Earlier this month, I sat down with Wil Anderson: comedian and presenter extraordinaire of Gruen. In anticipation of the latest season of Gruen, we talked about everything digital media and advertising related, in a conversation spanning from the dangers of internet virality, to AI Deepfakes and everything else in between.
Sath Balasuriya (SB): Because access to the internet is so democratised, it’s easier than ever to make something go viral without big ad spend. How has it been seeing the rise of viral independent media take over the traditional ad landscape?
Wil Anderson (WA): We live in an infrastructure now where everyone can make something immediately viral and that is great. I think there are so many reasons why this shift has been such an exciting moment. But of course, that doesn’t mean that virality is completely amazing. It’s great when you get that kind of success, but you shouldn’t be handcuffed to it. The idea of audience capture when it comes to artists is something that I worry a lot about. Online artists start out doing a whole range of things and then, when one of their pieces go viral, they will lean into just repeating that one thing over and over again. I see a lot of young creatives falling into this trap in their early careers, at a time when they should be experimenting. What we’ve seen with viral media is it is successful until it is not. Suddenly, everyone’s attention will move onto something else and you’ve put all your attention on this one thing that no one is interested in anymore.
If we’re speaking about brands and how viral media has impacted their advertising, there’s this quote in advertising that “half of your advertising budget goes to waste but no one knows which half”. I think viral marketing goes a step further than that because the return on investment for this kind of marketing has the potential to look so intoxicating on a balance sheet. On Gruen this week we’re talking about Sydney Sweeney selling 5000 soap bars infused with her bathwater. What’s interesting with this whole thing is that the ad itself translated into a lot of earned media with such a cheap idea. People everywhere are now talking to each other about a bar of soap that they’ve never bought.
And for every viral ad like that, there’s thousands of companies with attempts up on YouTube that have 130 views. What we’re seeing across all platforms is that there is a very small percentage of top creators that do very well and a giant iceberg of people and companies underneath them who throw things onto a wall everyday in the hopes of it sticking. At this point, viral marketing hasn’t completely replaced the typical paid advertising done by big firms because it can be pretty hit or miss.
But with virality, I basically think what everyone else thinks about it. And that is that virality is an enormous power and it’s a massive, transformative power that’s been unleashed to everyone with a phone in their hand. We’ve seen this play out in real time in the media, like with Haliey Welch, the Hawk Tuah Girl going from viral meme to crypto pump and dump scheme in the blink of an eye.
But I do think we’re moving away from a space where viral marketing used to be about getting influencers with huge audiences to do crazy things. Now you’ve got companies like White Fox working with micro influencers that have less than 50,000 followers, because companies have seen that kind of marketing feels more genuine. It’s like you’re receiving an old school endorsement from a friend or a word of mouth instead of something more in your face.
SB: I think part of the reason why that kind of independent and user generated marketing is so alluring is because it’s perceived to be more authentic. Do you feel like this kind of marketing works so well because it rarely feels or looks like a traditional ad?
WA: One of the things that Russell Howcroft says on Gruen is that an ad should be forced to tell you that it’s an ad. So it makes sense that a lot of what we’re trying to achieve with this new kind of virality is that it doesn’t feel or look like an ad.
You might have noticed that during the election campaign there were a slew of politicians who were moving away from polished TV ads into doing TikTok livestreams where they were ironing from their living room and talking to their followers. But of course, if you listened to what they were saying the messages were still absolutely the same. What would have been dressed up in the gray, with the drone and the red stamp from Canberra was suddenly replaced with a new kind of ad that was equally as effective.
There’s the showbiz cliche that “if authenticity is what you need and you can fake it, you’ve got it made.” So in a lot of cases with advertising, what they’re trying to do is capture the authenticity of a real moment and that really sells. But also, we live in a world now where it is so difficult to tell what is real and what is not real. The internet is full of the kind of ‘oh look at this kind moment that happened in this supermarket’ slop that is clearly staged for internet virality. And as Deepfake technology gets easier to replicate and people start watching more of it without taking the time to figure out whether that’s actually Anthony Albanese speaking or an AI deepfake, that kind of issue is only going to get worse.
I think we’re generally living in an era where it’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s real and what’s not an ad from something that is. The ads and the editorials in the newspaper used to be separate from each other and the idea that one would be connected to the other was offensive when I was studying journalism. But now, the most successful business model for anything online is to publish the most sensationalised headline in hopes of getting clicks and selling ads, so it’s not something you can really escape.
And this is a bit unrelated, but if we take away an infrastructure where people get paid for their work and the only way they can get paid is through ads, you’ll start running into trouble. That’s why I’ve been committed to public broadcasting over the years even though other places would have been more lucrative. If you don’t fight for public broadcasting and places like it where people can go and make things that aren’t determined by whether advertisers can make a profit on it or not, then you’ll fall into the trap of assuming that good can only come if something can be sold.
SB: Are you worried that it’s getting harder to tell what’s educational and what’s entertainment nowadays?
WA: Oh, definitely. And I think a big reason this kind of mix up happens is because we no longer have a central source of information. We’re not even watching the same things at the same time anymore. People in my generation talk about TikTok and Instagram as if we’re all watching the same stuff on there, but you’re seeing something on TikTok that’s very different to what I’ve been seeing on TikTok and vice versa. There was a point where we would all sit down and watch the same thing and debate whether what we were seeing was true or not. But that’s just not the world we live in now. When there’s a show like Adolescence that’s in the public zeitgeist, you can form an opinion on it without even watching the thing, or without even knowing whether the people’s opinions you’ve consumed are true at all. And that happens because you’ve seen enough of other people talking about it to form a picture in your head.
The bigger issue is whether we’re about to live in a world where we can’t accurately tell anything real apart from what’s not real. And I think there’s an argument to be made that we’ve been living in this world for a few years now and are moving towards the AI apocalypse. There’s so much bad information on the internet nowadays that these large language models are training themselves on it, essentially eating their own shit and then trying to regurgitate that back as answers to our questions.
And as far as what this means for the ads? What I do know is that the oldest sales business in the world is snake oil. So, if there’s an opportunity for ads to take advantage of one of our fears or worries and sell us something totally bogus that we don’t need, they will do that. That’s why the majority of advertising you’ll see on your feed will be about your sore back or ‘take this and you’ll live to be 150’ kind of thing.
SB: Do you feel like those kinds of ads have accelerated us towards the point where the media environment is currently or are ads like them just a symptom of us heading down the slope with digital media in general?
WA: I think some people will argue it’s a symptom, but I won’t. I think you could make an argument that it’s one of the major causes of this whole shift. The only reason these kinds of ads and algorithms exist to track and collect data from us is to sell us something.
I was reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and one of the data collection teams written about in the book was bragging that they could identify when a teenager was having body image issues when they archived a photo of themselves. They would then offer the opportunity for companies to advertise products around body image at that exact moment when the kid was feeling vulnerable. They could track that kind of information and hand it over to ad companies.
We talk about this whole thing as if data collection is a symptom of this process and all the data and personal record collection we endure as if they were flaws of the modern design age. I think they all exist because of the advertising model. If we all paid for Facebook, none of these things would exist and the internet would probably be a lovely place.
I mean, if ads didn’t have to interfere with everything, then Google would still be a good search engine. Before Google, the ranking systems for search engines used to be pretty much nonexistent. So if you looked up ‘fish’ you would get results for anything related to fish. But Google came up with a system where they ranked the most relevant and credible results at the top of the feed. Of course, the thing that stopped it from being that was when Google started to offer the top ranking results to people who paid for them. Suddenly, you go to book a holiday in South Asia and you realise that all the top results are actually ads!
SB: So ads are pretty evil?
WA: Ha ha. Yeah, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell people for nearly 20 years.
Gruen Season 17 is now available on ABC iview
