Category Archives: Digital Marketing

Why I Hate Marketing

I have had a love-hate relationship with marketing for a long time now. And – I have to admit – lately the pendulum has swung a lot more to the hate side.

This may sound odd coming from someone who was a marketer for the almost all of his professional life. From the time I graduated from college until I retired, I was marketing in one form or the other. That span was almost 40 years. And for that time, I always felt the art of marketing lived very much in an ethical grey zone. When someone asked me to define marketing, I usually said something like this, “marketing is convincing people to buy something they want but probably don’t need.” And sometimes, marketing has to manufacture that “want” out of thin air.

When I switched from traditional marketing to search marketing almost 30 years ago, I felt it aligned a little better with my ethics. At least, with search marketing, the market has already held up their hand and said they wanted something. They had already signaled their intent. All I had to do is create the connection between that intent and what my clients offered. It was all very rational – I wasn’t messing with anyone’s emotions.

But as the ways we can communicate with prospects digitally has exploded, including through the cesspool we call social media, I have seen marketing slip further and further into an ethical quagmire. Emotional manipulation, false claims and games of bait and switch are now the norm rather than the exception in marketing.

Let me give you one example that I’ve run into repeatedly. The way we book a flight has changed dramatically in the last 25 years. It used to be that airline bookings always happened through an agent. But with the creation of online travel agents, travel search tools and direct booking with the airlines, the information asymmetry that had traditionally protected airline profit margins evaporated. Average fare prices plummeted and the airline profits suffered as a result.

Here in Canada, the two major airlines eventually responded to this threat by following the lead of European lo-cost carriers and introduced an elaborate bait and switch scheme. They introduced “ultra-basic” fares (the actual labels may vary) by stripping everything possible in the way of customer comfort from the logistical reality of getting one human body from point A to Point B. There are no carry-on bag allowances, no seat selection, no point collection, no flexibility in booking and no hope of getting a refund or flight credit if your plans change. To add insult to injury, you’re also shuttled into the very last boarding group and squeezed into the most undesirable seats on the plane. The airlines have done everything possible to let you know you are hanging on to the very bottom rung of their customer appreciation ladder.

Now, you may say that this is just another case of “caveat emptor” – it’s the buyer’s responsibility to know what they’re purchasing and set their expectations accordingly. These fares do give passengers the ability to book a bare-bones flight at a much lower cost. It’s just the airlines responding to a market need. And I might agree – if it weren’t for how these fares are used by the airline’s marketers.

With flight tracking tools, you can track flight prices for future trips. These tools will send you an alert when fares change substantially in either direction. This kind of information puts a lot of power in the hands of the customer, but airlines like WestJet and Air Canada use their “Bare Bones” basic fares to game this system.

While it is possible on some tracking tools like Google Flights to set your preferences to exclude “basic” fares, most users stick to the default settings that would include these loss-leader offerings. They then get alerts with what seem to be great deals on flights as the airlines introduce a never-ending stream of seat sales. The airlines know that by reducing the fares on a select few seats for a few days just enough to trigger an alert, they will get a rush of potential flyers that have used a tracker waiting for the right time to book.

As soon as you come to the airline site to book, you see that while a few seats at the lowest basic fare are on sale, the prices on the economy seats that most of us book haven’t budged. In fact, it seems to me that they’ve gone up substantially. On one recent search, the next price level for an economy seat was three times as much as the advertised ultra-basic fare. If you do happen to stick with booking the ultra-basic fare, you are asked multiple times if you’re sure you don’t want to upgrade? With one recent booking, I was asked no fewer than five times if I wanted to pay more before the purchase was complete.

This entire marketing approach feels uncomfortably close to gas lighting. Airline marketers have used every psychological trick in the book to lure you in and then convince you to spend much more than you originally intended. And this didn’t happen by accident. Those marketers sat down in a meeting (actually, probably several meetings) and deliberately plotted out – point by point – the best way to take advantage of their customers and squeeze more money from them. I know, because I’ve been in those meetings. And a lot of you reading this have been too.

 When I started marketing, the goal was to build a long-term mutually beneficial relationship with your customers. Today, much of what passes for marketing is more like preying on a vulnerable prospect in an emotionally abusive relationship.

And I don’t love that.

Just Behave Archive: Q&A With Marissa Mayer, Google VP, Search Products & User Experience

This blog is the most complete collection of my various posts across the web – with one exception. For 4 years, from 2007 to 2011, I wrote a column for Search Engine Land called “Just Behave” (Danny Sullivan’s choice of title, not mine – but it grew on me). At the time, I didn’t cross-post because Danny wanted the posts to be exclusive. Now, with almost 2 decades past, I think it’s safe to bring these lost posts back home to the nest, here at “Out of My Gord”. You might find them interesting from a historical perspective, and also because it gave me the chance to interview some of the brightest minds in search at that time. So, here’s my first, with Google’s then VP of Search Products and User Experience – Marissa Mayer. It ran in January, 2007 :

Marissa Mayer has been the driving force behind Google’s Spartan look and feel from the very earliest days. In this wide-ranging interview, I talked with Marissa about everything from interface design to user behavior to the biggest challenge still to be solved with search as we currently know it.

I had asked for the interview because of some notable findings in our most recent eye tracking study. I won’t go into the findings in any great depth here, because Chris Sherman will be doing a deep dive soon. But for the purpose of setting the background for Marissa’s interview, here are some very quick highlights:


MSN and Yahoo Users had a better User Experience on Google

In the original study, the vast majority of participants were Google users, and their interactions were restricted to Google. With the second study, we actually recruited participants that indicated their engine of preference was Yahoo! or MSN (now Live Search), as the majority of their interactions would be with those two engines. We did take one task at random, however, and asked them to use Google to complete the task. By almost every metric we looked at, including time to complete the task (choose a link), the success of the link chosen, the percentage of the page scanned before choosing a link and others, these users had a more successful experience on Google than on their engine of choice.

Google Seemed to Have a Higher Degree of Perceived Relevancy

In looking at the results, we didn’t believe that it was the actual quality of the results that lead to a more successful user experience as much as it was how those results were presented to the user. Something about Google’s presentation made it easier to determine which results were relevant. We referred to it in the study as information scent, using the term common in the information foraging theory.

Google Has an Almost Obsessive Dedication to Relevancy at the Top of the Results Page

The top of the results, especially the top left corner, is the most heavily scanned part of the results page. Google seemed to be the most dedicated of all the three engines in ensuring the results that fall in this real estate are highly relevant to the query. For example, Google served up top sponsored ads in far fewer sessions in the study than did either Yahoo or MSN.

Google Offers the “Cleanest” Search Experience

Google is famous for its Spartan home page. It continues this minimalist approach to search with the cleanest results page. When searching, we all have a concept in mind and that concept can be influenced by what else we see on the page. Because a number of searches on Yahoo! and MSN were launched from their portal page, we wondered how that impacted the search experience.

Google Had Less Engagement than Yahoo with their Vertical Results

The one area where Google appeared to fall behind in these head to head tests was with the relevance of the OneBox, or their vertical results. Yahoo! in particular seemed to score more consistently with users with their vertical offerings, Yahoo! Shortcuts.

It was in these areas in particular that I wanted to get the thinking of Marissa and her team at Google. Whatever they’re doing, it seems to be working. In fact, I have said in the past that Google has set the de facto standard for what we expect from a search engine, at least for now.

Here’s the interview:

Gord: What, at the highest level, is Google’s goal for the user?

Marissa: Our goal is to make sure that people can find what they’re looking for and get off the page as quickly as possible

If we look at this idea of perceived versus real relevancy, some things seemed to make a big difference in how relevant people perceived the results to be on a search engine: things like how much white space there was around individual listings, separating organic results from the right rail, the query actually being bolded in the title and the description and very subtle nuances like a hair line around the sponsored ads as opposed to a screened box. What we found when we delved into it was there seemed to be a tremendous attention to that detail on Google. It became clear that this stuff had been fairly extensively tested out.

I think all of your observations are correct. I can walk you through any one of the single examples you just named and I can talk you through the background and exactly what our philosophy was when we designed it and the numbers we saw in our tests as we had tested them, but you’re right in that it’s not an accident. For example, putting a line along the side of the ad as opposed to boxing it allows it to integrate more into the page and lets it fall more into what people read.

One thing that I think about a lot are people that are new to the internet. A lot of times they subconsciously map the internet to physical idioms. For example, when you look at how you parse a webpage, chances are that there are some differences if there are links in the structure and so forth, but a lot of times it looks just like a page in a book or a page on a magazine, and when you put a box around something, it looks like a sidebar. The way people handle reading a page that has a sidebar on it is that they read the whole main page and then, at the end, if it’s not too interesting, they stop and read the sidebar on that page.

For us, given that we think our ads in some cases are as good an answer as our search results and we want them to be integral to the user experience, we don’t want that kind of segmentation and pausing. We tried not to design it so it looked like a side bar, even though we have two distinct columns. You know, There are a lot of philosophies like that that go into the results page and of course, testing both of those formats to see if that matches our hypothesis.

That brings up something else that was really interesting. If we separate the top sponsored from the right rail, the majority of the interaction happens on the page in that upper left real estate. One thing that became very apparent was that Google seemed to be the most aware of relevancy at that top of page, that Golden Triangle real estate. In all our scenarios, you showed top sponsored the least number of times and generally you showed fewer top sponsored results. We saw a natural tendency to break off the top 3 or 4 listings on a page and scan them as a set and then make your choice from those top 3 or 4. In Google, those top 3 or 4 almost always include 1 or 2 organic results, sometimes all organic results.

That’s absolutely the case. Yes, we’re always looking at how can we do better targeting with ads. But we believe part of the targeting for those ads is “how well do those ads match your query?” And then the other part is how well does this format and that prominence convey to you how relevant it is. That’s baked into the relevance.

Our ad team has worked very very hard. One of the most celebrated teams at Google is our Smart Ads team. In fact, you may have heard of the Google Founder’s Awards, where small teams of people get grants of stock of up to $10,000,000 in worth, split across a small number of individuals. One of the very first teams at Google to receive that award was the Smart Ads team. And they were looking, interestingly enough, at how you target things. But they were also looking at what’s the probability that someone will click on a result. And shouldn’t that probability impact our idea of relevance, and also the way we choose to display it.

So we do tend to be very selective and keep the threshold on what appears on the top of the page very high. We only show things on the top when we’re very very confident that the click through rate on that ad will be very high. And the same thing is true for our OneBox results that occasionally appear above the top (organic) results. Larry and Sergey, when I started doing user interface work, said we’re thinking of making your salary proportional to the number of pixels above the first result, on average. We’ve mandated that we always want to have at least one result above the fold. We don’t let people put too much stuff up there. Think about the amount of vertical space on top of the page as being an absolute premium and design it and program it as if your salary depended on it.

There are a couple of other points that I want to touch on. When we looked at how the screen real estate divided up on the search results page, based on a standard resolution, there seemed to be a mathematical precision to the Google proportions that wasn’t apparent on MSN and on Yahoo. The ratio seemed pretty set. We always seemed to come up with a 33% ratio dedicated to top organic, even on a fully loaded results page, so obviously that’s not by accident. That compared to, on a fully loaded page, less than 14% on Yahoo.

That’s interesting, because we never reviewed on a percentage basis that you’re mentioning. We’ve had a lot of controversy amongst the team, should it be in linear inches along the left hand margin, should it actually be square pixelage computed on a percentage basis? Because of the way that the search is laid out linear inches or vertical space may be more accurate. As I said, the metric that I try to hold the team to is always getting at least one organic result above the fold on 800 by 600, with the browser held at that size.

The standard resolution we set for the study was 1024 by 768.

Yes, we are still seeing as many as 30% plus of our users at 800 by 600. My view is, we can view 1024 by 768 as ideal. The design has to look good on that resolution. It has to at least work and appear professional on 800 by 600. So all of us with our laptops, we’re working with 1024 by 768 as our resolution, so we try to make sure the designs look really good on that. It’s obvious that some of our engineers have bigger monitors and bigger resolutions than that, but we always are very conscious of 800 by 600. It’s pretty funny, most of our designers, myself included, have a piece of wall paper that actually has rectangles in the back where if you line up the browser in the upper left hand corner and then align the edge of the browser with the box you can simulate all different sizes so we can make sure it works in the smaller browsers.

One of the members of our staff has a background in physics and design and he was the one that noticed that if you take the Golden Ratio it lined up very well with how the Google results page is designed. The proportions of the page lined up pretty closely with how that Ratio is proportioned.

I’m a huge fan of the Golden Ratio. We talk about it a lot in our design reviews, both implicitly and explicitly, even when it comes down to icons. We prefer that icons not be square, we prefer that they be more of the 1.7:1.

I wanted to talk about Google OneBox for a minute. Of all the elements on the Google page, frankly, that was the one that didn’t seem to work that well. It almost seemed to be in flux somewhat while we were doing the data collection. Relevancy seemed to be a little off on a number of the searches. Is that something that is being tested.

Can you give me an example?

The search was for digital cameras and we got news results back in OneBox. Nikon had a recall on a bunch of digital cameras at the time and we went, as far as disambiguating the user intent from the query, it would seem that news results for the query digital cameras is probably not the best match.

It’s true. The answer is that we do a fairly good job, I believe, in targeting our OneBox results. We hold them to a very high click through rate expectation and if they don’t meet that click through rate, the OneBox gets turned off on that particular query. We have an automated system that looks at click through rates per OneBox presentation per query. So it might be that news is performing really well on Bush today but it’s not performing very well on another term, it ultimately gets turned off due to lack of click through rates. We are authorizing it in a way that’s scalable and does a pretty good job enforcing relevance. We do have a few niggles in the system where we have an ongoing debate and one of them is around news versus product search

One school of thought is what you’re saying, which is that it should be the case that if I’m typing digital cameras, I’m much more likely to want to have product results returned. But here’s another example. We are very sensitive to the fact that if you type in children’s flannel pajamas and there’s a recall due to lack of flame retardation on flannel pajamas, as a parent you’re going to want to know that. And so it’s a very hard decision to make.

You might say, well, the difference there is that it’s a specific model. Is it a Nikon D970 or is it digital cameras, which is just a category? So it’s very hard on the query end to disambiguate. You might say if there’s a model number then it’s very specific and if only the model number matches in the news return the news and if not, return the products. But it’s more nuanced than that. With things like Gap flannel pajamas for children, it’s very hard to programmatically tell if that’s a category or a specific product. So we have a couple of sticking points.

So that would be one of the reasons why, for a lot of searches, we weren’t seeing product results coming back, and in a lot of local cases, we weren’t seeing local results coming back?. That would be that click through monitoring mechanism where it didn’t meet the threshold and it got turned off?

That’s right.

Here’s another area we explored in the study. Obviously a lot of searches from Yahoo or MSN Live Search get launched from a portal and the user experience if you launch from the Google home page is different. What does it mean as far as interaction with search results when you’re launching the search from what’s basically a neutral palette versus something that’s launched from a portal that colors the intent of the user as it passes them through to the search results?

We want the user to not be distracted, to just type in what they want and not be very influenced by what they see on the page, which is one reason why the minimalist home page works well. It’s approachable, it’s simple, it’s straightforward and it gives the user a sense of empowerment. This engine is going to do what they want it to do, as opposed to the engine telling them what they should be doing, which is what a portal does. We think that to really aid and facilitate research and learning, the clean slate is best.

I think there’s a couple of interesting problems in the portal versus simple home page piece. You might say it’s easier to disambiguate from a portal what a person might be intending. They look at the home page and there’s a big ad running for Castaway and if they search Castaway, they mean the movie that they just saw the ad for. That might be the case but the other thing that I think is more confusing than anything is the fact that most people who launch the search from the portal home page are actually ignoring and tuning out most of the content on a page. If anything you’re more inclined to mistake intent, to think, “Oh, of course when they typed this they meant that,” but they actually didn’t, because they didn’t even see this other thing. One thing that we’re consistently noticing, which your Golden Triangle finding validated, is that users have a laser focus on their task.

The Google home page is very simple and when we put a link underneath the Google search box on the home page to advertise one of our products, we say, “Hey, try Google video, it’s new, or download the new Picassa.” Basically it’s the only other thing on the page, and while it does get a fair amount of click through, it’s nothing compared to the search, because most users don’t even see it. Most users on our search results page don’t see the logo on the top of the page, they don’t see OneBox, they don’t even see spelling corrections, even though it’s there in bright red letters. There’s a single-mindedness of I’m going to put in my search, not let anything on the home page get in the way, and I’m going to go for the first blue left aligned link on the results page and everything above it basically gets ignored. And we’ve seen that trend again and again. My guess is that if anything, that same thing is happening at the portals but because there is so much context around it on the home page, their user experience and search relevance teams may be led astray, thinking that that context has more relevance than it has.

One thing eye tracking allowed us to pull this apart a little bit is that when we gave people two different scenarios, one aimed more towards getting them to look at the organic results and one that would have them more likely to look at sponsored results, and then look down to organic results, we saw the physical interaction with the page didn’t vary as much as we thought, but the cognitive interaction with the page, when it came to what they remembered seeing and what they clicked on, was dramatically different. So it’s almost like they took the same path through, but the engagement factor flicked on at different points.

My guess is that people who come to the portal are much more likely to look at ads. I like to think of them as users with ADHD. They’re on the home page and they enjoy a home page that pulls their attention in a lot of different directions. They’re willing to process a lot of information on the way to typing in their search, and as a result, that same mind that likes that, it may not even be a per user thing, it may be an of-the-moment thing, but a person that’s in the mindset of enjoying that, on the home page, is also going to be much more likely to look around on the search results page. Their attention is going to be much more likely to be pulled in the direction of an ad, even if it’s not particularly relevant, banner, brand, things like that.

I want to wrap up by asking you, what in your mind is the biggest challenge still to be solved with the search interface as we currently know it?

I think there’s a ton of challenges, because in my view, search is in its infancy, and we’re just getting started. I think the most pressing, immediate need as far as the search interface is to break paradigm of the expectation of “You give us a keyword, and we give you 10 URL’s”. I think we need to get into richer, more diverse ways you’re able to express their query, be it though natural language, or voice, or even contextually. I’m always intrigued by what the Google desktop sidebar is doing, by looking at your context, or what Gmail does, where by looking at your context, it actually produces relevant webpages, ads and things like that. So essentially, a context based search.

So, challenge one is how the searches get expressed, I think we really need to branch out there, but I also think we need to look at results pages that aren’t just 10 standard URLS that are laid out in a very linear format. Sometimes the best answer is a video, sometimes the best answer will be a photo, and sometime the best answer will be a set of extracted facts. If I type in general demographic statistics about China, it’d be great if I got “A” as a result. A set of facts that had been parsed off of and even aggregated and cross validated across a result set.

And sometimes the best result would be an ad. Out of interest, when we tracked through to the end of the scenario to see which links provided the greatest degree of success, the top sponsored results actually delivered the highest success rates across all the links that were clicked on in the study.

Really? Even more so than the natural search results?

Yes. Even the organic search results. Now mind you, the scenarios given were commercial in nature.

Right… that makes much more sense. I do think that for the 40 or so percent of page views that we serve ads on that those ads are incredibly relevant and usually do beat the search results, but for the other 60% of the time the search results are really the only reasonable answer.

Thanks, Marissa.

In my next column, I talk with Larry Cornett, Senior Director of Search & Social Media in Yahoo’s User Experience & Design group about their user experience. Look for it next Friday, February 2.

The World vs Big Tech

Around the world, governments have their legislative cross hairs trained on Big Tech. It’s happening in the US, the EU and here in my country,  Canada. The majority of these are anti-trust suits. But Australia has just introduced a different type of legislation, a social media ban for those under 16. And that could change the game – and the conversation -completely for Big Tech.

There are more anti-trust actions in the queue in the US than at any time in the previous five decades. The fast and loose interpretation of antitrust enforcement in the US is that monopolies are only attacked when they may cause significant harm to customers through lack of competition. The US approach to anti-trust since the 1970s has typically followed the Chicago School of neoclassical economy theory, which places all trust in the efficiency of markets and tells government to keep their damned hands off the economy. Given this and given the pro-business slant of all US administrations, both Republican and Democratic, since Reagan, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen relatively few anti-trust suits in the past 50 years.

But the rapid rise of monolithic Big Tech platforms has raised more discussion about anti-trust in the past decade than in the previous 5 decades. These platforms suck along the industries they spawn in their wake and leave little room for upstart competitors to survive long enough to gain significant market share.

Case in point: Google. 

The recent Canadian lawsuit has the Competition Bureau (our anti-trust watchdog) suing Google for anti-competitive practices selling its online advertising services north of the 49th parallel. They’re asking Google to sell off two of its ad-tech tools, pay penalties worth up to 3% of the platform’s global gross revenues and prohibit the company from engaging in anti-competitive practices in the future.

According to a 3-year inquiry into Google’s Canadian business practices by the Bureau, Google controls 90% of all ad servers and 70% of advertising networks operating in the country. Mind you, Google started the online advertising industry in the relatively green fields of Canada back when I was still railing about the ignorance of Canadian advertisers when it came to digital marketing. No one else really had a chance. But Google made sure they never got one by wrapping its gigantic arms around the industry in an anti-competitive bear hug.

The recent Australian legislation is of a different category, however. Anti-trust suits are – by nature – not personal. They are all about business. But the Australian ban puts Big Tech in the same category as Big Tobacco, Big Alcohol and Big Pharma – alleging that they are selling an addictive product that causes physical or emotional harm to individuals. And the rest of the world is closely watching what Australia does. Canada is no exception.

The most pertinent question is how will Australia enforce the band? Restricting social media access to those under 16 is not something to be considered lightly.  It’s a huge technical, legal and logistical hurdle to get over. But if Australia can figure it out, it’s certain that other jurisdictions around the world will follow in their footsteps.

This legislation opens the door to more vigorous public discourse about the impact of social media on our society. Politicians don’t introduce legislation unless they feel that – by doing so – they will continue to get elected. And the key to being elected is one of two things; give the electorate what they want or protect them against what they fear. In Australia, recent polling indicates the ban is supported by 77% of the population. Even those opposing the ban aren’t doing so in defense of social media. They’re worried that the devil might be in the details and that the legislation is being pushed through too quickly.

These types of things tend to follow a similar narrative arc: fads and trends drive widespread adoption – evidence mounts about the negative impacts – industries either ignore or actively sabotage the sources of the evidence – and, with enough critical mass, government finally gets into the act by introducing protective legislation.

With tobacco in the US, that arc took a couple of decades, from the explosion of smoking after World War II to the U.S. Surgeon General’s 1964 report linking smoking and cancer. The first warning labels on cigarette packages appeared two years later, in 1966.

We may be on the cusp of a similar movement with social media. And, once again, it’s taken 20 years. Facebook was founded in 2004.

Time will tell. In the meantime, keep an eye on what’s happening Down Under.

The Relationship Between Young(er) People and Capitalism: It’s Complicated

If you, like me, spend any time hanging out with Millennials or Gen Z’s, you’ll know that capitalism is not their favorite thing. That’s fair enough. I have my own qualms with capitalism.

But with capitalism, like most things, it’s not really what you say about it that counts. It’s what you do about it. And for all of us, Millennials and Gen Z included, we can talk all we want, but until we stop buying, nothing is going to change. And – based on a 2019 study from Epsilon – Gen Z and Millennials are outspending Baby Boomers in just about every consumer category.

Say all the nasty stuff you want about capitalism and our consumption obsessed society, but the truth is – buying shit is a hard habit to break

It’s not that hard to trace how attitudes towards capitalism have shifted over the generations that have been born since World War II, at least in North America. For four decades after the war, capitalism was generally thought to be a good thing, if only because it was juxtaposed against the bogeyman of socialism. Success was defined by working hard to get ahead, which led to all good things: buying a house and paying off the mortgage, having two vehicles in the garage and having a kitchen full of gleaming appliances. The capitalist era peaked in the 1980s: during the reign of Ronald Reagan in the US and the UK’s Margaret Thatcher.

But then the cracks of capitalism began to show. We began to realize the Earth wasn’t immune to being relentlessly plundered. We started to see the fabric of society showing wear and tear from being constantly pulled by conspicuous consumerism. With the end of the Cold War, the rhetoric against socialism began to be dialed down. Generations who grew up during this period had – understandably – a more nuanced view towards capitalism.

Our values and ethics are essentially formed during the first two decades of our lives. They come in part from our parents and in part from others in our generational cohort. But a critical factor in forming those values is also the environment we grow up in. And for those growing up since World War II, media has been a big part of that environment. We are – in part – formed by what we see on our various screens and feeds. Prior to 1980, you could generally count on bad guys in media being Communists or Nazis. But somewhere mid-decade, CEOs of large corporations and other Ultra-Capitalists started popping up as the villains.

I remember what the journalist James Fallows once said when I met him at a conference in communist China. I was asking how China managed to maintain the precarious balance between a regime based on Communist ideals and a society that embraced rampant entrepreneurialism. He said that as long as each generation believed that their position tomorrow would be better than it was yesterday, they would keep embracing the systems of today.

I think the same is true for generational attitudes towards capitalism. If we believed it was a road to a better future, we embraced it. But as soon as it looked like it might lead to diminishing returns, attitudes shifted. A recent article in The Washington Post detailed the many, many reasons why Americans under 40 are so disillusioned about capitalism. Most of it relates back to the same reason Fallows gave – they don’t trust that capitalism is the best road to a more promising tomorrow.

And this is where it gets messy with Millennials and Gen Z. If they grew up in the developed world, they grew up in a largely capitalistic society. Pretty much everything they understand about their environment and world has been formed, rightly or wrongly, by capitalism. And that makes it difficult to try to cherry-pick your way through an increasingly problematic relationship with something that is all you’ve ever known.

Let’s take their relationship with consumer brands, for example. Somehow, Millennials and Gen Z have managed the nifty trick of separating branding and capitalism. This is, of course, a convenient illusion. Brands are inextricably tied to capitalism. And Millennials and Gen Z are just as strongly tied to their favorite brands.

 According to a 2018 study from Ipsos, 57% of Millennials in the US always try to buy branded products. In fact, Millennials are more likely than Baby Boomers to say they rely on the brands they trust. This also extends to new brand offerings. A whopping 84% of Millennials are more likely to trust a new product from a brand they already know.

But – you may counter – it all depends on what the brand stands for. If it is a “green” brand that aligns with the values of Gen X and Millennials, then a brand may actually be anti-capitalistic.  

It’s a nice thought, but the Ipsos survey doesn’t support it. Only 12% of Millennials said they would choose a product or service because of a company’s responsible behavior and only 16% would boycott a product based on irresponsible corporate behavior. These numbers are about the same through every generational cohort, including Gen X and Baby Boomers.

I won’t even delve into the thorny subject of “greenwashing” and the massive gap between what a brand says they do in their marketing and what they actually do in the real world. No one has defined what we mean by a “ethical corporation” and until someone does and puts some quantifiable targets around it, companies are free to say whatever they want when it comes to sustainability and ethical behavior.

This same general disconnect between capitalism and marketing extends to advertising. The Ipsos study shows that – across all types of media – Millennials pay more attention to advertising than Baby Boomers and Gen X. And Millennials are also more likely to share their consumer opinions online than Boomers and Gen X. They may not like capitalism and consumerism, but they are still buying lots of stuff and talking about it.

The only power we have to fight the toxic effects of capitalism is with our wallets. Once something becomes unprofitable, it will disappear. But – as every generation is finding out – ethical consumerism is a lot easier said than done.

Can OpenAI Make Searching More Useful?

As you may have heard, OpenAI is testing a prototype of a new search engine called SearchGPT. A press release from July 25 notes: “Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results. We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.”

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time: search that moves beyond relevance to usefulness.  It was 14 years ago that I said this in an interview with Aaron Goldman regarding his book “Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google”:“Search providers have to replace relevancy with usefulness. Relevancy is a great measure if we’re judging information, but not so great if we’re measuring usefulness. That’s why I believe apps are the next flavor of search, little dedicated helpers that allow us to do something with the information. The information itself will become less and less important and the app that allows utilization of the information will become more and more important.”

I’ve felt for almost two decades that the days of search as a destination were numbered. For over 30 years now (Archie, the first internet search engine, was created in 1990), when we’re looking for something online, we search, and then we have to do something with what we find on the results page. Sometimes, a single search is enough — but often, it isn’t. For many of our intended end goals, we still have to do a lot of wading through the Internet’s deep end, filtering out the garbage, picking up the nuggets we need and then assembling those into something useful.

I’ve spent much of those past two decades pondering what the future of search might be. In fact, my previous company wrote a paper on it back in 2007. We were looking forward to what we thought might be the future of search, but we didn’t look too far forward. We set 2010 as our crystal ball horizon. Then we assembled an all-star panel of search design and usability experts, including Marissa Mayer, who was then Google’s vice president of search user experience and interface design, and Jakob Nielsen, principal of the Nielsen Norman Group and the web’s best known usability expert. We asked them what they thought search would look like in three years’ time.

Even back then, almost 20 years ago, I felt the linear presentation of a results page — the 10 blue links concept that started search — was limiting. Since then, we have moved beyond the 10 blue links. A Google search today for the latest IPhone model (one of our test queries in the white paper) actually looks eerily similar to the mock-up we did for what a Google search might look like in the year 2010. It just took Google 14 extra years to get there.

But the basic original premise of search is still there: Do a query, and Google will try to return the most relevant results. If you’re looking to buy an iPhone, it’s probably more useful, mainly due to sponsored content. But it’s still well short of the usefulness I was hoping for.

It’s also interesting to see what directions search has (and hasn’t) taken since then. Mayer talked a lot about interacting with search results. She envisioned an interface where you could annotate and filter your results: “I think that people will be annotating search results pages and web pages a lot. They’re going to be rating them, they’re going to be reviewing them. They’re going to be marking them up, saying ‘I want to come back to this one later.’”

That never really happened. The idea of search as a sticky and interactive interface for the web sort of materialized, but never to the extent that Mayer envisioned.

From our panel, it was Nielsen’s crystal ball that seemed to offer the clearest view of the future: “I think if you look very far ahead, you know 10, 20, 30 years or whatever, then I think there can be a lot of things happening in terms of natural language understanding and making the computer more clever than it is now. If we get to that level then it may be possible to have the computer better guess at what each person needs without the person having to say anything, but I think right now, it is very difficult.”

Nielsen was spot-on in 2007. It’s exactly those advances in natural language processing and artificial intelligence that could allow ChatGPT to now move beyond the paradigm of the search results page and move searching the web into something more useful.

A decade and a half ago, I envisioned an ecosystem of apps that could bridge the gap between what we intended to do and the information and functionality that could be found online.  That’s exactly what’s happening at OpenAI — a number of functional engines powered by AI, all beneath a natural language “chat” interface.

At this point, we still have to “say” what we want in the form of a prompt, but the more we use ChatGPT (or any AI interface) the better it will get to know us. In 2007, when we wrote our white paper on the future of search, personalization was what we were all talking about. Now, with ChatGPT, personalization could come back to the fore, helping AI know what we want even if we can’t put it into words.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we’ll have to wait to see if SearchGPT can make search more useful, especially for complex tasks like planning a vacation, making a major purchase onr planning a big event.

But I think all the pieces are there. The monetization siloes that dominate the online landscape will still prove a challenge to getting all the way to our final destination, but SearchGPT could make the journey faster and a little less taxing.

Note: I still have a copy of our 2007 white paper if anyone is interested. Just email me (email in the contact us page), give me your email and I’ll send you a copy.

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.

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

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 Look Back at 2023 from the Inside.

(Note: This refers to the regular feature on Mediapost – The Media Insider – which I write for every Tuesday)

It seems that every two years, I look back at what the Media Insiders were musing about over the past year. The ironic part is that I’m not an Insider. I haven’t been “inside” the Media industry for over a decade. Maybe that affords me just enough distance to be what I hope could be called an “informed observer.”

I first did this in 2019, and then again in 2021. This year, I decided to grab a back of an envelope (literally) and redo this far from scientific poll. Categorization of themes is always a challenge when I do this, but there are definitely some themes that have been consistent across the past 5 years.  I have tremendous respect for my fellow Insiders and I always find it enlightening to learn what was on their minds.

In 2019, the top three things we were thinking about were (in order): disruptions in the advertising business, how technology is changing us and how politics changed social media.

In 2021, the top three topics included (again) how technology was changing us, general marketing advice and the toxic impact of social media.

So, what about 2023? What were we writing about? After eliminating the columns that were reruns, I ended up with 230 posts in the past year.

It probably comes as a surprise to no one that artificial intelligence was the number one topic by a substantial margin. Almost 15% of all our Insider posts talked about the rise of AI and its impact on – well – pretty much everything!

The number two topic – at 12% – was TV, video and movies. Most of the posts touched on how this industry is going through ongoing disruption in every aspect – creation, distribution, buying and measurement.

Coming in at number three, at just under 12%, was social media. Like in the previous years, most of the posts were about the toxic nature of social media, but there was a smattering of positive case studies about how social platforms were used for positive change.

We Insiders have always been an existential bunch and last year was no different. Our number four topic was about our struggling to stay human in a world increasingly dominated by tech. This accounted for almost 11% of all our posts.

The next two most popular topics were both firmly grounded in the marketing industry itself. Posts about how to be a better marketer generated almost 9% of Insider content for 2023 and various articles about the business of tech marketing added another 8% of posts.

Continuing down the list, we have world events and politics (Dave Morgan’s columns about the Ukraine were a notable addition to this topic), examples of marketing gone wrong and the art and science of brand building.

We also looked at the phenomenon of fame and celebrity, sustainability, and the state of the News industry. In what might have been a wistful look back at what we remember as simpler times, there were even a few columns about retro-media, including the resurgence of the LP.

Interestingly, former hot topics like performance measurement, data and search all clustered near the bottom of the list in terms of number of posts covering these topics.

With 2023 in our rear view mirror, what are the takeaways? What can we glean from the collected year-long works of these very savvy and somewhat battle-weary veterans of marketing?

Well, the word “straddle” comes to mind. We all seem to have one foot still planted in the world and industry we thought we knew and one tentatively dipping its toes into the murky waters of what might come. You can tell that the Media Insiders are no less passionate about the various forms of media we write about, but we do go forward with the caution that comes from having been there and done that.

I think that, in total, I found a potentially worrying duality in this review of our writing. Give or take a few years –  all my fellow Insiders are of the same generation. But we are not your typical Gen-Xers/Baby Boomers (or, in my case, caught in the middle as a member of Generation Jones). We have worked with technology all our lives. We get it. The difference is, we have also accumulated several decades of life wisdom. We are past the point where we’re mesmerized by bright shiny objects. I think this gives us a unique perspective. And, based on what I read, we’re more than a little worried about what future might bring.

Take that for what it’s worth.

When AI Love Goes Bad

When we think about AI and its implications, it’s hard to wrap our own non-digital, built of flesh and blood brains around the magnitude of it. Try as we might, it’s impossible to forecast the impact of this massive wave of disruption that’s bearing down on us. So, today, in order to see what might be the unintended consequences, I’d like to zoom in to one particular example.

There is a new app out there. It’s called Anima and it’s an AI girlfriend. It’s not the only one. When it comes to potential virtual partners, there are plenty of fish in the sea. But – for this post, let’s stay true to Anima. Here’s the marketing blurb on her website: “The most advanced romance chatbot you’ve ever talked to. Fun and flirty dating simulator with no strings attached. Engage in a friendly chat, roleplay, grow your love & relationship skills.”

Now, if there’s one area where our instincts should kick in and alarm bells should start going off about AI, it should be in the area of sexual attraction. If there was one human activity that seems bound by necessity to being ITRW (in the real world) it should be this one.

If we start to imagine what might happen when we turn to AI for love, we could ask filmmaker Spike Jonze. He already imagined it, 10 years ago when he wrote the screenplay for “her”, the movie with Joaquin Phoenix. Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly, a soon-to-be divorced man who upgrades his computer to a new OS, only to fall in love with the virtual assistant (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) that comes as part of the upgrade.

Predictably, complications ensue.

To get back to Anima, I’m always amused by the marketing language developers use to lull us into the acceptance of things we should be panicking about. In this case, it was two lines: “No strings attached” and “grow your love and relationship skills.”

First, about that “no strings attached” thing – I have been married for 34 years now and I’m here to tell you that relationships are all about “strings.” Those “strings” can also be called by other names: empathy, consideration, respect, compassion and – yes – love. Is it easy to keep those strings attached – to stay connected with the person at the other end of those strings? Hell, no! It is a constant, daunting, challenging work in progress. But the alternative is cutting those strings and being alone. Really alone.

If we get the illusion of a real relationships through some flirty version of ChatGPT, will it be easier to cut the strings that keep us connected to other real people out there? Will we be fooled into thinking something is real when it’s just a seductive algorithm?  In “her”, Jonze brings Twombly back to the real world, ending with a promise of a relationship with a real person as they both gaze at the sunset. But I worry that that’s just a Hollywood ending. I think many people – maybe most people – would rather stick with the “no strings attached” illusion. It’s just easier.

And will AI adultery really “grow your love and relationship skills?” No. No more than you will grow your ability to determine accurate and reliable information by scrolling through your Facebook feed. That’s just a qualifier that the developer threw in so they didn’t feel crappy about leading their customers down the path to “AI-rmegeddon”.

Even if we put all this other stuff aside for the moment, consider the vulnerable position we put ourselves in when we start mistaking robotic love for the real thing. All great cons rely on one of two things – either greed or love. When we think we’re in love, we drop our guard. We trust when we probably shouldn’t.

Take the Anima artificial girlfriend app for example. We know nothing about the makers of this app. We don’t know where the data collected goes. We certainly have no idea what their intentions are. Is this really who you want to start sharing your most intimate chit chat with? Even if their intentions are benign, this is an app built a for-profit company, which means there needs to be a revenue model in it somewhere. I’m guessing that all your personal data will be sold to the highest bidder.

You may think all this talk of AI love is simply stupid. We humans are too smart to be sucked in by an algorithm. But study after study has shown we’re not. We’re ready to make friends with a robot at the drop of a hat. And once we hit friendship, can love be far behind?