You could just as easily make a blog "Things Real People Don't Say About Your App"
"I like the functionality, but it doesn't follow best practices."
or "Things Real People Don't Say About Science"
"These findings are compelling, but I'd like to see some corroborating studies in peer reviewed journals".
Any consumer facing industry is going to have a world of jargon that is inaccessible or ridiculous to the layperson. And similarly, these industries can support those who want to participate but don't have anything to add.
I don't see this as a jab at advertsising (although, it very well may have been intended as such) I see it as a jab at wannabes.
If you still don't believe me, try reading tech job postings...
But you couldn't put those sayings on stock photos and have it work so well.
This blog works because the "fakeness" of the stock people nicely parallels the ridiculousness of the slogan to create a satirical meta-advertisement... about advertisers.
Unless you make satirical apps for app developers, or satirical science papers about scientists, you're not duplicating the irony of this blog.
Interesting. But I disagree with a number of them.
> I love the copy, but it feels off brand ...
I remember the first time I saw a McPizza ad. It talked about how if you didn't like one kind, then you could get a different one. And it felt really strange.
Later I figured it out. Until then, McDonald's ads had always maintained the premise that everyone likes everything they sell.
> If only this solution was more scalable...
I am constantly annoyed at the idea that "scalable" is a meaningless word. Nonsense, it is a precise, well-defined, and useful term. True, it does get misused by marketing people. But the fact is that anyone who is purchasing a large system of any sort, if they know what they're doing, will have some concern for scalability.
> Finally, a place for me to share MY story!
Isn't this a huge reason for people going to blogging platforms?
On the other hand:
> This website's music is great - turn it up!
Definitely. No one has ever said that, ever, in the history of the web.
> Isn't this a huge reason for people going to blogging platforms?
Yes, but that's not what it's lampooning. TONS of ads and websites invite people to "share their story" or try to take advantage of user generated content. It's a cheesy cop out. No one wants to share their Doritos story on the Doritos website.
I agree with OP, here. This site had the guys at my agency rolling, but it's so funny because it's true. No one in my office thinks real people talk like this.
We know that when my aunt Kay visits a website and thinks it feels cheap or just doesn't hang together or seems like it's not safe to give my credit card to; it's because they used tired stock photography and their web copy is in three different voices, or that their copy leading and margins are inconsistent, or that they have no design language or brand focus.
Real people don't pick it apart like that because they don't care, don't have the talent to do so, won't acquire the skill to do so or a mix of all three. However, WE do think like this. And the fact that most people don't think like this is why all six of us still have jobs after five years.
the point is not whether advertising is effective, what i see here is laying bare the subtext juxtaposed and letting the reader draw their own conclusion.
the picture isn't pretty, unless, that is, Commerce is your middle name.
This is why as an app developer I am deeply sceptical about Google's model. Okay, so the consumer saves a buck, but then you chip away at their goodwill every time you show an ad. And note, when you're showing an ad, to make it effective you have to make it intrusive, you either have to lock them out of the free functionality for a while or you need to make it eye-catching.
I don't know anyone that said "I'm so glad Google bought Youtube and plastered ads all over the videos".
People hate advertising so much they will go out of their way to avoid it.
In economic terms, as an app developer the way I see it is that free+ads is really just burning up my user's good will to enrich Google. The more I annoy my customers like this, the less likely they are to recommend my app. To the extent that it is less than a zero-sum game... it's not just an even 50:50 trade-off between for pay and ad-supported.
The right kind of advertising is pretty awesome, because it provides value for me. Right now, Stack Overflow and Amazon have the best ads out there, IMO. SO took a while to get decent ads too.
I watched some stuff on Hulu the other day. Fancy cars, teeth whitening commercials, drugs I don't ever anticipate using, and other useless stuff to me was marketed at me. That's just not a good ad model I think. I would love to see some really new and interesting products - not Another Car|Soda|Beer commercial.
TechCrunch had a good guest article arguing that Hulu's poor targeting is intentional: http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/08/hulu-opec/
Hulu has enough information on its users to target ads very narrowly, but since it's run by a conglomerate of media companies, it intentionally does not do this in order to avoid competing with traditional (untargeted but highly profitable) television advertising.
This is a mix of half-amusing misconceptions -- "Of course I'll spend eight minutes of my life watching your branded content" -- and details that advertisers should care about -- "I love the copy, but it feels off brand". Most of the pictures fall into the latter, and are very "inside baseball". Why would you expect "real people" to talk like that, or chastise advertisers for doing so? People who buy from Amazon don't care how many servers Amazon has allocated to recommend products to them, but Amazon engineers certainly care. People searching Google don't care about the inner workings of how MapReduce distributes the work over multiple servers.
This website feels like a bunch of immature complaints and useless mockery.
I think you're taking it way too seriously. The author clearly has a good grasp of advertising and why the statements being lampooned are necessary. Humor doesn't have to be derisive.
Mockery, perhaps, but not entirely useless, since it helps prick the myopia that's a persistent danger in any business which uses lots of jargon to discuss the ideal forms of execution.
Believe it or not, there are a number of exceedingly self-absorbed people in advertising. These are folks who actually do assume that clients and audiences take advertising's technical aspects as seriously as they do, and start thinking that they can use their client's money to communicate on this level when, in fact, they can't. What's worse is that they can get heated in meetings when more grounded people try to tell them otherwise. Circulating stuff like this is a fine way to rein them in gently.
I'm sure variations on this send-up are possible in any business that evaluates its own work according to generally obscure measures. It's just especially funny here, since it also uses stock-photography so well, which is a product of the same business, and a separate source of endless eye-rolling from people who have to work with it.
A big part of a marketer's job is projecting oneself into the role of a consumer. Jargon can become a distraction from understanding your audience, and this site is a healthy reminder of that.
Maybe not, but those things may still wield pretty heavy influence. Advertising is a strange world of subconscious desires and difficult-to-rationalize preferences (colors and shapes of buttons, for example).
The captions are hyperbolic and quite funny, but perhaps funnier is the fact that our unconscious brains do have these kinds of reactions (though muted, of course).
From an article I read the other day:
"The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q."
"This website's music is great, turn it up!" - LMAO!
The funniest part is that most of this stuff actually works: on message copy, brand structure (http://bit.ly/fmyD7T), the word "solution" has sold hardware for 3 decades, buzzwords like "social currency" causing enough confusion to get your attention, focusing on intent increasing conversions/revenue, font size increasing conversions, branded apps (REI ski report, Oakley surf report), website users love introspection, stock photos increasing conversion, focusing on benefits (value prop).
If anyone wants to see an incredible look into how Sigmund Freud's research was turned around to manipulate people into consuming more, then Adam Curtis' excellent The Century of The Self is available to watch here: http://thoughtmaybe.com/video/the-century-of-the-self
If you've never seen an Adam Curtis documentary before, this is a good one to start with. His style and delivery is unique among documentary filmmakers and is definitely worth a watch.
It's incredible to me that Sigmund Freud's research was turned around to actually accomplish anything--the guy was a pseudoscientific hack who did virtually everything wrong. (It wouldn't, however, surprise me that it was attempted.)
You can also buy Edward Bernays books Propaganda and Crystallizing Public Opinion for a very fair price on Amazon, though Propaganda at least isn't so great.
Also, a book written by Vance Packard at the height of 1950s advertising called "The Hidden Persuaders", if you can find a copy. All about 'motivational research' and how subconscious cues can be used to sell and persuade. Very interesting -- for example, how some customers liked extremely-strong-smelling soap because it provided them with the same type of 'defense' in a socially-accepted way that B.O. did.
I don't think the post was intended to say that advertisers
actually think that people talk or even think this way, I
think the post was to point out that often, marketers will
have a certain perspective on their product and try to
force that perspective onto its users. The reality is,
users don't care about your perspective. They only care
whether or not the product meets their needs.
In all seriousness though, humor used well for the right type of product is extremely effective. I can no longer find the source, but I read somewhere that the Old Spice Body Wash sales went up close to 100% when the Old Spice Guy commercials were running. My wife even bought some for me the next she went shopping after she saw the ad. She said it was just to reward them for the ad itself, then she decided she liked how it smelled and kept buying it for me, all because the ad was funny.
They wouldn't say it those terms, but they might very well think it or say it in other terms. You wouldn't say, "Holy shit! This call to action button is better" but you might want to click it more.
"I like the functionality, but it doesn't follow best practices."
or "Things Real People Don't Say About Science"
"These findings are compelling, but I'd like to see some corroborating studies in peer reviewed journals".
Any consumer facing industry is going to have a world of jargon that is inaccessible or ridiculous to the layperson. And similarly, these industries can support those who want to participate but don't have anything to add.
I don't see this as a jab at advertsising (although, it very well may have been intended as such) I see it as a jab at wannabes.
If you still don't believe me, try reading tech job postings...
[edit: typo]