Russell Davies describes the invasiveness of advertising as approaching its own “uncanny valley” in a Nov 2007 post on his blog, advertising practitioner:
It seems like we’re about to enter a period where our digital lives will be full of the online equivalents of those messages you find on your television when you check into a hotel; always welcoming someone who’s got a name a bit like yours. Never actually your name. And you wish they just hadn’t bothered, you wish they’d just issued a general, warm welcome and not tried to connect at a level they just didn’t really feel (because if they’d have really felt it they’d have made sure they’d have gotten your name right.)
This online marketing revolution is going to generate quite a lot of these creepy feelings. We’re going to be wondering how companies know so much about us, why they’re talking to us in such a familiar way and how come they get everything just slightly wrong. At this point we might find ourselves responding more favourably to those brands and advertisers that can master the compelling generalisation and the universal truth. We might remember that great communicators can connect with millions by knowing only one thing about us, that we’re all people.
The loss of boundaries between private and public is often felt as an uncanny threat to the ego. Here the paranoid sense that secrets have been uncovered by monolithic, nameless marketers — lurking behind the anonymous slush of daily messaging like ghosts — is described in a progressive way. I hope advertisers listen to this truth, while remaining sensitive to the dangers of overgeneralization (or “compelling generalisation and the universal truth”). Advertisers will still be seeking the transcendent signifier, the godlike omnipotence, that lends them supernatural power and psychic presence where they otherwise have none. Advertising cannot survive without the magic system in the 21st century, even when it is “on demand.”
