On cesspools and how on the internet nobody knows you’re NOT a crook

23 October 2008 | Culture, Internet, Marketing, Media | Comments

[Cross posted with the iMedia blog.]

As a 40-year-old digital immigrant (I first learned to type on a typewriter, not a word processor) my life is so screen-centered that I tend to forget about printed magazines until it’s time to get on a plane. This week, before I zoomed cross country to our iMedia Financial Marketing Summit at New York’s Metropolitan Club, I picked up both Time and Newsweek, and found both covering the New York Public Library’s new “Not a Cough in a Carload: Images from the Tobacco Industry Campaign to Hide the Hazards of Smoking” exhibit, selections of which can be found online at tobacco.stanford.edu.

If you want to be horrified, skip this weekend’s “Saw 77: Jigsaw Battles Alzheimer’s Disease” and just take a look at the “Infants and Children” section of the magazine ads from the early 20th Century. The adorable Gerber baby saying, “Gee, Mommy, you sure enjoy your Marlboros” will haunt my sleep for a while. The images of doctors and athletes smoking are equally shocking.

Today, decades later, we have the Surgeon General’s Warning on every pack of cigarettes, ever-increasing nationwide bans on smoking in public places as well as lawsuit after lawsuit against tobacco companies. It only helps a little as youngsters continue to take up smoking and adults can’t bring themselves to quit, but at least the advertising makes fewer blatantly false pseudo-scientific claims.

So what does have to do with interactive advertising? Context, because not all that much has changed since those tobacco ads first ran.

I think that customers tend to be suspicious of all advertising, and if you happen to be a smart, decent, truthful advertiser online or off you have to remember that most folks don’t distinguish between you and the spammer selling Cialis or still peddling cheap mortgage re-fi. Many customers can’t tell the difference between white hats and black hats because it’s so cheap to build a website that it levels the playing field for all comers. In big media, for somebody to lie in :30s required the gobs of money usually reserved for auto launches and presidential campaigns.

Furthermore, the fact that these old tobacco ads are from magazines doesn’t really matter because these days many magazine ad have URLs at the bottom, leading customers to click to a website that probably looks authoritative because that’s easy and cheap to make. For example, is anybody other than me disturbed that the Corn Refiners Association is taking out :30s on late-night cable defending high-fructose corn syrup after a battery of bad press and exposes like Fran Kaufman’s wonderful book Diabesity? Those late-night spots link boldly to a website, SweetSurprise.com (they didn’t spring for the .org for some reason) that reminds me chillingly of the tobacco ads of yore.

Earlier this month, Google CEO Eric Schimdt referred to the internet as a “cesspool” where lies and misinformation grow like kudzu next to southern highways. Schmidt was addressing magazine executives and asserting that traditional, expensive, trusted media brands like magazines are what will help customers navigate the cesspool.

Part of me hopes that Schmidt is right, but most of me worries that he is wrong and that increasingly we as customers and citizens will have no trustworthy information source to turn to in these days of ever-increasing quantity and ever-uncertain quality when it comes to information, news and advertising.

But of course, we can always simply look forward to the Superbowl spots next February. Personally, I’m going to the New York Public Library next time I’m in the city.