From a Common Culture to an Audience of One

This is not hyperbole: beginning from the middle of the 20th century, the nuclear family is no more. Fragmented into itty bitty pieces.

There's no more family breakfast table ... who has the time? Barely even a family dinner table: Dad's answering email, Mom's checking her phone. One kid's watching YouTube, another waits for a pizza from DoorDash.

You know it, I know it.

I can point to a myriad possible reasons for this fragmentation. Economics ... divorce ... mobility ... changing social attitudes ... well-meant but poorly-conceived government policies ... workplace transformation. These all played their part.

But over a decades-long career in advertising and marketing, I've noticed another parallel development, though I still can't decide which is the chicken and which is the egg:

The evolution of mass media as shaped by advertising.

When the family was a media unit

Back in the fabled 1940s and '50s, the family was not just a social unit. From an ad agency perspective it was a media unit. Each member of the family consumed virtually the same content, because the media then were designed that way.

Magazines, for example, would be read by everyone.

Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post were for the entire family. Here were articles about homemaking for Mom ... technology and business for Dad ... cartoons and puzzles for the kids ... fiction and features for everybody. The whole family could find something of interest between those covers.

That mattered, because such magazines not only reflected the family's common interests, they reinforced them, giving people things to share and discuss. A father might read an article about some new invention and explain it to his kids. A mother might share a recipe or household idea with dad, kids or friends. Everyone might read the same story, or laugh at the same cartoon.

Each member had a clear view into the world of every other ... the world they shared. So the media did not just describe a common culture. They helped cement one.

LIFE and LOOK offered Americans a window into the lives and events of their fellow citizens, celebrities and national leaders. They could take you into a Hollywood dressing room ... a presidential office ... or some remote corner of the world. There was drama, certainly, but very little of the manufactured outrage that passes for journalism now.

We looked, we wondered, sometimes we marveled ... then we passed the magazine to a neighbor. Or took it to school, to show.

TIME and Newsweek brought us not just the news, but thoughtful analysis.

True, there were a few specialist magazines. Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, National Geographic and the many housekeeping and home magazines had specific audiences, but their appeal was still relatively broad. A handful were based on ethnicity.

How Madison Avenue split the audience

Then Madison Avenue began asking perfectly reasonable questions: Why advertise a woman's product in a magazine that was read by 50 percent men? Equally, why advertise a man's product in a magazine whose audience also embraced so many women and children?

From the standpoint of media efficiency, this was a brilliant question. But from the standpoint of social cohesion, it may have been a rather more consequential one.

The advertising business has always been disturbed by waste. "Waste circulation" is a wonderfully bloodless phrase for people who are not potential customers. If you were selling makeup, you didn't particularly want to pay for a half million husbands who had zero interest in using it. Likewise, if you were selling piston rings (yes, that was a thing) you didn't want to blow half your budget reaching ladies who had never seen a driveshaft and had no desire to start now.

The solution that evolved was this: find some way to specifically target those people individually. So media became increasingly specialized.

Magazines directed at women now sharpened their identities. Redbook, Harper's, Cosmopolitan and others defined themselves around readers with more personal interests. Men had their publications too: sports fans ... car enthusiasts ... hunters ... golfers ... every subculture now had their own.

Eventually, almost every conceivable interest would have its own publication.

This was the start of what we marketers would eventually call segmentation. Then targeting. Then personalization. Then behavioral targeting. Then "one-to-one engagement."

The terminology changed. The basic idea did not: Find the individual ... Learn what thing the individual wants ... Put a message in front of the individual ... Sell the individual that thing ... Measure the response. But now, do it all for less spend.

Media fragmenting was extraordinarily effective. But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and this reaction prompted its share of cultural consequences.

Whether these consequences were intended or unintended, I cannot say. Choose: chicken or egg. Did we (do we) marketers merely reflect cultural changes, or do we help to drive them?

The more precisely we market to individuals, the less necessary it becomes for the population as a whole to share the same media, the same information, the same interests, or even the same version of reality.

From cable to the algorithm

The trend is clear.

Just as the old family magazine was displaced by a collection of specialized magazines, those publications were in their turn displaced by specialized TV channels.

Television had begun as the ultimate mass medium. There were only three networks and a handful of local channels, so millions of Americans watched the same programs. The entire family would gather around the television after dinner and watch their favorite shows.

But the economics of television eventually produced the same pressure toward segmentation. Why sell to everybody when you can sell to a particular demographic?

In a relatively short span of time (beginning with a trickle in the 1970s) Cable TV produced channels for sports ... news ... history ... cooking ... children ... music ... shopping ... and just about every other human preoccupation.

Cable didn't just give us more choices. It began the process of separating audiences into smaller and smaller tribes. Because now it was the media business that discovered something the advertising business had already taught them: people are easier to sell to when you know who and where they are.

Then along came the internet, and the game changed once again. More sharply this time.

At least the old mass media had required us to occupy the same general cultural neighborhood. But now the World Wide Web gave every person a direct line to his or her own media universe.

Today, Google knows what you are looking for. Amazon knows what you buy. Netflix knows what you watch. Facebook knows who you know. YouTube knows what you watched at 11:47 last Tuesday and has a pretty good idea what it should show you next. TikTok may know what catches your interest, even before you do.

On top of all that, streaming now allows you to curate your very own, exclusive, unique, personal, only-one-of-its-kind media channel. Just for you. Alone.

And the algorithm finds you, and sells to you.

This is marketing's great triumph. And perhaps its greatest irony.

We spent decades learning how to identify the individual consumer. Then we built a media environment in which the individual consumer no longer had to encounter very many other people at all.

The family audience became the demographic audience; the psychographic audience. Algorithms then narrowed those to an audience of one.

As national attention drifted from the family toward the individual, and People magazine peaked, I used to joke that the next magazine would simply be called Me. Sure enough, something remarkably close appeared. It arrived online, and it was called Myspace.

Then came Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and a seemingly inexhaustible parade of platforms whose business models depend upon keeping each of us separately engaged with a customized stream of material calculated to hold our attention.

The cleverness of the system is almost impossible to deny. And the marketing logic is impeccable.

But here's the problem: a society cannot easily maintain a common culture when everyone lives inside their own personalized media bubble.

Self-absorption wasn't invented by Madison Avenue; the human appetite for vanity, status and self-regard is considerably older than the copywriter. But advertising did become extraordinarily good at identifying, stimulating and monetizing those impulses.

"Treat yourself" ... "Because you're worth it" ... "Build your personal brand" ... these are perfectly harmless propositions in and of themselves. However, taken together over several generations, they form something close to a philosophy: your desires define you ... your preferences are the objective ... your personal satisfaction is everything.

The old mass media had a different implicit message: you are part of something bigger. Here's something you'll find appealing ... Here's what your neighbors are doing ... Here's what your country is talking about ... Here's a story your family can discuss ... Here's something worth knowing, even if it has nothing directly to do with you.

That last one may be the most important. Because a common culture expects us to encounter and accommodate things we did not personally choose.

It's a chain: Shared experience creates shared reference points. Shared reference points create conversation. Conversation creates community. And community, writ larger, creates civilization.

It seems to me, though, that we turned ourselves in the opposite direction.

Is marketing the villain of this story?

Advertising has always reflected society as much as it has influenced society. We did not create the forces that weakened the traditional family, and we certainly did not create the technologies that transformed communications.

But we didn't slow the process, either.

We helped business to think in terms of segments rather than communities ... targets rather than audiences ... individuals rather than households. The great paradox is that the technologies that promised to connect us have made it easier than ever to separate.

Our common culture was never perfect, but it was real. We read the same magazines, listened to the same radio programs, gathered round the same TV shows, took in the same national events together. People who disagreed with one another nevertheless knew what the other person was talking about.

Today we have more media than humanity has ever possessed, more information than any individual could consume in a lifetime and more sophisticated marketing than the Mad Men of my generation could have imagined.

But what we have less of is the thing that all that media was once supposed to provide: something for everyone to share.

You can see a strange paradox at work here: the more precisely we have learned to speak to each individual, it seems the less we have to agree on, and the less we have to say to one another.

Where do we go from here?

If we continue down the present road, we may eventually discover that the most successful marketing movement in history has produced the least successful audience imaginable: millions of perfectly targeted individuals, each one isolated in a crowded room.

That may be great for engagement, but I'm not sure it's good for civilization.

And now here comes yet another step in the process. Artificial Intelligence is not only at the gates, it's deep inside the castle. It is taking shape, though not yet fully defined.

Maybe, just maybe (we can hope) this next great digital and media revolution will be not so much about seeking slicker ways to reach the isolated individual. But instead, about finding and creating ways to re-form these individuals back together, as a community.

And maybe, just maybe, a good place to start would be around the family table.

Blue sky? Sure. But we gotta start somewhere...

JGS