Category Archives: Search 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.

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.

In Defense of SEO

Last week, my social media feeds blew up with a plethora (yes – a plethora!) of indignant posts about a new essay that had just dropped on The Verge.

It was penned by Amanda Chicago Lewis and it was entitled: “The People that Ruined the Internet”

The reason for the indignation? Those “people” included myself, and many of my past colleagues. The essay was an investigation of the industry I used to be in. One might even call me one of the original pioneers of said industry. The intro was:

“As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful anymore, what happens to the cottage industry of search engine optimization experts who struck content oil and smeared it all over the web? Well, they find a new way to get rich and keep the party going.”

Am I going to refute the observations of Ms. Lewis?

No, because they are not lies. They are observations. And observations happen through the lens the observer uses to observe. What struck me is the lens Lewis chose to see my former industry through, and the power of a lens in media.

Lewis is an investigative journalist. She writes exposes. If you look at the collection of her articles, you don’t have to scroll very far before you have seen the words “boondoggle”, “hustler”, “lies”, “whitewashing”, and “hush money” pop up in her titles. Her journalistic style veers heavily towards being a “hammer”, which makes all that lie in her path “nails.”

This was certainly true for the SEO article. She targeted many of the more colorful characters still in the SEO biz and painted them with the same acerbic, snarky brush. Ironically, she lampoons outsized personalities without once considering that all of this is filtered through her own personality. I have never met Lewis, but I suspect she’s no shrinking violet. In the article, she admits a grudging admiration for the hustlers and “pirates” she interviewed.

Was that edginess part of the SEO industry? Absolutely. But contrary to the picture painted by Lewis, I don’t believe that defined the industry. And I certainly don’t believe we ruined the internet. Google organic search results are better than they were 10 years ago. We all have a better understanding of how people actually search and a good part of that research was done by those in the SEO industry (myself included). The examples of bad SEO that Lewis uses are at least 2 decades out of date.

I think Lewis, and perhaps others of her generation, suffer from “rosy retrospection” – a cognitive bias that automatically assumes things were better yesterday. I have been searching for the better part of 3 decades and – as a sample of one – I don’t agree. I can also say with some empirical backing that the search experience is quantitatively better than it was when we did our first eye tracking study 20 years ago. A repeat study done 10 years ago showed time to first click had decreased and satisfaction with that click had increased. I’m fairly certain that a similar study would show that the search experience is better today than it was a decade ago. If this is a “search optimized hellhole”, it’s much less hellish than it was back in the “good old days” of search.

One of the reasons for that improvement is that millions of websites have been optimized by SEOs (a label which, by the way Amanda, has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to be mistaken for a CEO) to unlock unindexable content, fix broken code, improve usability, tighten up and categorize content and generally make the Internet a less shitty and confusing place. Not such an ignoble pursuit for “a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks (who) were degrading our collective sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm.”

Amanda Chigaco Lewis did interview those who sat astride the world of search providers and the world of SEO: Danny Sullivan (“angry and defensive” – according to Lewis), Barry Schwartz (“an unbelievably fast talker”), Duane Forrester (a “consummate schmoozer”) and Matt Cutts (an “SEO celebrity”). Each tried to refute her take that things are “broken” and the SEOs are to blame, but she brushed those aside, intent on caricaturing them as a cast of characters from a carnival side show.  Out of the entire scathing diatribe, one scant paragraph grudgingly acknowledges that maybe not all SEO is bad. That said, Lewis immediately spins around and says that it doesn’t matter, because the bad completely negates the good.

Obviously, I don’t agree with Lewis’s take on the SEO industry. Maybe it’s because I spent the better part of 20 years in the industry and know it at a level Lewis never could. But what irritates me the most is that she made no attempt to go beyond taking the quick and easy shots. She had picked her lens through which she viewed SEO before the very first interview and everything was colored by that lens. Was her take untrue? Not exactly. But it was unfair. And that’s why reporters like Lewis have degraded journalism to the point where it’s just clickbait, with a few more words thrown in.

Lewis gleefully stereotypes SEOs as “content goblin(s) willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash.” That’s simply not true. It’s no more true than saying all investigative journalists are “screeching acid-tongued harpies who are hopelessly biased and cover their topics with all the subtlety of a flame-thrower.”

P.S.  I did notice the article was optimized for search, with keywords prominently shown in the URL. Does that make the Verge and Lewis SEOs?

The Seedy, Seedy World of Keto Gummies

OK, admit it. I play games on my phone.

Also, I’m cheap, so I play the free, ad-supported versions.

You might call this a brain-dead waste of time, but I prefer to think of it as diligent and brave investigative journalism.  The time I spend playing Bricks Ball Crusher or Toy Blast is, in actuality, my research into the dark recesses of advertising on behalf of you, the more cerebral and discerning readers of this blog. I bravely sacrifice my own self-esteem so that I might tread the paths of questionable commerce and save you the trip.

You see, it was because of my game playing that I was introduced to the seediest of seedy slums in the ad world, the underbelly known as the in-game ad. One ad, in particular, reached new levels of low.

If you haven’t heard of the Keto Gummies Scam, allow me to share my experience.

This ad hawked miracle gummies that “burn the fat off you” with no dieting or exercising. Several before and after photos show the results of these amazing little miracle drops of gelatin. They had an impressive supporting cast. The stars of the TV pitchfest “Shark Tank” had invested in them. Both Rebel Wilson and Adele had used them to shed pounds. And then — the coup de grace — Oprah (yes, the Oprah!) endorsed them.

The Gummy Guys went right the top of the celebrity endorsement hierarchy when they targeted the big O.

As an ex ad guy, I couldn’t ignore this ad. It was like watching a malvertising train wreck. There was so much here that screamed of scam, I couldn’t believe it. The celebrity pics used were painfully obvious in their use of photoshopping. The claims were about as solid as a toilet paper Taj Mahal. The entire premise reeked of snake oil.

I admit, I was morbidly fascinated.

First, of all the celebrities in all the world, why would you misappropriate Oprah’s brand? She is famously protective of it. If you’re messing with Oprah, you’ve either got to be incredibly stupid or have some serious stones. So which was it?

I started digging.

First of all, this isn’t new. The Keto Gummy Scam has been around for at least a year. In addition to Oprah, they have also targeted Kevin Costner, Rhianna, Trisha Yearwood, Tom Selleck, Kelly Clarkson, Melissa McCarthy — even Wayne Gretzky.

Last Fall, Oprah shared a video on Instagram warning people that she had nothing to do with the gummies and asking people not to fall for the scam. Other celebrities have fallen suit and issued their own warnings.

Snopes.com has dug into the Keto Gummy Scam a couple of times.  One exposé focused on the false claims that the gummies were featured on “Shark Tank.” The first report focused just on the supposed Oprah Winfrey endorsement. That one was from a year ago. That means these fraudulent ads have been associated with Oprah for at least a year and legally, she has been unable to stop them.

To me, that rules out my first supposition. These people aren’t stupid.

This becomes apparent when you start trying to pick your way through the maze of misinformation they have built to support these ads. If you click on the ad you’re taken to a webpage that looks like it’s from a reliable news source. The one I found looked like it was Time’s website. There you’ll find a “one-on-one interview” with Oprah about how she launched a partnership with Weight Watchers to create the Max Science Keto gummies. According to the interview, she “called the CEO of Weight Watchers and said ‘if you can’t create a product that helps people lose weight faster without diet and exercise, then I’m backing out of my investment and moving on.”

This is all complete bullshit. But it’s convincing bullshit.

It doesn’t stop there. Clickbait texts with outrageous claims, including the supposed death of Oprah, get clicks through to more bogus sites with more outrageous claims about gummies. While the sites mimic legitimate news organizations like Time, they reside on bogus domains such as genuinesmother.com and newsurvey22offer.com. Or, if you go to them through an in-app link, the URLs are cloaked and remain invisible.

If you turn to a search engine to do some due diligence, the scammers will be waiting for you. If you search for “keto gummies scam” the results page is stuffed with both sponsored and organic spam that appear to support the outrageous claims made in the ads. Paid content outlets like Outlook India have articles placed that offer reviews of the “best keto gummies,” fake reviews, and articles assuring potential victims that the gummies are not a scam but are a proven way to lose weight.

As the Snopes investigators found, it’s almost impossible to track these gummies to any company. Even if you get gummies shipped to you, there’s no return address or phone number. Orders came from a shadowy “Fulfillment Center” in places like Smyrna, Tennessee. Once they get your credit card, the unauthorized charges start.

Even the name of the product seems to be hard to nail down. The scammers seem to keep cycling through a roster of names.

This is, by every definition, predatory advertising. It is the worst example of what we as marketers do. But, like all predators, it can only exist because an ecosystem allows it to exist. It’s something we have to think about.

I certainly will. More on that soon.

Search and ChatGPT – You Still Can’t Get There From Here

I’m wrapping up my ChatGPTrilogy with a shout out to an old friend that will be familiar to many Mediaposters – Aaron Goldman. 13 years ago Aaron wrote a book called Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned from Google.  Just a few weeks ago, Aaron shared a post entitled “In a World of AI, is Everything I Know about Marketing (still) Learned from Google”. In it, he looked at the last chapter of the book, which he called Future-Proofing. Part of that chapter was based on a conversation Aaron and I had back in 2010 about what search might look like in the future.

Did we get it right? Well, remarkably, we got a lot more right than we got wrong, especially with the advent of Natural Language tools such as ChatGPT and virtual assistants like Siri.

We talked a lot about something I called “app-sistants”. I explained, “the idea of search as a destination is an idea whose days are numbered. The important thing won’t be search. It will be the platform and the apps that run on it. The next big thing will be the ability to seamlessly find just the right app for your intent and utilize it immediately.” In this context, “the information itself will become less and less important and the app that allows utilization of the information will become more and more important.”

To be honest, this evolution in search has taken a lot longer than I thought back then, “Intent will be more fully supported from end to end. Right now, we have to keep our master ‘intent’ plan in place as we handle the individual tasks on the way to that intent.”

Searching for complex answers as it currently sits requires a lot of heavy lifting. In that discussion, I used the example of planning a trip.  “Imagine if there were an app that could keep my master intent in mind for the entire process. It would know what my end goal was, would be tailored to understand my personal preferences and would use search to go out and gather the required information. When we look at alignment of intent, [a shift from search to apps is] a really intriguing concept for marketers to consider.”

So, the big question is, do we have such a tool? Is it ChatGPT? I decided to give it a try and see. After feeding ChatGPT a couple of carefully crafted prompts about a trip I’d like to take to Eastern Europe someday, I decided the answer is no. We’re not quite there yet. But we’re closer.

After a couple of iterations, ChatGPT did a credible job of assembling a potential itinerary of a trip to Croatia and Slovenia. It even made me aware of some options I hadn’t run across in my previous research. But it left me hanging well short of the “app-ssistant” I was dreaming of in 2010. Essentially, I got a suggestion but all the detail work to put it into an actual trip still required me to do hundreds of searches in various places.

The problem with ChatGPT is that it gets stuck between the millions of functionality siloes – or “walled gardens” – that make up the Internet. Those “walled gardens” exist because they represent opportunities for monetization. In order for an app-ssistant to be able to multitask and make our lives easier, we need a virtual “commonage” that gets rid of some of these walls. And that’s probably the biggest reason we haven’t seen a truly useful iteration of the functionality I predicted more than a decade ago.

This conflict between capitalism and the concept of a commonage goes back at least to the Magna Carta. As England’s economy transitioned from feudalism to capitalism, enclosure saw the building of fences and the wiping out of lands held as a commonage. The actual landscape became a collection of walled gardens that the enforced property rights of each parcel and the future production value of those parcels.

This history, which played out over hundreds of years, was repeated and compressed into a few decades online. We went from the naïve idealism of a “free for all” internet in the early days to the balkanized patchwork of monetization siloes that currently make up the Web.

Right now, search engines are the closest thing we have to a commonage on the virtual landscape. Search engines like Google can pull data from within many gardens, but if we actually try to use the data, we won’t get far before we run into a wall.

To go back to the idea of trip planning, I might be able to see what it costs to fly to Rome or what the cost of accommodations in Venice is on a search engine, but I can’t book a flight or reserve a room. To do that, I have to visit an online booking site. If I’m on a search engine, I can manually navigate this transition fairly easily. But it would stop something like ChatGPT in its tracks.

When I talked to Aaron 13 years ago, I envisioned search becoming a platform that lived underneath apps which could provide more functionality to the user. But I also was skeptical about Google’s willingness to do this, as I stated in a later post here on Mediapost.  In that post, I thought that this might be an easier transition for Microsoft.

Whether it was prescience or just dumb luck, it is indeed Microsoft taking the first steps towards integrating search with ChatGPT, through its recent integration with Bing. Expedia (who also has Microsoft DNA in its genome) has also taken a shot at integrating ChatGPT in a natural language chat interface.

This flips my original forecast on its head. Rather than the data becoming common ground, it’s the chat interface that’s popping up everywhere. Rather than tearing down the walls that divide the online landscape, ChatGPT is being tacked up as window decoration on those walls.

I did try planning that same trip on both Bing and Expedia. Bing – alas – also left me well short of my imagined destination. Expedia – being a monetization site to begin with – got me a little closer, but it still didn’t seem that I could get to where I wanted to go.

I’m sorry to say search didn’t come nearly as far as I hoped it would 13 years ago. Even with ChatGPT thumbtacked onto the interface, we’re just not there yet.

(Feature Image: OpenAI Art generated from the prompt: “A Van Gogh painting of a chatbot on a visit to Croatia”)

The Eternal Hatred of Interruptive Messages

Spamming and Phishing and Robocalls at Midnight
Pop ups and Autoplays and LinkedIn Requests from Salespeople

These are a few of my least favorite things

We all feel the excruciating pain of unsolicited demands on our attention. In a study of the 50 most annoying things in life of 2000 Brits by online security firm Kapersky, deleting spam email came in at number 4, behind scrubbing the bath, being trapped in voicemail hell and cleaning the oven.

Based on this study, cleanliness is actually next to spamminess.

Granted, Kapersky is a tech security firm so the results are probably biased to the digital side, but for me the results check out. As I ran down the list, I hated all the same things that were listed.

In the same study, Robocalls came in at number 10. Personally, that tops my list, especially phishing robocalls. I hate – hate – hate rushing to my phone only to hear that the IRS is going to prosecute me unless I immediately push 7 on my touchtone phone keyboard.

One, I’m Canadian. Two, go to Hell.

I spend more and more of my life trying to avoid marketers and scammers (the line between the two is often fuzzy) trying desperately to get my attention by any means possible. And it’s only going to get worse. A study just out showed that the ChatGPT AI chatbot could be a game changer for phishing, making scam emails harder to detect. And with Google’s Gmail filters already trapping 100 million phishing emails a day, that is not good news.

The marketers in my audience are probably outrunning Usain Bolt in their dash to distance themselves from spammers, but interruptive demands on our attention are on a spectrum that all share the same baseline. Any demand on our attention that we don’t ask for will annoy us. The only difference is the degree of annoyance.

Let’s look at the psychological mechanisms behind that annoyance.

There is a direct link between the parts of our brain that govern the focusing of attention and the parts that regulate our emotions. At its best, it’s called “flow” – a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly that describes a sense of full engagement and purpose. At its worst, it’s a feeling of anger and anxiety when we’re unwilling dragged away from the task at hand.

In a 2017 neurological study by Rejer and Jankowski, they found that when a participant’s cognitive processing of a task was interrupted by online ads, activity in the frontal and prefrontal cortex simply shut down while other parts of the brain significantly shifted activity, indicating a loss of focus and a downward slide in emotions.

Another study, by Edwards, Li and Lee, points the finger at something called Reactance Theory as a possible explanation. Very simply put, when something interrupts us, we perceive a loss of freedom to act as we wish and a loss of control of our environment. Again, we respond by getting angry.

It’s important to note that this negative emotional burden applies to any interruption that derails what we intend to do. It is not specific to advertising, but a lot of advertising falls into that category. It’s the nature of the interruption and our mental engagement with the task that determine the degree of negative emotion.

Take skimming through a news website, for instance. We are there to forage for information. We are not actively engaged in any specific task. And so being interrupted by an ad while in this frame of mind is minimally irritating.

But let’s imagine that a headline catches our attention, and we click to find out more. Suddenly, we’re interrupted by a pop-up or pre-roll video ad that hijacks our attention, forcing us to pause our intention and focus on irrelevant information. Our level of annoyance begins to rise quickly.

Robocalls fall into a different category of annoyance for many reasons. First, we have a conditioned response to phone calls where we hope to be rewarded by hearing from someone we know and care about. That’s what makes it so difficult to ignore a ringing phone.

Secondly, phone calls are extremely interruptive. We must literally drop whatever we’re doing to pick up a phone. When we go to all this effort only to realize we’ve been duped by an unsolicited and irrelevant call, the “red mist” starts to float over us.

You’ll note that – up to this point – I haven’t even dealt with the nature of the message. This has all been focused on the delivery of the message, which immediately puts us in a more negative mood. It doesn’t matter whether the message is about a service special for our vehicle, an opportunity to buy term life insurance or an attempt by a fictitious Nigerian prince to lighten the load of our bank account by several thousand dollars; whatever the message, we start in an irritated state simply due to the nature of the interruption.

Of course, the more nefarious the message that’s delivered, the more negative our emotional response will be. And this has a doubling down effect on any form of intrusive advertising. We learn to associate the delivery mechanism with attempts to defraud us. Any politician that depends on robocalls to raise awareness on the day before an election should ponder their ad-delivery mechanism.

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.