Category Archives: Big Data vs Strategy

Real Life Usually Lives Beyond The Data

There’s an intriguing little show you’ve probably never heard of on Netflix that might be worth checking out. It’s called Travelers and it’s a Canadian produced Sci-Fi show that ran from 2016 to 2018. The only face in it you’re probably recognize is Eric McCormack, the Will from Will and Grace. He also happens to be the producer of the series.

The premise is this – special operatives from the future (the “travelers”) – travel back in time to the present to prevent the collapse of society. They essential “body snatch” everyday people from our present at the exact moment of their death and use their lives as a cover to fulfill their mission.

And that’s not even the interesting part.

The real intrigue of the show comes from the everyday conflicts which come from an imperfect shoe horning of a stranger into the target’s real-world experience. The show runners do a masterful job of weaving this into their storylines: the joy of eating a hamburger, your stomach turning at the thought of drinking actual milk from a cow, calling your “wife” her real name when you haven’t called her that in all the time you’ve known her.  And it’s in this that I discovered an unexpected parallel to our current approach to marketing.

This is a bit of a detour, so bear with me.

In the future, the research team compiles as much as they can about each of the people they’re going to “borrow” for their operatives. The profiles are compiled from social media, public records and everything they can discover from the data available.

But when the “traveler” actually takes over their life, there are no end of surprises and challenges – made up of all the trivial stuff that didn’t make it into the data profile.

You probably see where I’m going with this. When we rely solely on data to try to understand our customers or prospects, there will always be surprises. You can only learn these little quirks and nuances by diving into their lives.

That’s what A.G. Lafley, CEO of Proctor and Gamble from 2000 to 2010 and then again from 20153 to 2015, knew. In a profile on Lafley which Forbes did in 2002, writer Luisa Kroll said,

“Like the monarch in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs’ Court, Lafley often makes house calls incognito to find out what’s the minds of his subjects. ‘Too much time was being spent inside Procter & Gamble and not enough outside,’ says Lafley who took over during a turbulent period two years ago. ‘I am a broken record when it comes to saying, ‘We have to focus on the customer.'”

It wasn’t a bad way to run a business. Under Lafley’s guidance, P&G doubled their market cap, making them one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world.

Humans are messy and organic. Data isn’t. Data demands to be categorized, organized and columnized. When we deal with data, we necessarily have to treat it like data. And when we do that, we’re going to miss some stuff – probably a lot of stuff. And almost all of it will be the stuff of our lives, the things that drive behavior, the sparks that light our emotions.

It requires two different ways of thinking. Data sits in our prefrontal lobes, demanding the brain to be relentlessly rational. Data reduces behavior to bits and bytes, to be manipulated by algorithms into plotted trendlines and linear graphs. In fact, automation today can totally remove we humans from the process. Data and A.I. work together to pull the levers and push the buttons on our advertising strategies. We just watch the dashboard.

But there’s another way of thinking – one that skulks down in the brain’s subcortical basement, jammed in the corner between the amygdala and the ventral striatum. It’s here where we stack all the stuff that makes us human; all the quirks and emotions, all our manias and motivations. This stuff is not rational, it’s not logical, it’s just life.

That’s the stuff A.G. Lafley found when he walked out the front door of Proctor and Gamble’s headquarters in Cincinnati and into the homes of their customers. And that’s the stuff the showrunners of Travelers had the insight to include in their narratives.

It’s the stuff that can make us sensational or stupid – often at the same time.

It’s the Buzz That Will Kill You

If you choose to play in the social arena, you have to accept that the typical peaks and valleys of business success can suddenly become impossibly steep.

In social media networks, your brand message is whatever meme happens to emerge from the collective activity of this connected market. Marketers have little control — and sometimes, they have no control. At best, all they can do is react by throwing another carefully crafted meme into the social-sphere and hope it picks up some juice and is amplified through the network.

That’s exactly what happened to Peloton in the past week and a half.

On Dec. 9, the HBO Max sequel to “Sex and the City” killed off a major character — Chris Noth’s Mr. Big — by giving him a heart attack after his one thousandth Peloton ride. Apparently, HBO Max gave Peloton no advance warning of this branding back hand.

On Dec. 10, according to Axios,  there was a dramatic spike in social interactions talking about Mr. Big’s last ride, peaking near 80 thousand. As you can imagine, the buzz was not good for Peloton’s business.

On Dec. 12, Peloton struck back with its own ad, apparently produced in just 24 hours by Ryan Reynold’s Maximum Effort agency. This turned the tide of the social buzz. Again, according to data from Newswhip and Axios, social media mentions peaked. This time, they were much more positive toward the Peloton brand.

It should be all good — right? Not so fast. On Dec 16, two sexual assault allegations were made against Chris Noth, chronicled in The Hollywood Reporter. Peloton rapidly scrubbed its ad campaign. Again, the social sphere lit up and Peloton was forced back into defensive mode.

Now, you might call all this marketing froth, but that’s  the way it is in our hyper-connected world. You just have to dance the dance — be nimble and respond.

But my point is not about the marketing side of this of this brouhaha – which has been covered to death, at least at MediaPost (sorry, pardon the pun.) I’m more interested  in what happens to the people who have some real skin in this particular game, whose lives depend on the fortunes of the Peloton brand. Because all this froth does have some very IRL consequences.

Take Peloton’s share price, for one.

The day before the HBO show aired, Peloton’s shares were trading at $45.91. The next day, they tumbled 16%. to $38.51.

And that’s just one chapter in the ongoing story of Peloton’s stock performance, which has been a hyper-compressed roller coaster ride, with the pandemic and a huge amount of social media buzz keeping the foot firmly on the accelerator of stock performance through 2020, but then subsequently dropping like a rock for most of 2021. After peaking as high as $162 a share exactly a year ago, the share price is back down to spitting distance of its pre-pandemic levels.

Obviously, Peloton’s share price is not just dependent on the latest social media meme. There are business fundamentals to consider as well.

Still, you have to accept that a more connected meme-market is going to naturally accelerate the speed of business upticks and declines. Peloton signed up for this dance — and  when you do that, you have to accept all that comes with it.

In terms of the real-world consequences of betting on the buzz, there are three “insider” groups (not including customers) that will be affected: the management, the shareholders and the employees. The first of these supposedly went into this with their eyes open. The second of these also made a choice. If they did their due diligence before buying the stock, they should have known what to expect. But it’s the last of these — the employees — that I really feel for.

With ultra-compressed business cycles like Peloton has experienced, it’s tough for employees to keep up. On the way up the peak, the company is running ragged trying to scale for hyper-growth. If you check employee review sites like Glassdoor.com, there are tales of creaky recruitment processes not being able to keep up. But at least the ride up is exciting. The ride down is something quite different.

In psychological terms, there is something called the locus of control. These are the things you feel you have at least some degree of control over. And there is an ever-increasing body of evidence that shows that locus of control and employee job satisfaction are strongly correlated. No one likes to be the one constantly waiting for someone else to drop the other shoe. It just ramps up your job stress. Granted, job stress that comes with big promotions and generous options on a rocket ship stock can perhaps be justified. But stress that’s packaged with panicked downsizing and imminent layoffs is not a fun employment package for anyone.

That’s the current case at Peloton. On Nov. 5 it announced an immediate hiring freeze. And while there’s been no official announcement of layoffs that I could find, there have been rumors of such posted to the site thelayoff.com.  This is not a fun environment for anyone to function in. Here’s what one post said: “I left Peloton a year ago when I realized it was morphing into the type of company I had no intention of working for.”

We have built a business environment that is highly vulnerable to buzz. And as Peloton has learned, what the buzz giveth, the buzz can also taketh away.

Whatever Happened to the Google of 2001?

Having lived through it, I can say that the decade from 2000 to 2010 was an exceptional time in corporate history. I was reminded of this as I was reading media critic and journalist Ken Auletta’s book, “Googled, The End of the World as We Know It.” Auletta, along with many others, sensed a seismic disruption in the way media worked. A ton of books came out on this topic in the same time frame, and Google was the company most often singled out as the cause of the disruption.

Auletta’s book was published in 2009, near the end of this decade, and it’s interesting reading it in light of the decade plus that has passed since. There was a sort of breathless urgency in the telling of the story, a sense that this was ground zero of a shift that would be historic in scope. The very choice of Auletta’s title reinforces this: “The End of the World as We Know It.”

So, with 10 years plus of hindsight, was he right? Did the world we knew end?

Well, yes. And Google certainly contributed to this. But it probably didn’t change in quite the way Auletta hinted at. If anything, Facebook ended up having a more dramatic impact on how we think of media, but not in a good way.

At the time, we all watched Google take its first steps as a corporation with a mixture of incredulous awe and not a small amount of schadenfreude. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were determined to do it their own way.

We in the search marketing industry had front row seats to this. We attended social mixers on the Google campus. We rubbed elbows at industry events with Page, Brin, Eric Schmidt, Marissa Mayer, Matt Cutts, Tim Armstrong, Craig Silverstein, Sheryl Sandberg and many others profiled in the book. What they were trying to do seemed a little insane, but we all hoped it would work out.

We wanted a disruptive and successful company to not be evil. We welcomed its determination — even if it seemed naïve — to completely upend the worlds of media and advertising. We even admired Google’s total disregard for marketing as a corporate priority.

But there was no small amount of hubris at the Googleplex — and for this reason, we also hedged our hopeful bets with just enough cynicism to be able to say “we told you so” if it all came crashing down.

In that decade, everything seemed so audacious and brashly hopeful. It seemed like ideological optimism might — just might — rewrite the corporate rulebook. If a revolution did take place, we wanted to be close enough to golf clap the revolutionaries onward without getting directly in the line of fire ourselves.

Of course, we know now that what took place wasn’t nearly that dramatic. Google became a business: a very successful business with shareholders, a grown-up CEO and a board of directors, but still a business not all that dissimilar to other Fortune 100 examples. Yes, Google did change the world, but the world also changed Google. What we got was more evolution than revolution.

The optimism of 2000 to 2010 would be ground down in the next 10 years by the same forces that have been driving corporate America for the past 200 years: the need to expand markets, maximize profits and keep shareholders happy. The brash ideologies of founders would eventually morph to accommodate ad-supported revenue models.

As we now know, the world was changed by the introduction of ways to make advertising even more pervasively influential and potentially harmful. The technological promise of 20 years ago has been subverted to screw with the very fabric of our culture.

I didn’t see that coming back in 2001. I probably should have known better.

The Privacy War Has Begun

It started innocently enough….

My iPhone just upgraded itself to iOS 14.6, and the privacy protection purge began.

In late April,  Apple added App Tracking Transparency (ATT) to iOS (actually in 14.5 but for reasons mentioned in this Forbes article, I hadn’t noticed the change until the most recent update). Now, whenever I launch an app that is part of the online ad ecosystem, I’m asked whether I want to share data to enable tracking. I always opt out.

These alerts have been generally benign. They reference benefits like “more relevant ads,” a “customized experience” and “helping to support us.” Some assume you’re opting in and opting out is a much more circuitous and time-consuming process. Most also avoid the words “tracking” and “privacy.” One referred to it in these terms: “Would you allow us to refer to your activity?”

My answer is always no. Why would I want to customize an annoyance and make it more relevant?

All in all, it’s a deceptively innocent wrapper to put on what will prove to be a cataclysmic event in the world of online advertising. No wonder Facebook is fighting it tooth and nail, as I noted in a recent post.

This shot across the bow of online advertising marks an important turning point for privacy. It’s the first time that someone has put users ahead of advertisers. Everything up to now has been lip service from the likes of Facebook, telling us we have complete control over our privacy while knowing that actually protecting that privacy would be so time-consuming and convoluted that the vast majority of us would do nothing, thus keeping its profitability flowing through the pipeline.

The simple fact of the matter is that without its ability to micro-target, online advertising just isn’t that effective. Take away the personal data, and online ads are pretty non-engaging. Also, given our continually improving ability to filter out anything that’s not directly relevant to whatever we’re doing at the time, these ads are very easy to ignore.

Advertisers need that personal data to stand any chance of piercing our non-attentiveness long enough to get a conversion. It’s always been a crapshoot, but Apple’s ATT just stacked the odds very much against the advertiser.

It’s about time. Facebook and online ad platforms have had little to no real pushback against the creeping invasion of our privacy for years now. We have no idea how extensive and invasive this tracking has been. The only inkling we get is when the targeting nails the ad delivery so well that we swear our phone is listening to our conversations. And, in a way, it is. We are constantly under surveillance.

In addition to Facebook’s histrionic bitching about Apple’s ATT, others have started to find workarounds, as reported on 9 to 5 Mac. ATT specifically targets the IDFA (Identified for Advertisers), which offers cross app tracking by a unique identifier. Chinese ad networks backed by the state-endorsed Chinese Advertising Association were encouraging the adoption of CAID identifiers as an alternative to IDFA. Apple has gone on record as saying ATT will be globally implemented and enforced. While CAID can’t be policed at the OS level, Apple has said that apps that track users without their consent by any means, including CAID, could be removed from the App Store.

We’ll see. Apple doesn’t have a very consistent track record with it comes to holding the line against Chinese app providers. WeChat, for one, has been granted exceptions to Apple’s developer restrictions that have not been extended to anyone else.

For its part, Google has taken a tentative step toward following Apple’s lead with its new privacy initiative on Android devices, as reported in Slash Gear. Google Play has asked developers to share what data they collect and how they use that data. At this point, they won’t be requiring opt-in prompts as Apple does.

All of this marks a beginning. If it continues, it will throw a Kong-sized monkey wrench into the works of online advertising. The entire ecosystem is built on ad-supported models that depend on collecting and storing user data. Apple has begun nibbling away at that foundation.

The toppling has begun.

The Profitability Of Trust

Some weeks ago, I wrote about the crisis of trust identified by the Edelman Trust Barometer study and its impact on brands. In that post, I said that the trust in all institutions had been blown apart, hoisted on the petard of our political divides.

We don’t trust our government. We definitely don’t trust the media – especially the media that sits on the other side of the divide. Weirdly, our trust in NGOs has also slipped, perhaps because we suspect them to be politically motivated.

So whom — or what — do we trust? Well, apparently, we still trust corporations. We trust the brands we know. They, alone, seem to have been able to stand astride the chasm that is splitting our culture.

As I said before, I’m worried about that.

Now, I don’t doubt there are well-intentioned companies out there. I know there are several of them. But there is something inherent in the DNA of a for-profit company that I feel makes it difficult to trust them. And that something was summed up years ago by economist Milton Friedman, in what is now known as the Friedman Doctrine. 

In his eponymously named doctrine, Friedman says that a corporation should only have one purpose: “An entity’s greatest responsibility lies in the satisfaction of the shareholders.” The corporation should, therefore, always endeavor to maximize its revenues to increase returns for the shareholders.

So, a business will be trustworthy as long as fits its financial interest to be trustworthy. But what happens when those two things come into conflict, as they inevitably will?

Why is it inevitable, you ask? Why can’t a company be profitable and worthy of our trust? Ah, that’s where, sooner or later, the inevitable conflict will come.

Let’s strip this down to the basics with a thought experiment.

In a 2017 article in the Harvard Business Review, neuroscientist Paul J. Zak talks about the neuroscience of trust. He explains how he discovered that oxytocin is the neurochemical basis of trust — what he has since called The Trust Molecule.

To do this, he set up a classic trust task borrowed from Nobel laureate economist Vernon Smith:

“In our experiment, a participant chooses an amount of money to send to a stranger via computer, knowing that the money will triple in amount and understanding that the recipient may or may not share the spoils. Therein lies the conflict: The recipient can either keep all the cash or be trustworthy and share it with the sender.”

The choice of this task speaks volumes. It also lays bare the inherent conflict that sooner or later will face all corporations: money or trust? This is especially true of companies that have shareholders. Our entire capitalist ethos is built on the foundation of the Friedman Doctrine. Imagine what those shareholders will say when given the choice outlined in Zak’s experiment: “Keep the money, screw the trust.” Sometimes, you can’t have both. Especially when you have a quarterly earnings target to hit.

For humans, trust is our default position. It has been shown through game theory research using the Prisoner’s Dilemma that the best strategy for evolutionary success is one called “Tit for Tat.” In Tit for Tat, our opening position is typically one of trust and cooperation. But if we’re taken advantage of, then we raise our defences and respond in kind.

So, when we look at the neurological basis of trust, consistency is another requirement. We will be willing to trust a brand until it gives a reason not to. The more reliable the brand is in earning that trust, the more embedded that trust will become. As I said in the previous post, consistency builds beliefs and once beliefs are formed, it’s difficult to shake them loose.

Trying to thread this needle between trust and profitability can become an exercise in marketing “spin”: telling your customers you’re trustworthy, while you’re are doing everything possible to maximize your profits. A case in point — which we’ve seen repeatedly — is Facebook and its increasingly transparent efforts to maximize advertising revenue while gently whispering in our ear that we should trust it with our most private information.

Given the potential conflict between trust and profit, is trusting a corporation a lost cause? No, but it does put a huge amount of responsibility on the customer. The Edelman study has made abundantly clear that if there is such a thing as a “market” for trust, then trust is in dangerously short supply. This is why we’re turning to brands and for-profit corporations as a place to put our trust. We have built a society where we believe that’s the only thing we can trust.

Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England and the former governor of the Bank of Canada, puts this idea forward in his new book, “Value(s).” In it, he shows how “market economies” have evolved into “market societies” where price determines the value of everything. And corporations will follow profit, wherever it leads.

If we understand that fundamental characteristic of corporations, it does bring an odd kind of power that rests in the hands of consumers.

Markets are not unilateral beasts. They rely on the balance between supply and demand. We form half that equation. It is our willingness to buy that determine how prices are determined in Carney’s “market societies.” So, if we are willing to place our trust in a brand, we can also demand that the brand proves that our trust has not been misplaced, through the rewards and penalties built into the market. 

Essentially, we have to make trust profitable.

Splitting Ethical Hairs in an Online Ecosystem

In looking for a topic for today’s post, I thought it might be interesting to look at the Lincoln Project. My thought was that it would be an interesting case study in how to use social media effectively.

But what I found is that the Lincoln Project is currently imploding due to scandal. And you know what? I wasn’t surprised. Disappointed? Yes. Surprised? No.

While we on the left of the political spectrum may applaud what the Lincoln Project was doing, let’s make no mistake about the tactics used. It was the social media version of Nixon’s Dirty Tricks. The whole purpose was to bait Trump into engaging in a social media brawl. This was political mudslinging, as practiced by veteran warriors. The Lincoln Project was comfortable with getting down and dirty.

Effective? Yes. Ethical? Borderline.

But what it did highlight is the sordid but powerful force of social media influence. And it’s not surprising that those with questionable ethics, as some of the Lincoln Project leaders have proven to be, were attracted to it.

Social media is the single biggest and most effective influencer on human behavior ever invented. And that should scare the hell out of us, because it’s an ecosystem in which sociopaths will thrive.

A definition of Antisocial Personality Disorder (the condition from which sociopaths suffer) states, “People with ASPD may also use ‘mind games’ to control friends, family members, co-workers, and even strangers. They may also be perceived as charismatic or charming.”

All you have to do is substitute “social media” for “mind games,” and you’ll get my point.  Social media is sociopathy writ large.

That’s why we — meaning marketers — have to be very careful what we wish for. Since Google cracked down on personally identifiable information, following in the footsteps of Apple, there has been a great hue and cry from the ad-tech community about the unfairness of it all. Some of that hue and cry has issued forth here at MediaPost, like Ted McConnell’s post a few weeks ago, “Data Winter is Coming.”

And it is data that’s at the center of all this. Social media continually pumps personal data into the online ecosystem. And it’s this data that is the essential life force of the ecosystem. Ad tech sucks up that data as a raw resource and uses it for ad delivery across multiple channels. That’s the whole point of the personal identifiers that Apple and Google are cracking down on.

I suppose one could  draw an artificial boundary between social media and ad targeting in other channels, but that would be splitting hairs. It’s all part of the same ecosystem. Marketers want the data, no matter where it comes from, and they want it tied to an individual to make targeting their campaigns more effective.

By building and defending an ecosystem that enables sociopathic predators, we are contributing to the problem. McConnell and I are on opposite sides of the debate here. While I don’t disagree with some of his technical points about the efficacy of Google and Apple’s moves to protect privacy, there is a much bigger question here for marketers: Should we protect user privacy, even if it makes our jobs harder?

There has always been a moral ambiguity with marketers that I find troubling. To be honest, it’s why I finally left this industry. I was tired of the “yes, but” justification that ignored all the awful things that were happening for the sake of a handful of examples that showed the industry in a better light.

And let’s just be honest about this for a second: using personally identifiable data to build a more effective machine to influence people is an awful thing. Can it be used for good? Yes. Will it be? Not if the sociopaths have anything to say about it. It’s why the current rogue’s gallery of awful people are all scrambling to carve out as big a piece of the online ecosystem as they can.

Let’s look at nature as an example. In biology, a complex balance has evolved between predators and prey. If predators are too successful, they will eliminate their prey and will subsequently starve. So a self-limiting cycle emerges to keep everything in balance. But if the limits are removed on predators, the balance is lost. The predators are free to gorge themselves.

When it comes to our society, social media has removed the limits on “prey.” Right now, there is a never-ending supply.

It’s like we’re building a hen house, inviting a fox inside and then feigning surprise when the shit hits the fan. What the hell did we expect?

The Ebbs and Flows of Consumerism in a Post-Pandemic World

As MediaPost’s Joe Mandese reported last Friday, advertising was, quite literally, almost decimated worldwide in 2020. If you look at the forecasts of the top agency holding companies, ad spends were trimmed by an average of 6.1%. It’s not quite one dollar in 10, but it’s close.

These same companies are forecasting a relative bounceback in 2021, starting slow and accelerating quarter by quarter through the year — but that still leaves the 2021 spend forecast back at 2018 levels.

And as we know, everything about 2021 is still very much in flux. If the year 2021 was a pack of cards, almost every one of them would be wild.

This — according to physician, epidemiologist and sociologist Nicholas Christakis — is not surprising.

Christakis is one of my favorite observers of network effects in society. His background in epidemiological science gives him a unique lens to look at how things spread through the networks of our world, real and virtual. It also makes him the perfect person to comment on what we might expect as we stagger out of our current crisis.

In his latest book, “Apollo’s Arrow,” he looks back to look forward to what we might expect — because, as he points out, we’ve been here before.

While the scope and impact of this one is unusual, such health crises are nothing new. Dozens of epidemics and a few pandemics have happened in my lifetime alone, according to this Wikipedia chart.

This post goes live on Groundhog Day, perhaps the most appropriate of all days for it to run. Today, however, we already know what the outcome will be. The groundhog will see its shadow and there will be six more months (at least) of pandemic to deal with. And we will spend that time living and reliving the same day in the same way with the same routine.

Christakis expects this phase to last through the rest of this year, until the vaccines are widely distributed, and we start to reach herd immunity.

During this time, we will still have to psychologically “hunker down” like the aforementioned groundhog, something we have been struggling with. “As a society we have been very immature,” said Christakis. “Immature, and typical as well, we could have done better.”

This phase will be marked by a general conservatism that will go in lockstep with fear and anxiety, a reluctance to spend and a trend toward risk aversion and religion.

Add to this the fact that we will still be dealing with widespread denialism and anger, which will lead to a worsening vicious circle of loss and crisis. The ideological cracks in our society have gone from annoying to deadly.

Advertising will have to somehow negotiate these choppy waters of increased rage and reduced consumerism.

Then, predicts Christakis, starting some time in 2022, we will enter an adjustment period where we will test and rethink the fundamental aspects of our lives. We will be learning to live with COVID-19, which will be less lethal but still very much present.

We will likely still wear masks and practice social distancing. Many of us will continue to work from home. Local flare-ups will still necessitate intermittent school and business closures. We will be reluctant to be inside with more than 20 or 30 people at a time. It’s unlikely that most of us will feel comfortable getting on a plane or embarking on a cruise ship. This period, according to Christakis, will last for a couple years.

Again, advertising will have to try to thread this psychological needle between fear and hope. It will be a fractured landscape on which to build a marketing strategy. Any pretense of marketing to the masses, a concept long in decline, will now be truly gone. The market will be rife with confusing signals and mixed motivations. It will be incumbent on advertisers to become very, very good at “reading the room.”

Finally, starting in 2024, we will have finally put the pandemic behind us. Now, says Christakis, four years of pent-up demand will suddenly burst through the dam of our delayed self-gratification. We will likely follow the same path taken a century ago, when we were coming out of a war and another pandemic, in the period we call the “Roaring Twenties.”

Christakis explained: “What typically happens is people get less religious. They will relentlessly seek out social interactions in nightclubs and restaurants and sporting events and political rallies. There’ll be some sexual licentiousness. People will start spending their money after having saved it. They’ll be joie de vivre and a kind of risk-taking, a kind of efflorescence of the arts, I think.”

Of course, this burst of buying will be built on the foundation of what came before. The world will likely be very different from its pre-pandemic version. It will be hard for marketers to project demand in a straight line from what they know, because the experiences they’ve been using as their baseline are no longer valid. Some things may remain the same, but some will be changed forever.

COVID-19 will have pried many of the gaps in our society further apart — most notably those of income inequality and ideological difference. A lingering sense of nationalism and protectionism born from dealing with a global emergency could still be in place.

Advertising has always played an interesting role in our lives. It both motivates and mirrors us.

But the reflection it shows is like a funhouse mirror: It distorts some aspects of our culture and ignores others. It creates demand and hides inconvenient truths. It professes to be noble, while it stokes the embers of our ignobility. It amplifies the duality of our human nature.

Interesting times lie ahead. It remains to be seen how that is reflected in the advertising we create and consume.

The Academics of Bullsh*t

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.”—

from “On Bullshit,” an essay by philosopher Henry Frankfurt.

Would it surprise you to know that I have found not one, but two academic studies on organizational bullshit? And I mean that non-euphemistically. The word “bullshit” is actually in the title of both studies. I B.S. you not.

In fact, organizational bullshit has become a legitimate field of study. Academics are being paid to dig into it — so to speak. There are likely bullshit grants, bullshit labs, bullshit theories, bullshit paradigms and bullshit courses. There are definitely bullshit professors.  There is even an OBPS — the Organization Bullshit Perception Scale — a way to academically measure bullshit in a company.

Many years ago, when I was in the twilight of my time with the search agency I had founded, I had had enough of the bullshit I was being buried under, shoveled there by the company that had acquired us. I was drowning in it. So I vented right here, on MediaPost. I dared you to imagine what it would be like to actually do business without bullshit getting in the way.

My words fell on deaf ears. Bullshit has proliferated since that time. It has been enshrined up and down our social, business and governmental hierarchies, becoming part of our “new” organizational normal. It has picked up new labels, like “fake news” and “alternate facts.” It has proven more dangerous than I could have ever imagined. And it is this dangerous because we are ignoring it, which is legitimizing it.

Henry Frankfurt defined the concept and set it apart from lying. Liars know the truth and are trying to hide it. Bullshitters don’t care if what they say is true or false. They only care if their listener is persuaded. That’s as good a working definition of the last four years as any I’ve heard.

But at least one study indicates bullshit may have a social modality — acceptable in some contexts, but corrosive in others. Marketing, for example, is highlighted by the authors as an industry built on a foundation of bullshit:

“advertising and public relations agencies and consultants are likely to be ‘full of It,’ and in some cases even make the production of bullshit an important pillar of their business.”

In these studies, researchers speculate that bullshit might actually serve a purpose in organizations. It may allow for strategic motivation before there is an actual strategy in place. This brand of bullshit is otherwise known as “blue-sky thinking” or “out-of-the-box thinking.”

But if this is true, there is a very narrow window indeed where this type of bullshit could be considered beneficial. The minute there are facts to deal with, they should be dealt with. But the problem is that the facts never quite measure up to the vision of the bullshit. Once you open the door to allowing bullshit, it becomes self-perpetuating.

I grew up in the country. I know how hard it is to get rid of bullshit.

The previous example is what I would call strategic bullshit — a way to “grease the wheels” and get the corporate machine moving. But it often leads directly to operational bullshit — which is toxic to an organization, serving to “gum up the gears” and prevent anything real and meaningful from happening. This was the type of bullshit that was burying me back in 2013 when I wrote that first column. It’s also the type of bullshit that is paralyzing us today.

According to the academic research into bullshit, when we’re faced with it, we have four ways to respond: exit, voice, loyalty or neglect. Exit means we try to escape from the bullshit. Loyalty means we wallow in it, spreading it wider and thicker. Neglect means we just ignore it. And Voice means we stand up to the bullshit and confront it.  I’m guessing you’ve already found yourself in one of those four categories.

Here’s the thing. As marketers and communicators, we have to face the cold, ugly truth of our ongoing relationship with bullshit. We all have to deal with it. It’s the nature of our industry.

But how do we deal with it? Most times, in most situations, it’s just easier to escape or ignore it. Sometimes it may serve our purpose to jump on the bullshit bandwagon and spread it. But given the overwhelming evidence of where bullshit has led us in the recent past, we all should be finding our voice to call bullshit on bullshit.

A Troubling Prognostication

It’s that time of year again. My inbox is jammed with pitches from PR flacks trying to get some editorial love for their clients. In all my years of writing, I think I have actually taken the bait maybe once or twice. That is an extremely low success rate. So much for targeting.

In early January, many of the pitches offer either reviews of 2019 or predictions for 2020.  I was just about to hit the delete button on one such pitch when something jumped out at me: “The number-one marketing trend for 2020 will be CDPs: customer data platforms.”

I wasn’t surprised by that. It makes sense. I know there’s a truckload of personal data being collected from everyone and their dog. Marketers love platforms. Why wouldn’t these two things come together?

But then I thought more about it — and immediately had an anxiety attack. This is not a good thing. In fact, this is a catastrophically terrible thing. It’s right up there with climate change and populist politics as the biggest world threats that keep me up at night.

To close out 2019,  fellow Insider Maarten Albarda gave you a great guide on where not to spend your money. In that column, he said this: “Remember when connected TVs, Google Glass and the Amazon Fire Phone were going to provide break-through platforms that would force mass marketing out of the box, and into the promised land of end-to-end, personalized one-on-one marketing?”

Ah, marketing nirvana: the Promised Land! The Holy Grail of personalized marketing. A perfect, friction-free direct connection between the marketer and the consumer.

Maarten went on to say that social media is one of the channels you shouldn’t be throwing money into, saying, “It’s also true that we have yet to see a compelling case where social media played a significant role in the establishment or continued success of a brand or service.”

I’m not sure I agree with this, though I admit I don’t have the empirical data to back up my opinion. But I do have another, darker reason why we should shut off the taps providing the flow of revenue to the usual social suspects. Social media based on an advertising revenue model is a cancerous growth — and we have to shut off its blood flow.

Personalized one-to-one marketing — that Promised Land —  cannot exist without a consistent and premeditated attack on our privacy. It comes at a price we should not be prepared to pay.

It depends on us trusting profit-driven corporations that have proven again and again that they shouldn’t be trusted. It is fueled by our darkest and least admirable motives.

The ecosystem that is required to enable one-to-one marketing is a cesspool of abuse and greed. In a pristine world of marketing with players who sport shiny ideals and rock-solid ethics, maybe it would be okay. Maybe. Personally, I wouldn’t take that bet. But in the world we actually live and work in, it’s a sure recipe for disaster.

To see just how subversive data-driven marketing can get, read “Mindf*ck” by Christopher Wylie. If that name sounds vaguely familiar to you, let me jog your memory. Wylie is the whistleblower who first exposed the Cambridge Analytica scandal. An openly gay, liberal, pink-haired Canadian, he seems an unlikely candidate to be the architect of the data-driven “Mindf*ck” machine that drove Trump into office and the Brexit vote over the 50% threshold.

Wylie admits to being blinded by the tantalizing possibilities of what he was working on at Cambridge Analytica: “Every day, I overlooked, ignored, or explained away warning signs. With so much intellectual freedom, and with scholars from the world’s leading universities telling me we were on the cusp of ‘revolutionizing’ social science, I had gotten greedy, ignoring the dark side of what we were doing.”

But Wylie is more than a whistleblower. He’s a surprisingly adept writer who has a firm grasp on not just the technical aspects, but also the psychology behind the weaponization of data. If venture capitalist Roger McNamee’s tell-all expose of Facebook, “Zucked,”  kept you up at night, “Mindf*ck” will give you screaming night terrors.

I usually hold off jumping on the year-end prognostication bandwagon, because I’ve always felt it’s a mug’s game. I would like to think that 2020 will be the year when the world becomes “woke” to the threat of profit-driven data abuse — but based on our collective track record of ignoring inconvenient truths, I’m not holding my breath.

This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Relevance is the new gold standard in marketing. In an  article in the Harvard Business Review written last year, John Zealley, Robert Wollan and Joshua Bellin — three senior execs at Accenture — outline five stages of marketing (paraphrased courtesy of a post from Phillip Nones):

  1. Mass marketing (up through the 1970s) – The era of mass production, scale and distribution.Marketing segmentation (1980s) – More sophisticated research enabling marketers to target customers in niche segments.
  2. Customer-level marketing (1990s and 2000s) – Advances in enterprise IT make it possible to target individuals and aim to maximize customer lifetime value.
  3. Loyalty marketing (2010s) – The era of CRM, tailored incentives and advanced customer retention.
  4. Relevance marketing (emerging) – Mass communication to the previously unattainable “Segment of One.”

This last stage – according to marketers past and present – should be the golden era of marketing:

“The perfect advertisement is one of which the reader can say, ‘This is for me, and me alone.” 

— Peter Drucker

“Audiences crave tailored messages that cater to them specifically and they are willing to offer information that enables marketers to do so.”

— Kevin Tash, CEO of Tack Media, a digital marketing agency in Los Angeles.

Umm…no! In fact, hell, no!

I agree that relevance is an important thing. And in an ethical world, the exchange Tash talks about would be a good thing, for both consumers and marketers. But we don’t live in such a world. The world we live in has companies like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Stop Thinking Like a Marketer!

There is a cognitive whiplash that happens when our perspective changes from that of marketer to that of a consumer. I’ve seen it many times. I’ve even prompted it on occasion. But to watch it in 113 minutes of excruciating detail, you should catch “The Great Hack” on Netflix. 

The documentary is a journalistic peeling of the onion that is the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It was kicked off by the whistle blowing of Christopher Wylie, a contract programmer who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame. But to me, the far more interesting story is that of Brittany Kaiser, the director of business Development of SCL Group, the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. The documentary digs into the tortured shift of perspective as she transitions from thinking like a marketer to a citizen who has just had her private data violated. It makes for compelling viewing.

Kaiser shifted her ideological compass about as far as one could possibly do, from her beginnings as an idealistic intern for Barack Obama and a lobbyist for Amnesty International to one of the chief architects of the campaigns supporting Trump’s presidential run, Brexit and other far right persuasion blitzkriegs. At one point, she justifies her shift to the right by revealing her family’s financial struggle and the fact that you don’t get paid much as an underling for Democrats or as a moral lobbyist. The big bucks are found in the ethically grey areas.  Throughout the documentary, she vacillates between the outrage of a private citizen and the rationalization of a marketer. She is a woman torn between two conflicting perspectives.

We marketers have to stop kidding ourselves and justifying misuse of personal data with statements like the one previously quoted from Kevin Tash. As people, we’re okay. I like most of the marketers I know. But as professional marketers, we have a pretty shitty track record. We trample privacy, we pry into places we shouldn’t and we gleefully high-five ourselves when we deliver the goods on a campaign — no matter who that campaign might be for and what its goals might be. We are very different people when we’re on the clock.

We are now faced with what may be the most important questions of our lives: How do we manage our personal data? Who owns it? Who stores it? Who has the right to use it? When we answer those questions, let’s do it as people, and not marketers. Because there is a lot more at stake here than the ROI rates on a marketing campaign.