Is Advertising a Means or an End?

Given that it is created to be noticed, it’s little wonder that advertising is one of the most visible business models. For some, it’s the way we learn about products and services, while for others, it’s tiresome and relentless.

Many years ago, Jeff Bezos described advertising as “the price you pay for having an unremarkable product or service.” For several years now, the product Bezos created, Amazon, has become the world’s largest advertiser by volume, which means either that Bezos decided at some point to contradict himself, or that Amazon is the world’s most unremarkable brand, even if it’s a household name on every continent.

The fundamental problem with advertising is that it’s both a means and an end. What is the end of a newspaper? Most people would say the purpose of a newspaper is to inform, to educate, and in some cases to express opinions or set an agenda.

But most newspapers depend on advertising to finance their activities, and given that advertising has low operating costs and high margins, we might ask when does a newspaper cease to be an informative medium and simply a succession of advertisements with some news stories in between?

Take the example of Spain, where the television advertising cake is mainly shared by two channels. Many of us must have wondered, during their interminable advertising breaks, if the sole the purpose of these companies is to squeeze as much advertising as possible into their daily schedule, and that the programs they broadcast are of secondary importance. Basically, that Atresmedia and Mediaset exist solely to torment us with advertising, and that if they could find a way (hypnotism?) to avoid having to generate or pay for content they generate, they would. Who gets paid more in those companies? Those who generate content, or those who sell advertising?

Reversing the means with the end is not uncommon. Amazon started out selling products and focused on putting their customer front and center. In fact it was so obsessive about it that the company claimed they would not make a decision without doing an A/B test, which consists of giving a sample of users two different versions of something (a page layout, a button, a color, etc.), and having those users vote with their mouse on which they preferred.

But now, the Amazon experience means searching through a jungle of ads paid for by companies to give their product greater visibility, even if its not what you’re really looking for. Amazon realized some time ago the money-making potential of advertising: with practically no operating costs all it generates is margin.

In other words, advertising, initially a means to finance its activities, has now reached the conceptual absurdity of becoming an end in itself: today, Amazon invoices $38 billion in advertising, more than the entire world press. You might think you go on to Amazon to buy something, but you don’t: you go on Amazon so that a bunch of advertisers can pay the company to give their products precedence, and Amazon makes a lot of money as a result.

I’d call it missing the point, but what would a business school professor with 30-plus years of experience know about these things? At some point, we’ll get fed up with the fact that there is no way to buy on Amazon without having to search through hundreds of irrelevant or bad products that we don’t want, and we’ll decide to buy elsewhere. And then, neither means nor ends: the fall will come.

Between means and ends, I know quite a few people who refuse to watch a movie or other content on free-to-air television because they cannot stand the constant advertising interruptions, which, in many cases, appear as if they had a drunken monkey hitting the pause button whenever he feels like it and without the slightest criterion or respect: clear proof that these television channels have confused means with ends.

Moreover, advertisers don’t give a damn about anything: they know we hate their ads, that we don’t watch them because we are tired or because we get up to pee, or that -as happens in online advertising- we block them. They have become so used to throwing money away and not knowing how much they really throw away, that they don’t care. They just do their job.

Is advertising a means or an end? I don’t know. But what I do know is that increasingly it’s lies and garbage.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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