Category Archives: Social Media

Post-mortem of a Donald Trump Sound Bite

This past weekend, Donald Trump was campaigning in Dayton, Ohio. This should come as news to no one. You’ve all probably seen various blips come across your social media radar. And, as often happens, what Trump said has been picked up in the mainstream press.

Now, I am quite probably the last person in the world that would ever come to Donald Trump’s defense. But I did want to take this one example of how it’s the media, including social media, that is responsible for the distortion of reality that we often see happen.

My first impression of what happened is that Trump promised a retributive bloodbath for any and all opposition if he’s not elected president. And, like many of you, that first impression came through my social media feeds. Joe Biden’s X (formerly Twitter) post said “It’s clear this guy wants another January 6th” Republican Lawyer and founding member of the Lincoln Project George Conway also posted: “This is utterly unhinged.”  

There was also retweeting of ABC coverage featuring a soundbite from Trump that said, “There would be a bloodbath if he is not re-elected in November.” This was conflated with Trump’s decision to open the stump speech with a recording of “Justice for All” by the J6 Choir, made of inmates awaiting trial for their roles in the infamous insurrection after the last election. Trump saluted during the playing of the recording.

To be crystal clear, I don’t condone any of that. But that’s not the point. I’m not the audience this was aimed at.

First of all, Donald Trump was campaigning. In this case, he was making a speech aimed at his base in Ohio, many of whom are auto-workers. And the “bloodbath” comment had nothing to do with armed insurrection. It was Trump’s prediction of what would happen if he wasn’t elected and couldn’t protect American auto jobs from the possibility of a trade war with China over auto manufacturing.

But you would be hard pressed to know that based on what you saw, heard or read on either social media or traditional media.

You can say a lot of derogatory things about Donald Trump, but you can’t say he doesn’t know his base or what they want to hear. He’s on the campaign trail to be elected President of the United State. The way that game is played, thanks to a toxic ecosystem created by the media, is to pick your audience and tell them exactly what they want to hear. The more you can get that message amplified through both social and mainstream media, the better. And if you can get your opposition to help you by also spreading the message, you get bonus points.

Trump is an expert at playing that game. He is the personification of the axiom, “There is no such thing as bad press.”

If we try to pin this down to the point where we can assign blame, it becomes almost impossible. There was nothing untrue in the coverage of the Dayton Rally. It was just misleading due to incomplete information, conflation, and the highlighting of quotes without context. It was sloppy reporting, but it wasn’t illegal.

The rot here isn’t acute. It isn’t isolated to one instance. It’s chronic and systemic. It runs through the entire media ecosystem. It benefits from round after round of layoffs that have dismantled journalism and gutted the platform’s own fact checking and anti-misinformation teams. Republicans, led by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, are doubling down on this by investigating alleged anti-conservative censorship by the platforms.

I’m pretty sure things won’t get better. Social media feeds are – if anything – more littered than ever with faulty information and weaponized posts designed solely to provoke. So far, management of the platforms have managed to slither away from anything resembling responsibility. And the campaigns haven’t even started to heat up. In the 230 days between now and November 5th, the stakes will get higher and posts will become more inflammatory.

Buckle up. It promises to be a bumpy (or Trumpy?) ride!

The Messaging of Climate Change

86% of the world believes that climate change is a real thing. That’s the finding of a massive new mega study with hundreds of authors (the paper’s author acknowledgement is a page and a half). 60,000 participants from 63 countries around the world took part. And, as I said, 86% of them believe in climate change.

Frankly, there’s no surprise there. You just have to look out your window to see it. Here in my corner of the world, wildfires wiped out hundreds of homes last summer and just a few weeks ago, a weird winter whiplash took temperatures from unseasonably warm to deep freeze cold literally overnight. This anomaly wiped out this region’s wine industry. The only thing surprising I find about the 86 percent stat is that 14% still don’t believe. That speaks of a determined type of ignorance.

What is interesting about this study is that it was conducted by behavioral scientists. This is an area that has always fascinated me. From the time I read Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book, Nudge, I have always been interested in behavioral interventions. What are the most effective “nudges” in getting people to shift their behaviors to more socially acceptable directions?

According to this study, that may not be that easy. When I first dove into this study, my intention was to look at how different messages had different impacts depending on the audience: right wing vs left wing for instance. But in going through the results, what struck me the most was just how poorly all the suggested interventions performed. It didn’t matter if you were liberal or conservative or lived in Italy or Iceland. More often than not, all the messaging fell on deaf ears.

What the study did find is that how you craft your campaign about climate change depends on what you want people to do. Do you want to shift non-believers in Climate Change towards being believers? Then decrease the psychological distance. More simply put, bring the dangers of climate change to their front doorstep. If you live next to a lot of trees, talk about wildfires. If you live on the coast, talk about flooding. If you live in a rural area, talk about the impacts of drought. But it should be noted that we weren’t talking a massive shift here – with an “absolute effect size of 2.3%”. It was the winner by the sheer virtue of sucking the least.

If you want to build support for legislation that mitigates climate change, the best intervention was to encourage people to write a letter to a child that’s close to you, with the intention that they read it in the future. This forces the writer to put some psychological skin in the game.  

Who could write a future letter to someone you care about without making some kind of pledge to make sure there’s still a world they can live in? And once you do that, you feel obligated to follow through. Once again, this had a minimal impact on behaviors, with an overall effect size of 2.6%.

A year and a half ago, I talked about Climate Change messaging, debating Mediapost Editor-in-Chief Joe Mandese about whether a doom and gloom approach would move the needle on behaviors. In a commentary from the summer of 2022, Mandese wrapped up by saying, “What the ad industry really needs to do is organize a massive global campaign to change the way people think, feel and behave about the climate — moving from a not-so-alarmist “change” to an “our house is on fire” crisis.”

In a follow up, I worried that doom and gloom might backfire on us, “Cranking up the crisis intensity on our messaging might have the opposite effect. It may paralyze us.”

So, what does this study say?

The answer, again, is, “it depends.” If we’re talking about getting people to share posts on social media, then Doom and Gloom is the way to go. Of all the various messaging options, this had the biggest impact on sharing, by a notable margin.

This isn’t really surprising. A number of studies have shown that negative news is more likely to be shared on social media than positive news.

But what if we’re asking people to make a change that requires some effort beyond clicking the “share” button? What if they actually have to do something? Then, as I suspected, Doom and Gloom messaging had the opposite effect, decreasing the likelihood that people would make a behavioral change to address climate change (the study used a tree planting initiative as an example). In fact, when asking participants to actually change their behavior in an effortful way, all the tested climate interventions either had no effect or, worse, they “depress(ed) and demoralize(d) the public into inaction”.

That’s not good news. It seems that no matter what the message is, or who the messenger is, we’re likely to shoot them if they’re asking us to do anything beyond bury our head in the sand.

What’s even worse, we may be losing ground. A study from 10 years ago by Yale University had more encouraging results. They showed that effective climate change messaging, was able to shift public perceptions by up to 19 percent. While not nearly as detailed as this study, the results seem to indicate a backslide in the effectiveness of climate messaging.

One of the commentators that covered the new worldwide study perhaps summed it up best by saying, “if we’re dealing with what is probably the biggest crisis ever in the history of humanity, it would help if we actually could talk about it.”

A Look Back at 2023 from the Inside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take that for what it’s worth.

The Branding Case Study of David Beckham

I have to admit, I’m not a sports fan. And of the few sports I know a little about, European football is certainly not one of them. So my choice to watch the recent Beckham documentary on Netflix is certainly not typical. That said, I did find it a fascinating case study in something I was not expecting: the making and valuation of a personal brand.

First, a controversial question must be posed: was Beckham a good player? According to those that know much more about the sport than I do, the answer is definitely “Yes” – but he wasn’t the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) – he wasn’t even a GOHT (Greatest of His Time). The closest Beckham ever came to winning the Ballon d’Or, given to the best player  of the year,  was to place second behind Rivaldo Ferreira in 1999. During his time at Real Madrid CF, he wasn’t even the best player on the team. Granted, it was a stacked team and Beckham was one of the “galácticos” (superstars), along with Figo, Zidane and Ronaldo. But, unlike Beckham, all those other players have at least one Ballon d’Or in their trophy case (Note, fellow Mediapost Jon Last recently took an interesting look at this topic in his column – The Death of Meritocracy in Sports Pay).

But despite this, Beckham was certainly the highest paid player in the world when Timothy Leiweke lured him to LA Galaxy, where his contract also gave him a piece of the profits. So, if he wasn’t the greatest player, but he was the most valuable one, what created that value? Why was David Beckham worth hundreds of millions of dollars?

As the documentary showed, there was a dimension to Beckham’s signing to a team that went far beyond his ability to put a round ball in the net. He was a global brand – the most famous football player in the world. And that’s what Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez and Timothy Leiweke respectively bought when they signed Beckham.

As I said, the documentary revealed some interesting truths about branding. What creates brand value? Who owns that value? What is the price paid for the value of a personal brand?

What the Beckham documentary showed, more than anything, is that brand value is determined in a public market. Beckham certainly brought brand assets to the table: his own athletic ability, being exceedingly good looking, a kaleidoscope of hair styles, and a marriage to one of the most popular pop stars in the world, Victoria Adams – Posh Spice from the Spice Girls. Those were the table stakes for establishing his brand value, the price of entry.

But beyond that, the value of his brand was really whatever the public determined it to be. For example, after he was red-carded in a critical match against Argentina the 1998 World Cup, all of Britain decided that Beckham had cost them the championship. Whether that was true or not (there are a lorry-full of “ifs” in that opinion) it caused his brand value to plummet. There was really nothing Beckham could do. His brand was out of his control. It was owned by the media and public.

The documentary really highlights the viral and frenzied nature of the market that determines the value of a personal brand. And remember, this all took place in the days before social media and the very real impact of being publicly cancelled! Since Beckham’s prime in the 1990s and early 2000’s, the market effect of branding has since been amplified and compressed. The market of public opinion is now wired, meaning network effects happen on incredibly short timelines and without even the illusion of control.

Certainly the monetary benefits of brand usually accrue to the supposed owner of the brand. David and Victoria Beckham are reportedly worth a half billion dollars, making him one of the richest athletes in the world. But the documentary makes it clear that there was a price paid that was not monetary. Much of what we would all call “our lives” had to be traded by the Beckhams for a brand that was controlled by the public and the press. There were no boundaries, no privacy, no refuge from fame.

When we pull back from the story of David and Victoria Beckham, there are takeaways there for anyone attempting to build a brand, whether it be personal or corporate. You may be able to plant the seeds, but after that, everything else is going to be largely out of your control.

How Canada is Killing its News Industry

In Canada, an interesting game of brinkmanship is happening. To help bring you up to speed, here are the Cole’s notes:

  • Like everywhere in the world, Canada’s news outlets are starving for revenue. Advertising is drying up, as more budget moves online.
  • In an ill-advised attempt to shore up the Canadian News industry, the federal government passed bill C-18, the Online News Act, which says that Facebook, Google and other tech giants must pay news organizations when someone comes to a web story through a link on one of their platforms.
  • Meta said – basically – WTF? We’re sending you traffic. You want us to pay for that? Fine, we’ll shut off that traffic.

Back in June, Meta posted this notice:

“In order to comply with the Online News Act, we have begun the process of ending news availability in Canada. These changes start today, and will be implemented for all people accessing Facebook and Instagram in Canada over the course of the next few weeks.”

Those changes started stripping news from our social media feeds in the last few weeks. I haven’t seen one news item on my Facebook feed in the last week.

 If you’re confused, you have a lot of company north of the 49th. Logic seems to be totally missing from this particular legislative hammer toss from Justin Trudeau and his merry band of lawmakers.

If there is any logic, it may be that for many some users, they never bother to click through to the actual story. They apparently get all the news they need from doomscrolling on Facebook.

Michael Geist, the Canadian Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, calls the bill a “Lose-Lose-Lose-Lose.” 

For the media outlets that this bill is supposedly protecting, Geist says, “It is difficult to overstate the harm that Bill C-18 will create for the media sector in Canada, with enormous losses that will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Oops.

Geist details how lobbyists and supporters of the bill were sure Meta was bluffing and would come to the table to negotiate when bidden to do so. A law professor from Carleton University said “I am not worried. The threats they are making, they are doing this all around the world.”

But Meta wasn’t bluffing. And why would they?  When you hold all the cards, you don’t have to bluff. Some news publishers estimate that as much as 50% of their traffic comes from these online channels. A recent study by Maru Public Opinion showed that 26% of Canadians say they get their news from social media sites. For younger age cohorts, this percentage jumps to 35%.

News publishers have now lost that traffic, with no offsetting revenue from Bill C-18 to compensate for it. For a bill that was supposed to save the Canadian news industry, this seems to be hammering nails in the coffin at an alarming rate.

Like Geist said, this is “a cautionary tale for a government that blithely ignored the warning signs, seemed to welcome a fight with the tech companies, and had no Plan B.”

If there are lessons to be learned – or, at least, points to be pondered – in this Canadian debacle, here are two to consider:

This shows that legislators, not just in Canada but around the world, have no idea of the new power dynamics in a digital economy. They still carry the quaint notion they are the power brokers within their borders. But this shows that Meta could care less about the Canadian market. We are a drop in their global revenue bucket. Not only have they not caved in when confronted with the awesome might of the Canadian government, they haven’t even bothered coming back to the table to talk. When the Liberal lawmakers decided to take on Meta, they were taking a knife to a gun fight.

Secondly, I wonder how one third of Canadians will now be informed about what’s happening in the world. With any information sources with even a shred of journalistic integrity stripped from their Facebook and Instagram feeds, who will they be listening to? In a bid for survival, Canada’s news publishers are supposedly launching a desperate campaign to “re-educate” us on how to find the news.

Yeah. We all know how successful “re-education” campaigns are.

Finally, in the irony of ironies, as they squared off against Facebook in this ill-fated battle, Canada’s Liberal government launched a new campaign asking for us to share our thoughts on a “Summer Check-In Survey.”

Their platform of choice for this campaign? Facebook.

X Marks the Spot

Elon Musk has made his mark. Twitter and its cute little birdy logo are dead. Like Monty Python’s famous parrot, this bird has shuffled off its mortal coil.

So Twitter is dead, Long live X?

I know — that seems weird to me, too.

Musk clearly has a thing for the letter X. He founded a company called X.com that merged with PayPal in 2000. In his portfolio of companies, you’ll find SpaceX, xAI, X Corp. Its seldom you see so much devotion to 1/26th of the Latin alphabet.

It’s not unprecedented to pick a letter and turn it into a brand. Steve Jobs managed to make the letter “i” the symbol for everything Apple. Mind you, he also tacked on helpful product descriptors to keep us from getting confused. If he had changed the name of Apple to “I” and just left it at that, it might not have worked so well.

At their best, brands should immediately bridge the gap between the DNA of a company and a long-term niche in the brains of those of us in the marketplace. Twitter did that. When you saw the iconic bird logo or hear the word Twitter, you know exactly what it referred to.

This is easier when the company is known for a handful of products. But when companies stretch into multiple areas, it’s tough to make one brand synonymous with hundreds or thousands of products. 

This brand diffusion is common with the hyper-accelerated world of tech. You launch a product and it’s so successful, it becomes a mega-corporation. At some point you’re stuck with an awkward transition: You leave the original brand associated with that product and create an umbrella brand that is vague enough to shelter a diverse and expanding portfolio of businesses. That’s why Google created the generic Alpha brand, and why Facebook became Meta.

But Musk didn’t create an umbrella to shelter Twitter and its brand. He used it to beat the brand to death. Maybe he just doesn’t like blue birds.

When a brand does its job well, we feel a personal relationship with it. Twitter’s brand did this. It was unique in tech branding, primarily because it was cute and organic. It was an accessible brand, a breath of fresh air in a world of cryptic acronyms and made-up terms with weird spellings. It made sense to us. And we are sorry to see it go.

In fact, some of us are flat-out refusing to admit the bird is dead. One programmer has already whipped together a Chrome extension that strips out the X branding and brings our favorite little Tweeter back from the beyond. Much as I admire this denial, I suspect this is only delaying the inevitable. It’s time to say bye-bye birdy. 

This current backlash against Musk’s rebranding could be a natural outcome of his effort to move from being one tied to a product to one that creates a bigger tent for multiple products. He has been pretty vocal about X becoming an “everything” app, a la China’s WeChat.

I suspect the road to making X a viable brand is going to be a rocky one. First of all, if you were going to pick the most generic symbol imaginable, X would be your choice. It literally has been a stand in for pretty much everything you could think of for centuries now. Even my great, great grandfather signed his name with an “X.”

We Hotchkisses have always been ahead of our time.

But the ubiquity of “X” brings up another problem, this time on the legal front. According to a lengthy analysis of Twitter’s rebranding by Emma Roth, you can trademark a single letter, but trying to make X your brand will come with some potentially litigious baggage. Microsoft has a trademark on X. So does Meta.

As long at Musk’s X sticks to its knitting, that might not be a problem. Microsoft registered X for its Xbox gaming console. Meta’s trademark also has to do with gaming. Apparently, as long as you don’t cross industries and confuse customers, having the same trademark shouldn’t be an issue.

But the chances of Elon Musk playing nice and following the rules of trademark law while pursuing his plan for world domination are somewhat less than zero. In this case, I think it’s fair to speculate that the formula for the future will be: X = a shitload of lawyer fees. 

Also, even if you succeed in making X a recognized and unique brand, protecting that brand will be a nightmare. How do you build a legal fence around X when the choice of it as a brand was literally to tear down fences?

But maybe Musk has already foreseen all this. Maybe he has some kind of superpower to see things we can’t.

Kind of like Superman’s X-Ray vision.

Why I’m Worried About AI

Even in my world, which is nowhere near the epicenter of the technology universe, everyone is talking about AI And depending on who’s talking – it’s either going to be the biggest boon to humanity, or it’s going to wipe us out completely. Middle ground seems to be hard to find.

I recently attended a debate at the local university about it. Two were arguing for AI, and two were arguing against. I went into the debate somewhat worried. When I walked out at the end of the evening, my worry was bubbling just under the panic level.

The “For” Team had a computer science professor – Kevin Leyton-Brown, and a philosophy professor – Madeleine Ransom. Their arguments seemed to rely mainly on creating more leisure time for us by freeing us from the icky jobs we’d rather not do. Leyton-Brown did make a passing reference to AI helping us to solve the many, many wicked problems we face, but he never got into specifics.

“Relax!” seemed to be the message. “This will be great! Trust us!”

The “Against” Team was comprised of a professor in Creative and Critical Studies – Bryce Traister. As far as I could see, he seemed to be mainly worried about AI replacing Shakespeare. He did seem quite enamored with the cleverness of his own quips.

It was the other “Against” debater who was the only one to actually talk about something concrete I could wrap my head around. Wendy Wong is a professor of Political Science. She has a book on data and human rights coming out this fall. Many of her concerns focused on this area.

Interestingly, the AI debaters all mentioned Social Media in their arguments. And on this point, they were united. All the debaters agreed that the impact of Social Media has been horrible. But the boosters were quick to say that AI is nothing like Social Media.

Except that it is. Maybe not in terms of the technology that lies beneath it, but in terms of the unintended consequences it could unleash, absolutely! Like Social Media, what will get us with AI are the things we don’t know we don’t know.

I remember when social media first appeared on the scene. Like AI, there were plenty of evangelists lining up saying that technology would connect us in ways we couldn’t have imagined. We were redefining community, removing the physical constraints that had previously limited connections.

If there was a difference between social media and AI, it was that I don’t remember the same doomsayers at the advent of social media. Everyone seemed to be saying “This will be great! Trust us!”

Today, of course, we know better. No one was warning us that social media would divide us in ways we never imagined, driving a wedge down the ideological middle of our society. There were no hints that social media could (and still might) short circuit democracy.

Maybe that’s why we’re a little warier when it comes to AI. We’ve already been fooled once.

I find that AI Boosters share a similar mindset – they tend to be from the S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) School of Thought. As I’ve said before, these types of thinkers tend to mistake complex problems for complicated ones. They think everything is solvable, if you just have a powerful enough tool and apply enough brain power. For them, AI is the Holy Grail – a powerful tool that potentially applies unlimited brain power.

But the dangers of AI are hidden in the roots of complexity, not complication, and that requires a different way of thinking. If we’re going to get some glimpse of what’s coming our way, I am more inclined to trust the instincts of those that think in terms of the humanities. A thinker, for example, such as Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens.

Harari recently wrote an essay in the Economist that may be the single most insightful thing I’ve read about the dangers of AI: “AI has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. AI has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.”

In my previous experiments with ChatGPT, it was this fear that was haunting me. Human brains operate on narratives. We are hard-wired to believe them. By using language, AI has a back door into our brains that bypass all our protective firewalls.

My other great fear is that the development of AI is being driven by for-profit corporations, many of which rely on advertising as their main source of revenue. If ever there was a case of putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, this is it!

When it comes to AI it’s not my job I’m afraid of losing. It’s my ability to sniff out AI generated bullshit. That’s what’s keeping me up a night.

Deconstructing a Predatory Marketplace

Last week, I talked about a predatory ad market that was found in — of all places — in-game ads. And the predators are — of all things — the marketers of Keto Gummies. This week, I’d like to look at why this market exists, and why someone should do something about it.

First of all, let’s understand what we mean by “predatory.” In biological terms, predation is a zero-sum game. For a predator to win, someone has to lose.  On Wikipedia, it’s phrased a little differently: “Predatory marketing campaigns may (also) rely on false or misleading messaging to coerce individuals into asymmetrical transactions. “

 “Asymmetrical” means the winner is the predator, the loser is the prey.

In the example of the gummy market, there are three winners — predators — and three losers, or prey. The winners are the marketers who are selling the gummies, the publishers who are receiving the ad revenue and the supply side platform that mediates the marketplace and take its cut.

The losers — in ascending order of loss — are the users of the games who must suffer through these crappy ads, the celebrities who have had their names and images illegally co-opted by the marketer, and the consumers who are duped into actually buying a bottle of these gummies.

You might argue the order of the last two, depending on what value you put on the brand of the celebrity. But in terms of sheer financial loss, consumer fraud is a significant issue, and one that gets worse every year.  In February, the Federal Trade Commission reported that U.S. consumers lost $8.8 billion to scams last year, many of which occurred online. The volume of scams is up 30% over 2021, and is 70% higher than it was in 2020.

So it’s not hard to see why this market is predatory. But is it fraudulent? Let’s apply a legal litmus test. Fraud is generally defined as “any form of dishonest or deceptive behavior that is intended to result in financial or personal gain for the fraudster, and does harm to the victim.”

Based on this, fraud does seem to apply. So why doesn’t anyone do anything?

For one, we’re talking about a lot of potential money here. Statista pegs the in-game ad market at $32.5 billion worldwide in 2023, with projected annual growth rate of 9.10% That kind of money provides a powerful incentive to publishers and supply-side platforms (SSPs) to look the other way.

I think it’s unreasonable expect the marketers of the gummies to police themselves. They have gone to great pains to move themselves away from the threat of legal litigation. These corporations are generally registered in jurisdictions like China or Cyprus, where legal enforcement of copyright or consumer protections are nonexistent. If someone like Oprah Winfrey has been unable to legally shut down the fraudulent use of her image and brand for two years, you can bet the average consumer who has been ripped off has no recourse. 

But perhaps one of the winners in this fraudulent ecosystem — the SSPs – should consider cracking down on this practice.

In nature, predators are kept in check by something called a predator-prey relationship. If predators become too successful, they eliminate their prey and seal their own doom. But this relationship only works if there are no new sources of prey. If we’re talking about an ecosystem that constantly introduces new prey, nothing keeps predators in check.

Let’s look at the incentive for the game publishers to police the predators. True, allowing fraudulent ads does no favours for the users of their game. A largescale study by Gao, Zeng, Lu et al found that bad ads lead to a bad user experience.

But do game publishers really care? There is no real user loyalty to games, so churn and burn seems to be the standard operating procedure. This creates an environment particularly conducive to predators.

So what about the SSPs?

GeoEdge, an ad security solution that guards against malvertising, among other things, has just released its Q1 Ad Quality Report. In an interview, Yuval Shiboli, the company’s director of product market, said that while malicious ads are common across all channels, in-game advertising is particularly bad because of a lack of active policing: “The fraudsters are very selective in who they show their malicious ads, looking for users who are scam-worthy, meaning there is no security detection software in the environment.”

Quality of advertising is usually directly correlated with the pricing of the ad inventory. The cheaper the ad, the poorer the quality. In-game ads are relatively cheap, giving fraudulent predators an easy environment to thrive in. And this entire environment is created by the SSPs.

According to Shiboli, it’s a little surprising to learn who are the biggest culprits on the SSP side: “Everybody on both the sell side and buy side works with Google, and everyone assumes that its platforms are clean and safe. We’ve found the opposite is true, and that of all the SSP providers, Google is the least motivated to block bad ads.”

By allowing — even encouraging — a predatory marketplace to exist, Google and other SSPs are doing nothing less than aiding and abetting criminals. In the short term, this may add incrementally to their profits, but at what long-term price?

The Seedy, Seedy World of Keto Gummies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I admit, I was morbidly fascinated.

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

I started digging.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I certainly will. More on that soon.

The Comedic Comeback

Public confessions are a funny thing.

No, seriously. They’re funny. At least, John Mulaney hopes they’re funny.

His latest Netflix special, Baby J, which just dropped two weeks ago is all about coming back from having his reputation hammered on social media.

John has had a tough time of late. He filled his “Covid Years” with getting divorced from his wife, Anna Marie Tendler, stumbling into an intervention, going to rehab, relapsing, going back to rehab, dating Olivia Munn – and – oh yeah – announcing he’s having a baby with Munn. All of that happening not necessarily in that order.

Mulaney opens his Neflix show with a little song and dance:

“You know what I mean!
We all quarantined!
We all went to rehab and we all got divorced,
and now our rep-u-ta-tion is different!”
“No one knows what to think! 
Hey ya! 
All the kids like Bo Burnham more!
Because he’s currently less problematic.…

Likability is a jail.”


“Likability is a jail.” Mulaney sang that with a smile on his face, but there is some grit in that line. You can almost feel it grinding in the gears of his career.

To be fair, when you build a career on likability in the era of social media, you have to accept that it’s a pretty tenuous foundation for fame. It leaves you extremely vulnerable to being publicly called out for anything that might rub against the grain of your carefully constructed brand.  And, if you are called out – or, in extreme cases – completely cancelled, you have to somehow make it all the way back from simply being accepted to being liked again.

When you think about it, it’s probably a lot easier to build your brand on being an asshole. It’s a lot lower bar to get over. I don’t think Donald Trump loses a lot of sleep over being cancelled. And – just last week –  people gathered at the Met in New York for their Gala honoring fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld, who has never apologized for being one of the biggest and most outspoken assholes in history.  

Mulaney is the latest of a long line of comedian come backs who have been hammered by the fickle fist of being “social media famous.” He is gingerly treading in the footsteps of Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari – even Chris Rock took a stab at it, and he wasn’t the one that got cancelled. That would be Will Smith, who is still trying to pick up the pieces of his career after an ill-considered incident of physical assault in front of a worldwide audience.

You probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there’s a playbook for coming back after being eviscerated in the public arena of social media. According to Lori Levine, CEO of the PR firm Flying Television, it requires something called an “Apology Tour.”

The timing of this is critical. According to Levine, you first have to fly under the radar for a bit, “take a certain amount of time to stay quiet, stay off social media, not engage in any press interviews.” After a period of being suitably and silently contrite, you then move to Stage Two, “Slowly return explaining that they have ‘done the work’ [and] are feeling remorseful.”

This was pretty much the playbook that Mulaney followed. The advantage, if you’re a comedian, is that the stand-up stage is the perfect platform for the “apology tour.” It has the built in advantage of being an entertainment form that thrives on making fun of yourself. That’s probably why a good portion of Netflix’s programming calendar consists of comedians lining up for their respective “apology tours.”

Comedians on the social media comeback tour are also given a helping hand in this by the emergence of the “uneasy laughter” of dark comedy over the past decade or so. While dark – or black – humor has been around decades in the form of novels or movies, it has only been in the last decade or so that stand-up comedians combined dark humor with an unflinchingly intimate look into their own personal struggles. Since the unapologetically brilliant live performance of Tig Notaro in 2012 where she talked about her recent diagnosis of breast cancer, stand-up has dared to go to places never imagined just a few years ago.

This creates the perfect environment for the “apology tour.” The whole point is to have a no holds barred discussion of where the comedian erred in judgement. Mulaney navigated this potential minefield with surefooted grace. Probably the funniest and most authentic bit was when he started riffing with a 5th grader up in the balcony at the start of the show, warning him not to “do any of the things I’m about to talk about.”  Somehow – to me – that felt more real than everything that was to follow.

If anything, Mulaney’s recent performance was a sign of our times. It was a necessary step back from public humiliation. I’m not sure it was that funny. But it was John Mulaney reclaiming some control over his public persona. He was telling us we can’t possibly do anything worst to him than he’s done to himself…

“What, are you gonna cancel John Mulaney? I’ll kill him. I almost did.”