Let me take you back to my Ad days. Before any major campaign. Every year. I would spend days out in the field, talking to people. About their dreams. Ambitions. About their daily routine. What they think of. Their families. Days. Hundreds of people. You think you are special snowflake? You are not. Because each of these people speak of themselves as individuals, never knowing that they are only part of a dataset. A data set that maps them. Closing in on the behavioural patterns and psychological triggers. Being primed for the ad men. Easy targets.
Then there are the reports. Tons of them. Presentations. Dissecting their behavioural patterns. To the teeth. Like butter on a juicy steak. Ready to be devoured.
I feel like we go through so much content today. Like so much overload of information. Podcasts. Videos. Social wank media. Like it is a continuous churning of information feeding. Like, like stuck in a large test-lab being fed fast-food for the mind. Forever gluttonous and forever hungry.
Like the anticipatory stage is our home. Never arrived. Or never departed. The anticipation dopamine of what could be or what-if. Being a cog to the algorithm.
And this is what nobody sees. Or at least I do because I have been on the other side of the propaganda machine, the marketing industrial complex. Propaganda artists I like to call it. When I am watching a content piece, I am specially keen on the products that content is selling. When I see the Ad, and the content being shown to you is an Ad, I am always reverse engineering the Ad itself. Forget me buying the product through an Ad. I would never. Tch. Honestly, only a perpetual loser watches an Ad and then proceeds to go wow, I need to get that product.
Me? The moment I see the Ad, by the time it is finishing I am already analysing the insight the Ad is leveraging. The pace of the Ad, the messaging, the category, the target audience it belongs to. Because, it is made with the purpose of inciting something in you.
I am always misleading the algorithm as well. And most of the time I am thinking to myself, if I am in the right place. Hint: if the Ad is about gummy bears with shilajit in them, chances are they have me. They got me exactly where they wanted. Male performance enhancers? You thought the podcast you are watching was about successful CEOs? These rich-wankers are selling their product and you watching other rich CEOs tells them exactly what they need to know about you, your inadequacies. They have you now. Your state of forever anxiety. Of inaction and hope-seeking. You think you are reaching somewhere. Your arrival was announced to the Ad guys before you set out.
What are you on about. What am I on about? The real CEO does not sit and watch other rich-wankers talk about their success. The real rock-n-rolla is “on the roll”.
You think you are going to watch a CEO and learn to rule the world? Guess again. And if you have bought the product from the rich-wanker-whose-podacst-you-were-watching? You are already done. Might as well go find a fork and stick yourself with it. Kill confirmed. On to the next.
When you are watching an Ad, you are looking straight in the eyes of the devil himself, hard eye-contact, and the devil is looking at you, seeing you, peeking into your soul through your eyes. Its reach is intentional. You are a deer just sitting there, ignorant to the fact, of the divine abuse you are going through.
The Ad industry calls it “salience”. A word that describes what you are left with, the aftertaste, the prominence that moves you. Emotional salience is used as a signal proxy. By using information that is alarming, exciting, or personally relevant. Made to feel important. This is a property of the information’s construction, not of the information’s actual content. News media, social media, and financial commentary are all designed to maximise emotional salience, which maximises attention, without regard to legit wellbeing or your interests. Emotional intensity as a noise amplifier.
So next time you get caught in the headlights with your pants down. Think. Think of how you ended up on the assembly line of meat being primed for fantasy land. Take a step back. Breathe. And change gears. Get on the driving seat, start dissociating with the ads you see. Intentionally. Then stop. Don’t bring upon the curse of dissecting Ads on yourself. Just know, if someone is spending money to bring a content piece to your peripheral receptivity, it is operating from a weak position. The winning product seldom has to announce itself, it is too busy winning. It is the weaker ones that are the loudest. And if you must buy, if you must insist on consuming endlessly, at least give the competition a look up. You might find better prices or better offering then the God-damned Ad that found you.
Keep it random, keep the algorithm confused. When you get into the driver seat you must click with the understanding that the algorithm is watching. The algorithm is on you. So hack it. Ensure everything you ingest is a conscious choice and know that every second-degree video you watch, you are submitting to the algorithm. Stay awake, and focus. This is cognitive sovereignty in practice.
From the journal of an Ad man