Uncle Google and his untold myriad of virtual assistants, would like to sell me things more than anything else. Uncle Google after all, has a business to run and he derives his income from placing advertisements in front of people's eyeballs. An advertisement though, relies upon triggering our internal covetous desires and enticing us. An advertisement in principle hopes to create the "I want" song within our hearts, which then comes to a conclusion with the acquisition of the things in question.
All of this assumes that the advertiser knows what we want. Uncle Google hopes to collect hundreds and thousands of data points to build a picture of who we are and hopefully what we want. The problem is that unless you are chronically online, Uncle Google's perfunctory data set, is a rather dull hammer.
Because I am a 47 year old man, Uncle Google obviously thinks that I have sufficiently enough money to have food delivered to me. Of late, the amount of times that I have seen the Uber ad with Cher in it, is enough to permanently make me never use the service.
The other favourite adverts that Uncle Google's minions want to throw my way are for big trucky truck trucks because presumably as I like watching Formula One, Supercars, Super GT, BTCC, and NASCAR, that I must be someone who has many tens of thousands of dollarpounds to throw around on new cars constantly.
This advert is typical:
https://youtu.be/SC4QxByqMzQ?si=M8VaKwx8l_isS4I7
Uncle Google thinks that all middle aged men are a monolith, which on the face of it is not a bad assumption as the SUVification of the motor industry rages on on and ever on, but just like not wanting to pay Hamburger Taxi for the affront of taking away my chance to drive somewhere, I do not want to buy an SUV or an SUV pretending to be a truck.
The gold star and pinnacle of what a work truck should be for the vast majority of tradies was the N170 Hilux, or the Falcon and Commodore Utes with fold down sides. The truth is that tradies either want vans because of the space that they can use a movable office, or a ute with a big tray so that they can cart around stuff. The Isuzu D-Max in these adverts is neither of those things
At any rate, I am not a tradie. The ute that I do want, is a V6 VE Commodore Ute because... it's fun.
Uncle Google unfortunately, although having directly determined that I am a 47 year old man who likes watching motor racing, has made the critical error in determining why. Motor racing is playing by proxy, as indeed is the rest of sport. I do not have hundreds of millions of dollarpounds but Horrible Tasting Energy Drink, Imaginary Internet Coin, and Bet Bet Betting Company do. Of those, I am still highly unlikely to buy what they're selling but at least they're having fun and paying for my entertainment.
The problem is that all of these firms make what is profitable rather than what I want to buy. Presumably someone is buying an Isuzu D-Max, but that someone is not me. The inherent paradox of advertising is that it is insanely hard to sell a want that people don't want, but you can leave reminders so that when people need to buy something, they will think of you.
So what is it that I actually want that Isuzu could in theory make? This:
Way back in the 1970s when General Motors realised that they couldn't very well sell cars with 6L engines to Europe or Asia, they developed the T-car. I took a survey of all the names that the T-car was sold under and came to a grand total of 37. Isuzu, still being aligned with the General Motors family of manufactures, sold T-car as the Isuzu Bellet in Japan and to Australia as the Holden Gemini.
Isuzu do not currently make anything even remotely similar to what I want to buy. Yes they make proper lorries and SUVs but I am neither a tradie, nor a pretend tradie who might like the D-Max. You can't even argue that people's needs and desires have changed because I'll even take a brand new 1975 Gemini if you are prepared to sell me one.
I am sorry Isuzu, but for me to 'go my own way', I'll need a wee ickle fun machine. You can also give up Uber, because I want to drive that wee ickle fun machine a hundred miles to buy that Pie/Hamburger/Donut. And as for you Uncle Google, I do know that you are trying but unless firms are prepared to sell something that we want to buy, then no transaction happens at all.
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