By John Clarvis, Data and Insights Director as originally featured in The Media Leader
The difficulty with decoupling threatening content and commercial operations is that the very nature of our psychological and physical reaction to threat — and especially identity threat — creates a very easy and lucrative revenue stream.
Similarly to addictive substances and habits, it is almost impossible to lose money by creating content that threatens individuals’ social identity and drives them into a cycle of clicks and rage.
Legislative solutions
Tabacco usage is widely known to cause serious physical harm to the individual and, when smoked, to those around them.
Despite there being no positives to smoking, its addictive nature circumvents the product development process of making something useful. The nature of its addiction is in fact psychological, due to nicotine’s ease of activating dopamine receptors in our brain, quickly becoming its own reward. The absence of nicotine causes a craving, which can only be met by more nicotine.
Agencies were forced by the Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act 2002 to cease any advertising on tobacco products. In anticipation of similar legislation, many agencies and groups have pre-emptively banned advertising of vapes and e-cigarettes. While this is done on the basis of avoiding litigation, the consequences are clear.
Media is a well-regulated industry and, as such, follows laws to the letter on advertising harmful products. However, digital media regulation, though tightened by GDPR, is less regulated. The Online Safety Act (2023) places an emphasis on the harm caused to children by exposure to social media and places the responsibility on media owners to enforce.
Unfortunately, the most powerful media entities in the world are based in the US and, since the repeal to the Fairness Doctrine by Ronald Reagan in 1987, media owners can publish without consequence or truth — a pattern copied around the world, including the UK.
To directly influence legislation, a direct causal pattern needs to be established between identity-threatening content and harm caused to individuals and society at large. Without a Jeffrey Wigand of media, legislative solutions are, sadly, unlikely.
Appealing to effectiveness
In over 15 years in media, I have never received a brief to “make our audience angry”. Yet, as planners, we will frequently pay premium rates to place our crafted work directly next to content designed to do just that.
The primary goal of creative is to drive effectiveness — be it brand awareness and favourability in the nurture stage or conversion to a sale. Provoking emotions is a well-known method of increasing effectiveness. Emotion, however, is a very broad term.
To be more specific:
>> Positive feelings such as happiness and joy increase the likelihood of content being shared
>> Fear can drive short-term changes in behaviour, but not long-term. Anti-smoking ads that terrified smokers resulted in short-term quitting, but significantly fewer long-term quitters than supportive messages and campaigns such as Stoptober. Ironically, the fear raised the anxiety levels in smokers who, after the initial shock, reverted to smoking more cigarettes as a method of reducing that anxiety.
>> Nostalgic and bittersweet creatives, as shown by the annual sob-fest by supermarkets, do drive sales and long-term brand favourability. Such ads create up to 67% improvements on effectiveness.
Anger is an emotion that drives change; both political and charity ads provoke anger to drive short-term actions. The successful campaigns run by both the Leave EU and Donald Trump campaigns succeeded in capitalising on anger. However, in the long term, anger can only be escalated so far until it becomes ineffective. It is a short-term emotion and is ineffective over the long term.
Studies are few and far between on effectiveness per emotion. From a psychological perspective, however, evidence shows that anger reduces attention span and visual-processing ability.
For advertisers, is an audience that isn’t paying attention and is less able to perceive visual stimuli a valuable one worth paying for?
Change the metrics
When looked at as a data professional, the numbers make sense.
Identity-threatening content gets high views, shares and engagement — more so than factual, unemotive content. In an industry in the throes of automation, a literal reading of the data leads algorithms to place its emphasis on this content. If a machine-learning process is applied to seek the highest reach (and therefore eyeballs), it will buy identity-threatening content — increasing its demand and, therefore, its value.
However, to paraphrase Frank Zappa, the machine doesn’t have eyebrows. That is, it cannot read the emotions or make long-term decisions based on effectiveness.
Measures of effectiveness in particular struggle in digital media when attribution is allocated only to the last click. While it shows which channels lead to sales, it ignores everything that has occurred before, including long-term brand activity, especially AV. Planners are aware of this shortcoming and in ideal circumstances carry out media mix modelling (MMM) to disentangle the bigger picture.
In order to attribute the role of identity-threatening content, the strength of emotions provoked should be factored into MMMs as a covariate in order to attribute the true value of media placements that are currently only measured at media-category level. This would provide a measure of the effectiveness of identity-threatening content and give planners and buyers a score by which to downweight the value of content and reach beyond the perpetual feedback loop created by its priority.
In a brilliant article, Marty Davies makes the case against buying “dirty attention” as a moral imperative for media buyers. This method would provide the business incentive to act morally against content that sows division, spreads hatred and harms society.
I’ve heard in my career many times at points of stress that “it’s just media — no-one is going to die”. Well, they have and will.
Shall we start taking it more seriously now?