Black Ops Advertising by Mara Einstein review – stealth marketing is everywhere
On the internet, advertising is the industry that dare not speak its name. A Facebook post is "suggested"; a tweet is "promoted" - they are ads. An article or video is "presented by" or "sponsored" - it's an ad. Even something as impressive as Felix Baumgartner's skydive from the edge of space in 2012 - that was an ad, paid for by Red Bull. The term "content" serves to blur lines - helpfully, from an advertiser's point of view - between what is advertising and what isn't.
Google's founders once wrote that any search engine that sold ads would be compromised; now it's the biggest advertising company on the planet. Your smartphone, media studies professor Mara Einstein says, is fundamentally an ad-delivery device. Advertising is everywhere. And yet, increasingly, we don't want to see it. We install ad-blockers because webpages are increasingly slowed down by waiting for intrusive adverts to be loaded from some distant server, and because we don't want to be tracked around the internet by shadowy companies that trade our personal data. But who does ad-blocking really hurt? Clue: not the advertisers.
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