and stuff, they, like, the kids, they, like, yeah, they couldn't even figure it out, you know? And so... Yeah. And I want to talk about manipulative TV ads, you know, because this is something that I remember very well when I was a kid. But my kids, man, they don't they don't understand that at all.
Renee:So cynics like the young kids today are cynics, too. Right. Like they wouldn't fall for half the crap we fall for. I don't think for sure. Right. I just think they're cynics right out of the gate. It would be hard to win them over.
Marc:Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Do you think TV ads felt more manipulative because they were so hard to escape?
Renee:Well, yeah. And I think they were they were deliberately. OK, so back in 1971. Oh, this makes me so mad. There's this you can go watch it on on.
Marc:Oh, are you going to tell the crying?
Renee:Yes. I hate it so much. Okay. So in 1971, the Keep America Beautiful campaign started because single-use plastics in 1971 were already out of control. Like it was already littering everywhere. It was just a mess. The whole country was a mess because of single-use plastics.
Marc:I think that might be a little bit of a stretch, but okay.
Renee:It was terrible. And it was and it was all their fault. That's what I'm going to say. But there was this there was this company. It was a lobbying company. Right. And they were lobbying for food and beverage and single use plastics. And they called themselves Keep America Beautiful. And then they picked this Italian guy named Oscar to play an Indian. First of all, he's not even Indian. He's like a Native American. He's not even Native American. and he's just this Italian guy named Oscar and they put him in this canoe and he's canoeing down this river and it's really beautiful and there's stuff everywhere like canyons and stuff and then all of a sudden. There's a rapper. He's like, what the hell? And he keeps going down the canoe. And now he's going past like factories that are spewing crap into the air. And he's going down and there's more crap in the river. Then he drags his canoe up out of the river and he climbs over a hill and it's a freeway. And then people throw something out of their car and hit him. Oh, dear God, you just hit a Native American with trash. He just left his canoe down there. And he turns to the camera and he and there's a tear just going down his face. Right and it's like you and it's here's why it makes me mad and there's many reasons one the guy's italian two this is sicilian even even better he's sicilian and on top of everything else this is the first this is it this you want to put the pin in it this is exactly where single use plastic create like people who create that stuff it's a four billion dollar a year industry of us creating crap that doesn't go to landfills, it ends up other places, like in tumbleweeds going across the road when I drive. Like, this is where it ends up, right? They blamed it on us. It became our problem. We had to clean that up. It was all on us. And they're like, look, it started the environmental movement. No, it started the environmental movement being my fault, not the people who created it to begin with, right? So in that moment, like for me, it was an overwhelming feeling being... What, five or six at the time and making a Native American cry because I go to McDonald's. How manipulative is that crap? Like, it's ridiculous. It's really ridiculous. And I really, you know, when you start doing that kind of stuff, it's really, really hard to have respect for what you're trying to say or what you're trying to do. And you're manipulating people all over the place and you don't care who it is. I used to run that stuff on Saturday afternoons. Who's watching TV on Saturday afternoons? Nine-year-olds, right? Like, it makes me mad even today. Like, I think about it today, and I think, you know, you can point the environmental movement right back to there. That's the day it became my fault. You blamed me. You, the plastics industry, blamed me using an app, right?
Marc:Yeah, well, I mean, even further, there's a whole, you know, recycling is a whole, its own topic, right? But the whole recycled movement, particularly in the U.S., was started by lobbyists, not because, you know, there was this, like, it was good for the environment.
Renee:Right, right.
Marc:It was because, well, maybe in the future at some point, you know, we can potentially maybe recycle this plastic that, you know, we can't recycle today. And so we'll make it the individual's problem to, quote, unquote, recycle. I
Renee:Have to separate all my trash and I have to do yeah it's my.
Marc:Responsibility it's a total it's a you know it's a boondoggle it's a it's really shameful how you know the political infrastructure was manipulated and and I think keep America beautiful is one example it's not the only one but you're right it's like it's like a seminal moment it is
Renee:It really is and when they figured out it worked we got bombarded with it.
Marc:Yeah yeah yeah no I think that's that's it's manipulative on multiple levels, but the two major levels, right, is like, you know, you, Renee, nine-year-old girl, was, you know, you made this dude cry, you know? Right?
Renee:You're bad.
Marc:You made him cry. You're evil. You're bad. You're evil. You made this guy cry. And then manipulative on the other sense, which is sort of manipulate the whole industry, you know, by basically making it somebody else's problem and pretending like individual action could actually solve this infrastructure problem. Yeah, it's a total, it's a total, yeah.
Renee:Yeah, that really made me mad. But here's what I will say. I, you know, we were regulating television back in the 70s though. So anybody who complains about, you know, censorship or anything else, the deal was if you were going to, back in the 70s, if you were going to put any programming on for kids. You had to include the same amount of time you spent selling them stuff. You had to create, you, the advertiser, had to create educational television. So for every 30 second ad, there's 30 seconds of educational TV. Now do that for two minutes and two seconds. Now you have to come up with two minutes and two seconds to pay on the backside of that. So no kids are getting brainwashed somehow, which brought us the ad council who cleverly created, you know what it is, schoolhouse rock schoolhouse rock was an answer to regulatory compliance requirements it's.
Marc:Not brainwash rock
Renee:Yeah and instead it brainwashed me with a noun is a person place or thing which i think is a better brainwashing than two all beef patty special sauce lettuce cheese pickles onions on a sesame seed bun like it's definitely better that i know what a noun is right.
Marc:Yeah well i'm glad you know what a noun is i i love three three is magic number
Renee:Oh nice I liked Grammar Rock I was a Grammar Rock fan.
Marc:Interplanet Janet she's a
Renee:Galaxy girl yeah exactly.
Marc:I think, you know, the, the ads that, that pop up and I put a little thing on LinkedIn yesterday and it was funny because, you know, some, somebody put in a UK ad and I was like, man, I don't, I don't even know that one. It was funny. It was for a tango, which is like an orange drink here. And then, and then one of my buddies, Carrie put on an Ovaltine ad and it was funny, you know, how, like, here's an Ovaltine ad from the fifties. And then there's this tango ad and it's just the style and, you know, tone, demeanor is completely different, you know. And I remember stuff like Smokey the Bear, you know, if you think about.
Renee:Do you think there was a time where it shifted? It went from being, you know, it's informational, it's meant to tell you what a product does, you know, and then it turned into real art. Like, I think we, like, we crossed the line where that became real art. Advertising was an artistic endeavor and it meant to do all those things but it was going to tug on all those things with real artistic integrity i feel like that was the 80s man like we went through the 80s and 90s like that was really good advertising i.
Marc:Don't know about integrity
Renee:But okay yeah i mean i'm marketing but yeah well.
Marc:You know i mean the the 1984 ad right i mean it's it's like it's just
Renee:It's gone down in marketing history right it's like that one like anytime we talk about the artistic endeavor of advertising everybody's like apple 1984 like yeah you're right yeah that was a completely different way of looking at you know product for.
Marc:Sure yeah yeah well and i mean there was there was no product you know it was like no you know you
Renee:Were breaking Free of like of the old gray, stupid, you know, IBM based, you know, yeah, computer. Yeah.
Marc:It just sat on it just sat there, you know, it's like, what does it do? I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, I know. But that one, Smokey the Bear, I mentioned Smokey and only you can prevent forest fires. I don't know. Did you get that on the West on the East Coast?
Renee:We didn't. We got Smokey the Bear because, yeah, we did. Because just because it was an educational program for kids. But it didn't mean anything because we didn't have forest fires that much in Pittsburgh. I do remember, though, the poison control, Pennsylvania poison control.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Renee:Did you have the green sticker, Mr.
Marc:Well, I don't know if we had green stickers, but I remember. No, not Mr. Yeah. But there was like that would be something that you would see on like, you know, the local broadcast stations at like three o'clock in the afternoon. Right. Yeah. It wouldn't show up in primetime.
Renee:Yeah. Because it was when kids are watching stuff after school. Right. So it's like, ours was Mr. Yuck. Mr. Yuck is mean. Mr. Yuck is green. It was awful. It was this video of this little kid. And he's like, do not... What is it? Like... Something about do not stop do not drink you will be sick sick sick sick and it's just like cut shots like all the way into this person like oh like don't drink it like i always and then they would sell you and then they would send you stickers and you would put it on all the bottles so kids knew don't drink that it has a mr yuck sticker on it right like it was this whole campaign about that but yeah i mean there was just all this like advertising back in the 70s and 80s and 90s and stuff like that before we get to social media like it really was a way to i don't know talk about product in an interesting way elicit emotion and really tug nostalgia right like that's what those anheuser-busch ads with the dog in the sled at christmas time it's all it was you're like oh look it's a puppy it's a beer commercial or.
Marc:The polar bears
Renee:Yeah it's like oh look they're sledding.
Marc:I asked i asked the kids and my wife and so you know the kids were like i don't know what you're talking about and then they just don't even know what a commercial is basically right and they get to skip them they get to skip them conceptually they you know but yeah then my wife was like oh mikey you know the mikey likes it and and i was like i thought about that and thought about it and thought about it hard for like a while and i'm like i know i know mikey and i know he was he it was something about something he was eating and i couldn't remember what what it was it was life
Renee:Remember he died oh stop.
Marc:That's a different episode. That's a different episode.
Renee:That was a huge rumor. It was life. I know. Look at Mikey. He likes life cereal. Yeah, that was Mikey. But then the rumor was in middle school that Mikey died in Pop Rocks.
Marc:Pop Rocks. Yeah. That was, go listen to episode Bat Boy, that one.
Renee:Yeah, that's a good episode to listen to for that.
Marc:Yeah.
Renee:All right. So now let's jump to the digital age, shall we?
Marc:Yeah. We talked too much about our young childhood nostalgia.
Renee:You know what, though? Everybody needs to know that cowboy or that Indian is Italian. You just need to know that. I need you to know that.
Marc:Oscar. Oscar de Cordy.
Renee:There you go. Like Sicilian. And spent his whole life dressing in fringe with his hair. And like he spent his whole life pretending like he was Native American. Stolen valor. That's what I call it. All right. So let's jump to the digital age. All right. Where things really start to get interesting, I guess. Yeah, the Internet opened a whole new world for marketers and digital ads became the next big frontier. But here's the thing. The principles of marketing we saw in the circus, like building anticipation, creating excitement, drawing in audiences, are still central to everything we see today. But now we've got data. Marketers can target us in the way Barnum wished he could. He wished he could do it, right? They knew where to shop. They know where we shop, what we browse, and even what we're likely to buy next. Modern marketing is all about personalization. Ads are no longer generic. They're tailored specifically to us. And with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google, one more time, just one more time, Facebook is an advertising platform. Just one more time. It's an advertising platform. I just want to make sure everybody understands that. Marketers can be hyper-targeted. They're showing the right ad to the right person at the right time. It's all about building anticipation, capturing attention when we're most likely to be looking. Social media influencers, just like Barnum's performers, are now used to draw crowds and create hype.
Marc:This is, this is one of the most interesting things tech wise for me is the rise of, of the whole advertising infrastructure and how that got started. Because if you think about like, I mean, 1993 at the end of the, you know, between October and December, right. Of, of 1993, the number of web servers was, it was tiny, you know, by the time we get to 1994. There's thousands upon thousands of web servers and you know this short period of time in the you know just like i wish i had the numbers but the the last part of 1993 when the web actually was born you know is like one to a thousand you know very rapidly but then it scaled even exponentially to 95 and it's just just crazy and of course what do we what are the things that drive technology right adult you know uh gaming yes yes right buying stuff because
Renee:We're terrible human beings are just disgusting i'm just gonna put it out there if we're it's all your baser instincts which made like like consuming and.
Marc:That's right like
Renee:Those are the two things that like brought us the internet like that's yeah we're just human beings are gross just keep.
Marc:Going I mean, can you remember when we were at the dot-com, like, who had all the money, right? When we were looking at, if you're walking down in the colo, you're going down the rack by rack, and you're like, oh, that's, you know, buy dot-com's cage. That's, you know, our cage. And who had Florida Ceiling Extreme and Juniper and, you know, just like, it was all the adult sites. You know, they...
Renee:Yeah, they knew what they were doing and they had a huge amount of subscription. Yeah, they made money and still do, hand over fist.
Marc:Tons of money. But I, but that whole, that whole targeting infrastructure, tracking, targeting behavior, you think about one name, it's DoubleClick. Like it's, you know, DoubleClick is like, like, right. You don't, you think about it. It was the biggest company on the internet as far as digital advertising that you never heard of. Right. You're browsing, you're browsing Amazon or you're browsing cooking.com or you're browsing whatever. Yeah. You don't go to double click.net. It's just there in the background and little things get dropped in cookies. All of this stuff is, all of this stuff is invented right then, you know, in the, in the, you know, night in the mid nineties. And then you know into the late 90s as as this infrastructure gets built out double click pioneers ad serving and christ cross-site tracking cross-site tracking do you think about this when the internet first starts you go from one site to the next site nobody knows how do you know like where are you going and so they invented a way to you know tell you well they came from this site you know and they left your site to go to this place and
Renee:They stayed here this time they looked at these pages and yes yes.
Marc:Exactly right yeah i mean that right there is the skeleton of modern digital advertising okay so i've got some stats on uh double click because i think it's like super important here so real-time reporting double click start system let advertisers monitor campaign performance while it was running not after a real-time reporting and that's revolutionary compared to print or tv you think about it right you think about we talk about Nielsen, right? Nielsen, you have a delay. That delay is like a month later. But with DART, their platform, real-time. Digital spend share, right? If you think about digital spend share where it is today, it's roughly $790 billion in digital global ad spend. And that's all built on the foundations that they had. Let's see here.
Renee:I find that profoundly depressing.
Marc:Yes, I think it is profoundly depressing as well. Almost a trillion dollars, right? Three quarters of a trillion dollars spent on digital ad spend. Like, whoa, crazy. And that's about 70-ish percent of ad spend. Print ad revenue is projected in the U.S. to fall from $4 billion in 2023 to about $2.5 billion by 2028.
Renee:Whoa, what do you think that's about?
Marc:Print print ad revenue yeah
Renee:Because we just don't do print anymore.
Marc:Because you don't do print anymore so i think like to me double click is like the the foundation for that stuff you know as i said google didn't invent that whole system they they bought double click and built on it so so you have this dominant player you know you have the yahoo and the and double click and then google buys in double click without that the idea of following you around the internet with ads just wouldn't exist at its peak their servers were said to deliver tens of thousands of ad per second ad impressions flying out across the web in real time and while not every ad was effective double clicks reporting tools meant advertisers could see performance almost immediately in tweet campaigns which as we said print and tv couldn't do at that scale imagine our
Renee:Future though think about this for a minute because then i can i can actually have an agent and an actual agent.
Marc:Oh okay yeah like
Renee:Yeah just look at this and say oh i'm only getting nine percent conversion on this i actually want to change it and it's among these people great i'm going to actually recreate this ad specifically for those people i'm going to rerun it in that space and we'll see if we can't get better traction on that and no human being ever had to touch it.
Marc:Yeah yeah yeah no i think i mean i have a little bit on click-through rates here ads on click-through It's like five clicks out of 10,000 impressions. So that's 0.05. It's horrible, right? And if you think about AI, the driving, you know, ad serving, all of a sudden you go, oh, I can do A-B testing, right? I can do A-B testing on, you know, ads in real time without a human playing with this stuff. Right. And then what happens when my click-through goes from 0.05% to 0.07%? Like, that's big. you know it's only two tenths of a percent and yet that's you know it's a big shift
Renee:Yeah it's.
Marc:I mean you know because once you those clicks the click to then convert right you want impressions to you know to conversions and you want that to be as high as possible
Renee:So and then think about the medium right like how else would i get 10 000 impressions and even if my conversion rate is you know five tenths of a percent like like okay fine like you know but how else would i get access to ten thousand and i think that's it or a million and a half or let's talk about influencers like like some influencers have 110 million followers like that person gets to say i'll post your stuff but you're going to owe me half a million dollars and you pay it because they have that many people and you're you're going to convert them because that person said it yeah.
Marc:And that click-through rate for an influencer is much higher than it is for just,
Renee:You know, blasting it.
Marc:Basically blasted ads.
Renee:Yeah, I'm going to put that on the on the feet of millennials. And Gen Y or Gen Z, because I feel like they're the Gen Z, they're the ones that trust influencers more than the brand. Right. So they'll, they'll trust your voice more than they will Johnson and Johnson. They'll trust your voice more than they will, you know, I don't know, elf cosmetics. Like, so yeah, it's really, it's that generation that says, you know, your big, what pharma, your big zip tie, your big whatever, like, like whoever you are, whoever you are, like, like, I don't trust you. But if somebody tells me you're okay, I'm all in, right? And because I trust that person, whether that's well founded or not, you know, because I trust them, I feel like I know them, we have a conversation, we have a relationship, it's one sided for sure. But I feel like I know that person and I trust them. Like, that's a whole other thing. Like, I follow this blue beauty influencer her name's nikki i can't remember her last name but um i.
Marc:Think one of my kids watches that yeah
Renee:Yeah right she's like she's unbelievable like the stuff she pulls off like just on her own face you're just like damn it girl you are really good at this and what she's telling you is don't buy this but buy this i really like this here's why this didn't turn out so great you're watching her use it right and she's just kind of trying to tell you here's what you should buy here's what you should not buy why yeah i trust nikki if nikki put out a line i'd buy it like and i don't know her. I don't know anything about her. There's nothing there in that relationship. But clearly, I trust her more than I trust Gavinci, who's putting out the lipstick that year for $76. Should I buy it? Nikki said, don't bother. I won't then. That's literally it, right? There is just a completely different way of approaching the market, which gives these influencers a crazy amount of influence, essentially, right? It gives them a ton of power. And they're not trained marketing professionals. They've never had media training. They're not. They are truly in every possible way authentic. And in that way, it's terrible. It's just terrible. Like, why would you put them in charge of your brand ever? Like, why would you have that wild card in the middle of that? You do it because you have 100,000 followers or you do it because they have a million and a half followers who listen to them. Right. And I think like, That's it. That's it in a nutshell. It's changing. It's all changing.
Marc:And I agree with the premise. I think that the influencer culture, right, there's like this tiered structure, right? At the very top of the tier are the people that, yeah, they've got millions upon millions of followers and they can actually make some money out of that. And those people, they absolutely have media training, right? They absolutely have a crafted message. they you know
Renee:Maybe but i also feel like they step in it a lot they step in it a lot they get canceled a lot right like like when i look at any of the mom influencers coming out of salt lake city right like they they are not media trained i don't think they know they post a bunch of stuff about their kids and disneyland sends them to disneyland right and they record a bunch of stuff before the park opens and then they get to post it and look disney has all this like content from These people who have two, four, eight million followers. Like, it's no joke. These people are a big deal. Yeah, I don't know. I just feel like where you used to say Jennifer Aniston's going to be my spokesperson, I'm going to pay her $14 million. She knows what she's doing. She doesn't want to ruin her own reputation. And she's going to be careful about this. Like, that's one thing saying, I'm going to pay you for your own conversion. I'm going to give you, what, $15,000 for a day at the park. And I'll pay for the park. And I'll pay for your hotel. And I'll pay for your airfare. I'll give you 15 grand. You're going to do this for me. It's a completely different thing. You're accepting a lot of risk in this scenario, right?
Marc:I agree. I agree. I think that's, well, what happens when, man, I just, what happens when the influencer is not a real influencer? You know, what happens when they're not a real person? What happens when it's, you know, a few years in the future when it's, you know, Marc, Marc is, you know, doing whatever on the screen. Yeah. And AI converts it into, you know, a 23 year old, you know, woman. And, you know, that's, that's going to be, that's going to be some scary stuff. And then, you know, what's the brand fallout when, you know, when that authenticity is, you know, It's shown to be not authentic, you know. Yeah. Authenticity and trust is the currency. And that's shown that, you know, it's not worth it. Then, you know, I think that's where the risk comes to any brands that rely on that structure, you know.
Renee:Of influencers. Yeah. Yeah. Right. How much you rely on that. All right. So today's marketing is all about creating experience. But it's a digital experience. This is what I think is the hardest part about all this. You went from being like, let's all be in the tent together watching, you know, people trick ride horses to, you know, let's all be in a digital experience like social media. We've all seen the buzzing, colorful ads that catch our attention. But now it's not just flashy posters or TV spots. It's about building a community and creating interactive experiences. Influencers are the new circus performers, except now they don't have to fit in the ring. They can influence millions of people through Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Just like Barnum created spectacle to draw crowds, influencers create spectacle to sell lifestyle status and products. Their followers are emotionally invested, just like the circus goers were in Barnum's time. And then there's the experience marketing, where brands aren't just selling a product. They're creating a whole experience around it. Think about Apple's product launches or how companies are using augmented reality to try to sell before you buy. I mean, that's how they sell nuclear power plants. You walk through it with VR. That's how they do it. Like, let's walk through your nuclear power plant before you spend a billion dollars. Okay. Yeah, that's exactly what happens. It's not just about a transaction anymore. It's about giving people something they'll remember.
Marc:Hey, folks. Marc here. This one was another longish episode that we decided to cut in half. This first half was all about the past, and right at the end here, we just started to talk about shifting into what the future holds for digital advertising and marketing. As you can tell by listening to this first half, this is a topic Renee and I love, and we both have a lot of formative memories about advertising. Thanks to Gordon and Kerry for sharing their favorite TV ads on LinkedIn. That was a lot of fun. And thanks to everyone for tuning in again. Please rate us on your favorite podcast app and drop us a line with feedback at nostalgicnerdspodcast at gmail.com.
