Hi, friends!
Have you had a situation lately where all you could think was where did they find the audacity to do that?
I keep seeing a fuckton of Estee Lauder ads in my Facebook feed. It’s fine. Makeup ads are fine. I’ll take them over other shit that I’d prefer not to burn my retinas seeing.
However.
It’s an endless parade of “get ready with me” iNfLuEnCeR videos with women in their late teens and early twenties slapping on the Estee Lauder. The audacity!
Estee Lauder is makeup you age into. Politely, it’s for “mature skin.” If I were to need good foundation that has high coverage and doesn’t settle into wrinkles etc for those of us over the age of 35 but still have oily skin, I’d buy theirs. In fact I wore the shade 2N1 desert beige back when I still wore foundation a few years ago. I can wear it at 40 and it works great. I could wear it at 60 and it would still be decent. Because their formula is not designed for babies with perfect smooth skin already.
The audacity though, to have women who are too young to be their target audience just pisses me off. The audacity! Like I’m not saying I want Judi Dench in a commercial, but you know what? Having someone who actually isn’t 23 with perfectly clear smooth skin be in their ad? Yeah, I’d definitely prefer that.
Ad targeting is not nearly as scientific as the tech bros want people to believe. They do inventory dumps all the time where they need to get impressions to meet a contract, so they just start manufacturing data categories and slapping them on personal profiles retroactively to claim that they’re meeting demographic guarantees.
Ad buyers don’t care because their own metrics are so fudged they know they’ll never be caught. Their job is just to place ads, not sell actual units, and impenetrable metrics make it impossible to prove they aren’t doing their jobs.
In the old days companies advertising in Vogue could at least know most of the readers were women and they could see the zip codes of paid subscribers. Now somebody who goes to Facebook has no idea what is happening, and marketing departments are often perfectly fine with that.
Some areas still have really targeted vectors though. Your cable providers? Yeah they know everything selected through those cable boxes and how often etc etc and can marry it up to demographic data for such detailed ad targeting if desired.
They collect giant amounts of data but they turn around and manipulate it to fit whatever they need to sell ad space.
If an advertiser wants to reach 5,000 urban women from 25-30 and an income between $60K-$100k, but they have empty space on a hunting channel, they’ll make the numbers work rather than lose the sale.
Sixteen years ago we lived in a godawful rent-stabilized walk-up tenement. I had an office in Midtown to which I often had mail sent, because the USPS delivery in my neighborhood was so shitty. But that tenement was in what became an incredibly hot zip code so suddenly (remember, there was a lot more print around) what made it through, to the apartment and to my office, were any number of high-end catalogs and free-to-me magazines and indy newspapers.
Then we moved and I left my job. The apartment I have now is indescribably better than what we suffered through, much bigger, assessed for more money than I thought I would ever see in my life, but it’s in a “transitional” zip code. Now I live on Tobacco Road. Forget about the print products drying up. Even my online ads reflect my ISP’s zip code info I guess? Saves me a lot of money, or temptation anyway. Goodbye, Prada fall catalog; hello JC Penney women’s clearance rack! (And I will say, as a big guy who could stand to lose a little weight, if I ever took to wearing women’s clothing, I would order online from JC Penney and take my chances. Some of the stuff is somehow both cute and age-appropriate.)
When my son was around nine or ten he briefly had some Minecraft group he ran. He never tried to pose as anything other than a bunch of kids playing the game online.
Minecraft’s demographics are overwhelming young kids. And yet for years there have been financial institutions and credit cards including Amex which have been sending direct mail solicitations – big, glossy, high cost per unit pieces – to a group that disbanded a decade ago looking for applications for cards and loans.
The zipcode demographics here don’t even match somewhere like the Upper East Side. But that didn’t stop the efforts to market to this group that had every indication it couldn’t possibly be a candidate for any of the services they were selling.
After the good voters in the state brightersider and I call home finally decided to follow Peter Tosh’s advice and “legalize it,” I got a couple of mailers from the local upstart dispensary chain. I’m planning to pay my first visit there tomorrow . . . to get some CBD cream for my mom, who just got her hip replaced today.
I use a nice cbd+thc lavendar scented cream that I got at the CBD Kratom store in Tower Grove. Great for my arthritis and tendonitis.
My instagram ads are HONED IN. I almost never get an ad for something that isn’t at least slightly related to something I’d click/have clicked or something I would buy/have bought. Facebook however? You’d never know they were the same company. The ads/spon posts on my FB feeds are like a space alien is in charge. Utter nonsense, and I don’t have the “targeted ad” thing turned off, though at this point I might as well since I get stuff for tourism to Texas, farm equipment, pharmaceuticals, and sports. The ads on FB are sometimes slightly weird and sexual? They remind me of the pop ups you’d get in the 90s. “Are there centipedes in YOUR vagina?” type stuff.
Just to be clear when I say makeup ads are fine even though I get annoyed at the younguns wearing the middle aged brands, here’s some examples of other ads that I get and hate:
I find (like a lot of women and gay men) the concept of a single dad to be alluring. Here is this guy nurturing the bébé. BUT I have heard from (straight, female) friends who have tried this that inevitably it turns into a really bad remake of “Rebecca” and the first wife, whether alive or dead, becomes, in Princess Diana’s memorable words, “the third person in the marriage.” And then there’s the resentful child(ren), who can cause no end of misery.
I don’t know about single dads on other dating apps, but the one advertised on facebook is inevitably some good ol’ country boy in his 40s who looks like he wants a bang maid and babysitter.
Bang maid! That’s a phrase I’m going to have to remember, but I can’t imagine when I’d ever say or write it.
I only learned it a few months back and I was like ahh that’s a new one but I immediately know what it means.
It really is a good one. I see it a lot on AITA posts, it is a RECURRING THEME.
I just saw on the news they busted a makeup theft ring in our area. I didn’t know that was a thing but when I tried to find a link, a bunch of other arrests popped up. I’ve been getting scam texts lately, today was an unknown number saying “hey, you said we should play golf sometime…”. I play golf once a year in a tournament w/ close family & friends so I have literally never said that to anyone! Delete & block.
My data was in that recent AT&T data breach despite me not being an AT&T cell customer for close to a decade. There’s definitely been an increase in spam texts since then.
I didn’t even think about all the data breaches. I just figured someone sold my info or robo-text but that’s probably it.
My spam calls/texts always go up in the run up to an election. I am even getting GOP texts (so is my dad on his landline). He got a pro-Trump call that asked him if he’d vote for Trump a “3rd time” and he said “I didn’t vote for that incompetent prick the first time *CLICK*“
Here’s something I just read that, 40 years on, was like a beam of sunlight piercing the cloudy fog that is my mental process:
“backdoor manipulation”? Get me rewrite!
Wasn’t that basically how R. Lee Ermey explained it to Stanley Kubrick after he improvised that one line in Full Metal Jacket. . . ?
Historians have wondered how long it took for the press to figure out J. Edgar Hoover was gay. Obviously nobody would have dared to say it directly, and would have been forced to used coded language.
Apparently the first known example of code to appear in print was all the way back in 1933, about nine years after Hoover started running the FBI. And so began all of the references to “dedicated bachelor” and “man devoted to his mother” which followed him as he mercilessly persecuted other gay men until his death 39 years later.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/09/how-colliers-suggested-j-edgar-hoover-was-gay-back-in-1933.html
I’ll have to check this out.
You know what was an amazing movie was Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar,” starring Leo diCaprio. I urge everyone to see it, whether the name J. Edgar Hoover repulses you or not.
He just really liked the way his calves looked in those pumps.