Tedium - The Art Of Annoyance 😒

Today in Tedium: This is nothing new if you’ve tapped into a streaming service like Hulu recently, but ads can overwhelm you with their loudness, something people find annoying enough to fill up the Federal Communications Commission’s inbox. This has been a problem for years, one that was so bad that a straight-up law, the CALM Act, passed in the early 2010s to address it. Unfortunately, streaming services have cropped up since then aren’t covered by the law, and have largely nullified the gains of the CALM Act. And that means, when you watch a show like The Bear, you are likely to get taken out of the moment by an annoying ad. It is, in fact, designed to do this. Annoyance is an excellent advertising strategy, a fundamental one even. Today’s Tedium talks about the relationship between advertising and annoyance. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s GIF comes from an episode of Late Night With Conan O’Brien, which had a one-time character named Barry Caldwell, the guy who wants you to know that he is not annoying. He doesn’t live up to the name.

The computer that led DEC to spam hundreds of ARPANET users. (Wikimedia Commons)

The first marketing message on ARPANET really pissed off a lot of people

In many ways, advertising is always meant to be a distraction. An intentional one, even. After all, just think about how billboards work, for example. In their most effective setting, they represent focal points in a sea of dead space, commanding your attention because you are a captive audience, insisting on being right there, not even asking for permission in the equation.

They know you’re stuck. If you’re in a classroom and Channel One News starts playing, you should know that you’re committed to watching, even if the ad for Twix annoys you. And unless you want to pay for YouTube Premium or subscribe to a premium feed, know that most videos have some sort of ad in them, mildly frustrating you.

But what if you’ve never experienced such a mild frustration or distraction before? What if you used a medium where you never before experienced the annoyance of advertising? What would that feel like?

In 1922, as NPR reports, New York’s WEAF (now WFAN) played a short promotion for the Hawthorne Court Apartments in Jackson Heights, representing the first-ever advertisement in a broadcast medium. It was the idea of AT&T, which owned WEAF at the time, and had developed much of the station’s infrastructure (using its Long Lines coaxial cable service) with the idea of advertising in mind, a concept the company called “toll broadcasting.”

AT&T eventually sold the radio station to the modern-day NBCUniversal. The ads stayed, and eventually moved to NBC’s next broadcasting medium, television.

The first ad on that medium after the FCC allowed them, a commercial for the Bulova watch brand, appeared in July 1941 on an NBC affiliate in New York, and cost a mere $9 (equivalent to $192.29 today). The message, aired during a baseball game, was simple: “America runs on Bulova time.”

A commenter on YouTube on this ad nailed down the mindset we collectively have towards advertising perfectly: “I'm sure back then people thought that ad was too much.”

At the time, TV producers barely knew what they were doing, and television didn’t really support pre-recorded ads at the time. None of the tricks and tactics that shape modern advertising had been set, so instead we experienced ads in this very plain, simplistic format for a bit. (World War II also slowed television’s entrance into the market—in the U.K., for example, the BBC’s television service was off for nearly seven years. Imagine if that had happened to the internet.) Television ads didn’t hit their stride until at least the 1960s.

But what about the digital medium? What was the first ad to appear there? There have been many claimants over the years, but the one that feels like the most obvious choice appeared in 1978, when Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) decided to share the details of its new DEC-20 machine, which had built-in ARPANET support, with users on the service.

The ad was a disaster. While well-written, and essentially an announcement of a product demo rather than a hard sale, the message was sent essentially as a mass-mailing into a system that could not support such a thing, as longtime software developer and onetime EFF chair Brad Templeton wrote in a post on his website. The message, with hundreds of intended recipients, was intended to go so many places that the message did not get sent to the entire list. (Sending through a mailing list to avoid such awkwardness was possible, but they didn’t use that function. Oops.)

And people were upset. Major Raymond Czahor, the Chief of the ARPANET Management Branch, underlined his annoyance as such: “THIS WAS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE USE OF ARPANET AS THE NETWORK IS TO BE USED FOR OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ONLY. APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.”

(In case you found that passage annoying: At the time, all-caps messages were kind of a given. You’re applying modern norms to a 44-year-old message.)

But the thing is, advertising always has had the power to annoy, even in its most basic forms. The problem is, advertisers didn’t rest on their laurels. They got more sophisticated.

There may be content under those ads, but we’re having trouble seeing it. (via Pixabay)

The id of the annoying ad

Here is the challenge with advertising of all kinds: If it doesn’t annoy or frustrate you, it may have zero effect at all. In other words, those distracting Taboola links are not frustrating or annoying by accident.

If anything, it requires them to be even more annoying than usual—an effort to twist the phrasing and suck you in just a little bit more on each read.

In the late 1990s, a movement of sorts coalesced against advertising as a concept, often with an anti-consumerist bent. The two key elements of the movement, the publishing empire Adbusters and the Naomi Klein book No Logo, each concerned themselves with the inherently manipulative nature of advertising, particularly the long-term damaging effects it has, and how spending on ads is constantly on the rise. As Klein wrote in No Logo:

This pattern is a by-product of the firmly held belief that brands need continuous and constantly increasing advertising in order to stay in the same place. According to this law of diminishing returns, the more advertising there is out there (and there always is more, because of this law), the more aggressively brands must market to stand out. And of course, no one is more keenly aware of advertising's ubiquity than the advertisers themselves, who view commercial inundation as a clear and persuasive call for more-and more intrusive-advertising. With so much competition, the agencies argue, clients must spend more than ever to make sure their pitch screeches so loud it can be heard over all the others. David Lubars, a senior ad executive in the Omnicom Group, explains the industry's guiding principle with more candour than most. Consumers, he says, "are like roaches—you spray them and spray them and they get immune after a while."

So, if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid. And nineties marketers, being on a more advanced rung of the sponsorship spiral, have dutifully come up with clever and intrusive new selling techniques to do just that.

Essentially, advertisers must continually shift gears, or the ads threaten to lose relevance.

Sometimes, these changes don’t come across as clever, but annoying. Ads show up in increasingly invasive places—as Klein noted at the time of No Logo, they started showing up in places like envelopes for unrelated products, on pieces of fruit, or even by pumping scents into movie theaters, invading every part of life in the process.

And it’s worth noting that Klein wrote what she did before the extremely invasive nature of online ads became a problem. In fact, at the time No Logo came out, the ultimate kind of ad-based annoyance was emerging—the pop-up ad. Much like the Bulova watch ad, the roots of the pop-up ad were modest and simple, but easy to explain in context. Ethan Zuckerman, in 2014, wrote in The Atlantic about how his goal with this invention, developed while he was at Tripod, was brand safety, not audience exploitation:

At the end of the day, the business model that got us funded was advertising. The model that got us acquired was analyzing users’ personal homepages so we could better target ads to them. Along the way, we ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: the pop-up ad. It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content. Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.

The reason why the pop-up ad (and later, the targeted ads) became a serious problem for the internet ultimately points to diminishing returns—almost exactly as Klein described it in No Logo.

The use of pop-ups seemed aggressive, but at the time they first came about they were actually somewhat rare, per CNET reporting of the era, which put their total percentage at 2 percent of online advertising impressions. (Helping: Browser makers took steps to minimize such ads where they could.) But despite limited impressions, their aggressive nature made them an outsize weapon of annoyance. And as a result, they burned out pretty quickly, to the point where pop-up blockers became more common than pop-up ads.

The story arc of the pop-up ad is really the story of online advertising in general: First, it started with the need to make money. The publisher saw a way to fund the site they run by just adding these pop-up ads. Then the advertiser saw success. But slowly, the effective thing became a victim of its own success. End users started complaining. “What have you done for me lately?” questions emerged from the publisher. Then, the advertisers moved onto something else that was even worse, like video ads or chumboxes. And when those stopped working, they went for the next thing.

Where’s the limit? Mobile game ads seem to suggest there may not be one. Often built as roadblocks that you cannot avoid, intended to get you to tap in the wrong place, and leading to a clear lack of trust, these ads are arguably worse than anything you’ll see on a web browser. Recently, they’ve been the subject of an annoying trend: Ads that do not actually match the content of the real game. While they’ve been banned in some countries, they persist, to the point where a parody of said fake games came out and went viral.

They don’t care if it’s annoying or basically lying to you. They just want you to buy the thing and buy it again once you’re done with the first thing you bought.