Category Archives: Brand Building

Why Can’t Markets be Moral?

Last week, I said there was an emerging market for morality. I painted that particular picture in a somewhat negative light. Andrew Goodman, a fellow Canadian who I have always admired for both his intellect and morality, called me on it (via my Facebook feed): Nice post, but I was hoping for a little more from this.” I paraphrase Andrew’s eloquent and lengthy reply by boiling it down to essentially this: extreme circumstances call for extreme measures and if that has to come from corporations and their advertising, then so be it.

It’s fair to say the last week has done nothing to dispel Goodman’s assessment of the extremity of the situation. Insanity seems to be accelerating at an alarming rate.

But on further reflection, I feel some further clarification needed here. I ascribed morality to markets, not necessarily corporations. There’s an important difference here. Corporations are agents within markets and will follow where markets lead. And increasingly, it looks like there is a market movement towards morality. Morality is becoming more profitable. So let’s look specifically at the morality of the market.

On one hand you could take the position of British economic historian Robert Skidelsky, who said in 2008 that there is an inherent dilemma when one looks for morality in economic markets. This was essentially the point I raised last week:

It has often been claimed that capitalism rewards the qualities of self-restraint, hard work, inventiveness, thrift, and prudence. On the other hand, it crowds out virtues that have no economic utility, like heroism, honour, generosity, and pity.

But let’s say for the moment that Adam Smith’s “Invisible Hand” is solely moved by greed. Does that mean that no good can come from it? New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof ran a column earlier this year stating that 2017 could be the best year ever. If you can set your cognitive dissonance aside for a moment, here were his reasons:

  • “Since 1990, more than 100 million children’s lives have been saved through vaccinations, breast-feeding promotion, diarrhea treatment and more.”
  • “Every day, an average of about a quarter-million people worldwide graduate from extreme poverty, according to World Bank figures. in the early 1980s, more than 40 percent of all humans were living in extreme poverty. Now fewer than 10 percent are. By 2030 it looks as if just 3 or 4 percent will be.”
  • “While income inequality has increased within the U.S., it has declined on a global level because China and India have lifted hundreds of millions from poverty.”
  • “Some 40 countries are now on track to eliminate elephantiasis. When you’ve seen the anguish caused by elephantiasis — or leprosy, or Guinea worm, or polio, or river blindness, or blinding trachoma — it’s impossible not to feel giddy at the gains registered against all of them.”
  • “85 percent of adults are literate. And almost nothing makes more difference in a society than being able to read and write.”

All these benefits come from the “trickling down” benefits of capitalism. Globalization and the opening of new markets have unleashed a tide that has raised all boats. Kristoff shows what happens when you look at a bigger picture and rely on facts rather than personally held beliefs that come from your own limited perspective. What we forget is that the very first mention Adam Smith made of his “invisible hand” was actually in a text called “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” in 1759. Here was the exact passage:

“The proud and unfeeling landlord views his extensive fields, and without a thought for the wants of his brethren, in imagination consumes himself the whole harvest … [Yet] the capacity of his stomach bears no proportion to the immensity of his desires … the rest he will be obliged to distribute among those, who prepare, in the nicest manner, that little which he himself makes use of. The rich…are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.”

In direct contrast to the protectionist policies of the current U.S. administration, the western world (especially the U.S.) is the landlord in this scenario. As much as we may want to rely on our beliefs rather than facts, the average American is better off now they were 50 years ago as measured by almost any empirical baseline you may want to use: lifespan, economic well being, degree of civil freedom, measure of social equality or quality of our environment. And this American free-market drive to get ahead has dragged the whole world in its wake. Again, Robert Skidelsky concedes this point:

“From the ethical point of view, consumption is a means to goodness, and the market system is the most efficient engine for lifting people out of poverty: it is doing so at a prodigious rate in China and India.”

The other potential moral windfall of markets is that there is a second kind of “trickle down” effect that also happens – the driving forward of technology. Technology is a tool that is designed to advance the interests of humans. While there is much in technology that is misapplied to the human condition, we cannot deny that technology continually and consistently makes us better than we were yesterday. As Kristof notes in his column, today 300,000 more people around the world will get electricity for the first time. This will enable access to communication networks, clean water, higher levels of hygiene and many other spin-off benefits. All this happens because corporations see potential profitability in new markets.

But there is another piece to this. If we look only at the “trickle down” effects of capital markets, we have to keep a careful eye on what’s happening at the top of the pyramid. As Skidelsky said in 2008, “But this does not tell us at what point consumption tips us into a bad life.”

 

 

 

 

A Market for Morality

Things are going to get interesting in the world of marketing. And the first indication of that was seen this past Sunday during the Super Bowl. As Bob Garfield noted, there were a lot of subtle and not so subtle undercurrents of messaging in the ads that ran in between the distracting sub-story that played out on the field. Things got downright political with a number of 167 thousand-dollar-a-second ad swipes at the current president and his policies.

I and many others here at Mediapost have been criticized over the past several months for getting political when we should have been talking about media and marketing. But as this weekend showed, we’re naïve to think those two worlds don’t overlap almost completely. And that’s about to become even more true in the future.

Advertising has to talk about what people are talking about. It has always been tied to the zeitgeist of society. And in a politically polarized nation, that means advertising’s “going to go there”. That’s normal. What’s not so normal is this weird topsy-turvy trend of for-profit companies suddenly becoming the moral gatekeepers of America. That’s supposed to be the domain of government and – if you believe in such things – religion. That’s in a normal world. But in the world of 2017 and the minds of 53.9% of America (the percentage of the electorate who didn’t vote for Trump) there is a vast, sucking moral vacuum on at least one of those fronts. It seems that Corporate America is ready to step up and fill the gap.

Suddenly, there is a market for morality. Of course, we have always had “feel-good” advertising and codes of corporate responsibility but this is different – both in volume and tone. It is more overtly political and it plays on perceived juxtaposition of the mores of the nation and the official stance of the government. Markets are built to be nimble and adaptive. Governments are seldom either of these things. Corporate America is sensing a market opportunity by taking the high road and the Super Bowl marked the beginning of what may become a stampede to higher moral ground.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. Around the turn of the last century, we saw the rise of welfare capitalism. In a rapidly expanding industrial market where there was a scarcity of human resources and little legislative regulation of working conditions, corporations became paternalistic. The reasoning was that no one could better provide stability for workers than the corporation that employed them. What is different about the current situation, however, is that this moral evangelism is primarily aimed at the market, not internal operations. We’ll come back to this in a bit.

This creates an interesting dynamic. In a free market economy citizens have the right to vote with their wallets. After a deeply divisive election the debate can continue in a market suddenly divided along political lines. This is compounded by the interconnected and interactive nature of marketing today. We have realized that our market is a complex system and plays by it’s own rules, none of which are predictable. Social network effects, outriding anomalies and viral black swans are now the norm. As I said in an earlier column, branding is becoming a game of hatching “belief worms” – messages designed to bypass rationality and burrow deep into our subconscious values. Our current political climate is a rich breeding ground for said “worms.”

You might say, “What’s wrong with Corporate America taking a moral stand? “

Well..two things.

There is no corporation I’m aware of that has as its first priority the safeguarding of morality. As economist Milt Friedman said, corporations are there to make a profit. Period. And they will always follow the path most likely to lead to that profit. For example, Silicon Valley has been very vocal in its condemnation of the Muslim travel ban not because it’s not right but because it jeopardizes the ability to travel for its employees from Muslim countries. And a century ago, welfare capitalism spread because it helped employers hang on to their employees and gave them a way to keep out unions. Even if morality and profitability happen to share the same bandwagon for a time the minute profitability veers in a new direction, corporations will follow. This is not the motivational environment you want to stake the future on.

Secondly, there is no democratic mandate behind the stated morality of a corporation. There are a lot of CEO’s that have robust ideological beliefs, but it is fair to say the moral proclivities of a corporation are necessarily tied to a very select special interest group: the employees, the customers and the shareholders of that corporation. Companies, by their very nature, should not be expected to speak for “we, the people.” Much as we would like morality to be universally defined, it is still very much a personal matter.

Take just one of these moral stakeholders – the customers. According to Blend, a millennial messaging app, their users loved the Coke, Budweiser and Airbnb ads that all had overt or thinly veiled moral messages. But there was a backlash from Trump supporters asking for boycotts of all these advertisers along with others that got political. The social storms stirred up on both sides were telling. Reaction was quick and emotionally charged. In a world where branding and beliefs are locked together at the hip, we can probably expect that morality and marketing will be similarly conjoined. That means that morality, just like marketing, will be segmented and targeted to very specific groups.

The Vanishing Value of the Truth

You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views.

Dr. Who, 1977

We might be in a period of ethical crisis. Or not. It’s tough to say. It really depends on what you believe. And that, in a nutshell, is the whole problem.

Take this past weekend for example. Brand new White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, in his very first address, lied about the size of the inauguration crowd. Afterwards, a very cantankerous Kellyanne Conway defended the lying when confronted by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. She said they weren’t lies…they were “Alternate Facts”.

http://www.nbcnews.com/widget/video-embed/860142147643

So, what exactly is an alternate fact? It’s something that is not a fact at all, but a narrative intended to be believed by a segment of the population, presumably to gain something from them.

To use a popular turn of phrase, it’s “Faking It til You Make It!”

And there you have the mantra of our society. We’re rewarding alternate facts on the theory that the end justifies the means. If we throw a blizzard of alternate facts out there that resonate with our audience’s beliefs, we’ll get what we want.

The Fake It Til You Make It syndrome is popping up everywhere. It’s always been a part of marketing and advertising. Arguably, the entire industry is based on alternate facts. But it’s also showing up in the development of new products and services, especially in the digital domain. While Eric Ries never espoused dishonesty in his book, The Lean Start Up, the idea of a Minimal Viable Product certainly lends itself to the principle of “faking it until you make it.” Agile development, in its purest sense, is about user feedback and rapid iteration, but humans being humans, it’s tough to resist the temptation to oversell each iteration, treading dangerously close to pitching “vaporware.” Then we hope like hell that the next development cycle will bridge some of the gap between reality and the alternate facts we sold the prospective customer.

I think we have to accept that our world may not place much value on the truth any more. It’s a slide that started about 100 years ago.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People author Stephen Covey reviewed the history of success literature in the US from the 1700’s forward. In the first 150 years of America’s history, all the success literature was about building character. Character was defined by words like integrity, kindness, virtue and honor. The most important thing was to be a good person.

Honesty was a fundamental underpinning of the Character Ethic. This coincided with the Enlightenment in Europe. Intellectually, this movement elevated truth above belief. Our modern concept of science gained its legs: “a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths.” The concepts of honor and honesty were intertwined

But Covey noticed that things changed after the First World War. Success literature became preoccupied with the concept of personality. It was important to be likeable, extroverted, and influential. The most important thing was to be successful. Somehow, being truthful got lost in the noise generated by the rush to get rich.

Here’s the interesting thing about personality and character. Psychologists have found that your personality is resistant to change. Personality tends to work below the conscious surface and scripts play out without a lot of mindful intervention. You can read all the self-help books in the world and you probably won’t change your personality very much. But character can be worked on. Building character is an exercise in mindfulness. You have to make a conscious choice to be honest.

The other interesting thing about personality and character is how other people see you. We are wired to pick up on other people’s personalities almost instantly. We start picking up the subconscious cues immediately after meeting someone. But it takes a long time to determine a person’s character. You have to go through character-testing experiences before you can know if they’re really a good person. Character cuts to the core, where as personality is skin deep. But in this world of “labelability” (where we think we know people better than we actually do) we often substitute personality cues for character. If a person is outgoing, confident and fun, we believe them to be trustworthy, moral and honest.

This all adds up to some worrying consequences. If we have built a society where success is worth more than integrity, then our navigational bearings become dependent on context. Behavior becomes contingent on circumstances. Things that should be absolute become relative. Truth becomes what you believe is the most expedient and useful in a given situation.

Welcome to the world of alternate facts.

Yahoo and the Transitory World

The writing has been on the wall for some time. But where once it spelled out Yahoo, it now says Altaba.

The Yahooligans are no more, have ceased to be, bereft of life, they rest in peace. Marissa Mayer may be riding off into the Silicon Valley sunset with her golden parachute trailing behind. The parking lot attendants at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA could soon be sandblasting her name off the CEO’s reserved parking spot. And, predictably, we Internet codgers are mourning the loss of yet another digital pioneer.

But here’s the thing. For the last 150 years the point of a corporation is to not be a permanent fixture. And, in this world, that’s truer than ever. So we’d better get use to stepping around a growing pile of corporate corpses.

The notion of a corporation has been around since Roman times. The name comes from the Latin corpus (body) and means “body of people.” The original idea was that a corporation would live on beyond the lifespan of any of its members. This has certainly been true of the Stora Kopparberg, a mining community in Sweden, the oldest corporation in the world. It started in 1347.

But things changed in 1855 with the passing of the Limited Liability act in England. This flipped the idea of the perpetuity of a corporation on its head. This legislation allowed shareholders to walk away from the wreckage of a failed corporation without assuming any personal liability. It enabled serial entrepreneurialism and lowered the threshold of tolerable risk.

In short, corporate limited liability law made it okay for business people to try and possibly fail.

In the century and a half since the passing of the limited Liability Act (and similar legislation in most US states) we somehow believed that corporations existed to build size and scale, as befits a market that’s pre-occupied with mass. Economist Ronald Coase said the reason corporations exist is that because in imperfect markets, there is less friction doing things inside an organization than outside, making corporate structures more profitable than open markets. That was true in markets that built physical things from raw materials scattered around the world and then also had to distribute those things to distant markets.

But that’s not the world we live in. The world we live in is the world of rapid iteration and Eric Ries’ “Minimum Viable Product”. Increasingly, these products are not made of physical stuff but of digital bytes, where there is very little in the way of transactional costs.

I think we have to start thinking of the Minimum Viable Company – companies that can be assembled quickly around a market need but also can be disassembled and repurposed quickly. In today’s world, that’s the purpose of an organization and it’s a transitory thing.

In their book Creative Destruction, Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan envision a new corporate structure more like a venture capital fund. A corporation should be made up of a number of transitory operating units that explore market opportunities in a Darwinian fashion. Arguably, this is closer to the model adopted by Google with Alphabet and, ironically, the new corporate structure of Altaba.

But even here, corporate hubris tends to get in the way. At some point, inevitably, the powers that be begin to believe they’re smarter than the market and build an illusion of sustainability. As economist Joseph Schumpeter said, “The problem that is usually being visualized is how capitalism administers existing structures, whereas the relevant problem is how it creates and destroys them.” Corporations have a vested interest in the status quo. Cognitive biases being what they are, we’ll always favor on the side of what we have rather than what we should build. For this reason, I think Coase’s justification for the corporation might be on its last legs.

That was definitely true of Yahoo. It was a corporation that lived beyond its time. Sooner or later, that had to catch up with it.

 

 

Branding in the Post Truth Age

If 2016 was nothing else – it was a watershed year for the concept of branding. In the previous 12 months, we saw a decoupling in the two elements we have always believed make up brands. As fellow Spinner Cory Treffiletti said recently:

“You have to satisfy the emotional quotient as well as the logical quotient for your brand.  If not, then your brand isn’t balanced, and is likely to fall flat on its face.”

But another Mediapost article highlighted an interesting trend in branding:

“Brands will strive to be ‘meticulously un-designed’ in 2017, according to WPP brand agency Brand Union.”

This, I believe, speaks to where brands are going. And depending on which side of the agency desk you happen to be on, this could either be good news or downright disheartening.

Let’s start with the logical side of branding. In their book Absolute Value, Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen sounded the death knell for brands as a proxy for consumer information. Their premise, which I agree with, is that in a market that is increasingly moving towards perfect information, brands have lost their position of trust. We would rather rely on information that comes from non-marketing sources.

But brands have been aspiring to transcend their logical side for at least 5 decades now. This is the emotional side of branding that Treffiletti speaks of. And here I have to disagree with Simonson and Rosen. This form of branding appears to be very much alive and well, thank you. In fact, in the past year, this form of branding has upped the game considerably.

Brands, at their most potent, embed themselves in our belief systems. It is here, close to our emotional hearts, which mark the Promised Land for brands. Reid Montague’s famous Coke neuro-imaging experiment showed that for Coke drinkers, the brand became part of who they are. Research I was involved in showed that favored brands are positively responded to in a split second, far faster than the rational brain can act. We are hardwired to believe in brands and the more loved the brand, the stronger the reaction. So let’s look at beliefs for a moment.

Not all beliefs are created equal. Our beliefs have an emotional valence – some beliefs are defended more strongly than others. There is a hierarchy of belief defense. At the highest level are our Core beliefs; how we feel about things like politics and religion. Brands are trying to intrude on this core belief space. There has been no better example of this than the brand of Donald Trump.

Beliefs are funny things. From an evolutionary perspective, they’re valuable. They’re mental shortcuts that guide our actions without requiring us to think. They are a type of emotional auto-pilot. But they can also be quite dangerous for the same reason. We defend our beliefs against skeptics – and we defend our core beliefs most vigorously. Ration has nothing to do with it. It is this type of defense system that brands would love to build around themselves.

We like to believe our beliefs are unique to us – but in actual fact, beliefs also materialize out of our social connections. If enough people in our social network believe something is true, so will we. We will even create false memories and narratives to support the fiction. The evolutionary logic is quite simple. Tribes have better odds for survival than individuals, and our tribe will be more successful if we all think the same way about certain things. Beliefs create tribal cohesion.

So, the question is – how does a brand become a belief? It’s this question that possibly points the way in which brands will evolve in the Post-Truth future.

Up to now, brands have always been unilaterally “manufactured” – carefully crafted by agencies as a distillation of marketing messages and delivered to an audience. But now, brands are multilaterally “emergent” – formed through a network of socially connected interactions. All brands are now trying to ride the amplified waves of social media. This means they have to be “meme-worthy” – which really means they have to be both note and share-worthy. To become more amplifiable, brands will become more “jagged,” trying to act as catalysts for going viral. Branding messages will naturally evolve towards outlier extremes in their quest to be noticed and interacted with. Brands are aspiring to become “brain-worms” – wait, that’s not quite right – brands are becoming “belief-worms,” slipping past the rational brain if at all possible to lodge themselves directly in our belief systems. Brands want to be emotional shorthand notations that resonate with our most deeply held core beliefs. We have constructed a narrative of who we are and brands that fit that narrative are adopted and amplified.

It’s this version of branding that seems to be where we’re headed – a socially infectious virus that creates it’s own version of the truth and builds a bulwark of belief to defend itself. Increasingly, branding has nothing to do with rational thought or a quest for absolute value.

Prospect Theory, Back Burners and Relationship Risk

What does relationship infidelity and consumer behavior have in common? Both are changing, thanks to technology – or, more specifically – the intersection between technology and our brains. And for you regular readers, you know that stuff is right in my wheelhouse.

drouin

Dr. Michelle Drouin

So I was fascinated by a recent presentation given by Dr. Michelle Drouin from Purdue University. She talked about how connected technologies are impacting the way we think about relationship investment.

The idea of “investing” in a relationship probably paints in a less romantic light then we typically think of, but it’s an accurate description. We calculate odds and evaluate risk. It’s what we do. Now, in the case of love, an admittedly heuristic process becomes even less rational. Our subliminal risk appraisal system is subjugated by a volatile cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters. But – at the end of the day – we calculate odds.

If you take all this into account, Dr. Drouin’s research into “back burners” becomes fascinating, if not all that surprising. In the paper, back burners are defined as “a desired potential or continuing romantic/sexual partner with whom one communicates, but to whom one is not exclusively committed.” “Back burners” are our fall back bets when it comes to relationships or sexual liaisons. And they’re not exclusive to single people. People in committed relationships also keep a stable of “back burners.” Women keep an average of 4 potential “relationship” candidates from their entire list of contacts and 8 potential “liaison” candidates. Men, predictably, keep more options open. Male participants in the study reported an average of over 8 “relationship” options and 26 liaison “back burners.” Drouin’s hypothesis is that this number has recently jumped thanks to technology, especially with the connectivity offered through social media. We’re keeping more “back burners” because we can.

What does this have to do with advertising? The point I’m making is that this behavior is not unique. Humans treat pretty much everything like an open marketplace. We are constantly balancing risk and reward amongst all the options that are open to us, subconsciously calculating the odds. It’s called Prospect Theory. And, thanks to technology, that market is much larger than it’s ever been before. In this new world, our brain has become a Vegas odds maker on steroids.

In Drouin’s research, it appears that new technologies like Tinder, What’sapp and Facebook have had a huge impact on how we view relationships. Our fidelity balance has been tipped to the negative. Because we have more alternatives – and it’s easier to stay connected with those alternatives and keep them on the “back burner” – the odds are worth keeping our options open. Monogamy may not be our best bet anymore. Facebook is cited in one-third of all divorce cases in the U.K. And in Italy, evidence from the social messaging app What’sapp shows up in nearly half of the divorce proceedings.

So, it appears that humans are loyal – until a better offer with a degree of risk we can live with comes along.

This brings us back to our behaviors in the consumer world. It’s the same mental process, applied in a different environment. In this environment, relationships are defined as brand loyalty. And, as Emanuel Rosen and Itamar Simonson show in their book Absolute Value, we are increasingly keeping our options open in more and more consumer decisions. When it comes to buying stuff – even if we have brand loyalty – we are increasingly aware of the “back burners” available to us.

 

 

 

The Bermuda Triangle of Advertising

In the past few weeks, via the comments I’ve received on my two (1,2) columns looking at the possible future of media selection and targeting, it’s become apparent to me that we’re at a crisis point when it comes to advertising. I’ve been fortunate enough to have some of the brightest minds and sharpest commentators in the industry contributing their thoughts on the topic. In the middle of all these comments lies a massive gap. This gap can be triangulated by looking at three comments in particular:

Esther Dyson: “Ultimately, what the advertisers want is sales…  attention, engagement…all these are merely indicators for attribution and waypoints on the path to sales.”

Doc Searls: “Please do what you do best (and wins the most awards): make ads that clearly sponsor the content they accompany (we can actually appreciate that), and are sufficiently creative to induce positive regard in our hearts and minds.”

Ken Fadner: “I don’t want to live in a world like this one” (speaking of the hyper targeted advertising scenario I described in my last column).

These three comments are all absolutely right (with the possible exception of Searls, which I’ll come back to in a minute) and they draw a path around the gaping hole that is the future of advertising.

So let’s strip this back to the basics to try to find solid ground from which to move forward again.

Advertising depends on a triangular value exchange: We want entertainment and information – which is delivered via various media. These media need funding – which comes from advertising. Advertising wants exposure to the media audience. So, if we boil that down – we put up with advertising in return for access to entertainment and information. This is the balance that is deemed “OK” by Doc Searls and other commenters

The problem is that this is no longer the world we live in – if we ever did. The value exchange requires all three sides to agree that the value is sufficient for us to keep participating. The relatively benign and balanced model of advertising laid out by Searls just doesn’t exist anymore.

The problem is the value exchange triangle is breaking down on two sides – for advertisers and the audience.

As I explained in an earlier Online Spin, value exchanges depend on scarcity and for the audience, there is no longer a scarcity of information and entertainment. Also, there are now new models for information and entertainment delivery that disrupt our assessment of this value exchange. The cognitive context that made us accepting of commercials has been broken. Where once we sat passively and consumed advertising, we now have subscription contexts that are entirely commercial free. That makes the appearance of advertising all the more frustrating. Our brain has been trained to no longer be accepting of ads. The other issue is that ads only appeared in contexts where we were passively engaged. Now, ads appear when we’re actively engaged. That’s an entirely different mental model with different expectations of acceptability.

This traditional value exchange is also breaking down for advertisers. The inefficiencies of the previous model have been exposed and more accountable and effective models have emerged. Dyson’s point was probably the most constant bearing point we can navigate to – companies want sales. They also want more effective advertising. And much as we may hate the clutter and crap that litters the current digital landscape, when it works well it does promise to deliver a higher degree of efficiency.

So, we have the previous three sided value exchange collapsing on two of the sides, bringing the third side – media- down with it.

Look, we can bitch about digital all we want. I share Searls frustration with digital in general and Fadner’s misgivings about creepy and ineffective execution of digital targeting in particular. But this horse has already left the barn. Digital is more than just the flavor of the month. It’s the thin edge of a massive wedge of change in content distribution and consumption. For reasons far too numerous to name, we’ll never return to the benign world of clearly sponsored content and creative ads. First of all, that benign world never worked that well. Secondly, two sides of the value-exchange triangle have gotten a taste of something better- virtually unlimited content delivered without advertising strings attached and a much more effective way to deliver advertising.

Is digital working very well now? Absolutely not. Fadner and Searls are right about that, It’s creepy, poorly targeted, intrusive and annoying. And it’s all these things for the very same reason that Esther Dyson identified – companies want sales and they’ll try anything that promises to deliver it. But we’re at the very beginning of a huge disruptive wave. Stuff isn’t supposed to work very well at this point. That comes with maturity and an inevitable rebalancing. Searls may rail against digital, just like people railed against television, the telephone and horseless carriages. But it’s just too early to tell what a more mature model will look like. Corporate greed will dictate the trying of everything. We will fight back by blocking the hi-jacking of our attention. A sustainable balance will emerge somewhere in between. But we can’t see it yet from our vantage point.

The Rise of the Audience Marketplace

Far be it from me to let a theme go before it has been thoroughly beaten to the ground. This column has hosted a lot of speculation on the future of advertising and media buying and today, I’ll continue in that theme.

First, let’s return to a column I wrote almost a month ago about the future of advertising. This was a spin-off on a column penned by Gary Milner – The End of Advertising as We Know It. In it, Gary made a prediction: “I see the rise of a global media hub, like a stock exchange, which will become responsible for transacting all digital programmatic buys.”

Gary talked about the possible reversal of fragmentation of markets by channel and geographic area due to the potential centralization of digital media purchasing. But I see it a little differently than Gary. I don’t see the creation of a media hub – or, at least – that wouldn’t be the end goal. Media would simply be the means to the end. I do see the creation of an audience market based on available data. Actually, even an audience would only be the means to an end. Ultimately, we’re buying one thing – attention. Then it’s our job to create engagement.

The Advertising Research Foundation has been struggling with measuring engagement for a long time now. But it’s because they were trying to measure engagement on a channel-by-channel basis and that’s just not how the world works anymore. Take search, for example. Search is highly effective at advertising, but it’s not engaging. It’s a connecting medium. It enables engagement, but it doesn’t deliver it.

We talk multi-channel a lot, but we talk about it like the holy grail. The grail in this cause is an audience that is likely to give us their attention and once they do that – is likely to become engaged with our message. The multi-channel path to this audience is really inconsequential. We only talk about multi-channel now because we’re stopping short of the real goal, connecting with that audience. What advertising needs to do is give us accurate indicators of those two likelihoods: how likely are they to give us their attention and what is their potential proclivity towards our offer. The future of advertising is in assembling audiences – no matter what the channel – that are at a point where they are interested in the message we have to deliver.

This is where the digitization of media becomes interesting. It’s not because it’s aggregating into a single potential buying point – it’s because it’s allowing us to parallel a single prospect along a path of persuasion, getting important feedback data along the way. In this definition, audience isn’t a static snapshot in time. It becomes an evolving, iterative entity. We have always looked at advertising on an exposure-by-exposure basis. But if we start thinking about persuading an audience that paradigm needs to be shifted. We have to think about having the right conversation, regardless of the channel that happens to be in use at the time.

Our concept of media happens to carry a lot of baggage. In our minds, media is inextricably linked to channel. So when we think media, we are really thinking channels. And, if we believe Marshall McLuhan, the medium dictates the message. But while media has undergone intense fragmentation they’ve also become much more measurable and – thereby – more accountable. We know more than ever about who lies on the other side of a digital medium thanks to an ever increasing amount of shared data. That data is what will drive the advertising marketplace of the future. It’s not about media – it’s about audience.

In the market I envision, you would specify your audience requirements. The criteria used would not be so much our typical segmentations – demography or geography for example. These have always just been proxies for what we really care about; their beliefs about our product and predicted buying behaviors. I believe that thanks to ever increasing amounts of data we’re going to make great strides in understanding the psychology of consumerism. These  will be foundational in the audience marketplace of the future. Predictive marketing will become more and more accurate and allow for increasingly precise targeting on a number of behavioral criteria.

Individual channels will become as irrelevant as the manufacturer that supplies the shock absorbers and tie rods in your new BMW. They will simply be grist for the mill in the audience marketplace. Mar-tech and ever smarter algorithms will do the channel selection and media buying in the background. All you’ll care about is the audience you’re targeting, the recommended creative (again, based on the mar-tech running in the background) and the resulting behaviors. Once your audience has been targeted and engaged, the predicted path of persuasion is continually updated and new channels are engaged as required. You won’t care what channels they are – you’ll simply monitor the progression of persuasion.

 

Media Buying is Just the Tip of Advertising’s Disruptive Iceberg

Two weeks ago, Gary Milner wrote a lucid prediction of what advertising might become. He rightly stated that advertising has been in a 40-year period of disruption. Bingo. He went on to say that he sees a consolidation of media buying into a centralized hub. Again, I don’t question the clarity of Milner’s crystal ball. It makes sense to me.

What is missing from Milner’s column, however, is the truly disruptive iceberg that is threatening to founder advertising as we know it – the total disruption of the relationship between the advertiser and the marketplace. Milner deals primarily with the media buying aspect of advertising but there’s a much bigger question to tackle. He touched on it in one sentence: “The fact is that a vast majority of advertising is increasingly being ignored.”

Yes! Exactly. But why?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because of a disagreement about what advertising should be. We (the buyers) believe advertising’s sole purpose is to inform. But the sellers believe advertising is there to influence buyers. And increasingly, we’re rejecting that definition.

I know. That’s a tough pill to swallow. But let’s apply a little logic to the premise. Bear with me.

Advertising was built on a premise of scarcity. Market places can’t exist without scarcity. There needs to be an imbalance to make an exchange of value worthwhile. Advertising exists because there once was a scarcity of information. We (the buyers) lacked information about products and services. This was primarily because of the inefficiencies inherent in a physical market. So, in return for the information, we traded something of value – our attention. We allowed ourselves to be influenced. We tolerated advertising because we needed it. It was the primary way we gained information about the marketplace.

In Milner’s column, he talks about Peter Diamandis’ 6 stages that drive the destruction of industries: digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization. Milner applied it to the digitization of media. But these same forces are also being applied to information and rather than driving advertising from disruption to a renaissance period, as Milner predicts, I believe we’ve barely scratched the surface of disruption. The ride will only get bumpier from here on.

The digitization of information enables completely new types of marketplaces. Consider the emergence of the two-sided markets that both AirBNB and Uber exemplify. Thanks to the digitization of information, entirely new markets have emerged that allow the flow of information between buyers and suppliers. Because AirBNB and Uber have built their business models astride these flows, they can get a cut of the action.

But the premise of the model is important to understand. AirBNB and Uber are built on the twin platforms of information and enablement. There is no attempt to persuade by the providers of the platforms – because they know those attempts will erode the value of the market they’re enabling. We are not receptive to persuasion (in the form of advertising) because we have access to information that we believe to be more reliable – user reviews and ratings.

The basic premise of advertising has changed. Information is no longer scarce. In fact, through digitization, we have the opposite problem. We have too much information and too little attention to allocate to it. We now need to filter information and increasingly, the filters we apply are objectivity and reliability. That turns the historical value exchange of advertising on its head. This has allowed participatory information marketplaces such as Uber, AirBNB and Google to flourish. In these markets, where information flows freely, advertising that attempts to influence feels awkward, forced and disingenuous. Rather than building trust, advertising erodes it.

This disruption has also driven another trend with dire consequences for advertising as we know it – the “Maker” revolution and the atomization of industries. There are some industries where any of us could participate as producers and vendors. The hospitality industry is one of these. The needs of a traveller are pretty minimal – a bed, a roof, a bathroom. Most of us could provide these if we were so inclined. We don’t need to be Conrad Hilton. These are industries susceptible to atomization – breaking the market down to the individual unit. And it’s in these industries where disruptive information marketplaces will emerge first. But I can’t build a refrigerator. Or a car (yet). In these industries, scale is still required. And these will be the last strongholds of mass advertising.

Milner talked about the digitization of media and the impact on advertising. But there’s a bigger change afoot – the digitization of information in marketplaces that previously relied on scarcity of information to prop up business models. As information goes from scarcity to abundance, these business models will inevitably fall.

The Case for Strong External Marketing Partnerships

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Sherry Turkle

We like to spend time with others that agree with what we have to say. In her book, Reclaiming Conversation, Sherry Turkle says this leads to us living in a bubble – in this case – a bubble of agreement. While soothing to our own sensibilities, this can be a dangerous path to walk down. It leads to dangerous biases in perception like Group Think and Information Cascades. It doesn’t give us a true picture of what the world is really like.

Last week, I said that a shorter “sense-making” cycle is one reason why moving advertising and marketing in-house might be a better way to go. But what if those sense-making cycles lead to a skewed view of the world because of perceptual distortion? What if it leads to us seeing the world not as it is, but as we wish it was? Today, as promised, I want to look at the other side of the question – the advantages that can come from having strong external partnerships.

As I said last week, Bayesian Strategy relies on three principles:

  • Strategic planning is a continuous and iterative process
  • Strategic plans are nothing more than hypotheses that are then subject to validation through empirical data
  • The span of the loop between the setting of the strategic frame and the data that validates it should be kept as short as possible.

While moving more functions – including marketing – in-house helps with the last of these, it can lead to problems with the second step: Empirical Validation.

Prolonged ideological homogeneity is never a good thing. Yet human nature craves it. So, from Socrates on down, we have created rational frameworks that force us to consider divergent thoughts. Democracy is built on such a framework. But over time, most organizations naturally move towards a shared opinion of the world – and that opinion usually starts at the top. It’s what Avinash Kaushik calls the HIPPO Syndrome – The Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

Agreement bubbles expand due to confirmation bias. Even if we pay lip service to validating our opinions with empirical data, what we count as data depends on what we believe. We look for evidence that confirms our beliefs. We can deny we do it, we can chastise ourselves for doing it, but the fact is, it’s human nature. In the end, we’ll still do it, because we’re programmed to do so.

One way to reliably poke our “agreement bubbles” is to build robust mechanisms to both encounter and embrace ideas from outside the bubble. Remember a few months ago, when I wrote that cultures in which higher percentages of atheists are found also tend to be more innovative? The same factors are at work here. Those cultures have more ideological divergence. More perspectives are considered. The result is almost always a more accurate view of the world. Everyone wants to believe they are “right”, but what is “right” – or as close as is possible – is a synthesis of many different opinions and beliefs.

In this case – especially with something as vital to strategy as marketing – a strong external partnership can force us to consider our agreement bubbles. This is where an agency can bring new views to the table. But the agency and the client have to realize that this is where the value of these partnerships lies. They have to embrace this role and build the trust required to introduce external perspectives into the strategic sense-making cycle.

With two sides of the argument now sketched out, we’ll look next week at how the agency partnership of the future might look.