Category Archives: Online Trends

Sorry Folks – Blame it on Ed

Just when you thought it was safe to assume I’d be moving on to another topic, I’m back. Blame it on Ed Papazian, who commented on last week’s column about the Rise of the Audience marketplace. I’ll respond to his comment in multiple parts. First, he said:

“I think it’s fine to speculate on “audience” based advertising, by which you actually mean using digital, not traditional media, as the basis for the advertising of the future.”

All media is going to be digital. Our concept of “traditional” media is well down its death spiral. We’re less then a decade away from all media being delivered through a digital platform that would allow for real time targeting of advertising. True, we have to move beyond the current paradigm of mass distributed, channel restricted advertising we seem stuck in, but the technology is already there. We (by which I mean the ad industry) just have to catch up. Ed continues in this vein:

“However, in a practical sense, not only is this, as yet, merely a dream for TV, radio and print media, but it is also an oversimplification.”

Is it an oversimplification? Let’s remember that more and more of our media consumption is becoming trackable from both ends. We no longer have to track from the point of distribution. Tracking is also possible at the point of consumption. We are living with devices that increasingly have insight into what we’re doing at any moment of the day. It’s just a matter of us giving permission to be served relevant, well targeted ads based on the context of our lives.

But what would entice us to give this permission? Ed goes on to say that…

“Even if a digital advertiser could actually identify every consumer in the U.S. who is interested—or “in the market” for what his ads are trying to sell and also how they are pitching the product/service—and send only these people “audience targeted ads”, many of the ads will still not be of interest…”

Papazian proposed an acid test of sorts (or, more appropriately – an antacid test):

“Why? Because they are for unpleasant or mundane products—toilet bowel cleansers, upset stomach remedies, etc.—-or because the ads are pitching a brand the consumer doesn’t like or has had a bad experience with.”

Okay, let me take up the challenge that Ed has thrown down (or up?). Are ads for stomach remedies always unwanted? Not if I have a history of heartburn, especially when my willpower drops and my diet changes as I’m travelling. Let’s take it one step further. I’ve made a dinner reservation for 7 pm at my favorite Indian food restaurant while I’m in San Francisco. It’s 2 pm. I’ve just polished off a Molinari’s sandwich and I’m heading back to my hotel. As I turn the corner at O’Farrell and Powell, an instant coupon is delivered to my phone with 50% off a new antacid tablet at the Walgreen’s ahead, together with the message: “Prosciutto, pepperoncinis and pakoras in the same day? Look at you go! But just in case…”

The world Ed talks about does have a lot of unwanted advertising. But in the world I’m envisioning, where audiences are precisely targeted, we will hopefully eliminate most of those unwanted ads. Those ads are the by-product of the huge inefficiencies in the current advertising marketplace. And it’s this inefficiency that is rapidly destroying advertising as we know it from both ends. The current market is built on showing largely ineffective ads to mainly disinterested prospects – hoping there is an anomaly in there somewhere – and charging the advertiser to do so. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t sound like a sustainable plan to me.

When I talk about selecting audiences in a market, it’s this level of specificity that I’m talking about. There is nothing in the above scenario that’s beyond the reach of current Mar-Tech. Perhaps it’s oversimplified. But I did that to make a point. In paid search, we used to have a saying, “buy your best clicks first”. It meant starting with the obviously relevant keywords – the people who were definitely looking for you. The problem was that there just wasn’t enough volume on these “sure-bet” keywords alone. But as digital has matured, the amount of “sure-bet” inventory has increased. We’re still not all the way there – where we can rely on sure-bet inventory alone – but we’re getting closer. The audience marketplace I’m envisioning gets us much of the way there. When technology and data allow us to assemble carefully segmented audiences with a high likelihood of successful engagement on the fly, we eliminate the inefficiencies in the market.

I truly believe that it’s time to discard the jury-rigged, heavily bandaged and limping behemoth that advertising has become and start thinking about this in an entirely new way. Papazian’s last sentence in his comment was…

“You just can’t get around the fact that many ads are going to be unwanted, no matter how they are targeted….”

Do we have to accept that as our future? It’s certainly the present, but I would hate to think we can’t reach any higher. The first step is to stop accepting advertising the way we know it as the status quo. We’ll be unable to imagine tomorrow if we’re still bound by the limitations of today.

 

The Rise of the Audience Marketplace

Far be it from me to let a theme go before it has been thoroughly beaten to the ground. This column has hosted a lot of speculation on the future of advertising and media buying and today, I’ll continue in that theme.

First, let’s return to a column I wrote almost a month ago about the future of advertising. This was a spin-off on a column penned by Gary Milner – The End of Advertising as We Know It. In it, Gary made a prediction: “I see the rise of a global media hub, like a stock exchange, which will become responsible for transacting all digital programmatic buys.”

Gary talked about the possible reversal of fragmentation of markets by channel and geographic area due to the potential centralization of digital media purchasing. But I see it a little differently than Gary. I don’t see the creation of a media hub – or, at least – that wouldn’t be the end goal. Media would simply be the means to the end. I do see the creation of an audience market based on available data. Actually, even an audience would only be the means to an end. Ultimately, we’re buying one thing – attention. Then it’s our job to create engagement.

The Advertising Research Foundation has been struggling with measuring engagement for a long time now. But it’s because they were trying to measure engagement on a channel-by-channel basis and that’s just not how the world works anymore. Take search, for example. Search is highly effective at advertising, but it’s not engaging. It’s a connecting medium. It enables engagement, but it doesn’t deliver it.

We talk multi-channel a lot, but we talk about it like the holy grail. The grail in this cause is an audience that is likely to give us their attention and once they do that – is likely to become engaged with our message. The multi-channel path to this audience is really inconsequential. We only talk about multi-channel now because we’re stopping short of the real goal, connecting with that audience. What advertising needs to do is give us accurate indicators of those two likelihoods: how likely are they to give us their attention and what is their potential proclivity towards our offer. The future of advertising is in assembling audiences – no matter what the channel – that are at a point where they are interested in the message we have to deliver.

This is where the digitization of media becomes interesting. It’s not because it’s aggregating into a single potential buying point – it’s because it’s allowing us to parallel a single prospect along a path of persuasion, getting important feedback data along the way. In this definition, audience isn’t a static snapshot in time. It becomes an evolving, iterative entity. We have always looked at advertising on an exposure-by-exposure basis. But if we start thinking about persuading an audience that paradigm needs to be shifted. We have to think about having the right conversation, regardless of the channel that happens to be in use at the time.

Our concept of media happens to carry a lot of baggage. In our minds, media is inextricably linked to channel. So when we think media, we are really thinking channels. And, if we believe Marshall McLuhan, the medium dictates the message. But while media has undergone intense fragmentation they’ve also become much more measurable and – thereby – more accountable. We know more than ever about who lies on the other side of a digital medium thanks to an ever increasing amount of shared data. That data is what will drive the advertising marketplace of the future. It’s not about media – it’s about audience.

In the market I envision, you would specify your audience requirements. The criteria used would not be so much our typical segmentations – demography or geography for example. These have always just been proxies for what we really care about; their beliefs about our product and predicted buying behaviors. I believe that thanks to ever increasing amounts of data we’re going to make great strides in understanding the psychology of consumerism. These  will be foundational in the audience marketplace of the future. Predictive marketing will become more and more accurate and allow for increasingly precise targeting on a number of behavioral criteria.

Individual channels will become as irrelevant as the manufacturer that supplies the shock absorbers and tie rods in your new BMW. They will simply be grist for the mill in the audience marketplace. Mar-tech and ever smarter algorithms will do the channel selection and media buying in the background. All you’ll care about is the audience you’re targeting, the recommended creative (again, based on the mar-tech running in the background) and the resulting behaviors. Once your audience has been targeted and engaged, the predicted path of persuasion is continually updated and new channels are engaged as required. You won’t care what channels they are – you’ll simply monitor the progression of persuasion.

 

NBC’s Grip on Olympic Gold Slipping

When it comes to benchmarking stuff, nothing holds a candle to the quadrennial sports-statzapooloza we call the Summer Olympics. After 3 years, 11 months and 13 days of not giving a crap about sports like team pursuit cycling or half heavyweight judo, we suddenly get into fist fights over 3 one hundredths of a second or an unawarded Yuko.

But it’s not just sports that are thrown into comparative focus by the Olympic games. It also provides a chance to take a snap shot of media consumption trends. The Olympics is probably the biggest show on earth. With the possible exception of the World Cup, it’s the time when the highest number of people on the planet are all watching the same thing at the same time. This makes it advertising nirvana.

Or it should.

Over the past few Olympics, the way we watch various events has been changing because of the nature of the Games themselves. There are 306 separate events in 35 recognized sports that are spread over 16 days of competition. The Olympics play to a global audience, which means that coverage has to span 24 time zones. At any given time, on any given day, there could be 6 or 7 events running simultaneously. In fact, as I’m writing this, diving, volleyball, men’s omnium cycling, Greco-Roman wresting, badminton, field hockey and boxing are all happening at the same time.

This creates a challenge for network TV coverage. The Olympics are hardly a one-size-fits-all spectacle. So, if you’re NBC and you’ve shelled out 1.6 billion dollars to provide coverage, you have a dilemma: how do you assemble the largest possible audience to show all those really expensive ads to? How do you keep all those advertisers happy?

NBC’s answer, it seems, is to repackage the Olympics as a scripted mini-series. It means throttling down real time streaming or live broadcast coverage on some of the big events so these can be assembled into packaged stories during their primetime coverage. NBC’s chief marketing officer, John Miller, was recently quoted as saying, “The people who watch the Olympics are not particularly sports fans. More women watch the games than men, and for the women, they’re less interested in the result and more interested in the journey. It’s sort of like the ultimate reality show and miniseries wrapped into one.”

So, how is this working out for NBC? Not so well, as it turns out.

Ratings are down, with NBC posting the lowest primetime numbers since 1992. The network has come under heavy fire for what is quite possibly the worst Olympic coverage in the history of the games. Let’s ignore for a moment their myopic focus on US contestants and a handful of superstars like Usain Bolt (which may not be irritating unless you’re a international viewer like myself). Their heavy-handed attempt to control and script the fragmented and emergent drama of any Olympic games has stumbled out of the blocks and fallen flat on its face.

I would categorize this as a “RTU/WTF” The first three letters stand for “Research tells us…” I think you can figure out the last three. I’m sure NBC did their research to figure out what they thought the audience really wanted in Olympics game coverage. I’m positive there was a focus group somewhere that told the network what they wanted to hear; “Screw real time results. What we really want is for you to tell us – with swelling music, extreme close ups and completely irrelevant vignettes– the human drama that lies behind the medals…” And, in the collective minds of NBC executives, they quickly added, “…with a zillion commercial breaks and sponsorship messages.”

But it appears that this isn’t what we want. It’s not even close. We want to see the sports we’re interested in, on our device of choice and at the time that best suits us.

This, in a nutshell, is the disruption that is broadsiding the advertising industry at full ramming speed. It was exactly what I was talking about in my last column. NBC may have been able to play their game when they were our only source of information and we were held captive by this scarcity. But over the past 3 Olympic games, starting in Athens in 2004, technology has essentially erased that scarcity. The reality no longer fits NBC’s strategy. Coverage of the Olympics is now a multi-channel affair. What we’re looking for is a way to filter the coverage based on what is most interesting to us, not to be spoon-fed the coverage that NBC feels has the highest revenue potential.

It’s a different world, NBC. If you’re planning to compete in Tokyo, you’d better change your game plan, because you’re still playing like it’s 1996.

 

 

 

Media Buying is Just the Tip of Advertising’s Disruptive Iceberg

Two weeks ago, Gary Milner wrote a lucid prediction of what advertising might become. He rightly stated that advertising has been in a 40-year period of disruption. Bingo. He went on to say that he sees a consolidation of media buying into a centralized hub. Again, I don’t question the clarity of Milner’s crystal ball. It makes sense to me.

What is missing from Milner’s column, however, is the truly disruptive iceberg that is threatening to founder advertising as we know it – the total disruption of the relationship between the advertiser and the marketplace. Milner deals primarily with the media buying aspect of advertising but there’s a much bigger question to tackle. He touched on it in one sentence: “The fact is that a vast majority of advertising is increasingly being ignored.”

Yes! Exactly. But why?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because of a disagreement about what advertising should be. We (the buyers) believe advertising’s sole purpose is to inform. But the sellers believe advertising is there to influence buyers. And increasingly, we’re rejecting that definition.

I know. That’s a tough pill to swallow. But let’s apply a little logic to the premise. Bear with me.

Advertising was built on a premise of scarcity. Market places can’t exist without scarcity. There needs to be an imbalance to make an exchange of value worthwhile. Advertising exists because there once was a scarcity of information. We (the buyers) lacked information about products and services. This was primarily because of the inefficiencies inherent in a physical market. So, in return for the information, we traded something of value – our attention. We allowed ourselves to be influenced. We tolerated advertising because we needed it. It was the primary way we gained information about the marketplace.

In Milner’s column, he talks about Peter Diamandis’ 6 stages that drive the destruction of industries: digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization. Milner applied it to the digitization of media. But these same forces are also being applied to information and rather than driving advertising from disruption to a renaissance period, as Milner predicts, I believe we’ve barely scratched the surface of disruption. The ride will only get bumpier from here on.

The digitization of information enables completely new types of marketplaces. Consider the emergence of the two-sided markets that both AirBNB and Uber exemplify. Thanks to the digitization of information, entirely new markets have emerged that allow the flow of information between buyers and suppliers. Because AirBNB and Uber have built their business models astride these flows, they can get a cut of the action.

But the premise of the model is important to understand. AirBNB and Uber are built on the twin platforms of information and enablement. There is no attempt to persuade by the providers of the platforms – because they know those attempts will erode the value of the market they’re enabling. We are not receptive to persuasion (in the form of advertising) because we have access to information that we believe to be more reliable – user reviews and ratings.

The basic premise of advertising has changed. Information is no longer scarce. In fact, through digitization, we have the opposite problem. We have too much information and too little attention to allocate to it. We now need to filter information and increasingly, the filters we apply are objectivity and reliability. That turns the historical value exchange of advertising on its head. This has allowed participatory information marketplaces such as Uber, AirBNB and Google to flourish. In these markets, where information flows freely, advertising that attempts to influence feels awkward, forced and disingenuous. Rather than building trust, advertising erodes it.

This disruption has also driven another trend with dire consequences for advertising as we know it – the “Maker” revolution and the atomization of industries. There are some industries where any of us could participate as producers and vendors. The hospitality industry is one of these. The needs of a traveller are pretty minimal – a bed, a roof, a bathroom. Most of us could provide these if we were so inclined. We don’t need to be Conrad Hilton. These are industries susceptible to atomization – breaking the market down to the individual unit. And it’s in these industries where disruptive information marketplaces will emerge first. But I can’t build a refrigerator. Or a car (yet). In these industries, scale is still required. And these will be the last strongholds of mass advertising.

Milner talked about the digitization of media and the impact on advertising. But there’s a bigger change afoot – the digitization of information in marketplaces that previously relied on scarcity of information to prop up business models. As information goes from scarcity to abundance, these business models will inevitably fall.

When Evolution (and Democracy) Get It Wrong

“I’ve made a huge mistake”

G.O.B. – Arrested Development

The world is eliminating friction. Generally, that’s a good thing. But there may be unintended consequences.

Let’s take evolution, for instance. Friction in evolution comes in the form of survival rates. Barring other mitigating factors over the length of a natural evolutionary timeline, successful mutations will result in higher survival rates and, therefore, higher propagation rates. Those mutations that best fit the adaptive landscape will survive. Unsuccessful ones will die out.

But that assumes a landscape in which survival has a fairly high threshold. The lower the threshold, the more likely it is that a greater number of mutations will “get over the bar”.

Two factors can vary that threshold. One is the adaptive environment itself. It may proved to be “kinder and gentler” for an extended period of time, allowing for the flourishing of “less fit” candidates.

The other is a factor unique to one species that allows them to alter the environment at their will. Like technology, for instance. In the hands of humans, we have used technology to eliminate friction and drag the bar lower and lower – until the idea of survival of the fittest has little meaning any more.

The more friction there is, the more demanding that propagation threshold is. This same phenomenon is true of most emergent systems. What emerges depends on the environment the system is operating in. Demanding environments are called rugged landscapes. There is some contrary logic that operates here. The removal of friction can actually increase the number of mutations (or, in societal terms – innovation). More mutations – or ideas – can survive because the definition of “fittest” is less demanding. But we also build up a tipping point of mediocrity in the gene or meme pool and if something does cause the adaptive landscape to suddenly become more rugged, the extinction rate soars. The reckoning can be brutal.

Lets look at memes. For ideas to spread, there used to be a fairly high threshold of “shareability.” There was a publishing and editorial supply chain that introduced a huge amount of friction into our culture. This friction has largely been removed, allowing any of us to instantly share ideas. This has lead to a recalibration of the shareability threshold – an explosion of viral content that happens to ding our fickle consciousness just long enough for us to hit the share button. Bob Garfield called this “The Survival of the Funnest” in a recent column.

But was the previous friction a good thing? We definitely have more content being produced now. Some of it is very good. This couldn’t have happened under the previous cultural supply chain. But a lot of the content is – at best – frivolous and – at worst – dangerous. That same chain did force thoughtfulness into the filter of content. Someone – somewhere – had to think about what was fit to publish.

Now, one could argue that ultimately the market will get it right. We could also argue that evolution never makes mistakes. But that’s not always true. If the threshold of fitness gets lowered, evolution will make mistakes. Tons of them. I suspect the same is true of markets. If we grow complacent and entitled, we can flood the market with mediocrity. We humans have an unlimited capacity to make bad choices if we don’t have to make good ones

This brings me to the current state of democracy. Democracy is cultural evolution in action. It means – literally – the “people” (demos) “rule” (kratia). It assumes that the majority will get it right. But the adaptive landscape of democracy has also changed. The threshold has been lowered. We are making electoral decisions based on the same viral content that has flooded the rest of our culture. Thoughtfulness is in woefully short supply. There is no shortage of knee-jerk soundbites that latch on to the belief system of a disgruntled electorate. This is an ideological death spiral that could have big consequences.

Correction.

Make that “Huuugggeee” consequences.

 

 

 

Chatting Up a Storm

I’ve been talking about a “meta-app” for ages. It looks like China may have found it in WeChat. We in the Western World have been monitoring the success of TenCent’s WeChat with growing interest. Who would have thought that a simple chat interface could be the killer app of the future?

Chat interfaces seem so old school. They appear to be clunky and inefficient. But the beauty of chat is that it’s completely flexible. As Wired.com’s David Pierce said, “You can, for all intents and purposes, live your entire life within WeChat.” That’s exactly the type of universal functionality you need to become a meta-app.

We’ve always envisioned having conversations with our computers, even going back to Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey. But we didn’t think out conversations would be carried out in text bubbles on a hand held device. A PEW study found that texting is the single most common activity on a Smartphone. 97% of us do it. So if messaging is the new UI, none of us have to learn anything new.

Graphic interfaces are necessarily tied to a particular task. The interface is designed for a specific intent. But messaging interfaces can adapt as intents change. They can quickly switch from social messaging to purchasing online to searching for an address to – well – you get the idea.

But where texting really shines is when it’s combined with artificially intelligent chatbots. A simple, universally understood interface that’s merged with powerful intelligent agents – either human and machine – allows the user to quickly request or do anything they wish. The functionality of intent specific apps can be called on as required and easily introduced into the chat interface.

In effect, text messaging is doing exactly what Apple hoped Siri would do – become the universal interface to the digital world. Given that speaking would appear to be easier than texting, one has to wonder why Siri never really gained the traction that Apple hoped it would. I think this can be attributed to three reasons:

  • The difficulties of spoken interpretation still restricts the functionality of Siri. The success rate isn’t high enough to completely gain our confidence
  • The use case of Siri is still primarily when we need to keep our hands free. It’s not that easy to switch to interactions where tactile input is required
  • We look like idiots speaking to a machine

All of these are avoided in a chat-based interface. We still have the flexibility of a conversational interface but we still have all the power of our device at our fingertips. Plus, we don’t infringe on any social taboos.

Given the advantages, it’s small wonder that a number of players – primarily Facebook – are seriously plotting for the commercialization of chat based messaging services. There’s one other massive advantage that a stand-alone messaging interface has. The more activities we conduct through any particular interface, the greater the opportunity for personalization. I’ve always maintained that a truly useful “meta-app” should be able to anticipate our intent. That requires interactions across the broad spectrum of our activities. Previously only operating systems offered this type of breadth and because OS’s operate “under the hood,” there were some limitations on the degree of personalization – and through that, commercialization – that was possible. But an app we explicitly choose to use seems to be fair game for commercialization. It’s one of those unwritten social modality rules that advertisers are well advised to be aware of.

Between Messenger and WhatsApp, Facebook has a huge slice of the chat market. They just passed the 900 million user mark for Messenger alone. According to a recent study from the Global Web Index, over 36% of users have used Messenger in the past month, followed closely by WhatsApp at 34%, then Skype at 19%, Line at 10% and Viber and SnapChat at 7% each. These numbers exclude the Chinese market, which is dominated by WeChat, but it remains to be seen if WeChat can expand its base beyond Asia.

And leaked documents from earlier this year indicated that Messenger may soon introduce targeted ads. This hardly qualifies as a security breach. It’s more of a “Duh – ya think?” The rumor mill around the commercialization of Messenger has been going full steam in 2016. If chatting is the UI juggernaut it seems to be, of course we will soon see ads there. WeChat is well down this road, and it seems to be working like a charm, if the recent Smart Car promotion is any example.

 

A Possibly Premature Post-Mortem on Yahoo

Last Thursday, Yahoo held it ‘s annual shareholder meeting. At that meeting, CEO Marissa Mayer dealt the company a doubled down kiss of death. She stated the goals of the board are fully aligned with one clear priority: “delivering shareholder value to all of you.” She further mentioned, when dealing with the divesture of all that once was Yahoo, that she’s “been very heartened by the level of interest in Yahoo. It validates our business processes as well as our achievements to date.”

It’s fancier language, but it’s basically the same as the butcher saying, “This cow is no longer viable as a cow, so I’m looking at it as a collection of rump roasts, T-Bones and hamburger. I’m hoping we have more of the former and less of the later.”

Yahoo_1996I first encountered Yahoo in 1995, shortly after it’s brief life as Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. I think it was probably still parked on Stanford’s servers at the time. At the time, the Internet was like the world’s biggest second-hand store – a huge collection that was 95% junk/5 % useful stuff with no overarching order or organization. David Filo and Jerry Yang’s site was one of the very first to try to provide that order.

As an early search marketer in the run up to the dot-com bubble, you couldn’t ignore the Yahoo directory. The Yahooligans walked with typical Valley swagger. Hubris was never in short supply. They were the cocks of the walk and they knew it.

It was a much-humbled post-bubble Yahoo that I visited in 2004. They had got their search asses soundly kicked by Google, who was now powering their non-directory results. The age of the curated directory was gone, replaced by the scalability of algorithmic search.

As a culture, the Yahooligans were struggling with the mixed management signals that came from then CEO Terry Semel and his team. Sunnyvale was clouded in a purple haze. The Yahooligans didn’t know who the hell they were or what they were supposed to do. Where they a tech company or an entertainment company? The answer, as it turned out, was neither.

I met with the remnants of the once mighty search team to talk about user behaviors. I didn’t know it at the time, but Yahoo was gearing up to relaunch their search service. A much vilified paid inclusion program would also be debuted. It was one of many ill-fated attempts to find the next “Big Thing.”

Marissa Mayer continues to put a brave face on it, but the Yahoo engine ran out of steam at least a decade and a half ago. What amazes me is how long the ride has been. There is a message here for tech-based companies.

If you dig down to the critical incubation period of any tech company, you find a recurring pattern. Some technologically mediated connection allows people to do something they were previously unable to do. This releases pent up market demand. It’s like a thin sliver trying to poke through a water balloon. If successful, this released market demand creates an immediate and sizable audience for whomever introduced the innovation. Yahoo’s directory, Google’s PageRank, Facebook’s “Facemash”, AirBnB’s accommodation directory, Uber’s ridesharing app – they all share the same modus operandi – a tech-step forward creates a new audience and market opportunity.

In hindsight, once you strip away all the hype, it’s amazing how tenuous and unimpressive these technological advances are. Luck and timing typically play a huge part. If the conditions are right, the sliver eases through the balloon’s membrane and for a time, there is a steady stream of opportunity.

The problem is that is that as easily as these markets form, they can just as easily evaporate. When the technological advantage passes to the next competitor, as it did when Yahoo gave way to Google, all that’s left is the audience. When you consider that Yahoo has been coasting on this audience for close to two decades, it’s rather amazing that Mayer still has any assets at all to sell.

 

What Would a “Time Well Spent” World Look Like?

I’m worried about us. And it’s not just because we seem bent on death by ultra-conservative parochialism and xenophobia. I’m worried because I believe we’re spending all our time doing the wrong things. We’re fiddling while Rome burns.

Technology is our new drug of choice and we’re hooked. We’re fascinated by the trivial. We’re dumping huge gobs of time down the drain playing virtual games, updating social statuses, clicking on clickbait and watching videos of epic wardrobe malfunctions. Humans should be better than this.

It’s okay to spend some time doing nothing. The brain needs some downtime. But something, somewhere has gone seriously wrong. We are now spending the majority of our lives doing useless things. TV used to be the biggest time suck, but in 2015, for the first time ever, the boob tube was overtaken by time spent with mobile apps. According to a survey conducted by Flurry, in the second quarter of 2015 we spent about 2.8 hours per day watching TV. And we spent 3.3 hours on mobile apps. That’s a grand total of 6.1 hours per day or one third of the time we spend awake. Yes, both things can happen at the same time, so there is undoubtedly overlap, but still- that’s a scary-assed statistic!

And it’s getting worse. In a previous Flurry poll conducted in 2013, we spent a total of 298 hours between TV and mobile apps versus 366 hours in 2015. That’s a 22.8% increase in just two years. We’re spending way more time doing nothing. And those totals don’t even include things like time spent in front of a gaming console. For kids, tack on an average of another 10 hours per week and you can double that for hard-core male gamers. Our addiction to gaming has even led to death in extreme cases.

Even in the wildest stretches of imagination, this can’t qualify as “time well spent.”

We’re treading on very dangerous and very thin ice here. And, we no longer have history to learn from. It’s the first time we’ve ever encountered this. Technology is now only one small degree of separation from plugging directly into the pleasure center of our brains. And science has proven that a good shot of self-administered dopamine can supersede everything –water, food, sex. True, these experiments were administered on rats – primarily because it’s been unethical to go too far on replicating the experiments with humans – but are you willing to risk the entire future of mankind on the bet that we’re really that much smarter than rats?

My fear is that technology is becoming a slightly more sophisticated lever we push to get that dopamine rush. And developers know exactly what they’re doing. They are making that lever as addictive as possible. They are pushing us towards the brink of death by technological lobotomization. They’re lulling us into a false sense of security by offering us the distraction of viral videos, infinitely scrolling social notification feeds and mobile game apps. It’s the intellectual equivalent of fast food – quite literally “brain candy.

Here the hypocrisy of for-profit interest becomes evident. The corporate response typically rests on individual freedom of choice and the consumer’s ability to exercise will power. “We are just giving them what they’re asking for,” touts the stereotypical PR flack. But if you have an entire industry with reams of developers and researchers all aiming to hook you on their addictive product and your only defense is the same faulty neurological defense system that has already fallen victim to fast food, porn, big tobacco, the alcohol industry and the $350 billion illegal drug trade, where would you be placing your bets?

Technology should be our greatest achievement. It should make us better, not turn us into a bunch of lazy screen-addicted louts. And it certainly could be this way. What would it mean if technology helped us spend our time well? This is the hope behind the Time Well Spent Manifesto. Ethan Harris, a design ethicist and product philosopher at Google is one of the co-directors. Here is an excerpt from the manifesto:

We believe in a new kind of design, that lets us connect without getting sucked in. And disconnect, without missing something important.

And we believe in a new kind economy that’s built to help us spend time well, where products compete to help us live by our values.

I believe in the Manifesto. I believe we’re being willingly led down a scary and potentially ruinous path. Worst of all, I believe there is nothing we can – or will – do about it. Problems like this are seldom solved by foresight and good intentions. Things only change after we drive off the cliff.

The problem is that most of us never see it coming. And we never see it coming because we’re too busy watching a video of masturbating monkeys on Youtube.

Dad: Unplugged

I went off the grid last week. It wasn’t intentional. First we changed ISPs and the connectivity we take for granted had a hiccup. We were soon back online, but it was irritating none-the-less.

As luck would have it, it was a warning of what was to come. The main logic board on my laptop packed it in the next day and I was once more cut off. I realized how dependent I am on that little 10 by 15 inch slab of brushed aluminum and electronics. My world was unplugged. It felt like it was a very big deal.

Given that I felt like my right arm was lopped off, you would think this might impact the quality of my Father’s Day. And it did. But it was all for the better. I didn’t have to check emails. There were no task reminders beeping. No Google searches itching to be launched. No Facebook posts to like. I was off the grid. And the day was glorious.

I realized that the things my daughters were thanking me for on last Sunday had little to do with the thousands and thousands of hours I have spent online in my life. They seem to appreciate my sense of humor. That predated the Internet by at least three decades. They like that I’m fairly calm and levelheaded. To be honest, being online generally has a negative correlation with my current state of calmness. I’m a pretty good listener but I’m a much better listener when my attention is not being distracted by a nearby screen. I try to be thoughtful. I’ve previously gone on record as saying that I fear the thoughtfulness of our species is eroding in the world of wired instant gratification. And finally, I try to be a good and ethical person. While being online helps inform those ethics, they are mostly the product of that off-line thoughtfulness I try to set time aside for.

I certainly felt the pain of being off-the-grid, but I realized that much of the urgency that caused that pain was a by-product of my being online. I think technology is creating it’s own cloud of noise that continually intrudes on our lives. These things all seem urgent, but are they important? Are we ignoring other, more important things because of the incessant noise of our digital lives?

If we sat down and made a list of the values that we hold to be important to us, how many of these would require being connected? Would being online make us a better parent? A better husband or wife? A better son or daughter? Probably not.

Technology should be a tool we use to help express the person we are and what we hold to be valuable and true. Technology should not define us. It should not be it’s own truth. It should not create it’s own values. But when technology becomes as ubiquitous as it has become, I fear the line is becoming permanently blurred. Our being online may be changing who we are. I’m pretty sure none of us intend to be distracted, short tempered, disconnected or intellectually shallow but the world is increasingly being filled with such people. I sometimes am one of these people. And I’m usually online when it happens.

This Sunday reminded me that there are things that can wait. This includes about 99% of what we do online.

And there are things that can’t wait. Like children who grow up way too fast. My kids are now 22 and 20. I’m pretty sure neither of them wish their dad had spent more time doing things on his computer.

 

 

 

Can Stories Make Us Better?

In writing this column, I often put ideas on the shelf for a while. Sometimes, world events conspire to make one of these shelved ideas suddenly relevant. This happened this past weekend.

The idea that caught my eye some months ago was an article that explored whether robots could learn morality by reading stories. On the face of it, it was mildly intriguing. But early Sunday morning as the heartbreaking news filtered to me from Orlando, a deeper connection emerged.

When we speak of unintended consequence, which we have before, the media amplification of acts of terror are one of them. The staggeringly sad fact is that shocking casualty numbers have their own media value. And that, said one analyst who was commenting on ways to deal with terrorism, is a new reality we have to come to terms with. When we in the media business make stories news worthy we assign worth not just for news consumers but also to newsmakers – those troubled individuals who have the motivation and the means to blow apart the daily news cycle.

This same analyst, when asked how we deal with terrorism, made the point you can’t prevent lone acts of terrorism. The only answer is to use that same network of cultural connections we use to amplify catastrophic events to create an environment that dampens rather than intensifies violent impulse. We in the media and advertising industries have to use our considerable skills in setting cultural contexts to create an environment that reduces the odds of a violent outcome. And sadly, this is a game of odds. There are no absolute answers here – there is just a statistical lowering of the curve. Sometimes, despite your best efforts, the unimaginable still happens.

But how do you use the tools at our disposal to amplify morality? Here, perhaps the story I shelved some months ago can provide some clues.

In the study from Georgia Tech, Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison used stories as models of acceptable morality. For most of human history, popular culture included at least an element of moral code. We encoded the values we held most dear into our stories. It provided a base for acceptable behavior, either through positive reinforcement of commonly understood virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, courage, faith, hope and charity) or warnings about universal vices (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride). Sometimes these stories had religious foundations, sometimes they were secular morality fables but they all served the same purpose. They taught us what was acceptable behavior.

Stories were never originally intended to entertain. They were created to pass along knowledge and cultural wisdom. Entertainment came after when we discovered the more entertaining the story, the more effective it was at its primary purpose: education. And this is how the researchers used stories. Robots can’t be entertained, but they can be educated.

At some point in the last century, we focused on the entertainment value of stories over education and, in doing so, rotated our moral compass 180 degrees. If you look at what is most likely to titillate, sin almost always trumps sainthood. Review that list of virtues and vices and you’ll see that the stories of our current popular culture focus on vice – that list could be the programming handbook for any Hollywood producer. I don’t intend this a sermon – I enjoy Game of Thrones as much as the next person. I simply state it as a fact. Our popular culture – and the amplification that comes from it – is focused almost exclusively on the worst aspects of human nature. If robots were receiving their behavioral instruction through these stories, they would be programmed to be psychopathic moral degenerates.

For most of us, we can absorb this continual stream of anti-social programming and not be affected by it. We still know what is right and what is wrong. But in a world where it’s the “black swan” outliers that grab the news headlines, we have to think about the consequences that reach beyond the mainstream. When we abandon the moral purpose of stories and focus on their entertainment aspect, are we also abandoning a commonly understood value landscape?

If you’re looking for absolute answers here, you won’t find them. That’s just not the world we live in. And am I naïve when I say the stories we chose to tell may have an influence on isolated violent events such as happened in Orlando? Perhaps. Despite all our best intentions, Omar Mateen might still have gone horribly offside.

But all things and all people are, to some extent, products of their environment. And because we in media and advertising are storytellers, we set that cultural environment. That’s our job. Because of this, I belief we have a moral obligation. We have to start paying more attention to the stories we tell.