Category Archives: Online Trends

Meta’s Social Media Battle Plan

My fellow Media Insider Maarten Albarda called it the “The Big Tobacco Moment for Social Media” in his post last week. Then, just yesterday, Steve Rosenbaum added that the K.G.M v. Meta Platforms case “signals a shift that cuts directly through the core defense platforms have relied on for decades.”

It was a seismic decision, and I’m pretty sure the various conference rooms of 1 Meta Way, Menlo Park, California have the doors closed as a bunch of sweaty lawyers and Meta staff are rolling out the whiteboards (or the Meta Quest virtual reality equivalent) and rolling up their sleeves to assess the potential damage and draw up a battle plan. Let’s take a moment to speculate about what they may be talking about.

In at least one of those conference rooms, Meta’s legal team is assessing one line of defence, which I’ll call Project “Hail Mary,” tapping into the current pop culture Zeitgeist. This involves an appeal to the $6 million decision. It’s not this case that’s worrying them. It’s the thousands waiting in the queue for the legal precedent to be set. The Meta Legal Team will be spending much of their foreseeable future in a courtroom. Even they know that chances for a successful appeal are slim. 

The second line of defence is to quantify the impact of this on Meta’s bottom line if the appeal is not successful. So let’s unpack that, because it deals with the elephant in the room, touched on in both Steve and Maarten’s post: Is this the beginning of a slippery slope that will lead to the dismantling of algorithmic ad targeting and the demise of the endless scroll for everyone, or just legal minors? 

If we follow the lead of Australia, the first country to implement a ban on social media, it will just be minors – those under 16. The legislation was passed late last year and the ban officially took place on December 10, 2025. 

There are several countries around the world looking at implementing a similar ban, including Canada. Most are watching to see how Australia implements and polices its ban, as there are several thorny issues at play here. The countries seriously looking at it tend to share a similar legislative sentiment with Australia when it comes to consumer rights and privacy concerns. 

The U.S., under the current administration, is the least likely to implement federal restrictions on social media. Still, that is not keeping several states from introducing their own legislation. What the K.M.G. v. Meta decision does do is move the debate from the arena of federally controlled media to that of state controlled online safety, privacy and mental health concerns. All will be watching the pending suits, which will likely fill up dockets in U.S. courts for the next few years at least. 

Given the international aspect of this, it’s instructive to look at how Meta’s revenues breakdown by region. 

The biggest share, 39%, is the U.S. and Canada, but 94% of that comes from the U.S. We’re a Meta rounding error up here.

The Asia-Pacific is the second biggest regional market – with 26.8% of global revenues. While the user numbers are huge, the revenue per user is much smaller than in North America. Several countries in this market are considering some type of age-based restriction on social media usage – largely driven by the academic concerns of parents and educators in China, Japan and Korea.

Next is Europe, with 23.2% of Meta’s revenue pie. If there is any jurisdiction likely to follow Australia’s lead, it’s the E.U., who have consistently shown leadership in implementing privacy protection legislation.

Finally, there is the rest of the world, which collectively accounts for about 11% of Meta revenues. When you consider this includes all of Africa, all South America and whatever else is left, you can appreciate that attitudes towards legislation will be all over the map, both literally and figuratively.

Still, let’s say that a significant chunk of Meta’s revenue – say about 30 to 40% – comes from regions likely to pass legislation similar to Australia’s. Still, that undoubtedly will be only directed at minors younger than 16, which today makes up less than 10% of Meta’s user base (between Instagram and Facebook). All those young people have gone to TikTok (where it makes up 25% of their user base). 

So, what Meta’s financial planners are probably talking about is the fact that – even in a worst legal case scenario – we’re talking about 3 to 4% of their total user base that may be legislatively restricted in some form or another. If you’re in triage mode, that’s not severe enough to consider major surgery or amputation. Probably a band-aid will do the trick. 

The Most Canadian of Social Networks

It may be the most polite social network in the world. It’s Hey.Cafe – a Facebook alternative built by Canadians for Canadians.

I first heard about Hey.Cafe through a reel on Facebook (oh, the irony) from Tod Maffin, a former CBC radio host, author and podcaster. Prompted by the not so veiled threats coming from south of the border, Tod’s been on a “buy Canadian” campaign for several months now and that has recently extended to Canadian alternatives for the big social media platforms. It was Tod that suggested to every Canadian listening (currently about 10,000,000 a week, according to Tod’s website) that we check out Hey.Cafe.

So, I did. It turned out that Anthony Lee, the creator of Hey.Cafe, lives about an hour down the highway from me, here in the heart of beautiful British Columbia. So I reached out and we had a chat – a nice, polite Canadian chat. Because that’s how we do things up here.

The first thing I learned, which was a surprise, is that Hey.Cafe is not new. In fact, it’s been around since 2001. That means there was a version of Hey.Cafe before there was ever a Facebook (which started in 2004). In addition to running a tech support company out of Penticton, BC, Anthony has been developing alternatives to the major social media platforms for the better part of 3 decades now, “Whenever I thought, ‘Oh, I think I have an idea,’ I’d make some changes, that kind of stuff. But it definitely wasn’t a sit down and work on it all day thing, unless I had some time free that I was just like, ‘Yeah, I’ll spend this week working on stuff.’”

Then I asked the obvious question, “Why now? Why is Hey.Cafe suddenly gaining attention?”

There is the “buy Canadian” thing, of course. But Anthony said it’s more than just Canadians being fed up with an American president and his bluster. We’re also fed up with social media founders that have their noses firmly pressed up against said President’s posterior simply because it’s good for business.

And let’s not even get into the simmering cesspool every major social media platform has become, driven by an ad-obsessed business model that monetizes eyeballs at the expense of ethics. Lee concurred, “It’s all about algorithm for them. They don’t care if it’s someone you follow or not. If, if it looks like it’s gonna make some attention, whether it be good or bad, they’re gonna push it in the feed.”

So, are Canadian’s kicking Hey.Cafes tires like a rink-side Zamboni? Yes, finally. Thanks to the plug from Tod Maffin, users shot up from about 5,000 to over 40,000 in two weeks. And it’s still growing. Because it’s still a side of the desk project, Anthony had to cap new accounts at 250 an hour.

Now, those numbers are infinitesimal compared to any of the major platforms, but they do signal a willingness by Canadians to try something not tied to business practices we don’t agree with. At the same time, it does bring up the elephant in the room for anyone going up against Facebook or any of the big platforms – the curse of Metcalfe’s Law. Metcalfe’s Law – named after Ethernet pioneer Robert Metcalfe – says that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. Having a telephone isn’t much use if no one else has one. For networks, bigger = better. And Facebook is currently 75,000 times bigger than Hey.Cafe.

Given that, does Hey.Cafe stand a chance? I hope so. I supported it with a one-year subscription because I would love to see Anthony Lee’s side project survive and – hopefully – succeed. I did go on and post a few things. I even started a new “café” – Hey.Cafe’s version of a Facebook Group. So far, nothing much has happened there, but we’ll politely wait and see. Again, that’s how we do things up here.

What I did find, however, is a community that seems genuinely, politely happy to be there. And not all of them are Canadian. This was a post from a nurse newly arrived from the U.S.: “Newly landed nurse practitioner from Oregon via Boston (long story). Love the concept of no ads and AI. Now to find some other communities, Bernese Mountain Dogs and skiing!”

I did ask Anthony, given the audience MediaPost (where this post also runs) reaches, if there’s any message he’d like to pass on. For media buyers especially, he offered this, “Whether it be HeyCafe, Bluesky, Mastodon, (consider) using more services that aren’t the big three players. Use more stuff that puts you in the spotlight of communities that are all over the place.”

While Anthony would love for Hey.Cafe to be economically sustainable, maybe the take-away here is not so much about financial success. Maybe these are Canadians signalling a change in our attitude. It’s as if we’ve been in an abusive relationship with Facebook for years but have put up with it because it’s been too hard to leave. But, at some point in abusive relationships, there comes a red line which, when crossed, you begin planning your exit. It doesn’t happen immediately. It may not happen at all, but there is a significant mental shift that happens where you become aware of how toxic the relationship really is and you start planning a life free from that toxicity.

For 40,000 Canadians and wannabe Canadians – at least – that switch may have happened.

How Seniors Get Sucked into Falling for Bad Information

It happened to me last Thursday. I was tired, I was jet lagged and I was feeling like garbage. My defenses were down. So, before I realized it, I was spinning down a social media sewer spiral. My thumb took over, doom scrolling through post after post offering very biased commentary on the current state of the world, each reinforcing just how awful things are. Little was offered in the way of factual back up, and I didn’t bother looking for it. My mood plummeted. I alternated between paranoia, outrage and depression. An hour flew by as my brain was hijacked by a feckless feed.

And I know better. I really do. Up in my prefrontal cortex, I knew I was being sucked into a vicious vortex of AI slop and troll baiting. Each time I scrolled down, I would tell myself, “Okay, this is the last one. After this, put the phone down.” And each time, my thumb would ignore me.

This is not news to any of us. Every one of you reading this knows about the addictive nature of social media. And you also know the pernicious impacts of AI generated content spoon fed to us by an algorithm whose sole purpose is to hog tie our own willpower and keep our eyes locked on the screen. I also suspect that you, like I, think because we know all this, we have built up at least some immunity to the siren call of social media.

But I’m here to tell you that social media has gotten really, really good at being really, really awful for us. I didn’t notice it so much when I was on my game, busy doing other things and directing my attention with a fully functional executive brain. But the minute my guard slipped, the minute my cognitive capacity shifted down into a lower gear, I was sucked into the misinformational sh*thole that is social media.

Being a guy that likes to ask why, I did exactly that when the jet lag finally dissipated. Why did I, a person who should know better, fall into the crappy content trap?  “Maybe,” I said to myself reluctantly, “it’s a generational thing.” Maybe brains of a certain age are more susceptible to being cognitively hijacked and led astray.

A recent study from the University of Utah does lend some credence to that theory. Researchers found that adults older than 60 were more likely to share misinformation online than younger people. This was true for information about health, but a prior study showed an even higher tendency to swallow bad information when it came to politics.

Lead researcher Ben Lyons set out to find why those of us north of 60 are more likely to be led astray by online misinformation. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t have anything to do with our brains slowing down or lower information literacy rates. It appears that older people can sniff out bullshit just as well as younger people. But it turns out that if that information, no matter how dubious it is, matches our own beliefs and world view, we’ll happily share it even if it doesn’t pass the smell test.

Lyons called this congeniality bias. I’ve talked before about the sensemaking cycle. In it, new information is matched to our existing belief schema. It it’s a match, we usually accept it without a lot of qualification. If it isn’t, we can choose to reject it or we can reframe our beliefs based on the new information. The second option is a lot more work and, it seems, the older we get the less likely we are to do this heavy lifting. As we age, we get more fully locked into who we are and what we believe. We’ve spent a lot of years building our beliefs and so we’re reluctant to stray from them.

Of course, like all things human, this tendency is not a given nor universally applied. Some older people are naturally more skeptical, and some are more inflexible in their beliefs. Not surprisingly, Lyons found those that leaned right in their political affiliations tend to be more belief-bound.

But, as I discovered this past Thursday, these information filtering tendencies are dependent on our moods and cognitive capacity. I am a naturally skeptical person and like to think I’m usually pretty picky about my information sources. But this is true only when I’m on my game. The minute my brain down-shifted, I began accepting dubious information at face value simply because I happened to agree with it. I didn’t bother checking to make sure it was true.

It sounded true, and that was all that mattered.

Happy 25th Birthday, Wikipedia!

Wikipedia is perhaps the last remaining vestige of the Internet we thought we’d build, two and a half decades ago. It was born of the same stuff that fueled open-source software and freeware, open access to knowledge and a democratization of data. This was part of the Internet that was supposed to make the world a fairer and more knowledgeable place, narrowing the gap between the haves and have nots. It was an “information superhighway” that would connect the global village and, according to the McGraw-Hill Computer Desktop Encyclopedia of 2001, “help all citizens regardless of their income level.”

We know better now. But despite the Internet’s hard pivot towards capitalism, Wikipedia is still around. It just celebrated its 25th birthday a few weeks ago. According to Wikipedia itself, there are 18 edits to its content every second from Wikipedians from all over the world. There are versions in over 300 different languages, and all of this receives 10,000 page views every second. There are over 7 million articles in the English version, and 500 new articles are added per day. In the last 25 years, almost 12 million users have edited the English Wikipedia at least once.

This was not what Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger envisioned in 2001, when they started Wikipedia. It was just supposed to be a collaborative sandbox that would allow for editing and drafting of articles which would then be included in their other project, Nupedia. Nupedia was more centrally controlled and structured. This side project used the wiki platform developed by Ward Cunningham in 1994. Wiki is Hawaiian for “quick” and Cunningham thought it had a little more panache than just calling his platform something like “Quickweb.”

The concept behind wikis is all about creating and empowering collaborative communities, opening the platform up to anyone who wanted to contribute. Wales and Sanger believed this would be a perfect way to quickly draft new entries at scale, but they still envisioned themselves and a team of editors as the gatekeepers who would control what would show up in Nupedia. But the pace of contribution soon outstripped the ability of Nupedia’s editorial team to keep up. The decision was made completely open the doors to contribution and make Wikipedia the end destination.

This completely open concept was a preview of what was to come. It may have been the one of the first times we saw what would become a common theme: a web-based platform unleashing the potential of a latent market by connecting an open community of suppliers (in this case, editors and contributors) and an audience of consumers at scale. It would be repeated by Uber, AirBnB and others.

The difference with Wikipedia was that – in this case – no one was making any money. The information was free. As a comparison, the competitor, the online version of Encyclopedia Brittanica, charged a yearly subscription of $50.

This upset of the information market didn’t go down well with everyone. This was especially true for academics and researchers. Students were warned not to use Wikipedia as a source. It was roundly criticized for its open nature and lack of peer review. To this day, much of the academic community still looks down its nose at Wikipedia, even though at least one academic study has shown that Wikipedia’s accuracy is on a par with the Encyclopedia Britannica and far outstrips it terms of the number of entries and the sheer breadth of content. This ongoing hostility towards Wikipedia is unfortunate, because the very same audience that sneers at it could be its most valuable contributors, especially in their own areas of expertise.

Of course, part of this lingering resentment could come in part due to the glacially-slow resistance to change from academic publishers, many of whom are still clinging to exorbitant subscription models. These publishers are resisting to the bitter end writer and iconoclast Stewart Brand’s feeling that “information wants to be free.”

Despite all this, Wikipedia has not only survived but thrived. It is still very much a part of the online information ecosystem, 25 years after its birth. And yes, it might be an anachronistic and naïve throwback to a more idealistic time, but it has proven at least one maxim of the open-source community. Eric. S. Raymond, in his seminal and prescient essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, called this maxim Linus’s Law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel. The law states, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”  

Or, to paraphrase, “Given enough eyeballs, most Wikipedia entries are mostly accurate.”

What Authoritarianism Gets Wrong

Like the rest of the world, my attention and intentions got hijacked over the weekend by what is happening in Minneapolis. I did not intend to write this post, but I feel I must.

What is happening right now is – plain and simple – authoritarianism. Some – like Jonathon Rausch in the Atlantic –  have used the word Fascism. Whatever label you put on it, it has the same flawed logic behind it – the belief that might makes right. It’s the same calculus of cruelty and coercion that the school yard bully uses: I’m bigger than you so do what I want you to do.

Here’s the problem with that formula. Resolve, resistance and resiliency aren’t things that can be consistently quantified. They are not static. The bewildering thing about humans when we’re faced with a crisis is this: the harder you push, the harder we’ll push back.

This is the reality of the red line. We accept adversity only up to a certain point. Past that point, individual concerns give way to that of the greater good. We join together into a coalition, dismantling the smaller walls that used to separate us to unite and fight a greater enemy that threatens us all. Rather than being beaten down by adversity, it raises us up.

We have always done this. Journalist Sebastian Junger documents one example in his excellent book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. During the London Blitz, Hitler believed he could bomb Londoners into submission. For 56 days he tried, dropping over 12,000 tonnes of bombs on the city, sure that it would break the will of Londoners. On one day alone, in September 1940, over 700 tones of high explosives and 86,000 incendiaries fell, killing 1,436 people. But the resolve of Londoners never wavered. In fact, it grew with adversity. They kept calm and carried on.

I’ve seen it firsthand in my own community. Our city, Kelowna, B.C., has been threatened with wildfires a number of times. In 2003, our city of 150,000 lost over 200 homes in one night and one third of the city was evacuated.

I have never seen this city come together like it did then. Neighbours helped neighbours. Those of us who weren’t evacuated opened our homes to those that were. In many cases, spare bedrooms and pull-out couches were occupied by total strangers. Crisis centers were swamped with offers of food, clothing, blankets and volunteer assistance.

This is how we’re wired. We band together in times of trouble. We are tribal creatures. As Junger found in his research, psychological health actually seems to improve in times of crisis. He cites a 1961 paper by American sociologist Charles Fritz, which opens with this sentence, “Who do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?” Junger writes, “Fritz’s theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a ‘community of sufferers’ that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.”

Humans evolved to join together to overcome obstacles. Our modern world doesn’t often ask that of us. But right now, in Minneapolis, that’s exactly what’s happening as thousands of ordinary people are coordinating protection patrols to document authoritarianism. They are using the encrypted Signal platform to communicate and direct observers to emerging trouble areas. They have established their own protocols of behaviour. It is, in the words of Robert F. Worth, again writing in the Atlantic, “a meticulous urban choreography of civic protest.”

At least two Minnesotans have paid as much as they mortally can, with their own lives.

This is the wrench that humans throw into the crushing cogs of authoritarian behaviour: the more you crack down on us, the stronger we will become as we join together to push back against you.

Of all the places on Earth, Americans should know this.  I can think of one more example of this that is particularly relevant. It happened 250 years ago, when American colonists joined together to protest against the authority of the British Crown.

We shouldn’t forget that.

Home Movies: The Medium of Memories

Media is a word that is used a lot, especially in my past industry of advertising, but we may not stop to think about the origin of the word itself. Media is the plural of medium, and in our particular context, medium is defined as “the intervening substance through which impressions are conveyed to the senses.”

When defined this way, media are powerful stuff. Let me give you a personal example.

At a recent family gathering a few cousins were talking about old 8 mm home movies. Some of you know what I’m talking about. You might even have some yourself, stuck somewhere in your attic or basement. They came in yellow-orange boxes from Kodak and might have “Kodachrome II” on the front. In my case, I had some which I salvaged from my mom during her transfer to her care facility. Two of my cousins similarly took custody of their films from their respective mothers. I packed what I could of these in my suitcase and gingerly transported them home, after trying to explain what they were to a curious TSA official and why they couldn’t go through an X-Ray scanner.

When I got them home, I transferred them to digital. Then, starting December 1st, I have been sharing small snippets of the resulting videos with the rest of my family, one a day in a type of home movie Advent Calendar.

Most of these home movies were shot between the mid 1950’s and mid 1960’s; capturing picnics, weekends at the family cottage north of Toronto, weddings, birthdays, going away parties, Christmases and other assorted occasions. I’ll soon tell you what this sharing of one particular medium has meant to my family and I, but first I want to give you a little background on 8 mm home movies, because I think it helps to understand why they were such an important medium.

The 8 mm format was introduced by Kodak in 1932. It was actually a 16mm format that had to be flipped and run through the camera twice. In processing, the film would be split and spliced together to create a 50 ft reel, capturing about 3 to 4 minutes.

Kodak hoped to extend the ability to make movies to the home market, but between the Great Depression and World War II, the format didn’t gain real traction until the post-war consumerism boom. Then, thanks to smaller cameras that were easier to use and improved picture quality, 8 mm movie cameras became more common place and started showing up at family gatherings, weddings, honeymoons, vacations and other notable events.

It would have been in the mid 1950’s that my mother’s family bought their first cameras. My grandfather and grandmother, a few great uncles and my mom and dad all became amateur movie makers. Suddenly, many family events became multi-camera shoots.

It was the results of this movie making boom in my family that I recently started digging through, rounding up those little yellow boxes, delicately threading the fragile film into a digital scanning system and letting grainy and poorly lit moving pictures transport me back to a time I had only heard stories about before.

Let me tell you what that meant to my family and myself. I never met my maternal grandfather (or my paternal one either, but that’s another story for another time). He passed away two weeks after I was born. I also never knew my father. He tragically died when I was just one year old. These were two man I desperately wanted to know, but never had the chance. I only knew them through still photos and stories passed on from older family members.

But suddenly, there they were; moving, laughing and living. My grandfather teasing my grandmother mercilessly and then sitting back in his easy chair with a big smile on his face as he watched his family around him. My father at his and my mom’s wedding, holding a huge cigar in one hand while he picked confetti out of his hair with the other. “My God!,” I thought, “he stands just like me!”

This medium, long forgotten as it sat in dusty boxes, brought my grandfather and father back to life for me. It colored in the outline sketches I had of who they were. For my family, these movies reconnected us to our younger selves, brought loved ones back, introduced the younger members to their direct ancestors and – for myself and others – shed new light on figures in our past that had been shrouded in the shadows of time.

Because of this project, two things became clear to me. First of all, if you have also inherited old media filled with family memories, find the time to transfer them into a medium that allows them to be shared and preserved for the future in some type of transferable format. The act of archiving brings up images of bespectacled staff peering over dusty tomes and pulling forgotten boxes from the top shelf. But it is simply the act of imbuing the past with a type of permanence so it always remains accessible.

Secondly, recognize the importance of any type of medium that captures the moments of our lives. Rick Prelinger, an archivist in California, has compiled a collection of over 30,000 home movies. He published a list of 22 reasons why home movies are important. For me, number 21 resonated most deeply: “showing and reusing (these movies) today invests audiences with the feeling that their own lives are also worth recording.”

I’m sure my dad or granddad had no idea of their own impending mortality when they were captured on these movies. They weren’t planning on being memorialized. They didn’t realize the importance of the moment – or the medium.

But today, these movies are one of the all-too-rare things we have to remember who they were. For me, it was this medium that erased the time and distance between my senses, here at the end of 2025, and that day in June, 1957 – the day my parents got married.

Thank Heavens someone was there with a camera.

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.

The Cost of Not Being Curious

The world is having a pandemic-proportioned wave of Ostrichitis.

Now, maybe you haven’t heard of Ostrichitis. But I’m willing to bet you’re showing at least some of the symptoms:

  • Avoiding newscasts, especially those that feature objective and unbiased reporting
  • Quickly scrolling past any online news items in your feed that look like they may be uncomfortable to read
  • Dismissing out of hand information coming from unfamiliar sources

These are the signs of Ostrichitis – or the Ostrich Effect – and I have all of them. This is actually a psychological effect, more pointedly called willful ignorance, which I wrote about a few years ago. And from where I’m observing the world, we all seem to have it to one extent or another.

I don’t think this avoidance of information comes as a shock to anyone. The world is a crappy place right now. And we all seem to have gained comfort from adopting the folk wisdom that “no news is good news.” Processing bad news is hard work, and we just don’t have the cognitive resources to crunch through endless cycles of catastrophic news. If the bad news affirms our existing beliefs, it makes us even madder than what we were. If it runs counter to our beliefs, it forces us to spin up our sensemaking mechanisms and reframe our view of reality. Either way, there are way more fun things to do.

A recent study from the University of Chicago attempted to pinpoint when children started avoid bad news. The research team found that while young children don’t tend to put boundaries around their curiosity, as they age they start avoiding information that challenges their beliefs or their own well-being. The threshold seems to be about 6 years old. Before that, children are actively seeking information of all kinds (as any parent barraged by never ending “Whys” can tell you). After that, chidren start strategizing the types of information they pay attention to.

Now, like everything about humans, curiosity tends to be an individual thing. Some of us are highly curious and some of us avoid seeking new information religiously. But even if we are a curious sort, we may pick and choose what we’re curious about. We may find “safe zones” where we let our curiosity out to play. If things look too menacing, we may protect ourselves by curbing our curiosity.

The unfortunate part of this is that curiosity, in all its forms, is almost always a good thing for humans (even if it can prove fatal to cats).

The more curious we are, the better tied we are to reality. The lens we use to parse the world is something called a sense-making loop. I’ve often referred to this in the past. It’s a processing loop that compares what we experience with what we believe, referred to as our “frame”. For the curious, this frame is often updated to match what we experience. For the incurious, the frame is held on to stubbornly, often by ignoring new information or bending information to conform to their beliefs. A curious brain is a brain primed to grow and adapt. An incurious brain is one that is stagnant and inflexible. That’s why the father of modern-day psychology, William James, called curiosity “the impulse towards better cognition.”

When we think about the world we want, curiosity is a key factor in defining it. Curiosity keeps us moving forward. The lack of curiosity locks us in place or even pushes us backwards, causing the world to regress to a more savage and brutal place. Writers of dystopian fiction knew this. That’s why authors including H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Ray Bradbury and George Orwell all made a lack of curiosity a key part of their bleak future worlds. Our current lack of curiosity is driving our world in the same dangerous direction.

For all these reasons, it’s essential that we stay curious, even if it’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable.

Being in the Room Where It Happens

I spent the past weekend attending a conference that I had helped to plan. As is now often the case, this was a hybrid conference; you could choose to attend in person or online via Zoom. Although it involved a long plane ride, I choose to attend in person. It could be because – as a planner – I wanted to see how the event played out. Also, it’s been a long time since I attended a conference away from my home. Or – maybe – it was just FOMO.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I was there, in the room.

This was a very small conference planned on a shoestring budget. We didn’t have money for extensive IT support or AV equipment. We were dependent solely on a laptop and whatever sound equipment our host was able to supply. We knew going into the conference that this would make for a less-than-ideal experience for those attending virtually. But – even accounting for that – I found there was a huge gap in the quality of that experience between those that were there and those that were attending online. And, over the duration of the 3-day conference, I observed why that might be so.

This conference was a 50/50 mix of those that already knew each other and those that were meeting each other for the first time. Even those who were familiar with each other tended to connect more often via a virtual meeting platform than in a physical meeting space. I know that despite the convenience and efficiency of being able to meet online, something is lost in the process. After the past two days, carefully observing what was happening in the room we were all in, I have a better understanding of what that loss might be – it was the vague and inexact art of creating a real bond with another person.

In that room, the bonding didn’t happen at the speaking podium and very seldom happened during the sessions we so carefully planned. It seeped in on the sidelines, over warmed-over coffee from conference centre urns, overripe bananas and the detritus of the picked over pastry tray. The bonding came from all of us sharing and digesting a common experience. You could feel a palpable energy in the room. You could pick up the emotion, read the body language and tune in to the full bandwidth of communication that goes far beyond what could be transmitted between an onboard microphone and a webcam.

But it wasn’t just the sharing of the experience that created the bonds. It was the digesting of those experiences after the fact. We humans are herding animals, and that extends to how we come to consensus about things we go through together. We do so through communication with others – not just with words and gesture, but also through the full bandwidth of our evolved mechanisms for coming to a collective understanding. It wasn’t just that a camera and microphone couldn’t transmit that effectively, it was that it happened where there was no camera or mic.

As researchers have discovered, there is a lived reality and a remembered reality and often, they don’t look very much alike. The difference between the effectiveness of an in-person experience and one accessed through an online platform shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. This is due to how our evolved sense-making mechanisms operate. We make sense of reality both internally, through a comparison with our existing cognitive models and externally, through interacting with others around us who have shared that same reality. This communal give-and-take colors what we take with us, in the form of both memories and an updated model of what we know and believe. When it comes to how humans are built, collective sense making is a feature, not a bug.

I came away from that conference with much more than the content that was shared at the speaker dais. I also came away with a handful of new relationships, built on sharing an experience and, through that, laying down the first foundations of trust and familiarity. I would not hesitate to reach out to any of these new friends if I had a question about something or a project I felt they could collaborate on.

I think that’s true largely because I was in the room where it happened.

Saying Goodbye to our Icons

It’s been a tough couple of months for those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s. Last month, we had to say goodbye to Robert Redford, and then, just over a week ago, we bid farewell to Diane Keaton.

It’s always sobering to lose those cultural touchstones of our youth. It brings us to forcibly reckon with our own mortality. Our brains play that maudlin math, “I remember them being young when I was young, so they can’t be that much older than me.”  We tend to conflate the age difference between us and those we watch when we’re young, so when they’re gone, we naturally wonder how much time we have left.

This makes it hard to lose any of the icons of our youth, but these two – for me – felt different: sadder, more personal. It was like I had lost people I knew.

I know there are many who swooned for Bobby Redford. But I know first-hand that an entire generation of male (and possibly female) adolescents had a crush on Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall. Her breakout role was one of those characters that carved a permanent place in our psyche. “Annie Hall-esque” became a descriptor we could all immediately understand – quirky, cute, with insecurities that were rendered as charming. We all wanted to be her port in a storm.

Diane Keaton and Robert Redford seemed like people we could know, given the chance. If circumstances ever caused our paths to cross, we felt we could have a real conversation with them. We could talk about meaningful things and perhaps connect on a personal level. There was depth below the celebrity and the heart of a real person beating there. We may have just known them through a screen – but they used those platforms to build a connection that felt real and human.

I wondered what it was about these two – in particular – that made the connection real. It was something that went beyond their talent, although their talent was undeniable. One only has to watch an example of Keaton’s master acting with Al Pacino in The Godfather: Part Two. After a visit with her estranged children, she is being pushed out the door before ex-husband Michael Corleone comes home, but he walks in while she’s still standing in the doorway. No words are said between the two for almost a minute. Everything is conveyed just by their expressions. It’s a scene that still rips my heart out.

It was also not about celebrity. In fact, Redford and Keaton both eschewed the life of a celebrity. Robert Redford found his life away from Hollywood in the ranch lands of Montana and Diane Keaton – well – in typical Keaton fashion, she just kind of ignored being a celebrity. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 1985, she said, ““I think I like to deny it (being famous). It suits me to deny it. It’s more comfortable for me to deny it, but I suppose that’s another one of my problems. Look, I don’t think it’s such a big deal. I don’t think I’m that big a thing.”

So, if it wasn’t their talent or their celebrity status, what was it about Keaton and Redford that forged such a strong bond with many of us? I think it may have been three things.

First, it was about consistency. They were judicious about what they shared with us but what they did choose to share was rock solid and reliable. Whatever was at the core of who they were – it shone through their performances. There was a foundation to each Redford and Keaton performance that was both essential and relatable. You couldn’t imagine anyone else playing these roles. 

The authenticity of their humanness was another factor. Robert Redford’s acting style was restrained and typically underplayed, but his charismatic good looks sometimes got in the way of the depth and vulnerability he tried to bring to his performances. He famously tried out for the title role in 1967’s The Graduate (which went to Dustin Hoffman) but was turned down by director Mike Nichols because he couldn’t see Redford as a believable “loser.” “Let’s put it this way,” Nichols reportedly said, “Have you ever struck out with a girl?” “What do you mean?” Redford replied.

Keaton was a little different. She embodied vulnerability in every role she played. She wasn’t perfect, and that was the point. We loved her imperfections. The characters Diane Keaton played were neither aspirational nor cautionary, they were revelatory. We connected with them, because we could see ourselves in them.

Finally, we knew there was depth to both Diane Keaton and Robert Redford. They believed passionately in things and weren’t afraid to speak out on behalf of those beliefs. I would have loved to have a conversation with either of them about serious things, because I feel I would have walked away with a perspective worth discovering.

It’s sadly ironic that for two icons who shared so much screen time with us, they never shared it with each other. They were tentatively scheduled to appear in a 2012 Holiday comedy but it never made it to the screen.

I will miss having both Robert Redford and Diane Keaton in my world. They made it better.