Full transcript of “Brands are FOOLING you!!”. Click a timestamp to open the video at that moment. Need another video? Use the YouTube transcript generator.
0:00 Everything that you see on the internet, you mean the colors, the products, when to buy, the discounts, even the timing, it's all not random. It's actually engineered so optimally that it'll blow your mind. And it's called the choice architecture. Now, you probably have never seen marketing like this. So, we'll discuss it through these seven, I think, evil tactics. stuff that shouldn't happen but happens every single day without you knowing it. So what you're going to do is let's give ourselves a conscious score. If you knew it, give it a one. If you didn't know it, give it a zero. And then let's put the scores together in the comments to understand who has reached where. Have you ever noticed when you're passing by some burger joint and you're telling
0:46 your friend and suddenly you get an ad from that very brand selling you that burger? I've always thought my phone's listening to me. But there's another way. It's a little more sneaky than listening to you. It's called geo fencing. Geo fencing basically is using your phone as a beacon and creating an area around it. I have a friend Raguandan. He used to run this company called Taxi for short. Basically, you would go to his app, order and people could get a cab. But he told me something really interesting. When people landed at an airport in the arrival zone, they would actually get an ad that they can get a cheaper ride home using taxi for sure. This blew my mind because the customer and the need is right there and
1:31 you can just test whether they need your thing or not. His idea was simple. If he can get the right user at the right place when they need the cab, his company would eventually grow. But some people take this tech and make it a lot more evil like changing prices. Imagine you have two different malls. One is super expensive luxurious mall and the other one is a normal mall. I actually found this LinkedIn post where a person ordered a cab to both the malls. He and his friend, no distance between them, same cab, same time and the prices were different. This is geotagging at its best. This customer can pay more, charge him more. This customer is likely to pay less, charge him less. Now, you can use
2:17 a geoence to do a targeted ad, but how do you know someone's going to click? Why would someone click? Well, there's a science behind this. Take for example 01's YouTube channel. Now, they're not selling anything to you, but they want you to see their video. So, they need you to click on the thumbnail. So, a simple scientific way for us to figure out what you're interested in is run a simple AB test, which is have two different thumbnails, one with a certain text and one without a text, or one with red a little bit more and one with less red. The first one is showed to 100 people and we can see that six out of 100 people clicked. The second one is shown and we can see that three people clicked. Therefore, option A wins and that thumbnail is seen by everyone. This
3:04 is called an A or B test. Now, this is just a YouTube channel. Imagine all the FMCG companies out there, all the products out there with dedicated teams running real AB tests, thousands of AB tests to figure out what you really, really need to make you spend money, to make you a little bit poorer. Sometimes the desire to buy something isn't there. It's actually manufactured. Now, once someone's clicked on an ad, there is another click to be made that's on the landing page. And you can actually run an AB test on a landing page as well. Like I found this interesting case study here by going and you can see on Going's homepage, it has a bunch of copy, but look at the button. The button says
3:51 trial for free. And they even have uh arrows in case you missed that there's a button over there. And they ran a second AB test. Everything's the same except they change the color of the button and they said join for free. Now whether it's trial for free or become a member for free, they all probably mean the same thing, but one gets way more clicks and they exactly know which one. And once these guys have caught your attention and you click, you actually enter the second zone of this entire funnel, the consideration stage. And you didn't even know it. And it all really starts with this harmless pop-up. I find this really weird. Without seeing the product, without seeing the page, it's asking me to accept this this cookie. The cookie finds your preferences,
4:39 tracks you, sees what you're doing across everything to personalize ads. I found this interesting infographic here explaining the different kinds of cookies and what they track. I mean, over here, they're tracking something that's outside of Google, within Google. When you're following a certain page, it even tracks timings and locations. Cookies are the reason why when you go to a running shoe website and you like a few shoes, you see ads of all kinds of running shoes across the internet. Ultimately, your self-control and willpower will give in. Even if you wanted to kind of buy that shoe, now you will probably buy that shoe because you see nudges everywhere. The first nudge is going to be an ad. there going to be a second ad, a third
5:25 and a fourth. If you interact with it, the algorithm will then push content your way. Then you go to a different website. You get the right ad at the right time, maybe even near your payday. And finally, you hit the And if you think I'm exaggerating, here's the next tactic. Look at this page. So normal. There's a button here. There's a sign up there. You won't guess. They're actually tracking your eyes, but there's no way that they can see your eyes, right? But interestingly, your eyes and your cursor move exactly at the same place. That's how you read a book on the internet. That's how you look at stuff. You move your cursor like
6:11 your eyes. So, they have a software installed. Every time you move the mouse, they are tracking that and it's actually turned into this video. If you play this video, that entire session on the entire website whilst you're there is recorded. And they're pretty popular tools to do this like Crazy Egg, Hot Jar, and you can use this Google Chrome extension which actually tells you whether they're recording your screen or not. Imagine a group of people sitting every single day in a company watching every single video for every single user trying to optimize for conversions. At some point when it's overoptimized, they will use dark tactics to make more money. Now, I'm not saying all companies use dark tactics, but I'm sure a lot of
6:56 people didn't know that this tech actually exists. So, these softwares also create a heat map. So, if you don't want to see a single session, what you'll do is you'll just see a generic heat map of where people spend the most time and the least time. So, you have hot and cold zones. Now, let's say a business is selling watches and they know you've spent a lot of time or most users have spent a lot of time on this center watch as shown here in red. So, what they'll do is they'll increase the prices of the other watches to make this look slightly cheaper or say that this is not in stock or only one in stock and use a bunch of other psychological tactics to make sure slightly more people prefer and buy this watch. Now I know you might say dude at the end of the day I am making the purchase. Sure
7:43 they're making some microscopic changes over here and there nudging me but I actually have to make the payment. True but actually the data looks slightly different. If you look at this right here these are small ticket personal loans that are loans under 1 lak rupees. Now I know you can't buy a car in 1 lakh rupees or a house or anything. you're buying these small items. Because these nudges exist and because taking these loans is super easy, people are just consuming more. So, we know how they catch attention. Then, we also know how they get us to consider their product cuz they use all these tools. But once they do, they need to nudge. Nudges are of all these kinds. And all of them are super interesting, right? Like this one says only one in
8:28 stock. Hey, you're a trillion dollar company and you have one stock. It's a lie. But you know that pop-up you get on the side where it says, "Abishek just bought these pair of socks and it feels like everyone's buying and you're not." That's actually a Shopify extension. I really mean it. You can go install the plugin and it just works out of the box. Nudges have been turned into pieces of software you just install and they have sort of hacked into you so you can buy It's that easy now. It used to be a science. Now it's just a plug-in. You know when you add an item to the cart and then you don't purchase anything and you wait and you start doing something else and then you forget
9:15 you had added something to the cart and then you get a message which is [Music] discount. Has this ever happened to you? It's called the abandoned cart effect. Actually, it's a real thing. Abandoned carts are perfect places to upsell customers because it shows that someone wanted to buy something but for whatever reason didn't buy it. They got distracted, they had second thoughts. So, if you're using an app or that person uses email, you can just create this flowchart. This flowchart basically says after a person has kept something inside the cart, wait for x amount of time and then do an offer. This could be an in-app notification or an email sent
10:00 to them. This is triggered automatically for thousands of customers in real time based on whatever flow you want. It's kind of like when you're trying to buy the dress on the roadside and then you walk away because you've abandoned the cart and they say, "Excuse me, madam. Please discount. Please buy." It's exactly the same thing except it's digital, fully automated, and it has more data about you. So, it's a little more deadly. And just like you don't want another credit card, you also don't want to buy stuff you'd never intended to. But that's where you're wrong. And that's where we get a recommendation system. And the top of the line is Amazon's. I personally think it's quite useful. And I actually buy a lot of stuff because those recommendations are quite useful. And you might think it's
10:45 just one row, but it's not. The recommendation system is all these things. So the question is, are your choices really your choices anymore when there are 100 different nudges nudging you to what you should do next? Think about buying protein powder. Once you buy protein powder, it knows exact date. once you've received it and maybe 25 days later it can nudge you to buy the next protein pack. And if you don't, it might nudge you for something even
11:30 better, creatine. And once you buy the creatine, I'm sure they'll think that you need a water bottle so you can actually shake that thing and drink every single day. But this entire video was actually a trick. Everything you saw over here, you think that this was actually what we were decoding when it really wasn't. This is how people used to do stuff. But now in the age of content, a piece of content is the actual ad. And all of these things are baked right into it and you just don't even know. and that conscious score. [Music]
