Category Archives: Corporate Strategy

In or Out: It’s Really About Making Sense of the Market

My fellow Insider, Maarten Albarda, tackled the inhouse vs outsourced question a few weeks ago in a thoughtful column. Today, I’m trying to repay thoughtfulness with additional thought provocation. The topic, I suspect, touches on the increasingly disruptive nature of marketing strategy.

As Maarten points out, when we think about bringing marketing inhouse, we also have to consider unintended consequences. But those fall on both sides of this question. What is probably a bigger question is how the company defines marketing. Because the answer to that question is not the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago. There, marketing was predicated on the assumption that the market was a fairly static and linear entity. But today, we are discovering that the market is complex, non-linear, adaptive and dynamic. And that discovery dramatically impacts the whole in-house vs outsourced question.

Maarten is absolutely right when he outlines many of the speedbumps (not to mention gapping chasms) that can lie on the path to bringing marketing inhouse. The reason, I believe, is that everyone involved is considering this plan based on the above-mentioned assumption. They aren’t factoring in the disruption that’s tearing the industry apart. And whether you’re continuing down the agency path or bringing marketing in house, you need to factor in that disruption. By doing so, you necessarily have to bring a different perspective to the decision and the things you have to consider.

Given the highly dynamic nature of the market, I believe there are two essential loops that have to be part of any marketing plan today. One of these is a robust and externally focussed “sense-making” loop. I’ve written about this before, in the context of search marketing.  The concept is borrowed from the fields of cognitive neuroscience, artificial intelligence and psychology. This shifts the fundamental precept of marketing, from that of crafting an internal strategy and executing it to a waiting market to that of constantly monitoring the evolving nature of the market and responding in real time. Strategy is still vital, but rather than an executable plan that plays out over multiple years, it’s a “frame” (to use the terminology of sensemaking) that has to be continually validated and – if necessary – updated. The other loop is a nimble and fully “tuned in” response loop. The two play together. One informs the other. They are also highly iterative. They have to continually be updated.

So, in considering this, one has to ask – are these loops better situated inside or outside of the organization. There are pros and cons on both sides of the question. Theoretically, for sensemaking, I would say the advantage lies on the agency side of the table.  Agencies should find it easier to maintain an objective, external focus. They also have the advantage of having “sensing” antennae over multiple clients, giving them a bigger and less myopic data picture. The challenge may come in matching the data to the existing frame. The frame – or strategy – is the nexus between the market’s reality and the marketer’s reality.  It is here where an agency may lose its advantage. Maarten rightly states that a company decides to bring marketing in-house, “these decisions have far-reaching consequences across the wider enterprise that impact working methods, required internal and external support structures, capital investment, HR policies, IT investment and talent, etc.” But I would argue that this should be true of marketing regardless of whether it lies within the corporate domain or at some agency boardroom table. Given the “real-time” reality of today’s marketing, it should be fully integrated into every aspect of the business. Siloes just can’t cut it. That’s a difficult integration when all the players are at the same table. I suspect it might be impossible when those players are at different tables within different companies.

One has to deeply consider the motivations for bringing marketing in-house. As Albarda notes, if it’s just cost saving, that’s a false economy. Control is also cited. That is getting closer to the issue, but it’s using the wrong language. Control is impossible. Responsiveness is a better label.

The motivation for bringing marketing inhouse should be exclusively to build the most robust sense-making and response loops possible.

 

Life After Google: The Great Social Experiment

Google is fascinating. And not because of an algorithm, or technology, or it’s balance sheet.

Google is fascinating at a human level. It is perhaps the greatest corporate-based social experiment conducted so far this century.

If we are talking about the Silicon Valley ethos, Google is the iconic example. There were other companies that started down the road of turning their corporate culture into a secular religion before Google, but it was this company that crystallized it. It is the company caricaturized in pop culture, whether it be the thinly disguised Hooli of the series Silicon Valley, a dystopian The Circle in the forgettable movie of the same name, or even straight up Google besieged by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn in The Internship.

By now, Facebook has arguably picked up the mantle of the iconic Silicon Valley culture but that’s also what makes Google interesting. Google – and it’s carefully crafted hyper-drive working culture – has now been around for two decades. Many have passed through the crucible of all that is Google and have emerged on the other side.  Today I offer three interesting examples of Life after Google – with three people who are making their social statements in three very different ways. Let’s call them the Evangelist, the Novelist and the Algorithmist.

The Evangelist – Tristan Harris

Harris_Tristan_AIF2018_0I’ve talked about Tristan before in this column. He is the driving force behind Time Well Spent and The Center for Humane Technology. Harris has been called the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience” by The Atlantic Magazine. He was sucked into the Google vortex when Google acquired his company – Apture – in 2011. Harris then spent some time as Google’s Design Ethicist before leaving Google in 2016 to work full-time on “reforming the attention economy.”

Tristan shares my fear that technology may be playing nasty tricks with our minds below the waterline of consciousness. He focuses on the nexus of that influence, the handful of companies that steer our thoughts without us even being aware of it. In Tristan’s crusade, the prime suspect is Facebook but Google also shares the blame. And the crime is the theft of our attention. This asset, which we believe is in our control, is actually being consciously diverted into areas by someone other than ourselves. Design engineers are all too aware of our psychological hot buttons and push them mercilessly because, in this new economy, attention equals profitability. For that reason, Harris’s message would risk being disingenuous coming from the Googleplex. As I’ve said before, it’s hard to believe that Google or Facebook would lead the “Time Well Spent” charge when doing so would directly impact their bottom line.

The Novelist – Jessica Powell

JessicaPowell_057_hires.0Jessica Powell was the head of communications at Google. And while she says her new novel – “The Big Disruption” –  is not a Google tell-all, the subject matter is definitely targeted right at her former employer. The name of the company in the novel has been changed to Anahata, but anyone who has ever visited the Google campus would recognize her descriptions instantly. The Big Disruption is satire and as such it’s been exaggerated for effect.  But hidden amongst the wild caricatures are spot-on revelations about Silicon Valley. The Novel – available at Medium.com – is billed as a “totally fictional but essentially true Silicon Valley Story.  And a review in the New York Times states, “while the events in her satire are purposefully and hilariously over the top, her diagnosis of Silicon Valley’s cultural stagnancy is so spot on that it’s barely contestable.”

The Algorithmist – Max Hawkins

maxhawkinsSo, if we’re talking about surrendering control of our lives to technology, we have to talk about Max Hawkins. His life is determined by an algorithm. Actually, his life is determined by a few algorithms.

Hawkins was profiled in the NPR podcast Invisibilia. He left his job as a Google software engineer three years ago. Max has created a number of programs that randomly direct his life. For example, he created a program that scraped Facebook’s events API and sent him to them at random. Suggestions about where and what he eats are also randomly generated by an algorithm. Even his new tattoo was determined by an algorithm that scraped Google Images for line art suggestions. Accordingly to an interview on Medium, his latest project involves a machine that scans books for verb-object pairs – such as “hire a babysitter” or even “kill a deer”  – randomly presenting them to him to act on.

The interesting thing about Hawkins’ experiment is the authority he gives to his algorithms. He feels comfortable doing this because of the randomness of the process. He speculates what this might mean for the world at large, “It’d be interesting to imagine what would happen if all power was distributed randomly. A randomized socialism where the computer decides that you’re rich for a couple of months and you get to see what it’s like to wield power and after that you’re poor for a while. There’s a certain fairness to that.”

For these three – life at Google must have shaped what came after.

Deconstructing the Google/Facebook Duopoly

We’ve all heard about it. The Google/Facebook Duopoly. This was what I was going to write about last week before I got sidetracked. I’m back on track now (or, at least, somewhat back on track). So let’s start by understanding what a duopoly is…

…a situation in which two suppliers dominate the market for a commodity or service.

And this, from Wikipedia…

… In practice, the term is also used where two firms have dominant control over a market.

So, to have a duopoly, you need two things: domination and control. First, let’s deal with the domination question. In 2017, Google and Facebook together took a very healthy 59% slice of all digital ad revenues in the US. Google captured 38.6% of that, with Facebook capturing 20%. That certainly seems dominant. But if online marketing is the market, that is a very large basket with a lot of different items thrown in. So, let’s do a broad categorization to help deconstruct this a bit.  Typically, when I try to understand marketing, I like to start with humans – or more specifically – what that lump of grey matter we call a brain is doing. And if we’re talking about marketing, we’re talking about attention – how our brains are engaging with our environment. That is an interesting way to divide up the market we’re talking about, because it neatly bisects the attentional market, with Google on one side and Facebook on the other.

Google dominates the top down, intent driven, attentionally focused market. If you’re part of this market, you have something in mind and you’re trying to find it. If we use search as a proxy for this attentional state (which is the best proxy I can think of) we see just how dominate Google is. It owns this market to a huge degree. According to Statista, Google has about 87% of the total worldwide search market in April of 2018. The key metric here is success. Google needs to be the best way to fulfill those searches. And if market share is any indication, it is.

Facebook apparently dominates the bottom up awareness market. These are the people killing time online and they are not actively looking with commercial intent. This is more of an awareness play where attention has to be diverted to an advertising message. Therefore, time spent becomes the key factor. You need to be in front of the right eyeballs, and so you need a lot of eyeballs and a way to target to the right ones.

Here is where things get interesting. If we look at share of consumer time, Google dominates here. But there is a huge caveat, which I’ll get to in a second. According to a report this spring by Pivotal Research, Google owns just under 28% of all the time we spend consuming digital content. Facebook has just over a 16% share of this market. So why do we have a duopoly and not a monopoly? It’s because of that caveat – a whopping slice of Google’s “time spent” dominance comes from YouTube. And YouTube has an entirely different attentional profile – one that’s much harder to present advertising against. When you’re watching a video on YouTube, your attention is “locked” on the video. Disrupting that attention erodes the user experience. So Google has had a tough time monetizing YouTube.

According to Seeking Alpha, Google’s search ad business will account for 68% of their total revenue of $77 billion this year. That’s over 52 billion dollars that is in that “top-down” attentionally focused bucket. YouTube, which is very much in the “bottom-up” disruptive bucket, accounts for $12 Billion in advertising revenues. Certainly nothing to sneeze at, but not on the same scale as Google’s search business. Facebook’s revenue, at about $36 B, is also generated by this same “bottom up” market, but they have a different attentional profile. The Facebook user is not as “locked in” as they are on YouTube. With the right targeting tools, something that Facebook has excelled at, you have a decent chance of gaining their attention long enough to notice your ad.

Domination

If we look at the second part of the definition of a duopoly – that of control – we see some potential chinks in the armor of both Google and Facebook. Typically, market control was in the form of physical constraints against the competition. But in this new type of market, the control can only be in the minds of the users. The barriers to competitive entry are all defined in mental terms.

In  Google’s case, they have a single line of defense: they have to be an unbreakable habit. Habits are mental scripts that depend on two things – obvious environmental cues that trigger habitual behavior and acceptable outcomes once the script completes. So, to maintain their habit, Google has to ensure that whatever environment you might be in when searching online for something, Google is just a click or two away. Additionally, they have to meet a certain threshold of success. Habits are tough to break, but there are two areas of vulnerability in Google’s dominance.

Facebook is a little different. They need to be addictive. This is a habit taken to the extreme. Addictions depend on pushing certain reward buttons in the brain that lead to an unhealthy behavioral script which become obsessive. The more addicted you are to Facebook and its properties, the more successful they will be in their dominance of the market. You can see the inherent contradiction here. Despite Facebook’s protests to the contrary, with their current revenue model they can only succeed at the expense of our mental health.

I find these things troubling. When you have two for-profit organizations fighting to dominate a market that is defined in our own minds, you have the potential for a lot of unhealthy corporate decisions.

 

Rethinking Media

I was going to write about the Facebook/Google duopoly, but I got sidetracked by this question, “If Google and Facebook are a duopoly, what is the market they are controlling?” The market, in this case, is online marketing, of which they carve out a whopping 61% of all revenue. That’s advertising revenue. And yet, we have Mark Zuckerberg testifying this spring in front of Congress that he is not a media company…

“I consider us to be a technology company because the primary thing that we do is have engineers who write code and build product and services for other people”

That may be an interesting position to take, but his adoption of a media-based revenue model doesn’t pass the smell test. Facebook makes revenue from advertising and you can only sell advertising if you are a medium. The definition of media literally means an intervening agency that provides a means of communication. The trade-off for providing that means is that you get to monetize it by allowing advertisers to piggyback on that communication flow. There is nothing in the definition of “media” about content creation.

Google has also used this defense. The common thread seems to be that they are exempt from the legal checks and balances normally associated with media because they don’t produce content. But they do accept content, they do have an audience and they do profit from connecting these two through advertising. It is disingenuous to try to split legal hairs in order to avoid the responsibility that comes from their position as a mediator.

But this all brings up the question:  what is “media”? We use the term a lot. It’s in the masthead of this website. It’s on the title slug of this daily column. We have extended our working definition of media, which was formed in an entirely different world, as a guide to what it might be in the future. It’s not working. We should stop.

First of all, definitions depend on stability, and the worlds of media and advertising are definitely not stable. We are in the middle of a massive upheaval. Secondly, definitions are mental labels. Labels are short cuts we use so we don’t have to think about what something really is. And I’m arguing that we should be thinking long and hard about what media is now and what it might become in the future.

I can accept that technology companies want to disintermediate, democratize and eliminate transactional friction. That’s what technology companies do. They embrace elegance –  in the scientific sense – as the simplest possible solution to something. What Facebook and Google have done is simplified the concept of media back to its original definition: the plural of medium, which is something that sits in the middle. In fact – by this definition – Google and Facebook are truer media than CNN, the New York Times or Breitbart. They sit in between content creators and content consumers. They have disintermediated the distribution of content. They are trying to reap all the benefits of a stripped down and more profitable working model of media while trying to downplay the responsibility that comes with the position they now hold. In Facebook’s case, this is particularly worrisome because they are also aggregating and distributing that content in a way that leads to false assumptions and dangerous network effects.

Media as we used to know it gradually evolved a check and balance process of editorial oversight and journalistic integrity that sat between the content they created and the audience that would consume it. Facebook and Google consider those things transactional friction. They were part of an inelegant system. These “technology companies” did their best to eliminate those human dependent checks and balances while retaining the revenue models that used to subsidize them.

We are still going to need media in a technological future. Whether they be platforms or publishers, we are going to depend on and trust certain destinations for our information. We will become their audience and in exchange they will have the opportunity to monetize this audience. All this should not come cheaply. If they are to be our chosen mediators, they have to live up to their end of the bargain.

 

 

My View from Pier 21

This week, as we celebrate our countries on both sides of the 49th  Parallel (Canada Day – July 1st  – and the 4th of July in the US) – what exactly are we celebrating? What is it that we are so patriotic towards? The whole idea of a nation is a rather nebulous one. Exactly what is this thing we call America or Canada?

I got a partial answer a few weeks ago when I went to Pier 21 in Halifax. It’s the Canadian version of Ellis Island. It was where almost 1 million new Canadians first set foot when they immigrated to this continent. It is a celebration of courage, dreaming and acceptance.

Immigration – to a great extent – has woven the fabric of the nations we will celebrate this week. That is what makes the xenophobia that also seems to be part of our character in both countries so puzzling. If there were no immigrants, there would be no nation. At least, certainly not in the form we recognize this week. These immigrants, where ever they come from, have defined the nation we celebrate so vigorously. The things we revere as ours were forged from the intellect, inspiration and energy of millions that, at one time, had to step on this continent for the very first time. This includes almost everyone I know. I am the grandchild of immigrants who set sail from Liverpool. My in-laws are immigrants who set sail from Naples. The non-aboriginal roots of this continent do not run deep – a few generations for most of us – but they are strong. And this week, I celebrate that. I believe it’s a good thing. Very good.

In 2017, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers partner Mary Meeker showed just how important immigration was to that most hallowed of American ideals, technical innovation. Sixty percent of the highest value tech companies in America were co-founded by first- or second- generation immigrants. Steve Jobs was the son of a Syrian. Sergey Brin was born in Russia. Facebook, Oracle, IBM, Uber, ADP, eBay – all of these American companies exist because someone decided that life would be better in a country other than the one they were born.

It is convenient to celebrate mmigration in hindsight. It is tempting to apply “Yes, but” logic to the topic. “Yes, we want immigrants, but only the right kind!” But what is the right kind? Who makes that choice? Who is wise enough – who has a crystal ball bright enough – to be able to look in the future and predict who will be a founder of the next Google or Facebook?

Here in Canada, we don’t have a great track record in that regard. Our record when it comes to welcoming new immigrants is hardly spotless. We treated the Chinese abysmally. We did the same to the Japanese during World War Two. In fact, we have – at one time or another – discriminated against immigrants from almost every nation on earth. Looking back, we admit our mistakes and apologize. We are Canadian, after all. But are we any the wiser for this knowledge? Aren’t we just making the same mistakes over and over again? The point of origin may be different, but the prejudice is all too familiar.

wheelofconsciousness

Wheel of Conscience – by Daniel Libeskind

At Pier 21 – as soon as you enter the door – you see a large mechanical wheel in the entry hall. It’s called the Wheel of Conscience, and it was created by architect Daniel Libeskind. It commemorates the tragic story of the SS. St. Louis.  The St Louis set sail for Cuba from Hamburg, Germany on May 13, 1939. There were 937 passengers, most of them were Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany. They left with valid Cuban visas, but due to a sudden change in immigration policy by a pro-Fascist government, they were denied entry in Havana. They next tried the US and set sail for Florida. Acting on the advice of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, the US government also said no. The US Coast Guard trailed the St. Louis to prevent it from running aground and allowing their passenger to illegally enter the country. Their last chance was Canada. The captain, Gustav Schroder, headed to Halifax. There, he was met with the official government decision – “None is too many” – voiced by Frederick Blair, Canada’s Director of Immigration at the time.

The MS St. Louis had no choice but to return to Europe, where the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and the Netherlands received the refugees. Of course, three of these countries would soon be overrun by the Nazis, and it’s estimated that about one quarter of the original passengers did not survive the Holocaust. The names of the refused refugees are engraved on one side of the massive wheel.

The creator, Daniel Libeskind, was the son of Holocaust survivors. He was born in Poland and immigrated to the US with his family in 1957. He became one of North America’s best-known architects and industrial designers. In 2002, he was chosen to oversee the rebuilding of the World Trade Center after 9/11.

If you want to celebrate a nation – this seems like a good place to start.

 

The View from the Other Side

After a life time in marketing I am now sitting on the other side of the table. Actually, I’m sitting on all sides of the table. In my newest venture it’s just me, so I have to do everything. And I don’t mind telling you I’m overwhelmed. These past few years have given me a whole new appreciation of how damned difficult it is to be a business owner. And my circumstances are probably better than 90% of others out there. This started as a hobby that – with surprisingly little direction from me – somehow grew into a business.  There

Is no real financial pressure on me. There are no sales numbers I have to hit. I have no investors to answer to. I have no debt to service. My business is very limited in scope.

But still – somehow – I feel like I’m drowning. I couldn’t imagine doing this if the stakes were higher

It’s Hard to Find the Time to Build a Better Mousetrap…

I’ve always been of the opinion that the core of the business and the marketing of that business should be inseparable. But as I’ve learned, that’s a difficult balancing act to pull off. Marketing is a vast black hole that can suck up all your time. And in any business, there is just a lot of stuff that requires a lot of time to do. It requires even more time if you want to do it well. Something has to give. So what should that something be? That sounds trite, but it’s not.

Take me, for example. I decided to offer bike tours. Sound simple enough, right? I had no idea how many permits, licenses and authorizations I needed to have. That all takes time. And it was time I had to spend before I could do anything else.

Like I said, to do things well takes time. Businesses naturally have to evolve. Almost none of us gets it right out of the gate. We make mistakes and then have to figure out how not to make those mistakes again. This is good and natural. I believe a good business has to have a leader that sweats the details, because the details are where shit goes wrong. I’m a big picture guy but I’ve discovered that big pictures are actually a mosaic of a million little pieces that someone has to pay attention to. And that takes time.

The Fear of a Not Doing Everything Right Now

New companies used to have the luxury of time. No one expected them to hit the home run in their first year. Well, Google and Facebook screwed that up for everyone, didn’t they? We are now all supposed to operate within some ridiculously compressed timeline for success. Our business lives are all about rushing things to market, rapid iteration, agile development. And while we’re doing all that, we should also be keeping up with our Instagram posts and building a highly engaged online community. If we don’t successfully do all those things, we feel like we’ve failed.

I’m calling bullshit on that. Most studies done on this subject show the odds of survival for a new company lasting five years are somewhere between 40 and 50%. That’s not great, but I have to believe that given the coin toss survival rate, there are a lot of companies that may not have a fully optimized Facebook business page that have somehow managed to survive bankruptcy. And even the businesses that do wrap it up are not always financial failures. Many times it’s because the founder has just had enough.

I completely understand that. I started this busIness because I wanted to have fun. And while not many of us give that reason for starting a business, I don’t believe I’m the only one. If this isn’t fun, why the hell are we doing it? But juggling a zillion balls knowing that I’m guaranteed to drop many of them isn’t all that much fun. Each morning begins with a dropped ball inventory. It seems that business today is all about reactive triage. What did I do? What didn’t I do? What might kill me and what’s only going to hurt for a while?

I’d like to end this column with some pat advice, some strategy to deal with the inevitable inundation of stuff that is demanding your time. But I’m struggling. I believe it’s hidden somewhere between my two previous points – deal with what’s potentially fatal and try to have some fun. At least, that’s what I’m trying to do.

Advertising Meets its Slippery Slope

We’ve now reached the crux of the matter when it comes to the ad biz.

For a couple of centuries now, we’ve been refining the process of advertising. The goal has always been to get people to buy stuff. But right now, there is now a perfect storm of forces converging that requires some deep navel gazing on the part of us insiders.

It used to be that to get people to buy, all we had to do was inform. Pent up consumer demand created by expanding markets and new product introductions would take care of the rest. We just had to connect better the better mousetraps with the world, which would then duly beat the path to the respective door.  Advertising equaled awareness.

But sometime in the waning days of the consumer orgy that followed World War Two, we changed our mandate. Not content with simply informing, we decided to become influencers. We slipped under the surface of the brain, moving from providing information for rational consideration to priming subconscious needs. We started messing with the wiring of our market’s emotional motivations.  We became persuaders.

Persuasion is like a mental iceberg – 90% of the bulk lies below the surface. Rationalization is typically the hastily added layer of ad hoc logic that happens after the decision is already made.  This is true to varying degrees for almost any consumer category you can think including – unfortunately – our political choices.

This is why, a few columns ago – I said Facebook’s current model is unsustainable. It is based on advertising, and I think advertising may have become unsustainable. The truth is, advertisers have gotten so good at persuading us to do things that we are beginning to revolt. It’s getting just too creepy.

To understand how we got here, let’s break down persuasion. It requires the persuader to shift the beliefs of the persuadee. The bigger the shift required, the tougher the job of persuasion.  We tend to build irrational (aka emotional) bulwarks around our beliefs to preserve them. For this reason, it’s tremendously beneficial to the persuader to understand the belief structure of their target. If they can do this, they can focus on those whose belief structure is most conducive to the shift required.

When it comes to advertisers, the needle on our creative powers of persuasion hasn’t really moved that much in the last half century. There were very persuasive ads created in the 1960’s and there are still great ads being created. The disruption that has moved our industry to the brink of the slippery slope has all happened on the targeting end.

The world we used to live in was a bunch of walled and mostly unconnected physical gardens. Within each, we would have relevant beliefs but they would remain essentially private. You could probably predict with reasonable accuracy the religious beliefs of the members of a local church. But that wouldn’t help you if you were wondering whether the congregation leaned towards Ford or Chevy.  Our beliefs lived inside us, typically unspoken and unmonitored.

That all changed when we created digital mirrors of ourselves through Facebook, Twitter, Google and all the other usual suspects. John Battelle, author of The Search,  once called Google the Database of Intentions. It is certainly that. But our intent also provides an insight into our beliefs. And when it comes to Facebook, we literally map out our entire previously private belief structure for the world to see. That is why Big Data is so potentially invasive. We are opening ourselves up to subconscious manipulation of our beliefs by anyone with the right budget. We are kidding ourselves if we believe ourselves immune to the potential abuse that comes with that. Like I said, 90% of our beliefs are submerged in our subconscious.

We are just beginning to realize how effective the new tools of persuasion are. And as we do so, we are beginning to feel that this is all very unfair. No one likes being manipulated; even if they have willing laid the groundwork for that manipulation. Our sense of retroactive justice kicks in. We post rationalize and point fingers. We blame Facebook, or the government, or some hackers in Russia. But these are all just participants in a new eco-system that we have helped build. The problem is not the players. The problem is the system.

It’s taken a long time, but advertising might just have gotten to the point where it works too well.

 

Who Should (or Could) Protect Our Data?

Last week, when I talked about the current furor around the Cambridge Analytica scandal, I said that part of the blame – or at least, the responsibility – for the protection of our own data belonged to us. Reader Chuck Lantz responded with:

“In short, just because a company such as FaceBook can do something doesn’t mean they should.  We trusted FaceBook and they took advantage of that trust. Not being more careful with our own personal info, while not very wise, is not a crime. And attempting to dole out blame to both victim and perpetrator ain’t exactly wise, either.”

Whether it’s wise or not, when it comes to our own data, there are only three places we can reasonably look to protect it:

A) The Government

One only has to look at the supposed “grilling” of Zuckerberg by Congress to realize how forlorn a hope this is. In a follow up post, Wharton ran a list of the questions that Congress should have asked, compiled from their own faculty. My personal favorite comes from Eric Clemons, professor of Operations, Information and Decisions:

“You benefited financially from Cambridge Analytica’s clients’ targeting of fake news and inflammatory posts. Why did you wait years to report what Cambridge Analytica was doing?”

Technology has left the regulatory ability to control it in the dust. The EU is probably the most aggressive legislative jurisdiction in the world when it comes to protecting data privacy. The General Data Protection Regulation goes into place on May 25 of this year and incorporates sweeping new protections for EU citizens. But it will inevitably come up short in three key areas:

  • Even though it immediately applies to all countries processing the data of EU citizens, international compliance will be difficult to enforce consistently, especially if that processing extends beyond “friendly” countries.
  • Technological “loopholes” will quickly find vulnerable gray areas in the legislation that will lead to the misuse of data. Technology will always move faster than legislation. As an example, the GDPR and blockchain technologies are seemingly on a collision course.
  • Most importantly, the GDPR regulation is aimed at data “worst case scenarios.” But there are many apparently benign applications that can border on misuse of personal data. In trying to police even the worst-case instances, the GDPR requires restrictions that will directly impact users in the area of convenience and functionality. There are key areas such as data portability that aren’t fully addressed in the new legislation. At the end of the day, even though it’s protecting them, users will find the GDPR a pain in the ass.

Even with these fundamental flaws, the GDPR probably represents the world’s best attempt at data regulation. The US, as we’ve seen in the past week, comes up well short of this. And even if the people involved weren’t doddering old technologically inept farts the mechanisms required for the passing of relevant and timely legislation simply aren’t there. It would be like trying to catch a jet with a lasso. Should this be the job of government? Sure, I can buy that. Can government handle the job? Not based on the evidence we currently have available to us.

B) The companies that aggregate and manipulate our data.

Philosophically, I completely agree with Chuck. Like I said last week – the point of view I took left me ill at ease. We need these companies to be better than they are. We certainly need them to be better than Facebook was. But Facebook has absolutely no incentive to be better. And my fellow Media Insider, Kaila Colbin, nailed this in her column last week:

“Facebook doesn’t benefit if you feel better about yourself, or if you’re a more informed, thoughtful person. It benefits if you spend more time on its site, and buy more stuff. Giving the users control over who sees their posts offers the illusion of individual agency while protecting the prime directive.”

There are no inherent, proximate reasons for companies to be moral. They are built to be profitable (which, by the way, is why governments should never be run like a company). Facebook’s revenue model is directly opposed to personal protection of data. And that is why Facebook will try to weather this storm by implementing more self-directed security controls to put a good face on things. We will ignore those controls, because it’s a pain in the ass to do otherwise. And this scenario will continue to play out again and again.

C) Ourselves.

It sucks that we have to take this into our own hands. But I don’t see an option. Unless you see something in the first two alternatives that I don’t see, I don’t think we have any choice but to take responsibility. Do you want to put your security in the hands of the government, or Facebook? The first doesn’t have the horsepower to do the job and the second is heading in the wrong direction.

So if the responsibility ends up being ours, what can we expect?

A few weeks ago, another fellow Insider, Dave Morgan, predicted the moats around the walled gardens of data collectors like Facebook will get deeper. But the walled garden approach is not sustainable in the long run. All the market forces are going against it. As markets mature, they move from siloes to open markets. The marketplace of data will head in the same direction. Protectionist measures may be implemented in the short term, but they will not be successful.

This doesn’t negate the fact that the protection of personal information has suddenly become a massive pain point, which makes it huge market opportunity. And like almost all truly meaningful disruptions in the marketplace, I believe the ability to lock down our own data will come from entrepreneurialism. We need a solution that guarantees universal data portability while at the same time maintaining control without putting an unrealistic maintenance burden on us. Rather than having the various walled gardens warehouse our data, we should retain ownership and it should only be offered to platforms like Facebook on a case-by-case “need to know” transactional basis. Will it be disruptive to the current social eco-system? Absolutely. And that’s a good thing.

The targeting of advertising is not a viable business model for the intertwined worlds of social connection and personal functionality. There is just too much at stake here. The only way it can work is for the organization doing the targeting to retain ownership of the data used for the targeting. And we should not trust them to do so in an ethical manner. Their profitability depends on them going beyond what is – or should be – acceptable to us.

The Pillorying of Zuckerberg

Author’s Note: When I started this column I thought I agreed with the views stated. And I still do, mostly. But by the time I finished it, there was doubt niggling at me. It’s hard when you’re an opinion columnist who’s not sure you agree with your own opinion. So here’s what I decided to do. I’m running this column as I wrote it. Then, next week, I’m going to write a second column rebutting some of it.

Let’s face it. We love it when smart asses get theirs. For example: Sir Martin Sorrell. Sorry your lordship but I always thought you were a pontificating and pretentious dickhead and I’m kind of routing for the team digging up dirt on you. Let’s see if you doth protest too much.

Or Jeff Bezos. Okay, granted Trump doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about regarding Amazon. And we apparently love the company. But just how much sympathy do we really have for the world’s richest man? Couldn’t he stand to be taken down a few pegs?

Don’t get me started on Bill Gates.

But the capo di tutti capi of smart-asses is Mark Zuckerberg. As mad as we are about the gushing security leak that has sprung on his watch, aren’t we all a little bit schaudenfreude-ish as we watch the public flailing that is currently playing out? It’s immensely satisfying to point a finger of blame and it’s doubly so to point it at Mr. Zuckerberg.

Which finger you use I’ll leave to your discretion.

But here’s the thing. As satisfying as it is to make Mark our scapegoat, this problem is systemic. It’s not the domain of one man, or even one company. I’m not absolving Facebook and it’s founder from blame. I’m just spreading it around so it’s a little more representatively distributed. And as much as we may hate to admit it, some of that blame ends up on our plate. We enabled the system that made this happen. We made personal data the new currency of exchange. And now we’re pissed off because there were exchanges made without our knowledge. It all comes down to this basic question: Who owns our data?

This is the fundamental question that has to be resolved. Up to now, we’ve been more than happy to surrender our data in return for the online functionality we need to pursue trivial goals. We rush to play Candy Crush and damn the consequences. We have mindlessly put our data in the hands of Facebook without any clear boundaries around what was and wasn’t acceptable for us.

If we look at data as a new market currency, our relationship with Facebook is really no different than that of a bank when we deposit our money in a bank account and allowing the bank to use our money for their own purposes in return for paying us interest. This is how markets work. They are complicated and interlinked and the furthest thing possible from being proportionately equitable.

Personal Data is a big industry. And like any industry, there is a value chain emerging. We are on the bottom of that chain. We supply the raw data. It is no coincidence that terms like “mining,” “scraping” and “stripping” are used when we talk about harvesting data. The digital trails of our behaviors and private thoughts are a raw resource that has become incredibly valuable. And Facebook just happens to be strategically placed in the market to reap the greatest rewards. They add value by aggregating and structuring the data. Advertisers then buy prepackaged blocks of this data to target their messaging. The targeting that Facebook can provide – thanks to the access they have to our data – is superior to what was available before. This is a simple supply and demand equation. Facebook was connecting the supply – coming from our willingness to surrender our personal data – with the demand – advertisers insisting on more intrusive and personal targeting criteria. It was a market opportunity that emerged and Facebook jumped on it. The phrase “don’t hate the player, hate the game” comes to mind.

When new and untested markets emerge, all goes well until it doesn’t. Then all hell breaks loose. Just like it did with Cambridge Analytica. When that happens, our sense of fairness kicks in. We feel duped. We rush to point fingers. We become judgmental, but everything is done in hindsight. This is all reaction. We have to be reactive, because emerging markets are unpredictable. You can’t predict something like Cambridge Analytica. If it wasn’t them – if it wasn’t this – it would have been something else that would have been equally unpredictable. The emerging market of data exchange virtually guaranteed that hell would eventually break loose. As a recent post on Gizmodo points out,

“the kind of data acquisition at the heart of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is more or less standard practice for every other technology company, including places like Google and even Apple. Facebook simply had the misfortune of getting caught after playing fast and loose with who has control over their data.”

To truly move forward from this, we all have to ask ourselves some hard questions. This is not restricted to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. It’s symptomatic of a much bigger issue. And we, the ground level source of this data, will be doing ourselves a disservice in the long run by trying to isolate the blame to any one individual or company. In a very real sense, this is our problem. We are part of a market dynamic that is untested and – as we’ve seen – powerful enough to subvert democracy. Some very big changes are required in the way we treat our own data. We owe it to ourselves to be part of that process.

What the Hell is “Time Spent” with Advertising Anyway?

Over at MediaPost’s Research Intelligencer, Joe Mandese is running a series of columns that are digging into a couple of questions:

  • How much time are consumers spending with advertising; and,
  • How much is that time worth.

The quick answers are 1.84 hours daily and about $3.40 per hour.

Although Joe readily admits that these are ‘back of the envelope” calculations, regular Mediapost reader and commentator Ed Papazian points out a gaping hole in the logic of these questions: an hour of being exposed to ads does not equal an hour spent with those ads and it certainly doesn’t mean an hour being aware of the ads.

Ignoring this fundamental glitch is symptomatic of the conceit of the advertising business in general. They believe there is a value exchange possible where paying consumers to watch advertising is related to the effectiveness of that advertising. The oversimplification required to rationalize this exchange is staggering. It essentially ignores the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It assumes that audience attention is a simple door that can be opened if only the price is right.

It just isn’t that simple.

Let’s go back to the concept of time spent with media. There are many studies done that quantify this. But the simple truth is that media is too big a catchall category to make this quantification meaningful. We’re not even attempting to compare apples and oranges. We’re comparing an apple, a jigsaw and a meteor. The cognitive variations alone in how we consume media are immense.

And while I’m on a rant, let’s nuke the term “consumption” all together, shall we? It’s probably the most misleading word ever coined to define our relationship with media. We don’t consume media any more than we consume our physical environment. It is an informational context within which we function. We interact with aspects of it with varying degrees of intention. Trying to measure all these interactions with a single yardstick is the same as trying to measure our physical interactions with water, oxygen, gravity and an apple tree by the same criterion.

Even trying to dig into this question has a major methodological flaw – we almost never think about advertising. It is usually forced on our consciousness. So to use a research tools like a survey – requiring respondents to actively consider their response – to explore our subconscious relationship with advertising is like using a banana to drive a nail. It’s the wrong tool for the job. It’s the same as me asking you how much you would pay per hour to have access to gravity.

This current fervor all comes from a prediction from Publicis Groupe Chief Growth Officer Rishad Tobaccowala that the supply of consumer attention would erode by 20% to 30% in the next five years. Tobaccowala – by putting a number to attention – led to the mistaken belief that it’s something that could be managed by the industry. The attention of your audience isn’t slipping away because advertising and media buying was mismanaged. It’s slipping away because your audience now has choices, and some of those choices don’t include advertising. Let’s just admit the obvious. People don’t want advertising. We only put up with advertising when we have no choice.

“But wait,” the ad industry is quick to protest, “In surveys people say they are willing to have ads in return for free access to media. In fact, almost 80% of respondents in a recent survey said that they prefer the ad-supported model!”

Again, we have the methodological fly in the ointment. We’re asking people to stop and think about something they never stop and think about. You’re not going to get the right answer. A better answer would be to think about what happens when you get the pop up when you go to a news site with your ad-blocker on. “Hey,” it says, “We notice you’re using an ad-blocker.” If you have the option of turning the ad-blocker off to see the article or just clicking a link that let’s you see it anyway, which are you going to choose? That’s what I thought. And you’re probably in the ad business. It pays your mortgage.

Look, I get that the ad business is in crisis. And I also understand why the industry is motivated to find an answer. But the complexity of the issue in front of us is staggering and no one is served well by oversimplifying it down to putting a price tag on our attention. We have to understand that we’re in an industry where – given the choice – people would rather not have anything to do with us. Unless we do that, we’ll just be making the same mistakes over and over again.