Advertising done right

Vacuuming yesterday, I listened to Krista Tippett’s On Being conversation with Oliver Burkeman (as one does). It meanders delightfully, but touches at one point on the attention economy, how time spent on and around social media shapes not just the time spent there, but time later (as we think about what we’ve been exposed to, fit our thoughts or photos to the formats of these platforms, and so on).

Burkeman made the oft-raised point that these sites’ business models depend, first and foremost, upon your keeping your attention there. This made me think about advertising, both direct and indirect (indirect meaning the vast data broker economy, meant to make it possible to micro-target offerings to specific individuals, among other more worrying activities).

On Thursday night, I saw A Face in the Crowd with REEL Politics. It’s a film about many things, but of note for today is that it portrays both the on- and off-air world of 1950s TV advertising, a world where variety shows are interrupted for “a word from our sponsor”, when the host proudly downs a pill or sleeps on a mattress while reading from an approved script. Andy Griffith’s character doesn’t quite follow those scripts, and he’s a little too honest about the mattresses. This, you get the sense, was not par for the course in 1950s TV advertising.

Think instead of the ads you hear on some podcasts today. In some, the show cuts away to a recorded ad. In others, the host talks through a product’s virtues, maybe affirming that they themselves use and recommend the product. Paul Wells cited this need to be “[the advertiser’s] pitchman” when describing why he shied away from advertising, part of the reason he stopped regular production of The Paul Wells Show.

While TV and podcast ads are personalized in that they’re legitimized by the person delivering them, they’re generally not specific to you, the receiver, other than your interest in whatever TV program or podcast they’re on.

There’s been some wondering—though, classic, I struggle to find any good links in my feeds—about the inevitability of LLM providers introducing advertising to their products.

The lack of ads has been one of the high points in my occasional usage. Though I’m almost always running an adblocker anyway, the simple page design of an LLM response is refreshing in contrast to the busy design of many sites on the web. My most common use for LLMs (aside from coding) is when cooking: here are some ingredients, give me a few recipe options; handily, LLMs also offer options depending on your preferences. In contrast to recipe sites, which often wend their way through narrative with the goal of working a few affiliate links in, the few clear paragraphs and line items of an LLM response are a breath of fresh air.

It’s notable that these tools all do have some form of pricing, but the consumer model on the web still seems to favour “free, and sure, chuck some ads in my way”, and I’m not sure the companies behind these tools will resist those market forces. No doubt these ads will themselves be generated by LLMs—how else to make them as “personalized” as possible!?

I’ve resisted paying for LLMs so far—partly out of frugality, mostly out of principle—and am glad that there remains an ad-free alternative to my described use of LLMs: the cookbook. I made the excellent pancakes recipe from The Art of Simple Food, which already includes options based on what’s at hand. Other cookbooks I like in that spirit include The Everlasting Meal Cookbook and The Flavor Thesaurus, which inspire you to think in terms of the ingredients on hand.

I’ll end this by saying I don’t even think advertising is bad. I just think that data-driven, hyper-targeted advertising is hugely overrated. I don’t want it to be about me—I want it to be about the product.

It’s easy to advertise to me (my credit card statements would confirm it): make a product good enough for Lee Valley to carry it, and I’ll see it as soon as they add it to their online catalogue. (I’m sure some webmaster over on Morrison Drive scratches their head at the IP address that loads the “all new products” page multiple times a day.) Or it’ll appear in the epic Fine Woodworking Tools Catalog, and I’ll happily flip through it between tasks in the shop (perhaps the finest form of browsing).

This, to me, is the crux of good advertising: domain-specific (whatever you’re in to, be it woodworking, cooking, craft, etc), and written by people who actually know the products they’re selling. That’s advertising for which I’d sign up my attention.

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This newsletter remains proudly ad-free. On to the links!

Two heavier ones:

• The news this week was decidedly awful. On the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, I thought long and hard about John Gruber’s post about the bravery of bystander Caitlin Callenson, to keep filming (and move closer) even as a shooting unfolded in front of her.
• The power and impunity of the US extend well beyond its borders, as shown by the experience of sanctioned International Criminal Court justices. (via SB)

Some lighter ones:

• Dave Rupert writes about CSS’s new contrast-color() function that, given a colour input, returns white or black as the most accessible contrast colour (for, e.g., text over a background). He’s continued writing about it since—examples of modern CSS are absolutely wild to me, remembering as I do creating gradients and rounded corners with carefully placed… images.
• I only just learned about Library and Archives Canada’s completed ATI requests database, via Dean Beeby who provides some background on the tool. (In the GC, only LAC can do this easily, because historical documents are excluded from Official Languages Act requirements.) For one random fun find, see the circa 2005 TBS PowerPoint on spending restraint in the first few pages of A-2022-11055—so familiar, twenty years on!
• Paul Wells spoke with the ever delightful Stéphane Dion about the 2025/2026 flavours of sovereignty wars. Fellow Canadian politics nerds, let us never forget Dion’s “proportional-preferential-personalized” (“P3”) proposal for electoral reform (also available in archived form from Dion’s blog), iconic enough to be satirized by The Beaverton as “that dope ass one Stephane Dion likes”.
• Doug Wilson’s Linotype Book Project has been a delight to follow these past few years; the most recent issue covered his research at the Smithsonian. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wilson also has some great typography and design writing on his personal site.

All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas