The TV Pilot Hoax of 1997

Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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11 Responses

  1. Dark Matter says:

    Part of it is scale. A one percent shift in sales is a HUGE number when we talking about national food companies big brands. Well worth hiring dozens of people to investigate how to do that.

    Another problem is they want to observe what you do without you knowing what answer they’re looking for because if you know that will affect your answers.

    The way they’d do it now days is they’d show different internet ads. You see ad “A”, so do 10000 other people, but 10000 others are shown ad “B”. Then they check your clicks. They also checkout whether they want to have the model wear a red dress rather than blue and whatever.

    There are lots of serious players paying serious money on this sort of thing.Report

  2. Burt Likko says:

    I guess the question is whether the use of internet-based marketing techniques has made things better or worse.

    Apparently pickle jars are a significant enough factor in selling pickles that it’s worth it to sink this sort of research effort into studying it, and like Dark Matter points out above, there are new ways of doing it that don’t involve the kinds of ruses that the OP describes. That won’t have changed. But now, the researcher can sponsor click-through ads and ask these questions in different ways (among other techniques).

    Is it better now? It’s probably more accurate. And less intrusive and deceptive than what the OP describes. So I’m tentatively saying “yes, it’s better now.”Report

    • InMD in reply to Burt Likko says:

      To me the question is better for whom. It’s certainly more seamless but I also wonder if it isn’t exacerbating the commodification of everything with negative cultural effects. I mean the great thing about this post is just how quaint the story is compared to things 25 years later. The company played a little trick to get Will’s opinion on pickle jars that one day in 1997 and then he disappeared never to be tracked or heard from again. Nowadays they’re putting a cookie on Will’s phone and mining data from ISPs and other third parties to find out his reaction to any pickle or pickle adjacent content for all eternity in hopes that maybe just maybe they can use that information to nudge saleals up a point or two. The former is kinda funny, while the latter feels downright dystopian.Report

      • LeeEsq in reply to InMD says:

        Amazon apparently made it impossible to search for kindle books from a list. Now everything in the Kindle store is recommended by the algorithm. If I want to browse for new history books on Amazon, I have to go into the book department, select history, past 30 days, and order by publication date. And I still get a lot of crap like podcasts or people trying to make money by republishing books in the public domain and literature marketed as history. This is a very recent change that seems to have started in December 2022 and I hate it.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

        You are greatly underestimating how intrusive it’s gotten.

        Companies understand that your buying is pretty much set in stone, i.e. what you buy this week will be the same as last week.

        However, there are times where your spending habits become fluid for a short period of time. Pregnancy is one of the big examples. Thus there is a LOT of value to knowing who is pregnant before everyone else does.

        Target put together an AI app which reviews the 20+ products associated with pregnancy. Not diapers, if they’re buying diapers then it’s too late. Things like vitamins and a bunch of “normal” stuff which if taken collectively mean something. They could identify a newly pregnant woman.

        They ran into problems sending baby related ads to women who hadn’t announced it. This seemed intrusive and offensive. And the parents of a pregnant teen who don’t know she’s pregnant could think Target was encouraging her to be pregnant.

        Their solution was to put the baby related ads next to ads for tires and chainsaw blades. If the ads look random then people don’t get offended.

        This was 10-20 years ago, if Target could do it then, ALL OF THEM can do it now.Report

        • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

          Believe me, I know all about it. My take is that it is still more a combination of intrusive and blunt rather than intrusive and smart, but that it’s getting smarter all the time.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    If a psych department was doing this on students, would this have made it past the ethics board?Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

      As a student, you can opt-out of “deceptive” experiments. I didn’t because they’re cooler.

      So imho it would have made it past the ethics board. Now they would have explained what they were really doing and why after the fact so there’s that.Report