The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 22: The Lying Press

Mike Isaacson: Lügenpresse!

[Theme song]

Nazi SS UFOs Lizards wearing human clothes Hinduism’s secret codes These are nazi lies

Race and IQ are in genes Warfare keeps the nation clean Whiteness is an AIDS vaccine These are nazi lies

Hollow earth, white genocide Muslim’s rampant femicide Shooting suspects named Sam Hyde Hiter lived and no Jews died

Army, navy, and the cops Secret service, special ops They protect us, not sweatshops These are nazi lies

Mike: Welcome to another episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. Today, we're talking about the lying press with Jonathan Hardy, professor of communications and media at the University of Arts, London. His most recent book, Branded Content: The Fateful Merging of Media and Marketing, explores the world of branded content, particularly native advertising or sponsored content–longform marketing copy made to look like news items. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Hardy.

Jonathan Hardy: Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here.

Mike: It's great to have you. So I'm really excited to talk about marketing with you because that's the industry I'm in now, and I do have some ethical issues with some of the techniques that we use. Now I write in the B2B space, selling services to business owners and officers, so I don’t super have a problem with what I do–you know, manipulating business owners into buying things.

So reading your book, what comes up again and again is that most of these marketing techniques aren’t new, but the digital age has made them more invasive and persistent. Can you talk a bit about how digitization has changed the advertising world?

Jonathan: Sure. Well, it's done so definitely in a great many ways but I'll talk about some key ones that really relate to the work I've been doing on branded content. In the 20th century, through most of the 20th century, we had a model that I call advertising integration with separation, which means that the advertising appeared in the same vehicles as media.

When you looked at a magazine or a newspaper, you turned the page and it’s editorial, you turn the page, it's advertising. Or the adverts that appeared between programs on television and radio. So we had integration, but often some quite strict rules and strict practices that kept advertising and media separate.

So what we're seeing in the digital age is an intensification of two tendencies which face in opposite directions. One is towards integration, so advertising getting baked into media content and integrated with it; product placement all the way through to influencer marketing, branding content and so on. But the other trend is disaggregation, advertising getting decoupled from media. Because essentially in the digital age, advertisers didn't need–as some of them put it–to pay the premium prices to put their ads in media content. They could track users around the internet. So these are trends going in opposite directions obviously, right? One is about integration, the other one is about disaggregation.

But I argue that they have one really common power, which is that they indicate the growing strength of marketers over media. Media that rely on advertising revenue are having to become more and more dependent, satisfying advertisers who want to integrate their content so that people will engage with it. And they're also desperate because of these other trends of losing ad revenue coming from disaggregation to kind of, again, appeal as much as they can. So what we're seeing is a strengthening of marketer power in the digital age.

Mike: So my intention with this episode was to give a deep dive into how things like the Cambridge Analytica scandal could have happened. To start, let’s get some technical details. We’re talking mostly about inbound marketing today. So before we get into advertising techniques and stuff, what is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?

Jonathan: Sure. Well, I'll talk about that, Mike. But we should acknowledge there's some confusion here, because these terms are not always used to talk about the same things.

I think one really valuable aspect is this idea of push and pull, right? If you're pushing out messages, this is known as outbound marketing. You're sort of pushing your message out to reach people. If you on the other hand create great content that people come to you for to engage with, that's pulling. And that's known as inbound. So, so far, so good. That makes sense to me.

But this is used in other ways too, and I think that illustrates actually a broader point which is that marketers, not surprisingly, are often in a competitive struggle to be on the side of the new and the innovative, and not the old and the tired. So some versions of inbound and outbound marketing I think get a bit problematic here. Because outbound in some versions is kind of associated with scattergun marketing. Right? The opposite of inbound as highly targeted aiming at particular people.

And I don't really buy that. You know, marketers sometimes talk about spray and pray, for instance, you know? Chucking out messages. But quite honestly, most of the time modern marketers don't do that because they can't afford to do that. So I don't really buy the argument that outbound is untargeted. I think that's misleading.

What's a bit more helpful from all of this, and actually quite a crucial issue, is if you like the challenges for a thing called push marketing. The challenge is when people are not engaging with traditional advertising forms and pushing them out, and the need to come up with more engaging content; either because it's more entertaining or it's more informative. And I think that aspect of inbound is important.

Mike: So when it comes to inbound marketing, it’s all about the buyer journey or the marketing funnel. Can you talk a bit about the theory behind the marketing funnel?

Jonathan: Yeah, sure. I often test this out on students, but if you were studying advertising in the 20th century, you might have come across a model called AIDA, which was a mnemonic, helps you remember some important fundamentals.

AIDA stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. And it kind of summed up this idea of what's called in modern terms, a marketing funnel or a customer journey. Sort of how if you're a brand, people start off with awareness and then become more interested and motivated all the way up to purchase. That's essentially what the marketing funnel means.

Just to relate it to branded content for a moment, it was often argued in the past that brands branded content, which means content that's produced or funded by brands, was particularly associated with that early stage–building brand awareness.

But if you speak to people in the industry, they say it's not really true. Branded content is the content that serves people right across the customer journey. So if you think someone becomes more interested and they want to find more information about the product, for example, I think they're right and I think that's–

We're often thinking about a new world where brands are involved in kind of thinking, "What are the information needs? What are the communication needs of consumers at every point?" And engaging with it. And amongst other things, that's breaking down some old divisions between what we might call advertising and customer services. And as an academic, I'm really interested. I'm critical of a lot of what's going on, but I'm interested in how that speaks to a changing world and convergence across communications.

Mike: Where I work, we definitely use branded content across the buyer journey and we use different kinds of content for different points along the journey. So for instance, we do more informative content for when you're in the awareness stage. Whereas when you're in the purchasing stage, we hit you more with salesy content. Because that's the point where you're trying to just hear about the benefits and decide upon a final product.

Jonathan: Yeah exactly.

Mike: Can you talk a little bit about the software that's used to track customers? Because that's something that I don't think most people are aware about, the CRM software.

Jonathan: Yeah. CRM means customer relations management software. Some of your listeners might be aware of software like Salesforce, which tracks relations between a company and its clients, or including its prospects. So yeah, customer relations management is a huge area.

One of the things I looked at interestingly was the annual reports of what are called the holding companies. These are the really big groups that own advertising agencies and PR agencies. And they've been in a battle for survival and for their presence in companies, and they're often fighting alongside companies like Accenture who are offering companies all sorts of other data services.

So it's a kind of interesting world in which the traditional advertisers are maneuvering to cover more ground because that ground’s becoming more and more important to companies. And definitely, all the data around customers and other people in the chain is a really important battleground for these firms.

Mike: Okay, and we'll talk a bit about what gets fed into the CRM in a bit. So the company I work for, we do exclusively owned media and digital ads, pretty much all inbound with an occasional email campaign here or there. But there’s other forms of digital advertising, too. Let’s start by talking about what owned media is. What do advertisers mean when they talk about owned media?

Jonathan: Okay. This is content that's produced and published by the brand or the marketer themselves. It's got a really long history. In the United States at the en