Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about advertising.
I run a few small businesses, so this started as a very practical question:
If I don’t advertise on Facebook or Instagram, how will anyone know my businesses exist?
And then I started thinking about how strange that question actually is.
In the old days, businesses advertised on television, in newspapers and magazines, on buses, billboards and walls. They handed out flyers. People walked past shops. Someone told a friend about a restaurant. You wandered through a market and found something you weren’t looking for.
It was a much more local world.
Then the internet arrived, followed by smartphones and social media, and suddenly discovery became global.
I can make something in Taiwan or New Zealand and someone on the other side of the world can see it, like it and buy it.
That is incredible.
But something else changed at the same time.
We don’t always have to go looking anymore.
Things find us.
Ads follow us from one website to another.
Instagram notices what we stop scrolling for.
Google knows what we searched yesterday.
Platforms learn what kind of clothes, homes, food, travel and art we seem to like, and give us more of it.
Something appears on my screen.
I think, Oh, I like that. Then I search for it. And technically, I am now actively searching.
But I keep wondering about the step before that.
- Would I have searched for it if it had never been shown to me?
- Would I have wanted that bag?
- Would I have known that interior style was “me”?
- Would I have travelled to that café?
- Would I even have known what words to type into the search bar?
And I find this particularly interesting because I am on both sides of it.
As a consumer, I don’t necessarily want an algorithm deciding what I discover.
As someone building a business, I desperately need people to discover what I make.
So perhaps my marketing question isn’t simply Where should I advertise?
Maybe it is: How do people discover things now?
And how much of discovery is still something we do ourselves?
I don’t have an answer yet.
But I find myself missing the idea of stumbling across something.
There have never been more things available to us.
But increasingly, we don’t have to find them.
They find us.
And I wonder what that is doing to the things we choose.
And then, of course, there is the irony of writing all of this here.
I’ll post this article. I’ll share it on Instagram and Facebook. Somewhere along the way, an algorithm might decide to put it in front of you.
And I suppose, in my own small way, I’m hoping it does.
I hope that somewhere between the posts, the ads, the searches and the scrolling, you find me.