Category Archives: Content and Thought Leadership

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.

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.

The Challenge in Regulating AI

A few weeks ago, MediaPost’s Wendy Davis wrote a commentary on the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation of OpenAI. Of primary concern to the FTC was ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate. I found this out for myself when ChatGPT told some whoppers about who I was and what I’ve done in the past.

Davis wrote, “The inquiry comes as a growing chorus of voices — including lawmakers, consumer advocates and at least one business group — are pushing for regulations governing artificial intelligence. OpenAI has also been hit with lawsuits over copyright infringement, privacy and defamation.”

This highlights a problem with trying to legislate AI. First, the U.S. is using its existing laws and trying to apply them to a disruptive and unpredictable technology. Laws, by their nature, have to be specific, which means you have to be able to anticipate circumstances in which they’d be applied. But how do you create or apply laws for something unpredictable? All you can do is regulate what you know. When it comes to predicting the future, legislators tend to be a pretty unimaginative bunch. 

In the intro to a Legal Rebels podcast on the American Bar Association’s website, Victor Li included this quote, “At present, the regulation of AI in the United States is still in its early stages, and there is no comprehensive federal legislation dedicated solely to AI regulation. However, there are existing laws and regulations that touch upon certain aspects of AI, such as privacy, security and anti-discrimination. “

The ironic thing was, the quote came from ChatGPT. But in this case, ChatGPT got it mostly right. The FTC is trying to use the laws at its disposal to corral OpenAI by playing a game of legal whack-a-mole:  hammering things like privacy, intellectual property rights, defamation, deception and discrimination as they pop their heads up.

But that’s only addressing the problems the FTC can see. It’s like repainting the deck railings on the Titanic the day before it hit the iceberg. It’s not what you know that’s going to get you, it’s what you don’t know.

If you’re attacking ChatGPT’s tendency to fabricate reality, you’re probably tilting at the wrong windmill. This is a transitory bug. OpenAI benefits in no way from ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate. The company would much rather have a large language-based model that is usually truthful and accurate. You can bet they’re working on it. By the time the ponderous wheels of the U.S. legislative system get turned around and rolling in the right direction, chances are the bug will be fixed and there won’t really be anything to legislate against.

What we need before we start talking about legislation is something more fundamental. We need an established principle, a framework of understanding from which laws can be created as situations arise.

This is not the first time we’ve faced a technology that came packed with potential unintended consequences. In February, 1975, 140 people gathered at a conference center in Monterey, California to attempt to put a leash on genetic manipulation, particularly Recombinant DNA engineering.

This group, which included mainly biologists with a smattering of lawyers and physicians, established principle-based guidelines that took its name from the conference center where they met. It was called the Asilomar Conference agreement.

The guidelines were based on the level of risk involved in proposed experiments. The higher the risk, the greater the required precautions.

These guidelines were flexible enough to adapt as the science of genetic engineering evolved. It was one of the first applications of something called “the precautionary principle” – which is just what it sounds like: if the future is uncertain, go forward slowly and cautiously.

While the U.S. is late to the AI legislation party, the European Union has been taking the lead. And, if you look its first attempts at E.U. AI regulation drafted in 2021, you’ll see it has the precautionary principle written all over it. Like the Asilomar guidelines, there are different rules for different risk levels. While the U.S. attempts at legislation are mired in spotty specifics, the EU is establishing a universal framework that can adapt to the unexpected.

This is particularly important with AI, because it’s an entirely different ballgame than genetic engineering. Those driving the charge are for-profit companies, not scientists working in a lab.

OpenAI is intended as a platform that others will build on. It will move quickly, and new issues will pop up constantly. Unless the regulating bodies are incredibly nimble and quick to plug loopholes, they will constantly be playing catch-up.

What Media Insiders Were Thinking (And Writing) In 2021

Note: This is a year back look at the posts in the Media Insider Column on Mediapost, for which I write every Tuesday. All the writers for the column have been part of the Marketing and Media business for decades, so there’s a lot of wisdom there to draw on. This is the second time I’ve done this look back at what we’ve written about in the previous year.

As part of the group of Media Insiders, I’ve always considered myself in sterling company. I suspect if you added up all the years of experience in this stable of industry experts, we’d be well into the triple digits. Most of the Insiders are still active in the world of marketing. For myself, although I’m no longer active in the business, I’m still fascinated by how it impacts our lives and our culture.

For all those reasons, I think the opinions of this group are worth listening to — and, thankfully,  MediaPost gives you those opinions every day.

Three years ago, I thought it would be interesting to do a “meta-analysis” of those opinions over the span of the year, to see what has collectively been on the minds of the Media Insiders. I meant to do it again last year, but just never got around to it — as you know, global pandemics and uprisings against democracy were a bit of a distraction.

This year, I decided to give it another shot. And it was illuminating. Here’s a summary of what has been on our collective minds:

I don’t think it’s stretching things to say that your Insiders have been unusually existential in their thoughts in the past 12 months. Now, granted, this is one column on MediaPost that leads to existential musings. That’s why I ended up here. I love the fact that I can write about pretty much anything and it generally fits under the “Media Insider” masthead. I suspect the same is true for the other Insiders.

But even with that in mind, this year was different. I think we’ve all spent a lot of the last year thinking about what the moral and ethical boundaries for marketers are — for everyone, really — in the world of 2021. Those ponderings broke down into a few recurring themes.

Trying to Navigate a Substantially Different World

Most of this was naturally tied to the ongoing COVID pandemic.  

Surprisingly, given that three years ago it was one of the most popular topics, Insiders said little about politics. Of course, we were then squarely in the middle of “Trump time.” There were definitely a few posts after the Jan. 6 insurrection, but most of it was just trying to figure out how the world might permanently change after 2021. Almost 20% of our columns touched on this topic.

A notable subset of this was how our workplaces might change. With many of us being forced to work from home, 4% of the year’s posts talked about how “going to work” may never look the same again.

Ad-Tech Advice

The next most popular topic from Insiders (especially those still in the biz, like Corey, Dave, Ted and Maarten) was ongoing insight on how to manage the nuts and bolts of your marketing. A lot of this focused on using ad tech effectively. That made up 15% of last year’s posts.

And Now, The Bad News

I will say your Media Insiders (myself included) are a somewhat pessimistic bunch. Even when we weren’t talking about wrenching change brought about by a global pandemic, we were worrying about the tech world going to hell in a handbasket. About 13.5% of our posts talked about social media, and it was almost all negative, with most of it aimed squarely at Facebook — sorry, Meta.

Another 12% of our posts talked about other troubling aspects of technology. Privacy concerns over data usage and targeting took the lead here. But we were also worried about other issues, like the breakdown of person-to-person relationships, disappearing attention spans, and tears in our social fabric. When we talked about the future of tech, we tended to do it through a dystopian lens.

Added to this was a sincere concern about the future of journalism. This accounted for another 5% of all our posts. This makes almost a full third of all posts with a decidedly gloomy outlook when it comes to tech and digital media’s impact on society.

The Runners-Up

If there was one branch of media that seemed the most popular among the Insiders (especially Dave Morgan), it was TV and streaming video. I also squeezed a few posts about online gaming into this category. Together, this topic made up 10.5% of all posts.

Next in line, social marketing and ethical branding. We all took our own spins on this, and together we devoted almost 9.5% of all posts in 2021 to it. I’ve talked before about the irony of a world that has little trust in advertising but growing trust in brands. Your Insiders have tried to thread the needle between the two sides of this seeming paradox.

Finally, we did cover a smattering of other topics, but one in particular rose about the others as something increasingly on our radar. We touched on the Metaverse and its implications in almost 3% of our posts.

Summing Up

To try to wrap up 2021 in one post is difficult, but if there was a single takeaway, I think it’s that both marketing and media are faced with some very existential questions. Ad-supported revenue models have now been pushed to the point where we must ask what the longer-term ethical implications might be.

If anything, I would say the past year has marked the beginning of our industry realizing that a lot of unintended consequences have now come home to roost.

COVID And The Chasm Crossing

For most of us, it’s been a year living with the pandemic. I was curious what my topic was a year ago this week. It was talking about the brand crisis at a certain Mexican brewing giant when its flagship brand was suddenly and unceremoniously linked with a global pandemic. Of course, we didn’t know then just how “global” it would be back then.

Ahhh — the innocence of early 2020.

The past year will likely be an historic inflection point in many societal trend lines. We’re not sure at this point how things will change, but we’re pretty sure they will change. You can’t take what has essentially been a 12-month anomaly in everything we know as normal, plunk it down on every corner of the globe and expect everything just to bounce back to where it was.

If I could vault 10 years in the future and then look back at today, I suspect I would be talking about how our relationship with technology changed due to the pandemic. Yes, we’re all sick of Zoom. We long for the old days of actually seeing another face in the staff lunchroom. And we realize that bingeing “Emily in Paris” on Netflix comes up abysmally short of the actual experience of stepping in dog shit as we stroll along the Seine.

C’est la vie.

But that’s my point. For the past 12 months, these watered-down digital substitutes have been our lives. We were given no choice. And some of it hasn’t sucked. As I wrote last week, there are times when a digital connection may actually be preferable to a physical one.

There is now a whole generation of employees who are considering their work-life balance in the light of being able to work from home for at least part of the time. Meetings the world over are being reimagined, thanks to the attractive cost/benefit ratio of being able to attend virtually. And, for me, I may have permanently swapped riding my bike trainer in my basement for spin classes in the gym. It took me a while to get used to it, but now that I have, I think it will stick.

Getting people to try something new — especially when it’s technology — is a tricky process. There are a zillion places on the uphill slope of the adoption curve where we can get mired and give up. But, as I said, that hasn’t been an option for us in the past 12 months. We had to stick it out. And now that we have, we realize we like much of what we were forced to adopt. All we’re asking for is the freedom to pick and choose what we keep and what we toss away.

I suspect  many of us will be a lot more open to using technology now that we have experienced the tradeoffs it entails between effectiveness and efficiency. We will make more room in our lives for a purely utilitarian use of technology, stripped of the pros and cons of “bright shiny object” syndrome.

Technology typically gets trapped at both the dread and pseudo-religious devotion ends of the Everett Rogers Adoption Curve. Either you love it, or you hate it. Those who love it form the market that drives the development of our technology, leaving those who hate it further and further behind.

As such, the market for technology tends to skew to the “gee whiz” end of the market, catering to those who buy new technology just because it’s new and cool. This bias has embedded an acceptance of planned obsolescence that just seems to go hand-in-hand with the marketing of technology. 

My previous post about technology leaving seniors behind is an example of this. Even if seniors start out as early adopters, the perpetual chase of the bright shiny object that typifies the tech market can leave them behind.

But COVID-19 changed all that. It suddenly forced all of us toward the hump that lies in the middle of the adoption curve. It has left the world no choice but to cross the “chasm” that  Geoffrey Moore wrote about 30 years ago in his book “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers.” He explained that the chasm was between “visionaries (early adopters) and pragmatists (early majority),” according to Wikipedia.

This has some interesting market implications. After I wrote my post, a few readers reached out saying they were working on solutions that addressed the need of seniors to stay connected with a device that is easier for them to use and is not subject to the need for constant updating and relearning. Granted, neither of them was from Apple nor Google, but at least someone was thinking about it.

As the pandemic forced the practical market for technology to expand, bringing customers who had everyday needs for their technology, it created more market opportunities. Those opportunities create pockets of profit that allow for the development of tools for segments of the market that used to be ignored.

It remains to be seen if this market expansion continues after the world returns to a more physically based definition of normal. I suspect it will.

This market evolution may also open up new business model opportunities — where we’re actually willing to pay for online services and platforms that used to be propped up by selling advertising. This move alone would take technology a massive step forward in ethical terms. We wouldn’t have this weird moral dichotomy where marketers are grieving the loss of data (as fellow Media Insider Ted McConnell does in this post) because tech is finally stepping up and protecting our personal privacy.

Perhaps — I hope — the silver lining in the past year is that we will look at technology more as it should be: a tool that’s used to make our lives more fulfilling.

The View from the Other Side

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fear of a Not Doing Everything Right Now

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

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

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

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

Basic Instincts and Attention Economics

We’ve been here before. Something becomes valuable because it’s scarce. The minute society agrees on the newly assigned value, wars begin because of it. Typically these things have been physical. And the battle lines have been drawn geographically. But this time is different. This time, we’re fighting over attention – specifically, our attention – and the battle is between individuals and corporations. Do we, as individuals, have the right to choose what we pay attention to? Or do the creators of content own our attention and can they harvest it at their will? This is the question that is rapidly dismantling the entire advertising industry. It has been debated at length here at Mediapost and pretty much every other publication everywhere.

I won’t join in the debate at this time. The reality here is that we do control our attention and the advertising industry was built on a different premise of scarcity from a different time. It was built on a foundation of access and creation, when both those things were in short supply. By creating content and solving the physical problem of giving us access to that content, the industry gained the right to ask us to watch an ad. No ads, no content. It was a bargain we agreed to because we had no other choice.

The Internet then proceeded to blow that foundation to smithereens.

By removing the physical constraints that restricted both the creation and distribution of content, technology has also erased the scarcity. In fact, the balance has been forever tipped the other way. We now have access to so much content; we don’t have enough attention to digest it all. Viewed in this light, it makes the debate around ad blockers seem hopelessly out of touch. Accusing someone of stealing content is like accusing someone of stealing air. The anti-blocking side is trying to apply the economic rational of a market that no longer exists.

So let us accept the fact that we are the owners of our own attention, and that it is a scarce commodity. That makes it valuable. My point is that we should pay more attention to how we pay attention. If the new economy is going to be built on attention, we should treat it with more respect.

The problem here is that we have two types of attention, the same as we have two types of thinking: Fast and Slow. Our slow attention is our focused, conscious attention. It is the attention we pay when we’re reading a book, watching a video or talking to someone. We consciously make a choice when we pay this type of attention. Think of it like a spotlight we shine on something for an extended period of time.

It’s the second type of attention, fast attention, which is typically the target of advertising. It plays on the edge of our spotlight, quickly and subconsciously monitoring the environment so it can swing the spotlight of conscious attention if required. Because this type of attention operates below the level of rational thought, it is controlled by base instincts. It’s why sex works in advertising. It’s why Kim Kardashian can repeatedly break the Internet. It’s why Donald Trump is leading the Republican race. And it’s why adorable Asian babies wearing watermelons can go viral.

It’s this type of attention that really determines the value of the attention economy. It’s the gatekeeper that determines how slow attention is focused. And it’s here where we may need some help. I don’t think instincts developed 200,000 years ago are necessarily the best guide for how we should invest something that has become so valuable. We need a better yardstick that simple titillation for determining where our attention should be spent.

I expect the death throes of the previous access economy to go on for some time. The teeth gnashing of the advertising industry will capture a lot of attention. But the end is inevitable. The economic underpinnings are gone, so it’s just a matter of time before the superstructures built on top of them will collapse. In my opinion, we should just move on and think about what the new world will look like. If attention is the new currency, what is the smartest way to spend it?

Some Second Thoughts on Mindless Media

When I read Tom Goodwin’s Online Spin last week, I immediately jumped on his bandwagon. How could I not? He played the evolutionary psychology card and then trumped that by applying it to the consumption of media. This was right up my ideological alley.

addict_f1pjr6Here’s a quick recap: Humans evolved to crave high calorie foods because these were historically scarce. In the last century, however, processed food manufacturing has ensured that high calorie foods are abundantly available. The result? We got fat. Really fat. Tom worries that the same thing is happening to our consumption of media. As traditional publishing channels break down, will we become a society of information snackers?

“We’re rewarding pieces that are most-clickable or most easily digested, and our news diet shifts from good-for-us to snackable.”

Goodwin also mourns the death of serendipitous discovery – which was traditionally brought to us by our loyalty to a channel and the editorial control exercised by that channel. If we were loyal to the New York Times, then we were introduced to content they thought we should see. But in the age of “filter bubbles” our content becomes increasingly homogenized based on algorithms, which are drawing an ever-narrowing circle bounded by our explicit requests and our implicit behavior patterns. We become further insulated from quality by mindless social media sharing – which tends to favor content pandering to the lowest common denominator.

But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if this wasn’t a little paradoxical? Tom’s very thoughtful column, which hardly qualifies as intellectual fast-food, didn’t come to us through traditional journalism. Tom, like myself, is not a professional journalist. And while MediaPost does provide some editorial curation, it’s purpose it to provide a fairly transparent connection between industry experts like Tom and other experts like you. Tom’s piece came to us through a much more transparent information marketplace – the very same marketplace that Tom worries is turning us into an audience of mindless media junkies. And I should add that Tom’s piece was shared through social circles over 200 times.

So where is the disconnect here? The problem is that when it comes to human behaviors, there are no universal truths. How we act in almost any given situation will eventually distribute itself across a bell curve. Let’s take obesity, for instance. If we talk trends, Tom is absolutely correct. The introduction of fast food in North America coincided with an explosion of obesity, which as a percentage of the US population rose from about 10% in the 1950’s to almost 35% in 2013. But if we accept the premise that we all mindlessly crave calories, we should all be obese. Obesity rates should also continue to be going up until they reach 100% of the population. But those two things are just not true. Obesity rates have plateaued in the last few years and there are indications that they are starting to decline amongst children. Also, although fast food is now available around the world – obesity rates vary greatly. Japan has one of the highest concentrations of McDonald’s outlets per capita (25 per million) in the world but has an obesity rate of 3.2%, the lowest in all OECD countries. The US has a higher concentration McDonald’s (45 per million) but has an obesity rate 10 times that of Japan. And my own country, Canada, almost matches the US McDonald for McDonald (41 per million) but has an obesity rate half that of the US (14.3%).

My point is not to debate whether we’re getting fatter. We are. But there’s more to it than just the prevalence of fast food. And these factors apply to our consumption of media as well. For example, there is a strong negative correlation between obesity levels and education. There is also a strong negative correlation between obesity and income. Cultural norms have a huge impact on the prevalence of obesity. There are no universal truths here. There are just a lot of nebulous factors at play. So, if we want to be honest when we draw behavioral comparisons, we have to be accepting of those factors.

Much as I believe evolution drives many of our behaviors, I also believe that more open markets are better than more restrictive ones. As the mentality of abundance takes hold, our behaviors take time to adjust. Yes, we do snack on crap. But we also have access to high quality choices we could have never dreamed of before. And the ratio of consumption between those two extremes will be different for all of us. Consider the explosion of TV programming that has happened over the last 3 decades. Yes, there is an over-abundance of mindless dreck, but there is also more quality programming than ever to choose from. The same is true of music and pretty much any other category where markets have opened up through technology.

The way to increase the quality of what we consume, whether it be food, information or entertainment, is not to limit the production and distribution of those consumables through more restrictive markets, but to improve education, access and create a culture of considered consumption. Some of us will choose crap. But some of us will choose the cream that rises to the top. The choice will be ours. The answer is not to take those choices away, but rather to create a culture that encourages wiser choices.

Today, Spend Some Time in Quadrant Two

First published April 17, 2014 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I ranted, and it was therapeutic — for me, at least. Some of you agreed that the social media landscape was littered with meaningless crap. Others urged me to “loosen up and take a chill pill,” intimating that I had slipped across the threshold of “grumpy old man-itis.” Guilty, I guess, but there was a point to my rant. We need to spend more time with important stuff, and less time with content that may be popular but trivial.

Hey, I’m the first to admit that I can be tempted into wasting gobs of time with a tweet like: “Prom season sizzles with KFC chicken corsages.” This is courtesy of Guy Kawasaki. Guy’s Twitter feed is a fire hose of enticing trivia. And the man (with the team that supports him) does have a knack of writing tweets with irresistible hooks. Come on. Who could resist checking out a fried chicken corsage?

But here’s the problem. Online is littered with fried chicken corsages. No matter where we turn, we’re bombarded by these tasty little tidbits of brain candy. Publishers have grown quite adept at stringing these together, leading us from trivial link to trivial link. Personally, I’m a sucker for Top Ten lists. But after succumbing to the temptation for “just a second” I find myself, 20 minutes later, having accomplished nothing other than learning what the 10 Biggest Reality Show Blunders were, or where the 10 Most Extravagant Homes in the U.S. happen to be.

Entertaining? Absolutely.

Useful? Doubtful.

Important?  Not a chance.

merrillcoveymatrixWe need to set aside time for important stuff. A few decades ago, I happened to read Stephen Covey’s “First Things First,” which introduced a concept I still try to live by to this day. Covey called it the Urgent/Important matrix. It’s a simple two-by-two matrix with four quadrants:

1 – Urgent and Important – for example, a fire in your kitchen.

2 – Not Urgent but Important – long-term planning.

3 – Urgent but Not Important – interruptions.

4 – Not Important and Not Urgent – time-wasters.

Covey’s Advice? Better balance your time in these quadrants. Quadrant One takes care of itself. We can’t ignore these types of crises. But we should try to minimize the distractions that fall into Quadrant Three and cut down the time we spend in Quadrant Four. Then, we should move as much of this freed-up time as possible into Quadrant Two.

Covey’s Quadrants are more applicable than ever to the online world.  I suspect most of us spend the majority of time in the online equivalents of Quadrant Three (responding to emails or other instant forms of messaging that aren’t really important) or Quadrant Four (online time wasters). We probably don’t spend much time in Quadrant Two (which I’ll abbreviate it to Q2). In fact, in writing this column, I tried to find a quick guide to finding important stuff online. I have a few places I like to go, which I’ll share in a moment, but despite the vast potential of online as a Q2 resource, it doesn’t seem that anyone is it making it easy to filter for “importance.” As I said in my last column, we have filters for popularity and recency, but I couldn’t find anything helping me track down Q2 candidates.

So, here is my contribution to helping you set aside more quality Q2 time:

Amazon Kindle and DevonThink: Reading thought-provoking books is my favorite Q2 activity.  I try to set aside at least an hour a day to read. Anytime someone suggests a book or I find one referenced, I download immediately it from Kindle and add it to the queue. Then, as I read, I use Kindle’s highlight feature to create a summary of the important ideas. After, I copy my highlighted notes into DevonThink, a tool that helps track and archive notes and resources for future reference.

Scientific American & Science Daily: I’m a science geek. I love learning about the latest advances — in particular, new discoveries in the areas of psychology and neuroscience. When I find an interesting article, I again save it to DevonThink.

Google Scholar and Questia: Every so often, I dive into the world of academia to find research done in a particular area, usually related to a blog post or column idea. Google Scholar usually unearths a number of publicly available papers on most topics. And, if you share my predilection for academic research, a subscription to Questia is worth considering.

Big Think, weforum.org and TED: Looking for big ideas — world-changing stuff? These three sites are the place to find them.

HBR, Wired, The Atlantic and The Economist: Another favorite topic of mine is corporate strategy — particularly how organizations have to adapt to a rapidly evolving environment. I find sites like these great for giving me a sense of what’s happening in the world of business.

Hey, it may not be a fried chicken corsage, but these aren’t bad ways to spend an hour or two a day.

 

The Momentum of Marketing

First published May 23, 2013 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

After becoming a parent, I discovered that there are no shortcuts to being a Dad. Contrary to popular belief, there’s no such thing as “quality time” with kids… there’s just time. You have to be there, as much as you can be, because you never know when those moments will occur that will cement your relationship with your children. You keep trying, you keep putting in the time, you keep doing the things you have to do to be a parent. Think of it as relationship “momentum.”

The same is true, I believe, in all worthwhile endeavors. Activity breeds success. And that includes marketing. If you take your foot off the gas, you lose momentum.

I’ve found that myself in the last few years. The marketing strategy of our company was all about activity. We conducted research, we published whitepapers, we blogged, we spoke at conferences, we held webinars — we never missed an opportunity to generate awareness. It was a lot of activity, aimed at maintaining our marketing momentum. And it worked. We had a profile in the industry that was probably out of proportion to our actual share of business. When it came to maintaining a profile, I think we punched above our weight.

I was the producer of much of this activity, so as our company profile rose, so did my own personal one. I was constantly fielding requests to speak, comment, participate or write.

But for various reasons, I’ve taken my foot off the gas recently. I’m not nearly as active in the industry as I was previously. My assumption was that the momentum would carry me for some period of time. I was wrong. The minute the activity decreased, so did the opportunities.

Now, this was partly by design. I knew that my previous industry profile would start to slip and so I didn’t panic. But still, I was surprised at how quickly it happened. And because of that, I suspect there’s a cautionary tale here for marketers. If you produce content or generate thought leadership, a hiatus can be costly. That lost momentum can take several months to build again. In fact, you might never get it back.

For myself, I’m now entering a new phase of my career, so my activity will change over the coming months. I still intend to be active — perhaps more so than ever — but it will be aimed in a new direction. I do have the advantage of past experience. I know it can work, because it has worked in the past.

So I leave you with these words of advice — be active in your marketing efforts. Always be producing new content, generating awareness, and raising your profile. I believe busy parents are generally good parents — and the same is true, I suspect, for marketers.