Only the Polytron…

Readers and former readers of science journals and magazines will be able to complete the famous line.

“…reduces an entire mouse to a soup-like homogenate in 30 seconds.”

It’s like the “They laughed when I sat down at the piano.” of laboratory advertising. There should be an awards show and a coffee table book about this ad.

The Polytron ad keeps getting shared. On Reddit, you can spot it onr/vintageads,r/WTF, and elsewhere. It popped up on science Twitter when that was a thing. The Polytron has entered popular (biomedical laboratory) culture in a big way.Kevin Simler’s “cultural imprinting” effect in action. And it’s effective. Try finding a lab that processes samples and doesn’t have a Polytron, and look how many scientific papers include Polytron in their materials and methods.

But I have never seen a Polytron used on an entire mouse. Even mouse researchers generally instead [icky mouse processing redacted, you’re welcome]. The ad is terribly non-personalized. The cultural imprinting effect of an long-running campaign, and the attention-getting effect in the reader’s imagination, outweigh the effect that could have been achieved by dropping in an “AI” headline that personalizes a sample type and homogenization time for each reader based on their own research interests.

Cultural imprinting isn’t just an everybody thing, like the often-repeated beer jingles that George Tannenbaum (and many others) remember from baseball games on the radio. Cultural imprinting can work in a subculture or community of practice, if you meet them where they are. (And trying to do that with general-purpose surveillance advertising is less and less effective for more and more communities, wherethe most engaged people are getting the best privacy protections. Advertising to subcultures and communities of practice is hard, and it gets both harder and more interesting when the people being advertised to are making a point of blocking or even spoofing the conventional measurement tools.)

What reminded me of this was The Paradox Of Personalization: Billions Of AI-Tailored Ads Creates A Measurement Mess by Erez Levin. We must reject the fantasy of infinite creative variations – not just because it is technically impossible but because it fundamentally misunderstands how advertising works for the vast majority of brands. (IMHO, brands are a cognitive hack that uses our existing monkey reputation brain wiring, that we’re already equipped with at the hardware level, to help us participate in markets, where are too new on an evolutionary time scale to have built-in support.) Brands are built on a collective understanding of what a brand stands for. When you fragment that message into infinite, hyper-personalized silos, you destroy the macro-cultural signal that gives a brand its authority and prestige. It dilutes a shared asset into statistical noise. Anyway, read the whole thing.

Cultural imprinting is not necessarily good. Jessica Orwig, Leon Siciliano, and Lara O’Reilly coverYour candy ads are about to get a lot more personalized, Mars says. Rankin Carroll, chief brand officer of Mars Snacking, says the company behind your favorite candies like M&M’s, Snickers, Skittles, and Twix is reworking how it advertises to consumers — and the shift could mean people start seeing very different versions of the same candy campaign.

Regularly eating high-sugar foods in the middle of the day wasn’t always a thing, and people were probably better off. Some cultural changes, involving advertising, helped normalize the snacking habit. Now Mars is going whole hog for surveillance advertising—which means that machine learning systems will “learn” to candymax the people at risk for eating disorders for a quick revenue hit, while pulling back on reinforcing the cultural acceptance. Mars may be opening up an opportunity for cultural imprinting of an alternate habit.icymi:Finally, The True Value Of A Facebook Fan by Bob Hoffman

Related

cheese or woodstain?personalization risks

Bonus links

Trump admin abandons fight against wind energy as clean energy output surges by Aman Azhar. This latest victory in a string of legal setbacks for the administration comes at a time when clean energy production continues to surge despite a slew of policy, permitting, and procedural hurdles imposed by the White House. (fwiw, theattribution cartel omitted any mention of the environmental impact of its extra data processing—green stuff is no longer in fashion with the AI-maxing companies—but they’re increasingly out of touch with regular people anyway. And maybe even theirown employees?)

Has AI Already Killed How-To Nonfiction? Sales Trends, My Personal Data, and What It Might Mean for the Future by Tim Ferriss. ChatGPT, powered by the updated GPT-3.5 model, launched on November 30, 2022. There was a gentle -5% slip [in sales of Tim Ferriss books] in 2023, then -13% in 2024, and then the floor disappears: -46% in 2025, followed by an even steeper -57% pace this year. If the run-rate holds, my catalog will sell roughly 80% fewer print copies in 2026 than it did in 2022, with almost all of that happening since LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT exploded in use.