The AdNews end of year Perspectives, looking back at 2024 and forward to next year.
Rupert Price, Chief Strategy Officer, DDB Group
The Macquarie Dictionary has just named their word of 2024. It’s ‘enshittification’.
First coined by the brilliant tech commentator, Cory Doctorow, the word is defined as:
noun Colloquial: the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.
There was a time when Facebook is where you went to connect with friends, where Google is where you went to find useful information, and when Netflix was where you went to enjoy great quality entertainment without having to pay an ever-inflating price.
Well dear advertising friends, these platforms have all been degraded by us. Yes, us. The over saturation of advertising is the primary reason why people are turning away from Facebook, no longer look to Google for objective information and either reluctantly upgrade to premium Netflix to avoid the ads or worse, switch off altogether.
Hang on I hear you say. This has always been the contract between advertisers, the media and the audience. The media brands build the audience by earning attention through the quality of their content, which has largely been advertiser funded. Nothing new here, this cosy arrangement goes from the present day right back to the widely distributed news sheets of the 17th century and probably long before that.
However, that ‘contract’ between the audience and brands has always been a respectful one. One where the advertiser has been responsible enough to know their place. Advertising always playing a supporting role to the editorial content, earning and rewarding attention where it can with ideas that seek to sell but through being engaging and entertaining. In return the audience would tolerate the advertising and sometimes even embrace it as a useful ‘value exchange’ as the selling message would be seductive and persuasive.
But as the word enshittification implies, that contract has been broken. Not just in online channels but pretty much across the entire media spectrum. The ‘quiet quitting’ of audiences away from platforms and channels is happening all around us because advertising has forgotten its place. Particularly aided through the acceleration of technology, advertisers have free reign to bombard and interrupt the audience at every conceivable moment. The audience is no longer respected as an audience but contemptuously treated as a captive market and is used and abused accordingly.
I was recently told by a very senior media executive, who shall remain nameless, that these days creativity needs only to be five out of t10, the speed and efficiency of the media exposure will do the rest. Is that what we as an industry aspire to now, five out of 10?!
There was a time when there was no distinction, all media was earned media and advertising aspired accordingly.
The end of 2024 should see the demise of third party cookies, (although I’ll believe it when I see it) and with it the opportunity for advertisers to beat an audience into submission, irrespective of how many times they’ve seen the message or whether they might even be interested in the first place. Unfortunately, we need to be controlled from our own reckless behaviour. Advertising is having the same effect as over generously dispensed antibiotics. The more the population is exposed, the more resistant that population becomes.
So I’m hoping 2025 proves to be the tipping point when we see a return to quality taking precedence over quantity and advertising learns and earns its rightful place once again.
Instead of prioritising speed or volume of exposure, we strive for earning more media attention but with less exposure. Let’s give the audience a break. And an ad break worth watching.
In 2025 let’s aim to introduce a new word to our vocabulary. Let’s make ‘enrichification’ our ambition and make ‘enshittification’ an aberration from a year gone by.
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