Category Archives: Corporate Strategy

No News is Not Good News

Kelowna, the city I live in – with a population of about 250,000 – just ran its last locally produced TV news show. That marks the end of a 67-year streak. Our local station, CHBC – first signed on the air on September 21, 1957.

That streak was not without some hiccups. There have been a number of ownership changes. The trend in those transitions was away from local ownership towards huge nation spanning media conglomerates. In 2009, when the station became part of the Global network, the intention was to shut down the local station and run everything out of CHAN, the Vancouver Global operation. We kicked up a Kelowna fuss and convinced Global to at least keep a local news presence in the community. But – as it turned out – that was just buying us some time. 15 years later, the plug was finally pulled.

In that time, my city has also essentially lost its daily newspaper, which is a mere ghost of its former self; an anemic online version and a printed paper which is little more than a wrapper for a bunch of grocery flyers.  The tri weekly paper has suffered a similar fate. Radio stations have gutted their local news teams. The biggest news team in the region works for a local news portal. They are young and eager, but few of them are trained journalists.

CHBC started as an extension of local radio. At the time it was launched, only 500 households in the city had a TV set. Broadcasting was “over the air” and I live in a very mountainous location, so it was impossible to watch TV prior to the station signing on. 

Given that the first TV stations only signed on in Canada in 1952 (CBFT in Montreal and CBLT in Toronto), it’s rather amazing to think that my little town (population 10,000 at the time) had its own station just 5 years later. Part of the rapid roll out of TV in Canada was to prevent cultural colonization from the rapidly expanding American TV industry. Our federal government pushed hard to have Canadian programming available from coast to coast.

For the decades that followed, it was local news that defined communities. Local was granular and immediately relevant in a way networks news couldn’t be. It gave you what you needed to know to knowingly participate in local democracy.

For that alone, CHBC News will be missed here in Kelowna.

This story probably resonates with all of you. The death of local journalism is not unique to my city. I have just learned that I probably will be living in a news desert soon.  The  importance of local news is enshrined in the very definition of a news desert:

“a community, either rural or urban, with limited access to the sort of credible and comprehensive news and information that feeds democracy at the grassroots level.”

The death of local news was recently discussed at the Canadian Association of Journalists Annual conference in Toronto. There, April Lindgren, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Journalism and the principal investigator of the Local News Research Project, said this:

“I think one of the things .. people don’t think about in terms of the mechanics of the role of local news in a community is the role that it plays in equipping people to participate in decision-making.”

We need local news. A recent study by Resonate said that Americans trust Local News more than any other source. And not just by a little margin. By a lot. The next closest answer was a full 15 percentage points behind.

But there are two existential problems that are pushing local news to the brink of an extinction event. First of all, most local news outlets were swallowed up into corporate mass media conglomerates over the past 3 or 4 decades. And secondly, the business model for local news has disappeared. Local advertising dollars have migrated to other platforms. So the fate of local news had become a P&L decision.

That’s what it was for CHBC. It’s owned by Corus entertainment. Corus owns the Global Network (15 stations), 39 radio stations, 33 specialty TV channels and a bunch of other media miscellanea.  

Oh, did I mention that Corus is also bleeding cash at a fatal rate? On the heels of an announced $770 Million loss (CDN) it cut 25% of its workforce. That was the death knell for CHBC. It didn’t have a hope in hell.

Local news doesn’t have to die. It just has to find another way to live. Like so much of our media environment, basing survival on advertising revenue is a sure recipe for disaster. That’s why the Local News Research Project is floating ideas like supporting local news with philanthropy. I’m not sure that’s a viable or scalable answer.

I think a better idea might be to move local news to protected species status. If we recognize its importance to democracy, especially at local levels, then perhaps tax dollars should go to ensuring it’s survival.

The scenario of government supported local journalism brings up a philosophical debate that I have ignited in the past, when I talked about public broadcasting. It split my readers along national lines, with those from the US giving a thumbs down to the idea, and those from Australia, New Zealand and Canada receiving it more favorably.

Let’s see what happens this time.

The Adoption of A.I.

Recently, I was talking to a reporter about AI. She was working on a piece about what Apple’s integration of AI into the latest iOS (cleverly named Apple Intelligence) would mean for its adoption by users. Right at the beginning, she asked me this question, “What previous examples of human adoption of tech products or innovations might be able to tell us about how we will fit (or not fit) AI into our daily lives?”

That’s a big question. An existential question, even. Luckily, she gave me some advance warning, so I had a chance to think about it.  Even with the heads up, my answer was still well short of anything resembling helpfulness. It was, “I don’t think we’ve ever dealt with something quite like this. So, we’ll see.”

Incisive? Brilliant? Erudite? No, no and no.

But honest? I believe so.

When we think in terms of technology adoption, it usually falls into two categories: continuous and discontinuous. Continuous innovation simply builds on something we already understand. It’s adoption that follows a straight line, with little risk involved and little effort required. It’s driving a car with a little more horsepower, or getting a smartphone with more storage.

Discontinuous innovation is a different beast. It’s an innovation that displaces what went before it. In terms of user experience, it’s a blank slate, so it requires effort and a tolerance for risk to adopt it. This is the type of innovation that is adopted on a bell curve, first identified by American sociologist Everett Rogers in 1962. The acceptance of these new technologies spreads along a timeline defined by the personalities of the marketplace. Some are the type to try every new gadget, and some hang on to the tried and true for as long as they possibly can. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

As an example, think about going from driving a tradition car to an electric vehicle. The change from one to the other requires some effort. There’s a learning curve involved. There’s also risk. We have no baseline of experience to measure against. Some will be ahead of the curve and adopt early. Some will drive their gas clunker until it falls apart.

Falling into this second category of discontinuous innovation, but different by virtue of both the nature of the new technology and the impact it wields, are a handful of innovations that usher in a completely different paradigm. Think of the introduction of electrical power distribution in the late 19th century, the introduction of computers in the second half of the 20th century, or the spread of the internet in the 21st Century.

Each of these was foundational, in that they sparked an explosion of innovation that wouldn’t have been possible if it were not for the initial innovation. These innovations not only change all the rules, they change the very game itself. And because of that, they impact society at a fundamental level. When these types of innovations come along, your life will change whether you choose to adopt the technology or not. And it’s these types of technological paradigm shifts that are rife with unintended consequences.

If I was trying to find a parallel for what AI means for us, I would look for it amongst these examples. And that presents a problem when we pull out our crystal ball and try to peer ahead at what might be. We can’t know. There’s just too much in flux – too many variables to compute with any accuracy. Perhaps we can project forward a few months or a year at the most, based on what we know today. But trying to peer any further forward is a fool’s game. Could you have anticipated what we would be doing on the Internet in 2024 when the first BBS (Bulletin Board System) was introduced in Chicago in 1978?

A.I. is like these previous examples, but it’s also different in one fundamental way. All these other innovations had humans at the switch. Someone needed to turn on the electrical light, boot up the computer or log on to the internet. At this point, we are still “using” A.I., whether it’s as an add-on in software we’re familiar with, like Adobe Photoshop, or a stand-alone app like ChatGPT, but generative A.I.’s real potential can only be discovered when it slips from the grasp of human control and starts working on its own, hidden under some algorithmic hood, safe from our meddling human hands.

We’ve never dealt with anything like this before. So, like I said, we’ll see.

Google Leak? What Google Leak?

If this were 15 years ago, I might have cared about the supposed Google Leak that broke in late May.

But it’s not, and I don’t. And I’m guessing you don’t either. In fact, you could well be saying “what Google leak?” Unless you’re a SEO, there is nothing of interest here. Even if you are a SEO, that might be true.

I happen to know Rand Fishkin, the person who publicly broke the leak last week. Neither Rand nor I are in the SEO biz anymore, but obviously his level of interest in the leak far exceeded mine. He devoted almost 6000 words to it in the post where he first unveiled the leaked documents, passed on to him by Erfan Azimi, CEO and director of SEO of EA Eagle Digital.

Rand and I spoke at many of the same conferences before I left the industry in 2012. Even at that time, our interests were diverging. He was developing what would become the Moz SEO tool suite, so he was definitely more versed in the technical side of SEO. I had already focused my attention on the user side of search, looking at how people interacted with a search engine page. Still, I always enjoyed my chats with Rand.

Back then, SEO was an intensely tactical industry. Conference sessions that delved into the nitty gritty of ranking factors and shared ways to tweak sites up the SERP were the ones booked into the biggest conference rooms, because organizers knew they’d be jammed to the rafters.

I always felt a bit like a fish out of water at these conferences. I tried to take a more holistic view, looking at search as just one touchpoint in the entire online journey. To me, what was most interesting was what happened both before the search click and after it. That was far more intriguing to me than what Google might be hiding under their algorithmic hood.

Over time, my sessions developed their own audience. Thanks to mentors like Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman and Brett Tabke, conference organizers carved out space for me on their agendas. Ken Fadner and the MediaPost team even let me build a conference that did its best to deal with search at a more holistic level, the Search Insider Summit. We broadened the search conversation to include more strategic topics like multipoint branding, user experience and customer journeys.

So, when the Google leak story bleeped on my radar, I was immediately taken back to the old days of SEO. Here, again, there was what appeared to be a dump of documents that might give some insights into the nuts and bolts of Google’s ranking factors. Mediapost’s own post said that “leaked Google documents has given the search industry proprietary insight into Google Search, revealing very important elements that the company uses to rank content.” Predictably, SEOs swarmed over it like a flock of seagulls attacking a half-eaten hot dog on a beach. They were still looking for some magic bullet that might move them higher in the organic results.

They didn’t come up with much. Brett Tabke, who I consider one of the founders of SEO (he coined the term SERP), spent five hours combing through the documents and said it wasn’t a leak and the documents contained no algorithm-related information. To mash up my metaphors, the half-eaten hotdog was actually a nothingburger.

But Oh My SEOs – you still love diving into the nitty gritty, don’t you?

What is more interesting to me is how the actual search experience has changed in the past decade or two. In doing the research for this, I happened to run into a great clip about Tech monopolies from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. He shows how much of the top of the Google SERP is now dominated by information and links from Google. Again, quoting a study from Rand Fishkin’s new company, SparkToro, Oliver showed that “64.82% of searches on Google…ended..without clicking to another web property.”

That little tidbit has some massive implications for marketers. The days of relying on a high organic ranking are long gone, because even if you achieve it, you’ll be pushed well down the page.

And on that, Rand Fishkin and I seem to agree. In his post, he does say, “If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be: ‘Build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search.’”

Amen.

You Know What Government Agencies Need? Some AI

A few items on my recent to-do list  have necessitated dealing with multiple levels of governmental bureaucracy: regional, provincial (this being in Canada) and federal. All three experiences were, without exception, a complete pain in the ass. So, having spent a good part of my life advising companies on how to improve their customer experience, the question that kept bubbling up in my brain was, “Why the hell is dealing with government such a horrendous experience?”

Anecdotally, I know everyone I know feels the same way. But what about everyone I don’t know? Do they also feel that the experience of dealing with a government agency is on par with having a root canal or colonoscopy?

According to a survey conducted last year by the research firm Qualtrics XM, the answer appears to be yes. This report paints a pretty grim picture. Satisfaction with government services ranked dead last when compared to private sector industries.

The next question, being that AI is all I seem to have been writing about lately, is this: “Could AI make dealing with the government a little less awful?”

And before you say it, yes, I realize I recently took a swipe at the AI-empowered customer service used by my local telco. But when the bar is set as low as it is for government customer service, I have to believe that even with the limitations of artificially intelligent customer service as it currently exists, it would still be a step forward. At least the word “intelligent” is in there somewhere.

But before I dive into ways to potentially solve the problem, we should spend a little time exploring the root causes of crappy customer service in government.

First of all, government has no competitors. That means there are no market forces driving improvement. If I have to get a building permit or renew my driver’s license, I have one option available. I can’t go down the street and deal with “Government Agency B.”

Secondly, in private enterprise, the maxim is that the customer is always right. This is, of course, bullshit.  The real truth is that profit is always right, but with customers and profitability so inextricably linked, things generally work out pretty well for the customer.

The same is not true when dealing with the government. Their job is to make sure things are (supposedly) fair and equitable for all constituents. And the determination of fairness needs to follow a universally understood protocol. The result of this is that government agencies are relentlessly regulation bound and fixated on policies and process, even if those are hopelessly archaic. Part of this is to make sure that the rules are followed, but let’s face it, the bigger motivator here is to make sure all bureaucratic asses are covered.

Finally, there is a weird hierarchy that exists in government agencies.  Frontline people tend to stay in place even if governments change. But the same is often not true for their senior management. Those tend to shift as governments come and go. According to the Qualtrics study cited earlier, less than half (48%) of government employees feel their leadership is responsive to feedback from employees. About the same number (47%) feel that senior leadership values diverse perspectives.

This creates a workplace where most of the people dealing with clients feel unheard, disempowered and frustrated. This frustration can’t help but seep across the counter separating them from the people they’re trying to help.

I think all these things are givens and are unlikely to change in my lifetime. Still, perhaps AI could be used to help us navigate the serpentine landscape of government rules and regulations.

Let me give you one example from my own experience. I have to move a retaining wall that happens to front on a lake. In Canada, almost all lake foreshores are Crown land, which means you need to deal with the government to access them.

I have now been bouncing back and forth between three provincial ministries for almost two years to try to get a permit to do the work. In that time, I have lost count of how many people I’ve had to deal with. Just last week, someone sent me a couple of user guides that “I should refer to” in order to help push the process forward. One of them is 29 pages long. The other is 42 pages. They are both about as compelling and easy to understand as you would imagine a government document would be. After a quick glance, I figured out that only two of the 71 combined pages are relevant to me.

As I worked my way through them, I thought, “surely some kind of ChatGPT interface would make this easier, digging through the reams of regulation to surface the answers I was looking for. Perhaps it could even guide you through the application process.”

Let me tell you, it takes a lot to make me long for an AI-powered interface. But apparently, dealing with any level of government is enough to push me over the edge.

Dove’s Takedown Of AI: Brilliant But Troubling Brand Marketing

The Dove brand has just placed a substantial stake in the battleground over the use of AI in media. In a campaign called “Keep Beauty Real”, the brand released a 2-minute video showing how AI can create an unattainable and highly biased (read “white”) view of what beauty is.

If we’re talking branding strategy, this campaign in a master class. It’s totally on-brand with Dove, who introduced its “Campaign for Real Beauty” 18 years ago. Since then, the company has consistently fought digital manipulation of advertising images, promoted positive body image and reminded us that beauty can come in all shapes, sizes and colors. The video itself is brilliant. You really should take a couple minutes to see it if you haven’t already.

But what I found just as interesting is that Dove chose to use AI as a brand differentiator. The video starts with by telling us, “By 2025, artificial intelligence is predicted to generate 90% of online content” It wraps up with a promise: “Dove will never use AI to create or distort women’s images.”

This makes complete sense for Dove. It aligns perfectly with its brand. But it can only work because AI now has what psychologists call emotional valency. And that has a number of interesting implications for our future relationship with AI.

“Hot Button” Branding

Emotional valency is just a fancy way of saying that a thing means something to someone. The valence can be positive or negative. The term valence comes from the German word valenz, which means to bind. So, if something has valency, it’s carrying emotional baggage, either good or bad.

This is important because emotions allow us to — in the words of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman — “think fast.” We make decisions without really thinking about them at all. It is the opposite of rational and objective thinking, or what Kahneman calls “thinking slow.”

Brands are all about emotional valency. The whole point of branding is to create a positive valence attached to a brand. Marketers don’t want consumers to think. They just want them to feel something positive when they hear or see the brand.

So for Dove to pick AI as an emotional hot button to attach to its brand, it must believe that the negative valence of AI will add to the positive valence of the Dove brand. That’s how branding mathematics sometimes work: a negative added to a positive may not equal zero, but may equal 2 — or more. Dove is gambling that with its target audience, the math will work as intended.

I have nothing against Dove, as I think the points it raises about AI are valid — but here’s the issue I have with using AI as a brand reference point: It reduces a very complex issue to a knee-jerk reaction. We need to be thinking more about AI, not less. The consumer marketplace is not the right place to have a debate on AI. It will become an emotional pissing match, not an intellectually informed analysis. And to explain why I feel this way, I’ll use another example: GMOs.

How Do You Feel About GMOs?

If you walk down the produce or meat aisle of any grocery store, I guarantee you’re going to see a “GMO-Free” label. You’ll probably see several. This is another example of squeezing a complex issue into an emotional hot button in order to sell more stuff.

As soon as I mentioned GMO, you had a reaction to it, and it was probably negative. But how much do you really know about GMO foods? Did you know that GMO stands for “genetically modified organisms”? I didn’t, until I just looked it up now. Did you know that you almost certainly eat foods that contain GMOs, even if you try to avoid them? If you eat anything with sugar harvested from sugar beets, you’re eating GMOs. And over 90% of all canola, corn and soybeans items are GMOs.

Further, did you know that genetic modifications make plants more resistance to disease, more stable for storage and more likely to grow in marginal agricultural areas? If it wasn’t for GMOs, a significant portion of the world’s population would have starved by now. A 2022 study suggests that GMO foods could even slow climate change by reducing greenhouse gases.

If you do your research on GMOs — if you “think slow’ about them — you’ll realize that there is a lot to think about, both good and bad. For all the positives I mentioned before, there are at least an equal number of troubling things about GMOs. There is no easy answer to the question, “Are GMOs good or bad?”

But by bringing GMOs into the consumer world, marketers have shut that down that debate. They are telling you, “GMOs are bad. And even though you consume GMOs by the shovelful without even realizing it, we’re going to slap some GMO-free labels on things so you will buy them and feel good about saving yourself and the planet.”

AI appears to be headed down the same path. And if GMOs are complex, AI is exponentially more so. Yes, there are things about AI we should be concerned about. But there are also things we should be excited about. AI will be instrumental in tackling the many issues we currently face.

I can’t help worrying when complex issues like AI and GMOs are broad-stroked by the same brush, especially when that brush is in the hands of a marketer.

Feature image: Body Scan 002 by Ignotus the Mage, used under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 / Unmodified

AI Customer Service: Not Quite Ready For Prime Time

I had a problem with my phone, which is a landline (and yes, I’ve heard all the smartass remarks about being the last person on earth with a landline, but go ahead, take your best shot).

The point is, I had a problem. Actually, the phone had a problem, in that it didn’t work. No tone, no life, no nothing. So that became my problem.

What did I do? I called my provider (from my cell, which I do have) and after going through this bizarre ID verification process that basically stopped just short of a DNA test, I got routed through to their AI voice assistant, who pleasantly asked me to state my problem in one short sentence.

As soon as I heard that voice, which used the same dulcet tones as Siri, Alexa and the rest of the AI Geek Chorus, I knew what I was dealing with. Somewhere at a board table in the not-too-distant past, somebody had come up with the brilliant idea of using AI for customer service. “Do you know how much money we could save by cutting humans out of our support budget?” After pointing to a chart with a big bar and a much smaller bar to drive the point home, there would have been much enthusiastic applause and back-slapping.

Of course, the corporate brain trust had conveniently forgotten that they can’t cut all humans out of the equation, as their customers still fell into that category.  And I was one of them, now dealing face to face with the “Artificially Intelligent” outcome of corporate cost-cutting. I stated my current state of mind more succinctly than the one short sentence I was instructed to use. It was, instead, one short word — four letters long, to be exact. Then I realized I was probably being recorded. I sighed and thought to myself, “Buckle up. Let’s give this a shot.”

I knew before starting that this wasn’t going to work, but I wasn’t given an alternative. So I didn’t spend too much time crafting my sentence. I just blurted something out, hoping to bluff my way to the next level of AI purgatory. As I suspected, Ms. AI was stumped. But rather than admit she was scratching her metaphysical head, she repeated the previous instruction, preceded by a patronizing “pat on my head” recap that sounded very much like it was aimed at someone with the IQ of a soap dish. I responded again with my four-letter reply — repeated twice, just for good measure.

Go ahead, record me. See if I care.

This time I tried a roundabout approach, restating my issue in terms that hopefully could be parsed by the cybernetic sadist that was supposedly trying to help me. Needless to say, I got no further. What I did get was a helpful text with all the service outages in my region. Which I knew wasn’t the problem. But no one asked me.

I also got a text with some troubleshooting tips to try at home. I had an immediate flashback to my childhood, trying to get my parents’ attention while they were entertaining friends at home, “Did you try to figure it out yourself, Gordie? Don’t bother Mommy and Daddy right now. We’re busy doing grown up things. Run along and play.”

At this point, the scientific part of my brain started toying with the idea of making this an experiment. Let’s see how far we can push the boundaries of this bizarre scenario: equally frustrating and entertaining. My AI tormenter asked me, “Do you want to continue to try to troubleshoot this on the phone with me?”

I was tempted, I really was. Probably by the same part of my brain that forces me to smell sour milk or open the lid of that unidentified container of green fuzz that I just found in the back of the fridge.  And if I didn’t have other things to do in my life, I might have done that. But I didn’t. Instead, in desperation I pleaded, “Can I just talk to a human, please?”

Then I held my breath. There was silence. I could almost hear the AI wheels spinning. I began to wonder if some well-meaning programmer had included a subroutine for contrition. Would she start pleading for forgiveness?

After a beat and a half, I heard this, “Before I connect you with an agent, can I ask you for a few more details so they’re better able to help you?” No thanks, Cyber-Sally, just bring on a human, posthaste! I think I actually said something to that effect. I might have been getting a little punchy in my agitated state.

As she switched me to my requested human, I swore I could hear her mumble something in her computer-generated voice. And I’m pretty sure it was an imperative with two words, the first a verb with four letters, the second a subject pronoun with three letters.

And, if I’m right, I may have newfound respect for AI. Let’s just call it my version of the Turing Test.

Privacy’s Last Gasp

We’ve been sliding down the slippery slope of privacy rights for some time. But like everything else in the world, the rapid onslaught of disruption caused by AI is unfurling a massive red flag when it comes to any illusions we may have about our privacy.

We have been giving away a massive amount of our personal data for years now without really considering the consequences. If we do think about privacy, we do so as we hear about massive data breaches. Our concern typically is about our data falling into the hands of hackers and being used for criminal purposes.

But when you combine AI and data, a bigger concern should catch our attention. Even if we have been able to retain some degree of anonymity, this is no longer the case. Everything we do is now traceable back to us.

Major tech platforms generally deal with any privacy concerns with the same assurance: “Don’t worry, your data is anonymized!” But really, even anonymized data requires very few dots to be connected to relink the data back to your identity.

Here is an example from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Let’s say there is data that includes your name, your ZIP or postal code, your gender and your birthdate. If you remove your name, but include those other identifiers, technically that data is now anonymized.

But, says the EEF:

  • First, think about the number of people that share your specific ZIP or postal code. 
  • Next, think about how many of those people also share your birthday. 
  • Now, think about how many people share your exact birthday, ZIP code, and gender. 

According to a study from Carnegie Mellon University, those three factors are all that’s needed to identify 87% of the US population. If we fold in AI and its ability to quickly crunch massively large data sets to identify patterns, that percentage effectively becomes 100% and the data horizon expands to include pretty much everything we say, post, do or think. We may not think so, but we are constantly in the digital data spotlight and it’s a good bet that somebody, somewhere is watching our supposedly anonymous activities.

The other shred of comfort we tend to cling to when we trade away our privacy is that at least the data is held by companies we are familiar with, such as Google and Facebook. But according to a recent survey by Merkle reported on in MediaPost by Ray Schultz, even that small comfort may be slipping from our grasp. Fifty eight percent of respondents said they were concerned about whether their data and privacy identity were being protected.

Let’s face it. If a platform is supported by advertising, then that platform will continue to develop tools to more effectively identify and target prospects. You can’t do that and also effectively protect privacy. The two things are diametrically opposed. The platforms are creating an ecosystem where it will become easier and easier to exploit individuals who thought they were protected by anonymity. And AI will exponentially accelerate the potential for that exploitation.

The platform’s failure to protect individuals is currently being investigated by the US Senate Judiciary Committee. The individuals in this case are children and the protection that has failed is against sexual exploitation. None of the platform executives giving testimony intended for this to happen. Mark Zuckerberg apologized to the parents at the hearing, saying, “”I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through. It’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered.”

But this exploitation didn’t happen just because of one little crack in the system or because someone slipped up. It’s because Meta has intentionally and systematically been building a platform on which the data is collected and the audience is available that make this exploitation possible. It’s like a gun manufacturer standing up and saying, “I’m sorry. We never imagined our guns would be used to actually shoot people.”

The most important question is; do we care that our privacy has effectively been destroyed? Sure, when we’re asked in a survey if we’re worried, most of us say yes. But our actions say otherwise. Would we trade away the convenience and utility these platforms offer us in order to get our privacy back? Probably not. And all the platforms know that.

As I said at the beginning, our privacy has been sliding down a slippery slope for a long time now. And with AI now in the picture, it’s probably going down for the last time. There is really no more slope left to slide down.

Fooling Some of the Systems Some of the Time

If there’s a system, there’s a way to game it. Especially when those systems are tied to someone making money.

Buying a Best Seller

Take publishing, for instance. New books that say they are on the New York Times Best-Seller List sell more copies than ones that don’t make the list. A 2004 study by University of Wisconsin economics professor Alan Sorenson found the bump is about 57%. That’s; certainly motivation for a publisher to game the system.

There’s also another motivating factor. According to a Times op-ed, Michael Korda, former editor in chief of Simon and Schuster, said that an author’s contract can include a bonus of up to $100,000 for hitting No. 1 on the list.

This amplifying effect is not a one-shot deal. Make the list for just one week, in any slot under any category, and you can forever call yourself a “NY Times bestselling author,” reaping the additional sales that that honor brings with it. Given the potential rewards, you can guarantee that someone is going to be gaming the system.

And how do you do that? Typically, by doing a bulk purchase through an outlet that feeds its sales numbers to TheTimes. That’s what Donald Trump Jr. and his publisher did for   his book “Triggered,” which hit No. 1 on its release in November of 2019, according to various reports.  Just before the release, the Republican National Committee reportedly placed a $94,800 order with a bookseller, which would equate to about 4,000 books, enough to ensure that “Triggered” would end up on the Times list. (Note: The Times does flag these suspicious entries with a dagger symbol when it believes that someone may be potentially gaming the system by buying in bulk.)

But it’s not only book sales where you’ll find a system primed for rigging. Even those supposedly objective 5-star buyer ratings you find everywhere have also been gamed.

5-Star Scams

A 2021 McKinsey report said that, depending on the category, a small bump in a star rating on Amazon can translate into a 30% to 200% boost in sales. Given that potential windfall, it’s no surprise that you’ll find fake review scams proliferate on the gargantuan retail platform.

A recent Wired exposé on these fake reviews found a network that had achieved a level of sophistication that was sobering. It included active recruitment of human reviewers (called “Jennies” — if you haven’t been recruited yet, you’re a “Virgin Jenny”) willing to write a fake review for a small payment or free products. These recruitment networks include recruiting agents in locations including Pakistan, Bangladesh and India working for sellers from China.

But the fake review ecosystem also included reviews cranked out by AI-powered automated agents. As AI improves, these types of reviews will be harder to spot and weed out of the system.

Some recent studies have found that, depending on the category, over one-third of the reviews you see on Amazon are fake. Books, baby products and large appliance categories are the worst offenders.

Berating Ratings…

Back in 2014, Itamar Simonson and Emanuel Rosen wrote a book called “Absolute Value: What Really Influences Customers in the Age of (Nearly) Perfect Information.” Spoiler alert: they posited that consumer reviews and other sources of objective information were replacing traditional marketing and branding in terms of what influenced buyers.

They were right. The stats I cited above show how powerful these supposedly objective factors can be in driving sales. But unfortunately, thanks to the inevitable attempts to game these systems, the information they provide can often be far from perfect.

A Column About Nothing

What do I have to say in my last post for 2023? Nothing.

Last week, I talked about the cost of building a brand. Then, this week, I (perhaps being the last person on earth to do so) heard about Nothing.  No – not small “n” nothing as in the absence of anything – Big “N” Nothing as in the London based tech start-up headed by Chinese born entrepreneur Carl Pei.

Nothing, according to their website, crafts “intuitive, flawlessly connected products that improve our lives without getting in the way. No confusing tech-speak. No silly product names. Just artistry, passion and trust. And products we’re proud to share with our friends and family. Simple.”

Now, just like the football talents of David Beckham I explored in my last post, the tech Nothing produces is good – very good – but not uniquely good. The Nothing phone (1) and the just released Nothing Phone (2) are capable mid-range smart phones. Again, from the Nothing website, you are asked to “imagine a world where all your devices are seamlessly connected.”

It may just be me, but isn’t that what Apple has been promising (and occasionally delivering) for the better part of the last quarter century? Doesn’t Google make the same basic promise? Personally, I see nothing earth shaking in Nothing’s mission. It all feels very “been there, done that.” Or, if you’ll allow me – it all seems like much ado about Nothing (sorry). Yet people have paid thousands over the asking price when the 100 units of the first Nothing phone were put up for auction prior to its public launch.

Why?  Because of the value of the Nothing brand. And that value comes from one place. No, not the tech. The community. Pei may be a pretty good building of phones, but he’s an even better building of community. He has expertly built a fan base who love to rave about Nothing. On the “Community” section of the Nothing Website, you’re invited to “abandon the glorification of I and open up to the potential of We.”  I’m not sure exactly what that means, but it all sounds very cool and idealistic, if a little vague.

Another genius move by Pei was to open up to the potential of Nothing. In what is probably a latent (or perhaps not so latent) backlash against over advertising and in-your-face branding, we were eager to jump on the Nothing bandwagon. It seems like anti-branding, but it’s not. It’s actually expertly crafted, by-the-book branding. Just like Seinfeld, a show about nothing that became one of the most popular tv shows in history, it has been shown that there is some serious branding swagger to the concept of nothing. I can’t believe no one thought to stake a claim to this branding goldmine before now.

The Branding Case Study of David Beckham

I have to admit, I’m not a sports fan. And of the few sports I know a little about, European football is certainly not one of them. So my choice to watch the recent Beckham documentary on Netflix is certainly not typical. That said, I did find it a fascinating case study in something I was not expecting: the making and valuation of a personal brand.

First, a controversial question must be posed: was Beckham a good player? According to those that know much more about the sport than I do, the answer is definitely “Yes” – but he wasn’t the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) – he wasn’t even a GOHT (Greatest of His Time). The closest Beckham ever came to winning the Ballon d’Or, given to the best player  of the year,  was to place second behind Rivaldo Ferreira in 1999. During his time at Real Madrid CF, he wasn’t even the best player on the team. Granted, it was a stacked team and Beckham was one of the “galácticos” (superstars), along with Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo. But, unlike Beckham, all those other players have at least one Ballon d’Or in their trophy case (Note, fellow Mediapost Jon Last recently took an interesting look at this topic in his column – The Death of Meritocracy in Sports Pay).

But despite this, Beckham was certainly the highest paid player in the world when Timothy Leiweke lured him to LA Galaxy, where his contract also gave him a piece of the profits. So, if he wasn’t the greatest player, but he was the most valuable one, what created that value? Why was David Beckham worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

As the documentary showed, there was a dimension to Beckham’s signing to a team that went far beyond his ability to put a round ball in the net. He was a global brand – the most famous football player in the world. And that’s what Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez and Timothy Leiweke respectively bought when they signed Beckham.

As I said, the documentary revealed some interesting truths about branding. What creates brand value? Who owns that value? What is the price paid for the value of a personal brand?

What the Beckham documentary showed, more than anything, is that brand value is determined in a public market. Beckham certainly brought brand assets to the table: his own athletic ability, being exceedingly good looking, a kaleidoscope of hair styles, and a marriage to one of the most popular pop stars in the world, Victoria Adams – Posh Spice from the Spice Girls. Those were the table stakes for establishing his brand value, the price of entry.

But beyond that, the value of his brand was really whatever the public determined it to be. For example, after he was red-carded in a critical match against Argentina the 1998 World Cup, all of Britain decided that Beckham had cost them the championship. Whether that was true or not (there are a lorry-full of “ifs” in that opinion) it caused his brand value to plummet. There was really nothing Beckham could do. His brand was out of his control. It was owned by the media and public.

The documentary really highlights the viral and frenzied nature of the market that determines the value of a personal brand. And remember, this all took place in the days before social media and the very real impact of being publicly cancelled! Since Beckham’s prime in the 1990s and early 2000’s, the market effect of branding has since been amplified and compressed. The market of public opinion is now wired, meaning network effects happen on incredibly short timelines and without even the illusion of control.

Certainly the monetary benefits of brand usually accrue to the supposed owner of the brand. David and Victoria Beckham are reportedly worth a half billion dollars, making him one of the richest athletes in the world. But the documentary makes it clear that there was a price paid that was not monetary. Much of what we would all call “our lives” had to be traded by the Beckhams for a brand that was controlled by the public and the press. There were no boundaries, no privacy, no refuge from fame.

When we pull back from the story of David and Victoria Beckham, there are takeaways there for anyone attempting to build a brand, whether it be personal or corporate. You may be able to plant the seeds, but after that, everything else is going to be largely out of your control.