Advertising audiences: wolves in sheep's clothing
Sarah Morning
Since Mark Earls' groundbreaking paper Advertising to the Herd, in 2003, the ad industry has come to accept that humans are a group species; a theory borne out by the way in which the web is evolving from a basic information system to a complex social network.
In his paper, Earls asserted that humans have an innate herding instinct; that as individuals we gravitate towards behaviours dictated by the wider group, following the crowd as it were. It is why we walk into a crowded restaurant rather than an empty...