EEEERRRRHHHHH
Excuse me, I just threw up on myself after being assaulted by another ad by a fat billionaire exhorting me to ‘Make Australia Great Again’ by voting for him and his dodgy party.
That nasty experience got me wondering about the nature of advertising in the digital world.
While we have people in Canberra who still think that regulating for diversity in media ownership is a thing on which they should be spending time, Google, Facebook , and Alibaba (the latter almost exclusively in China) have sucked up 62% of the worlds digital ad spend of US 327 billion, last year. Bringing up the rear is a rapidly improving Amazon, aggressively chasing a bigger share of this largess. These huge numbers leave what is left of the rest of the media, particularly the ‘old media’, scrabbling to pay the rent.
The owners of the ‘Old’ media which interrupted me with the ad that started this thought are no doubt pleased to have the fat billionaire as a paying customer. Their priority is to get the dollars in any way they can, to pay the rent, not make judgements on the veracity of the claims made by their advertisers. Facebook also faces this problem of fact neutrality, magnified geometrically by the reach and ‘stickiness’ of the platform, combined with its capacity to target and deliver messages to a very specific audience .
However, our society has been built, at least to some extent, on the foundation of a free and diverse press that has the funds and bottle to be the ‘policemen’ of the standards and performance of those in power, political and corporate.
These media businesses have largely disappeared in the last decade, overwhelmed by the shift of advertising dollars, the foundations of their business, to digital outlets.
This has left the place without any police.
Look no further than the 2 recent Royal Commissions for any evidence you may need. If it was not for Kate McClymont, and a very few other investigative journalists with a passion for the truth, and the now defunct Sydney Morning Herald, these two rocks would not have been kicked over. The roaches hiding underneath would still be free to engage in their brand of hyper-hypocrisy, with most of us unaware of their corrosive and immoral activities.
Advertising funded investigative journalism via a neutral and responsible press is almost dead in this country. Without it we are deprived of the major driver of publicly minded behaviour. We want, and need corporations to be publicly minded, to act in the best interests of the community they serve. However nice those words may be, the officers of corporations are charged with the responsibility to deliver shareholder returns, and generally they do so without reference to the long term public good. The corollary is that personal agendas, and greed, also get a very solid run.
We have conferences and forums where these corporate officers and politicians tell us what they are doing for us. However, the reality is they are mostly reading from a PR script, while attending a firefighting conference that only invites arsonists.
Advertising is increasingly becoming a tax on the poor, those who cannot afford to pay to be ad free. All this does is add weight to the confirmation bias we all have by removing any contrary voice that we may have seen and heard in the past.
That emasculation of media, the demise of a broad based, investigative and community minded press has consequences for the amount, type and quality of public debate, none of which I like.
Cartoon credit: Hugh McLeod at gapingvoid.com
