Tài liệu Chasing String in the Digital Era docx

Contents EndorsementsDedication Preface Introduction Chapter 1: Politics and Media Behold, Here Comes Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee The Demise Of Mainstream Media, One Constituency At A Ti

Chasing String in the Digital Era

by Jaffer Ali Smashwords Edition Copyright 2013 Jaffer Ali

Contents Endorsements

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Politics and Media

Behold, Here Comes Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee

The Demise Of Mainstream Media, One Constituency At A TimeDOJ Asks Court to Keep GOOGLE-NSA Partnership SecretThe Decline of the MSM

What Middle East Uprisings Say About Online Marketing

The Egyptian Revolution, Media and the Internet

Is Media Privatization The New Trend?

Chapter 2: On Technology

Our Faustian Bargain

Has Google’s Empire Passed Its Zenith?

Can Eric Schmidt and Marketers Predict Human Behavior?

First, Do No Harm: How Our Need to Intervene Ruins EverythingFrom Simulated Life To Simulated Marketing

Will the Tallest Midget in the Room Please Stand Up!

Chapter 3: The Online Ecosystem

Sustainability

Media Evolve or Die?

After the Last Sky

The Internet’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Rescuing The Internet From Infocrats

Inside Plato’s Digital Cave

A Critical Discourse

One More Time - The Ad Model Is Broken

Has Online Advertising Lost Its “Schwerpunkt”?

The Audience In The Media Ecosystem

Chapter 4: On Privacy

An Interview with George Orwell & Paddy Chayefsky

Big Brother’s Brother

Why Behavioral Targeting Is Immoral

Behavioral Targeting: Putting Lipstick on a Pig

A Brand’s-Eye View of Behavioral Targeting

Chapter 5: Uncertainty Reigns

The Center Cannot Hold

Limits of Knowledge

The Paradigm of Prediction

Embracing Uncertainty

The Pretense of Knowledge

Chapter 6: Sense and Nonsense

Walking the Talk: Count on Yourself

Respecting the Rodney Principle

The Algorithmic Debate Is Over- The Loser Is Clear

Long Tail Marketing – A Field of Screams

Time for a New Thinking Cap

What’s My Job?

Leaked Memo from a Brand Manager – ‘Discovered’ by Jaffer Ali

Chapter 7: The Wonder of it All

Chasing String in the Digital Era

Marketing with Wonder

Being ‘In the Zone’

Dreams of the Heart

O Captain, My Captain

Abandoning Fear

Taking Flight with Black Swans

Fear is the Mind-killer

Media and Marketing Beyond The Algorithm

55 About the Author  

What Are They Saying About Chasing String in the Digital Era?

“Jaffer Ali’s prose is about all things large and small while forever lighting the way Chasing String in the

Digital Era is part a working-man’s Nassim Nicholas Taleb, part Henry David Thoreau, part John Boyd, part

Marshall McLuhan, part soaring heart, part unfettered mind and - thankfully - all vintage Jaffer Ali.”

- Jeff Einstein, Media critic and founder of Brothers Einstein Digital Agency

“Everyone in online marketing has opinions, but like all industries there’s a great deal of groupthink Jaffer has

a refreshing voice for two important reasons First, he has invested his own money to test the approaches he has opinions about And second, he is more concerned with what works than with what is popular I highly value what Jaffer has to say So should you.”

- Tom Cunniff, Founder of Cunniff Consulting

“Jaffer Ali writes from the intersections of Heart, Common Sense, Street Smarts and Experience I’ve helped countless brands in the digital marketing sector since 1994 and learn something new every time he makes time

to share his wisdom Whether this is your first foray into ecommerce and digital marketing or you’re an

experienced veteran, this collection of Life and Business lessons will open your eyes.”

- Adam Boettiger, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist

“Whether you’re talking politics, privacy or technology, Jaffer’s insight and knowledge will help you sift through the illusion of everyday life and cut right to the heart of matters!”

- Shelly Palmer, Fox Television’s Shelly Palmer Digital Living & author, Digital Wisdom: Thought

Leadership For a Connected World

Everything I am or will likely become rests on the foundations that my father, Khalil B Ali, taught me At an early age, he inculcated in me the notion of what it meant to be a “free man” So much of what I write is a loving tribute to this amazing man and Father He was my first teacher about entrepreneurship and through his lovingly patient and guiding hand lit the way for the path forward

No dedication would be complete without mentioning my wife, Carol She has been my faithful companion for over 26 years She defines what it means to nurture all that know her and gratitude is unbound for the joy she has brought every day to our lives As a serial entrepreneur, there is no way I could have managed the highs and lows without her undying support This is not a cliché Everyone needs at least one person in the world to believe in them Her faith carried me through many tough days as she created an oasis of calm at home

Lastly, I would like to thank my cousin Tom and sister Anisa for their patience in being my business partners for over seventeen years It has been quite a ride and they have always been generous with their spirit in both good times and bad

The online digital marketing and media ecosystem is a troubled mess But few of the trade publications

acknowledge or are aware of the mess Since our own media companies and marketing division has touched every part of the online ecosystem, we have a front row seat into the problems and challenges of our industry

I started writing about the problems of the industry way back in 1998 and continued more or less to this day It

is not always comfortable to be the one yelling that the emperor has no clothes, but that is what I set out to do

Chasing String in the Digital Era is a collection of the essays and articles written over the years.

But what is “chasing string?” If you ever had a pet cat, you would understand how it chased string endlessly, seemingly without purpose While we can never be sure what purpose is in the cat’s mind, modern day

marketers are doing their best feline imitation Only the digital string being chased is behavioral targeting, Big Data and a love of all things new (neomania) Our industry is chasing this string all the while purring like a kitten

I have noticed that few of the pundits that do most of the writing really have skin in the game What I mean by this is that few are really spending their own money while making a living in the online ecosystem They may

be flush with VC money and publishing content Others are at agencies who must peddle the latest technologies and services to their clients Other “experts” come from large brands making media buying decisions with budgets supplied from high above them

This environment does not lend itself to truth It lends itself to a great deal of cheerleading While we have made a good living within this dysfunctional ecosystem, we never could get ourselves to don the pom poms and cheerlead I am congenitally unable to cheerlead

Because we always spent our own money exploring this new thing or that new idea, we had to look at reality squarely in the eye If banners sucked as a medium, we would only say it after spending our own money If pre-roll advertising could be sold, but REALLY did not work very well, how could we continue to buy it? We could not How could we continue to sell pre-roll? We could not and still look ourselves in the mirror

Nothing stops you from chasing string more than if that twine can wrap around your neck and strangle you We discovered the dangers of chasing string pretty quickly There are others that really make a lot of money

dangling that string in front of others Another metaphor of “snake oil” also comes to mind

Chasing string has another terrible side effect We get shockingly distracted from what is important And that goes way beyond making or losing money Our digital lives have engendered the age of distraction where data trumps knowledge and wisdom is in very short supply

Chasing String in the Digital Era is meant to give readers a chance to pause…to think To add a bit more

deliberation to what they do We cannot continue to short change privacy…to exaggerate differences between political parties…to surrender our thoughts and inclinations to entities “too big to fail”

This collection of essays is a journey of sorts Politics, economics, marketing and media are covered Each essay can stand on its own and collectively, a business and worldview emerges that hopefully the reader will appreciate

Jaffer Ali, March, 2013

This collection of essays represents my fourth contribution to the publishing industry Some may find it a curious blend The articles or essays are divided into seven themes But what unites them all is a sense that something is not quite right

In Chapter One, “Politics and Media,” the curious relationship between our media, economics and political discourse is examined Traditional media is having a difficulty competing with the Internet on many fronts It is worthwhile asking just how much our MSM is secretly subsidized to maintain prevailing societal myths

But as audiences for MSM news erodes, independent, online media are replacing traditional media outlets that frame discourse with only two frames of reference The online environment allows for many different types of flowers to bloom

In Chapter Two, the overriding theme deals with why we should not place unbridled faith in technology There

is a pervasive love of all things new… neomania if you will and this is not healthy Technology and its

relationship to regime change has been drastically overstated Examining the relationship to social change and technology is a subject worthy of a book by itself

In Chapter Three we take a look at the online ecosystem from several perspectives Asking questions of

sustainability to drilling down and examining the advertising model, there is a lot of fodder for the fire if one wishes to explore in depth after reading

Chapter Four deals with privacy challenges a connected world presents In a drive for improving advertising returns, there is a real cost to our privacy The irony of ironies is that all the data collected on us is not leading

to improved economic performance

If one is honest and experiences poor performance of the new ad models, it behooves us to understand why so much data has not improved ROI Chapter Five deals with how uncertainty is cooked into the meals we are served… in our online ad models and beyond

There is not always a hard delineation between one chapter and another In Chapter Six, we cover the extremes between what makes sense and nonsense We hope you have a little fun with The Rodney Principle which liberally uses simple, yet elegant one-liners from Rodney Dangerfield Tying jokes to business models was not

as difficult as it might sound Working for fifteen years in the online space, I have seen more than my share of business models that were no better than jokes

The final chapter “The Wonder of It All” offers hope and a possible way out It is not just a way out for online marketers, it is a way out for us personally who admit to the challenges of being tethered to the Internet 24/7 Our online lives have merged with our offline lives The space between the two has narrowed They promise to

narrow even further One need not look further than Google Glasses in beta at the time of this e-book coming out.

Chasing string is a useful metaphor for our lives I hope these collected essays offer a perspective that can help you in your personal and professional lives

Chapter 1: Politics and Media

Behold, Here Comes Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee

Published 10/9/12

“Our democracy is but a name We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.”

- Helen Keller, in a letter written in 1911

Did you happen to catch the “debate” last week? The monumentally wooden Jim Lehrer spent most of his time trying to get Romney and Obama to air how different they were from each other Lehrer was not so much of a moderator but more of a human jack-o-lantern with eyes looking as if he was drawn by a Japanimation artist.But I digress…

I spent a lot of time watching the pundits afterwards further making a case for the “stark differences” between Obama and Romney CNN and MSNBC felt the differences were not drawn as sharply as they could have…and

“should have” Chris Matthews was practically foaming at the mouth because Obama did not draw enough distinctions

In short, Tweedle Dum appeared too much like Tweedle Dee

I have been writing about politics, media and marketing for over thirty years now The binding thread of all three is that they all deal with illusion My particular style of writing is to expose the illusions, sort of like that guy sitting in the front row at a magic show saying the bird is in the front, left pocket

“There’s not a dime’s worth a difference between the two of them.”

- Judge Napolitano

So here is just a partial checklist of areas in which Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee are in almost perfect

harmony:

Bailouts: Both supported corporate welfare programs

Federal Reserve: Both support the policies of the Fed as well as Chairman Ben Bernanke

Iranian Sanctions: Both support

Patriot Act: Both support

NDAA: Both support [National Defense Authorization Act codifies into law, for the first time in our history, the

right to imprison US citizens indefinitely WITHOUT trial]

Universal Health Care: Both support [Marginal differences]

Gun Laws: Both support the same registration procedures

Foreign Aid: Both support same levels of foreign aid

Support for Israel: Both fall over themselves touting full-throated support

Aggressive Foreign Policy: Both have neo-con advisors advocating imperial ambitions

Goldman Sachs: Largest donor to both campaigns

“Between Romney and Obama, there isn’t all that much difference.”

- George Soros

I actually could go on for quite some time While I disagree with most of the above, that is not the point of this post The reason for this blog post is to point out the illusion To demonstrate that the differences are

exaggerated by powerful interests that seeks to foster the illusion of choice

I know most reading this are about to protest and ready with MSM talking points on the minutia of differences between them

Now for the speculation

We have demonstrated that the pigeon is in the inside front pocket But why does the MSM wish to continue the illusion? Why does the MSM want to foster the nonsensical notion of “choice” and therefore seek to draw distinctions without real differences?

The answer is quite simple As long as we FEEL there is a difference between these candidates, we will not seek out candidates that want real change The MSM exists to perpetuate the myths of the power elite In

essence, to protect the elite To protect its interests To protect the status quo So if we busy ourselves with the illusion of choice, real change can be avoided

A candidate like Ron Paul threatens the status quo because he represents real change He would knock down the military-industrial complex He would bring troops home from 170 bases around the world He would eliminate the Federal Reserve He would decentralize decision from authoritarian government to individual states He would not make war without a Congressional declaration of war

That is major stuff…and real change

How much money did Goldman Sachs give to RP’s campaign? They actually strip the illusion by giving

generously to both candidates…but the MSM keeps that quiet It matters not to Goldman which candidate wins,

as long as the winner is Obama or Romney

Because of the Internet, the grip of MSM and therefore the elite’s mouthpiece is waning with each passing election That is why the elite tried hard to pass SOPA and will try many new things in the coming years to control information The elite requires a powerful advocate.

Helen Keller wrote the words that introduced this post back in 1911 Although blind, she saw more than we do Although deaf, Helen Keller heard more acutely than we do

The Demise Of Mainstream Media, One Constituency At A Time

- John Swinton, 19th Century NY Times Journalist (Source: Labor’s Untold Story)

The great political theater otherwise known as our political conventions are over The way Ron Paul and his delegates were treated made me pause to think about how the MSM covered him I happened to be in Maine when the Ron Paul delegation was unseated by the RNC The RNC did not want Paul to have a 5-state plurality

of delegates that would have insured his name put into nomination for President

The MSM basically made this story nothing more than a footnote in the theatrical production Millions of Ron Paul supporters know that the MSM basically left him out of the equation for the entire campaign In other words, the Ron Paul constituency learned what journalist John Swinton said more than 100 years ago

But how many other constituencies have learned the lessons of Ron Paul and John Swinton?

If you are a Native American that has not fully assimilated or lost his/her identity, would you not know that the MSM has largely marginalized your history…and your present circumstances as well? On my recent trip to the great Northeast, I traveled from Illinois (a vestige of the Indian word, “irenwe-wa” meaning “speak the regular way”) to Niagara Falls (Iroquois for “thundering water”) and on to Maine which was only inhabited by the Algonquin Indians until the 1600s

My trip was breathtakingly beautiful, but the long forgotten Native American names and villages along the way reminded me what Gore Vidal said; “USA stands for the United States of Amnesia.” MSM has been obliging in forgetting history and even made its destruction sound noble with phrases like “Manifest Destiny.” MSM lost the confidence and trust of the Native American constituency long ago

If you are a black person living in the USA, an overwhelming majority have dropped out of the MSM target audience One in three black men end up in prison Less than 30% of blacks vote I think it is safe to say that the MSM has lost the trust of a majority of this constituency, from conservative blacks like Louis Farrakhan and his followers to progressive voices like Cornel West.

If you are a progressive who hangs on every word Noam Chomsky says, you will not find him anywhere on MSM news outlets If you lean left…really left, there is no place within the MSM matrix to satisfy you You understand quite well what Swinton was talking about

If you are one of the 7 million Muslims in the US, you know how the MSM implies association with Al Qaida if you dare question drone strikes killing civilians The NY Times has done this on more than one occasion, helping out its handlers MSM has never earned the trust and confidence of this constituency, so it could not lose that trust

If you are a real conservative Tea Party member (as opposed to the neo-conservative Tea Party hack) or a liberal Occupy Wall Street protester, you know how the MSM has marginalized you as fringe groups and most likely have you wearing a tinfoil hat The MSM has lost the trust and confidence of these two constituencies

If you are a person who questions why a private bank (Federal Reserve) is allowed to print money and earn interest from printing trillions of dollars…interest paid by the government earned from taxing citizens…you are marginalized as a “conspiracy theorist” for even asking why we pay taxes to pay interest to a private bank Meanwhile, the General Accounting Office (GAO) released a partial audit of the Fed and discovered that $16 TRILLION was given to banks, not the amount reported by the MSM (see page 131 of the report for details.)

If you are one of the 57% that believe that Kennedy was not killed by a lone gunman or 52% of the population who questions the official version of 9-11, the MSM labels you a kook…and tries to marginalize you Simply put, these constituencies no longer believe or trust the MSM which continues to promote the official story.Another former, NY Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize summarized why the MSM is in decline:

“We are ruled, entertained, and informed by courtiers — and the media has evolved into a class of

courtiers The Democrats, like the Republicans, are mostly courtiers Our pundits and experts, at least those with prominent public platforms, are courtiers We are captivated by the hollow stagecraft of political theater as we are ruthlessly stripped of power It is smoke and mirrors, tricks and con games, and the purpose behind it is deception.”

- Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle

There are many more constituencies for whom the MSM has lost trust In the past, there was really no place for these constituencies to turn But the Internet has allowed these groups to find and nurture each other And what has become of the national news outlets?

They are in precipitous decline With each attempt to marginalize yet another group, newspapers and national news outlets like CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC News, NBC News and CBS News have all become a shell of their former selves They increasingly carry the water for their masters They give quote approval for Obama and Romney camps They withhold stories on demand.

When the most trusted name in US journalism is an American comedian, Jon Stewart, the joke may be on us The MSM is in full decline because it has lost constituencies one at a time I could have continued with naming more but in the interest of time, I cut it off Many of the ones listed may disagree with each other but they are all

in agreement that trust in MSM has been lost And they have all found alternatives

DOJ Asks Court to Keep GOOGLE-NSA Partnership Secret

Published 3/16/12

“Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how

it can bear discussion and publicity.”

I have written extensively about the collusion between government and corporate data hoarders I need not go into that here The real point of taking to the keyboard is to chastise our industry trades for a job poorly done Amidst all the privacy talk, how much has focused on the unholy alliance between Google and the government?

If I am to be kind, I will say, “not enough” But if we are honest, we can conjure a raft of epithets that come much closer to the mark I accuse our industry trades of malignant neglect The privacy debate is incomplete without addressing collusion between “Big Data” and Big Government

And in the rare instances when the topic arises, some “enterprising” mouthpiece for “Big Data” will invariably

go on the attack by labeling the whistleblower a “conspiracy, tin-foil hat aficionado” I have personally brought this issue up in two high profile industry discussion groups comprising self-professed industry leaders

With the exception of only a few, the issue did not resonate I guess it was not deemed important by the trade publications The trades exist to inform us on important issues that affect us, yet the ongoing collusion between

“Big Data” and the NSA has not made the headlines Are these trades de facto tools of these unholy alliances? Not sure Perhaps the answer lies in an analysis of whose advertising dollars are at play Or, maybe the industry trades are not tools, but merely fools

So often I have felt like Brando in the Wild One When asked, “What are you protesting?” He answered, “What have you got?” I don’t write as much as I used to I am tired It sure would be grand to see a few younger people

in our online industry pick up the torch and defy the darkness

The Decline of the MSM

So I decided to continue the theme The quote that begins today’s essay comes from Edward Bernays Have you heard of him? If you are a media professional and have not heard of him, our problem as a nation begins here

We all need to learn the history of the profession in which we operate

Bernays is the father of modern-day advertising and public relations He also happened to be the nephew of Sigmund Freud He wrote a book, Propaganda Back then, the term “propaganda” was not a negative term It was not until after WW II and Nazi Goebbels set out to systematically apply the principles outlined by Bernays that the term took on negative connotations

By the way, before you start thinking that Bernays was some kind of right-wing yahoo, he was a liberal in the Rooseveltian sense Once one really dives down into media criticism, you discover that conservative/liberal labels do not really matter

Last week an expose came out on the BBC You probably did not hear about it, but it was significant The Independent broke the story how documentaries were produced by production companies receiving millions of dollars from the subjects of the films Egypt’s Mubarak paid a production company to tout how great he was and the BBC hired this firm to make a documentary on Egypt

The Independent discovered 13 such propaganda films made in the past year The BBC was forced to issue a global “apology” for breaking editorial rules This is a big story and ask yourself, “why didn’t you know about the story?”

I spend a lot of my time reading alternative media sources And I try to understand history in a different light ever since reading Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the US.” But a recent PBS documentary, “Slavery By Another Name” shocked me After the 13th amendment was passed making slavery illegal, a little known exception in the amendment made slavery legal if one was imprisoned

So “peonage laws” were passed throughout the south that made many cultural practices that blacks normally did illegal The result? Hundreds of thousands of blacks were imprisoned and then their services sold to coal mines, steel mills and other businesses

How is it that this shameful chapter in history is not known by every grade school child? Instead, we get a day off in grade school honoring Columbus, who raped, murdered and pillaged from the native population amidst landing in the New World

You see, our history books are part of the MSM and they serve a real function of fostering myths Propaganda

by another name

I have never voted Republican NOR Democrat so I am no party hack But if you have not noticed how the MSM treats Ron Paul, you are simply not paying attention Here is just one line from the MSM LA Times trying to marginalize Ron Paul

“As usual, he ranted about monetary policy and railed against wars and other military operations

abroad.”

- Kim Geiger, LA Times, 2/4/2012

But where the MSM particularly shines is in its full throated calls for war with Iran Lost amidst the rhetoric is the fact that Iran has not attacked another country in more than 300 years It has oil, which we all know, but no longer accepts dollars to settle oil sales This fact coupled with what that means evades discussion

On the Morning Joe (2/15/2012), the normally antiwar Al Sharpton was trotted out at 5:30 AM to lend his voice

to the cause of war The MSM needed Rev Al to shepherd his flock or constituency to the cause of war We are being manipulated into supporting war

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society

constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

- Edward Bernays

The BBC was caught being subsidized by propaganda agents The Bush Administration was caught paying Armstrong Williams to go on MSM outlets to promote education policies They also were caught paying

generals to write and appear on MSM outlets touting war with Iraq The MSM gives the platform…for a price

as they are secretly subsidized by government agencies That is how they are surviving the huge erosion in audience and not just in the US as the BBC and the Dutch MSM shows

If you have read this far and are asking “so what” then you need to understand how critical it is for governments

to grab control of information And that means the Internet The MSM is losing its grip Ron Paul’s campaign demonstrates this point well The MSM continued declining audience when it comes to news is losing to

alternative information sources This is the real intention behind SOPA, PIPA and ACTA Beware of what new alphabet soup will soon be served to you

What Middle East Uprisings Say About Online Marketing

Published 2/18/11

“Despite our best intentions, the system is sufficiently dysfunctional that intelligence failure is

guaranteed.”

- From The Coming Intelligence Failure, Defense Intelligence Agency Analysis

Middle East politics and online marketing are two of my passions Whenever I get a chance to combine the two

in one article, I gladly take the opportunity

Unless you have been living in a cave, you know that there are major uprising going on in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Iran With the exception of Iran where Western support for protesters involves

financial subsidies, none of these organic protests were predicted

Israel’s vaunted Game Theory and the overwhelming data mining techniques of the CIA have failed

MISERABLY to predict the most massive events in modern Middle East history Nassim Taleb would label these uprisings “Black Swan” events – occurrences that deviate beyond what is normally expected of a situation and that are extremely difficult to predict

A simple question to ask is; “If our predictive modeling methodologies cannot foretell major, cataclysmic events, what value do these tools really have?”

The simple answer is not much

Think of the US government’s investment in Mubarak This is not a hypothetical because we invested in him for 30 years, as we did the Shah of Iran from 1953 to 1979 Mubarak and the Shah paid off huge dividends

while they reigned Much like the huge dividends we have reaped through our support of the Bahraini, Saudi and Kuwaiti monarchies.

But these investments turn potentially toxic when we continue to pour money into them because we cannot predict the Black Swan In essence, the Middle East is experiencing a political market crash This analogy rings true in light of recent experience that proved data methodologies incapable of predicting, let alone preventing, a global stock meltdown

And this is the point that behavioral targeters and those supporting this pseudo science refuse to acknowledge These models invariably – and cataclysmically – fail when you need them most! The CIA has computers

capable of doing 10 trillion calculations per second that use the SAME DATA MINING AND PREDICTIVE METHODOLOGIES favored by stock-market mathematicians The CIA uses the SAME DATA MINING AND PREDICTIVE METHODOLOGIES touted by online behavioral-targeting marketers

“If you want to make a fool fail, give him information.”

- Nassim Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

Marketers with significant skin in the media investment game should heed this warning: the more you “bet” on these failed methodologies, the more you are at risk when the Black Swan rears its predictably unpredictable head If you continue to measure more and more about less and less, and rely on algorithmic reduction to

predict human behavior, the only certainty is that you will fail And you won’t realize it until it happens

The Egyptian Revolution, Media and the Internet

Published 2/3/11

OK, if you are only watching CNN/FOX/ABC/NBC/MSNBC, you probably think you know what is going on

in Egypt Right?

Wrong Al Jazeera English was the place to get the information, except since cable operators are largely

boycotting the channel in the US, you would have to be one of approximately 1 million folks who were glued to

Al Jazeera’s live stream

Tin pot dictator, Hosni Mubarak decided to follow the US playbook in Iraq After occupying Baghdad, the US occupation decided to let chaos reign, hardened criminals set free from prisons, social services suspended, museums looted all the while controlling the information landscape This “chaos strategy” involves creating a crisis then to be followed by the “solution” of order Iraq still has not found that order years after the fall of Saddam But that is a different story

In a key component of this chaos strategy, Mubarak had police in plain clothes start looting This fact you would not hear from US media outlets, or Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned channel (King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is a staunch supporter of Mubarak) The Egyptian people outwitted and largely foiled the regime and its plan People quickly created neighborhood watch groups and protected antiquities, properties and each other.

When the initial chaos strategy failed due to citizen activism, thousands of police donned plain clothes and mounted a counter protest They began attacking anti-government protesters with Molotov cocktails, gunfire, rocks, knives, etc

Al Jazeera had its license revoked because it dared to expose the agent provocateurs Mubarak’s government tried to suppress this and other news by denying 22 million internet users access to online information (out of

85 million total population) This was as much an attempt to control information from getting out as it was an attempt to stop protesters from communicating and coordinating with each other

Al Jazeera had six on-the-ground correspondents arrested, but continued to broadcast images from an

undisclosed location They continued to interview people though land line communications and satellite phones

as the cell phone industry closed down by government edict

To keep the outside world abreast of what was going on, proxy tweeters relayed information called in Dial up accounts in France were set up since land lines had not been cut Twitter was used as a broadcast medium as an army of worldwide sympathizers retweeted news Al Jazeera through Creative Commons made much of its footage available for uploading

YouTube and RT videos provided brutal images and were shared worldwide Hundreds of citizen journalists communicated with the outside world in 140 character bursts New “networks” were seemingly created

overnight Audio feeds from on-the-ground protesters and citizen journalists somehow made their way from

“Liberation Square” and Alexandria to websites The URL was tweeted around the world

Mubarak was not going to give up power easily He decided to name a VP, Omar Suleiman This former

intelligence thug was in charge of torture and the US rendition program Again, a piece of news you would not hear on ANY US mainstream media outlet until days later Instead, our media gave us a steady attempt to bolster Muhammad El Baredei as a possible successor to Mubarak El Baredei was one of the key folks who was part of the WMD charade in Iraq and was in Vienna when the revolution broke out

The real story of the Internet and Egyptian revolution is that it was largely irrelevant to the events ground The digital revolution helped us outside Egypt stay informed but the people on-the-ground had the best social media at their disposal; word of mouth But I will suggest that there was one tremendous benefit of Mubarak’s inability to block the flow of information; the world had a window to what was really going on The White House was actually monitoring Twitter feeds of #Egypt

on-the-Is Media Privatization The New Trend?

Published 1/1/08

The title of this article is somewhat rhetorical With Clear Channel and the Tribune Company each entering into multi-billion dollar leveraged buyouts (LBO), there are two main reasons for what some are seeing as this emerging trend One is economic and the other is political

The first is often spoken of freely in public discourse while the other lies largely hidden beneath the water line

As audience shares decline and future economic performance appear unstable, mainstream media assets must get higher marginal advertising rates to compensate for the new realities How long is this sustainable? The LA Times recently said,

“Shares of major newspaper publishers have been declining in recent months over deepening concerns about an ongoing migration of readers and advertisers to the Internet.”

- LA Times, October 18, 2007

“Going private” is one strategy media outlets are considering Even the venerable Sumner Redstone, Chairman

of CBS responded to the LBO trend,

“…would we consider [going private] at some time in the future? We consider all alternatives And if we did decide to take one of these companies private there would be more money offered than we could possibly handle.”

- Sumner Redstone, Chairman of CBS

Speculation abounds that the NY Times and Virgin Media will also follow the privatization trend But the astute reader will instantly recognize that “going private” will not solve the fundamental economic dilemma facing traditional media Going private is no magical elixir for solving the audience shift that is afoot

But what going private does offer is a shield for companies from prying, public eyes Traditional media has an enormous “responsibility” that is rarely spoken about That is to promote the prevailing worldview of the

government What? Let me say this in another way Traditional media exists to promote acquiescence to a political agenda

Let me use two examples to clarify

The number one selling album in the nation last week was the new Bruce Springsteen album, Magic Clear

Channel, the largest radio network has ordered that its stations not play a single track from the album They are publicly saying Springsteen is too old, yet they play his older tracks liberally.*

It makes no sense until you understand that Magic is intensely anti-war and Clear Channel, which is being

purchased by Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, has the unfortunate habit of exercising its political agenda

It is obvious that people will gravitate toward alternative media outlets to find “The Boss” Clear Channel seems

to be acting against its economic interests This situation only makes sense when you understand that it is being loyal to its political agenda

Another example of the media dutifully acting as a quasi-governmental arm can be seen by examining how the

media en masse reacted to the September air strike on a Syrian facility When President Bush was asked about

it he curtly said, “I will not comment on that.” The press corps tried one more run at the issue and the President grew more irritated The press corps got the message and let the issue slide into obscurity

But just a few weeks after the attack, Israel’s Jerusalem Post published a report that it was not Israel who

attacked Syria, but it was the US Air Force that carried out the air strike and Israel only provided air cover

The truth or falsity of who attacked is beyond me to personally know, but the point is that when a government official can determine what is news or what is not news by dismissing important questions, then we in fact have

a subservient media that is complicit with the government agenda It should be clear to anyone with any sense

of journalism that an air strike on Syria is news, whichever nation carried out the attack

The case has been made that mainstream media audience share will continue its decline if media outlets do not break their allegiance to an overall political agenda I have read in at least four or five alternative online media

sources about our air strike on Syria, and of course have listened to Springsteen’s Magic tracks on outlets other

than Clear Channel Millions have found alternatives to traditional media and will continue to do so

What I am suggesting is that there is a connection between the economic dynamic of audience shrinkage and the overall political agenda All media must be subsidized from advertising or other sources In dictatorships, media

is subsidized directly by the government In democracies, media is subsidized by corporations

The Private Equity firms leading the LBO charge have a political agenda as well as economic agenda

“Private-equity firms …largely unknown outside Wall Street now possess more than $2 trillion in buying power In addition to Kohlberg Kravis, the new brand names of finance are Bain Capital, Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group and Texas Pacific Group.”

- NY Times July 25, 2006

If you doubt the political agenda of some of these Private Equity firms, one only needs to look at the board of directors of just one of the movers and shakers in this space:

Carlyle Group

George H Bush: Former President

James Baker: Former Sec of State

Frank Carlucci: Former Dir of CIA

John Majors: Former PM of England

So the trend to privatize will continue precisely because audience shares will certainly continue to decline The more that CNN, Fox, NY Times, Washington Post and other media outlets appear to become subservient to and act as a quasi-propaganda arm of Washington politicians, people will “exit”.

Privatization will allow mainstream media outlets to follow a political agenda without the public quarterly report card Ultimately, privatization is not a long term answer to the problem At best it is like sweeping back the tide with the proverbial broom

Notes:

* Bruce: Magic Refused Radio Play

- Neil Postman

The end of the year is always a time to take stock of the past year and if one is lucky enough to dream, we can slow down enough to wonder in the world of possibilities As part of taking personal stock, it is fair to say that there are a few recurring themes in what I write

After a cursory review, a pompous approach to our industry must be admitted Trying to be more erudite than I actually am is a character flaw that can only be cured through abandoning an ego often running amok

Hopefully 2012 will bring more humility to bear

Also after reviewing several of past essays, an old speech that Neil Postman gave came to mind Neil Postman was a media ecologist and wrote about the intersection between culture and technology The quote at the beginning is a nice summary of his work It accurately summarizes the binding thread of my essays

The legend of the Faustian bargain never has the devil [Mephistopheles] outlining the potential dangers of making a pact with him That makes sense since the infernal region does not have any benefits to sell as the alternative to the supposed advantages An overview of our industry trades reveals an unbridled belief in the benefits of technology Faith in our media and technological prowess has assumed similar irrational impulses worthy of the Heaven’s Gate cult At minimum, faith in technology has assumed religious zeal

For my part, transferring faith in a higher power to science and technology has not enriched our beings As Thoreau said, we have an “improved means to an unimproved end.” For those blinded by their faith in new technologies, they are so enamored with their tools (means) that they rarely contemplate whether the ends are improved They assume it, but never contemplate

So what I set out to do in my essays is explain the other side of the Faustian bargain Our trade publications should be promoting this dialectic But they are too busy promoting the thesis to be interested with the harmful

side of the bargain After all, our trade publications owe their existence to interests promoting media and

technology Audiences spend ad dollars and fill trade show space This is only one reason I have never been asked to speak at an industry event They rather have Mephistopheles extolling the virtues of technology rather than our hubris

Our industry is chock full of hubris How, other than hubris, do you explain Google’s Eric Schmidt’s words when he said, “we will be able to predict what someone will search for before they search for it”? Even if it were possible, what are the hazards or costs? How much data on us would be necessary to fulfill this promise? And what costs to our privacy and personal freedom is at risk? How might this information be transferred to a government increasingly interested in our every thought?

So as we move into 2012, yours truly hopefully will strike a more humble pose yet still determined to provide a clarion call to explore how our media and technologies have another, yes darker side I am no Luddite and believe we should not eschew technology reflexively We just should not accept it reflexively Let’s use our media and technology wisely Otherwise, we will be the ones used

Have a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year

Has Google’s Empire Passed Its Zenith?

Published 12/8/10

“Google’s a complete f-ing mess on the inside A total f-ing trainwreck They don’t talk to each other They fight constantly A lot is being pissed away In three or four years you’ll be looking back at this company and wondering what happened.”

- Peter Kafka quoting a Valley insider

On November 20th 2010, one of the great scholars of the past 50 years died His name was Chalmers Johnson Beloved by paleoconservatives and progressives alike, this third generation Navy scholar chronicled the decline

of empires and specifically how and why the American Empire was crumbling

Johnson did this through a trilogy of books, the last of the three entitled Nemesis: The Last Days of the

American Republic And whereas Johnson doesn’t address the Google situation per se, if we pay attention to the themes he writes about we will see how and why the Google Empire may be past its zenith and in decline

So what are the telltale signs of an empire in decline?

Hubris

“There is no safety in unlimited technological hubris.”

- McGeorge Bundy

Google burst onto the scene with the motto “do no evil” (as opposed to “do only good”) But has that attitude sustained itself? Witness Eric Schmidt touting the latest Google algorithm as able to predict what people will search for before they search for it Not only is this pure hubris, it is 100% “bull Schmidt”

One report has Google penetrating 85% of the Internet’s websites How does Google treat its publishers?

Arrogant disdain could be one way to describe it Complete opacity rules the day as it is up to Google alone to decide what publishers get for their clicks, irrespective of the percentage split between them Publishers were content to settle for Google’s imperial droppings as long as the bills got paid, but most publishers agree that these droppings have become smaller and smaller — with only imperial Google’s profits increasing

As the lone online search superpower (sorry, Bing, you don’t qualify), Google does what it wants when it wants

— pure imperial hubris

But Google’s haughtiness towards publishers PALES in comparison to its attitude toward the great unwashed (that’s you and me) Its behavioral targeting imperative hinges on the complete stalking of our every virtual move Every click and search is chronicled in the quest to monitor our behavior for economic gain

And all of this information is a short subpoena away from being handed over to a government ever more

inclined to monitor and track its own citizens In fact, the government abandoned its Carnivore program in favor

of having the private sector do its bidding

Below is how Eric Schmidt dismisses privacy with all the casual disregard of Marie Antoinette suggesting that

we eat cake:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, but if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time, and it’s important, for example that we are all subject in the

United States to the Patriot Act It is possible that that information could be made available to the

authorities.”

- Eric Schmidt, December 2009

Simply stated, Google’s view of privacy is a prime example of unbridled arrogance and a blatant disregard for anything espoused either in the Bill of Rights to our Constitution or in their own pledge to do no harm

Overreach

“It’s the inevitable price of imperial arrogance making leaders feel invulnerable till they no longer are, and it’s too late.”

- Stephen Lendman

Chalmers Johnson outlined how this feeling of invincibility can catch empires blindly unaware as they spread themselves too thin Case in point, US forces are now in over 170 countries, a clear indication of overreach without commensurate return In fact, any sane person knows that the $1 trillion a year we spend on our

military, including billions earmarked to defend Japan, Germany and South Korea, now generates diminishing returns to the American Empire

So where is Google overreaching? How much does Google Maps make? Google Books? After five years, how much has YouTube brought to the bottom line? Or how about Google Video for that matter? Google’s attempt

at transforming television advertising can probably now be called a failure as prospective partners reconsider and bail Do you think Gmail makes money? Does anybody even remember Google Wave?

While I am not a rabid Google watcher, one does not need to look very far to see its tentacles extending in every online direction, illustrated most recently in its failed bid to purchase Groupon By turning down Google’s $6 billion offer, Groupon may actually have helped save Google from itself

Google’s finances will eventually follow its attitude One can see Google further alienating publishers to

maintain their lofty profits One can also see Google further alienating its audience while pursuing an “all knowing” algorithm In the end, it is the attitude or Gestalt of a company that defines it In Google’s case, this attitude boils down to the existential difference between a self-serving pledge to Do No Evil and the simple promise to Do Only Good

Can Eric Schmidt and Marketers Predict Human Behavior?

Published 9/2/10

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to

analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.”

- Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities

Laplace wrote the above in 1816 This was well before the discovery of quantum physics He and his

contemporary scientists and philosophers thought that their ability to predict the future was limited by

insufficient measurement tools and the resulting lack of precise information on which to base their predictions

Since at the time of Laplace humans were considered little more than machines, predicting human behavior fell completely within the realm of observable planetary motion But something happened in the early 20th Century: Quantum Physics Unfortunately, too many psychologists and too many marketers never got the memo

The foundation of quantum physics is “indeterminacy” Roughly speaking, uncertainty is built into the very fabric of reality, whether speaking of human behavior or the position of an electron The new advances in the mathematical proofs of Heisenberg and his colleagues did not deter behavioral psychologists from their

determinate, yet outdated worldviews

John Watson, known as the father of “Behaviorism”, believed all behavior could be reduced, predicted and controlled through “proper” conditioning His disciple, B.F Skinner tried to perfect this folly And let’s not forget Sigmund Freud, who made behavioral reductionism fun and interesting through his obsession with a single overriding impulse that he believed controlled us all: SEX

Of course, there were some who did incorporate a quantum understanding into their views of human behavior For example, Erich Fromm and C.G Jung rebelled against the reductionism sweeping their field of study In fact, Jung, first an acolyte of Freud, eventually abandoned Freud’s materialistic philosophy

Now, fast forward to what’s happening today in online marketing circles Just a cursory glance will reveal that the place we’re now in is nothing more than a return to Laplace we came from (sorry, Sigmund, but I couldn’t resist)! If we only had MORE data, predicting human behavior would be a snap, right?

Wrong Today’s marketers are not marketing…they’re too busy dodging customers in the rear view mirror to see the prospects in the road dead ahead Once upon a time, marketing was all about the art of selling But art has given way to specious science promulgated by irrational “experts” who chase the folly of prediction,

seemingly impervious to the existential flies in the ointment They strive to be like Nostradamus when they’d be better served to emulate David Ogilvy

One of the leading gurus of this misbegotten practice is Google’s Eric Schmidt In a recent magazine article he announced that soon “ we will be able to predict what someone will search for before they search for it.” Of course our government lends its imprimatur by claiming that they can catch terrorists before the fact by

accumulating personal data on exactly which sites these suspects visit and what they search for

I used to think that those selling predictive technologies were snake oil salesmen That’s because I found it hard

to swallow the notion that anyone still believed in behavioral reductionism It was easier to dismiss them as mere charlatans…and I said so at every opportunity As you might imagine, this seemingly predictable personal behavior of my own did not endear me to my colleagues (and besides, the comparison was hardly fair to snake oil salesman and charlatans)

But I have come to the conclusion that the purveyors of voodoo behaviorism are neither snake oil salesmen, nor charlatans, merely intellectual simpletons And while this may not score me many points at the next cocktail party, there is a little more charity, and clarity in my heart

First, Do No Harm: How Our Need to Intervene Ruins Everything

Ever since Hypocrites, physicians had to take an oath that included “primum non nocere”; First, do no harm This concept has utility in every field you can imagine We make a mistake by believing the concept is domain specific to the health care industry We will explore a few areas before exploring how supposedly cutting edge online marketing is violating the first principle of intervention

Iatrogenesis and Foreign Policy

Who can look at the Iraq of today with over 1 million dead, 500,000 of them children, without wondering if the Hippocratic edict should have been invoked? With an interventionist foreign policy that stretches around the globe, we rarely slow down enough to even ask whether intervention itself might do more harm than good Our foreign policy which claims to bring forth democracy and all the good that springs from it has increasingly brought death and destruction Only the blind cannot see that we have done much more harm to Iraq by

intervening

Iatrogenesis and Media Coverage

The rule of “first, do no harm” can be asked of our media coverage of national events Some have moved from wondering if the coverage of the Newton school massacre did more harm to our nation’s psyche to concluding that there was considerable harm done by media saturation Unfortunately our media assumes more coverage is better Media critic Jeff Einstein questioned the iatrogenic nature of media saturation in a recent column He comes down clearly on the side that our media is not aiding in national healing and the saturation is

overwhelmingly damaging

Iatrogenesis and Economic Intervention

Whether you want to call them “bailouts” or the benign sounding “quantitative easings” (which now we are numbering and if memory serves me correctly, we are up to QE IV), are policy makers other than Ron Paul questioning whether the interventions are doing more long term harm than good? Black Swan author, Nassim Taleb, has weighed in with convincing arguments that these interventions create more harm than good In his view, the “too big to fail” mantra will inevitably lead to even larger failures We have shifted the responsibility for bank failures from the banks to US citizens No harm? We shall soon see

And then Iatrogenesis and Online Marketing

If any readers are familiar with my writings on behavioral targeting you will know that I believe BT is snake oil and does more harm than good Anything that examines rewards without a thorough examination of the risks is

a fool’s marketing errand Charlatans prosper by peddling this iatrogenic marketing cure while the empirical evidence is rather weak They have no skin in their own game, preferring to sell shovels to the proverbial

miners

All one needs to examine is the steadily declining click thru rates This decline occurs concurrently with the use

of “sophisticated” targeting methodologies Possibly because of its use

I was at a roundtable discussion concerning online marketing when the topic of “relevance” came up Those touting targeting one-to-one relevant offers rarely ask whether the practice is more costly than the derived benefits In other words, is the practice of hyper targeting more harmful than helpful in terms of profits? When I raised the question at the table I was met with dumbfounded silence Everyone at the table assumed relevance was an absolute positive that they never considered the alternative

Almost all of the new online marketing methodologies involve the same interventionist mindset that has caused

a great deal of harm in hospitals, foreign policy, economics and do not get me started on overly prescribed psychotropic drugs

So let me state as clearly as I can and without complicated jargon: Those peddling online targeting technologies are by and large frauds Their “solutions” are:

1) Not scalable

2) Are more costly employing them than the benefit derived

3) Give a false patina of precision

4) Increases risk in a nonlinear manner as marketing budgets increase

5) Relying on predictive methodologies that have already been proven to be mathematically impossible

There are many proofs for #5 above, from treatises on quantum randomness to explaining chaos theory But the ancients have also pointed the way for understanding In Semitic languages, the root for the word “prediction” and “prophecy” are the same This leads to the notion of faith in predictions even though faith is an anathema to marketing reductionists They are unaware of the irony Online marketers with their thinly disguised faith in measuring everything are again unaware that the Sanskrit root for the word “measure” means “illusion.” It seems the ancients knew a lot more about 21st Century online marketing than we do now

From Simulated Life To Simulated Marketing

Published 7/24/12

“Scientists at Stanford University and the J Craig Venter Institute have developed the first software simulation of an entire organism, a humble single-cell bacterium that lives in the human genital and respiratory tracts.”

- NY Times article, 7/20/2012

When you are done reading below, take a minute or two to read the NY Times article on this breakthrough We return to a familiar theme, whether in predictive behavioral targeting methodologies, financial markets, global politics, war scenarios or now life itself

And what is this recurring theme?

Reductionism my friends

Isn’t it the case that simulating a single-cell bacterium in a computer model, yet another attempt to reduce complex, nonlinear systems to algorithmic precision? I can’t believe I just typed this sentence What the heck does it mean?

Nonlinearity is not an easy concept to grasp for most of us, yet it is a central concept in life and the universe Nonlinearity roughly means that outputs are not directly proportional to inputs This makes establishing cause and effect a bit dicey Algorithmic precision in this context refers to our desire to predict outcomes using computer programs

Stanford (home of Google founders amongst many other online thought leaders) believes they have modeled life and can simulate it with precision well almost One of the doctors leading the attempt to reduce life to bits

and bytes said, “Where I think our work is different is that we explicitly include all of the genes and every known gene function (emphasis added) There’s no one else out there who has been able to include more than a handful of functions or more than, say, one-third of the genes.”

This one-celled bacterium with 525 genes lives in the genitals It is not terribly new for us men to contemplate the mysteries of our genitalia But we will table that for a different discussion

The problems with the Stanford initiative are many First, scientists do not know every gene function How do you model functions that remain unknown? Secondly, certain functions are actually unknowable The spaces between what we know, what we do not know and what is inherently unknowable seems to be beyond

reductionists’ ability to contemplate

Malcolm in Jurassic Park was skeptical about the strategy of forcing sterility on newly created dinosaurs when

he said, “life finds a way” He was speaking about how life is creative it mutates it adapts in short, life cannot be reduced By the way, the search for a “God particle” is another attempt at reductionist science

Hubris drives reductionism The doctor barely can hide his self-satisfaction because “no one else has included more than a handful of functions.” The number of functions of the simplest life form is unknown and even if

you could identify “all” existing functions, new functions emerge all the time Life is creative and this simulated approach does not quite understand this basic proposition Life is more than the rules set up in a program Computational biology and computational marketing are two sides of the same coin They both misunderstand the fundamental nature of life.

What I am about to say may sound contradictory, but I am not against trying to understand the levels of life’s existence I am against believing that we can be reduced to these levels, be they in search of the God particle, computational biology or online marketing And that is exactly what more and more people are doing as our computational skills grow exponentially

Will the Tallest Midget in the Room Please Stand Up!

Published 2/19/11

“There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a

measurement If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.”

- Enrico Fermi

The title of this article may not be the most politically correct one I’ve ever used, but it just might be the most descriptive In the fifteen years of working in the online industry, I firmly believe that the industry has beaten a path to becoming more and more ridiculous

Why do I say this?

Simply put, we have declared “measurement” as our virtual pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, a circuitously foolish pursuit that now has us measuring the metrics Ever since Vedics instructed us that we become our attention, isn’t it obvious that we have done exactly that? In fact, we have taken things to such an illogical extreme that the old carpenter’s rule of “measure twice, cut once” has become “measure forever, cut never”

Our industry is awash in folks getting out their yardsticks to measure the tallest metaphorical midget in the room And if that midget is just a quarter inch taller than the next tallest, it’s as if we’ve encountered a veritable Manute Bol! It’s like crediting a behavioral targeting algorithm for doubling the clickthrough rate on a banner

ad Sounds great until you realize that you’ve just increased response from 1% to 2% Like I said, the tallest midget

I participate in a few discussion lists with some very intellectual and capable industry veterans But I find

myself becoming increasingly bored with the topics of discussion Discourse involving real issues that capture the sense of wonder and imagination are sacrificed on the altar of discussions about tools that, by design reveal our shortcomings instead of our potential

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

- Marshall McLuhan

I have two sons taking a course at Bradley University called “The Big Questions” and we have more relevant and interesting discussions when we visit at the dinner table than we could ever hope for if we focused - as many today are wont to do - on reductionist predictive modeling that is absolutely useless in a chaotic

(opposed to value-driven principles)

The Egyptian revolution was not predicted Nor was the Tunisian revolution And the freedom virus spreading across the entire Middle East has taken the CIA and State Department completely by surprise These “deer in the headlight” government agencies rely on the same methodologies employed by online marketers and stock market quantitative analysts And whereas these methodologies are great at measuring the most minute details,

to what end are they any reasonable means? All of the sophisticated tools all of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men couldn’t keep Mubarak on his throne Our tools were useless

“You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers You can tell whether a man is wise by his

questions.”

- Naguib Mahfouz, Egyptian author

I guess the above quote gets to what I am trying to say here As an industry as a nation we are becoming less wise because we are asking the wrong questions and measuring the wrong things We have indeed become tools

of our tools, and we are all shrinking because of it

Chapter 3: The Online Ecosystem

Sustainability

Published 6/29/10

“Sustainability is a condition of existence which enables the present generation of humans and other species to enjoy social wellbeing, a vibrant economy, and a healthy environment, and to experience fulfillment, beauty and joy, without compromising the ability of future generations of humans and other species to enjoy the same.”

- Guy Dauncey, speaker & author

The title of this short essay, “sustainability” is the major concern of environmentalists and ecologists Since I write about online media it is fair to ask what does this ecological term have to do with my area of expertise

Simply put, the online media ecosystem is suffering under the weight of many practices that render it

unsustainable The lack of sustainability is masked by steady increases in money from advertisers coming online But if you pay attention to the larger picture rather than one’s particular situation, you can see the ecosystem as a whole is unhealthy

What are the practices that render the online media ecosystem unsustainable?

The Targeting Meme

There are few practices more destructive to the online media ecosystem than behavioral targeting The math underlying predictive modeling promised by BT has been proven to rest on fundamental errors and

assumptions The benefits to publishers are nil The benefit to marketers is limited within such narrow

parameters that the cost is not justified Add the disastrous privacy issues and we have a creep factor coupled with its inherently unscalable premise; each new “advance” into complexity brings the system closer to

collapse

But that doesn’t stop the BT purveyors eager to sell shovels to the hopeful miners But it is becoming more commonplace to call BT for what it always was; snake oil

Overwhelming Ad Clutter

The response to declining ad performance for publishers has been to increase more ad units per page In ten years, we have beaten a path from 5% ctr to 1% Few industry pundits acknowledge this simple fact; increasing what people want to avoid is no way to right the ship This is a lot like trying to get out of a hole by digging ever deeper.

The online media ecosystem cannot get healthy by adding more toxic waste to the environment And

advertising has become more and more like toxic waste to offline as well as online audiences

Erecting a Pay Wall

A paywall solution completely ignores how passion over profit trumps content owners’ desire and ability to charge for information Forget news and current events becoming a sustainable pay business model except in the rarest of instances This boondoggle proffered by Brill and Murdoch has yet to play out in all of its

inglorious permutations, but this will certainly fail Content creation will never be the same as it experiences great deflationary pressures as citizen journalists and passionate aggregators offer a global perspective on issues from Wimbledon to Mideast news

Agency Woes

Agencies are caught in an unsustainable position unless they drastically change Media buying is becoming more automated and the added value of agencies becomes less and less when creative voices take a backseat to algorithmic solutions Instead of emphasizing creative and unique online offers, agencies play to their own death march concerts Instead of offering solutions to an unsustainable ecosystem, agencies are so busy being busy that few of them can actually slow down long enough to contemplate

Lack of Scalability

The top 100 advertisers in the US economy reportedly account for just under 50% of the total ad spend* Ask

any one of those big advertisers and they will universally say that the problem with online advertising is the ability to scale their reach Even though over 76% of the North American population is online**, we ought to heed their woes How is it that with 76%+ online, top brands are saying they cannot reach audiences cost

effectively?

The simple answer is that people are ignoring ads and what has passed for reach is no longer a sustainable metric We need a new definition of reach and then a new way to execute transmitting corporate messaging if advertising can sustain the ecosystem

Long Tail Niches

The wondrous aspect of the online ecosystem is the plethora of choice and niche interests available to

audiences The devastating aspect of our niche mentality is to believe that every niche or hobby can be turned

into a business Longtail nonsense driven by self-indulgent narcissism has led to folks wasting tremendous resources chasing the modern equivalent of the fountain of youth.

The overwhelming majority of passionate niches are not economically sustainable and advertisers will soon understand that continuing to subsidize ever more fragmented marketplaces makes their jobs more difficult Commoditizing our passions and turning them into money might seem like a nice idea, but common sense needs

to be restored

Each portion of the online media ecosystem is facing the issue of sustainability Over the years, I have written about many of these issues individually But this is the first attempt to combine the themes into a manageable cohesive whole There are solutions to be sure, but we cannot begin to fully grasp them until we first recognize that the current course is not sustainable

- Jeff Einstein, Digital Media Pioneer (and friend)

I was having a back and forth discussion about the stress in our advertising and media ecosystem with Stefan Tornquist, the VP of Research at eConsultancy He is charming, intelligent and articulate In short, clearly our friendship is an attraction of opposites I owe the title of this article to his concluding remark to me As is often the case when we interact, his words reverberated with me long after our encounter

It took a while before discovering that I disagreed with Stefan Not because change is unnecessary, but because

I have come to the conclusion that our ecosystem needs to be radically restructured The time for gradual

evolution is past We cannot evolve out of the mess we’re in, we must halt what we are doing ASAP and leap into the solution Ah, the old, evolution vs revolution dichotomy

Thomas Friedman recently penned an article, Something Is Happening Here I thank Jason Heller for pointing

me to it Friedman basically outlined two competing views of our economic system One embraces “The Great Disruption” (GD) and the other places its faith in “The Big Shift” (BS) GD explains cataclysmic change

whereas BS describes an evolutionary, gradually shifting world

Friedman’s article did not speak about a third camp I will dub this “The Ostrich Camp” Their heads stuck in the metaphorical sand, they don’t want to acknowledge or actually see a problem If you are in this camp, move

on, for I have neither the time nor inclination to speak to you any longer

It is true that Friedman was outlining two worldwide political and economic perspectives, and while I have penned many articles on global politics, this article is about our media ecosystem and its own opposing camps

The BS camp ardently believes that we can fix plummeting relationships between audiences and brands by doing one of the following:

1) Change the size of online ad units

2) Develop new online metrics, including GRP and TRP (Gross Rating Points/Targeted Rating Points)

3) Continue doing what we are doing, but with improved creative

I am sure there are more incremental tweaks within the BS camp than those offered here, but they are

illustrative of cause and effect reactions at a glacial pace

Now the GD camp, of which I passionately belong, believes that the first rule in getting out of a hole is to stop digging immediately if not sooner We are disruptors who view the ecosystem as existentially flawed

Let me be as clear as I possibly can Any “solution” to the stress in the media ecosystem that does not “solve” the fundamental problem of audiences turning away from advertising either consciously or unconsciously is ridiculous Making “better” ads is a tweak that has limited utility, and reducing ads to limit clutter is nothing more than a confession to failure

Why?

One is not beating a dead horse to agree with Jeff Einstein’s assertion that no one wants ads and that everyone is equipped and inclined to avoid them Similarly, we know with the certainty of e=mc2 (the other Einstein’s sage observation), that everyone wants more information and entertainment Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer has hinted at a way out by coining the term “magnetic content” Geoff has noted what common sense has told us for years Audiences are drawn to content and savvy brands are using content to attract audiences

Now, if you believe that attracting audiences (like a magnet) is better than repelling them with ads, let me welcome you to The Great Disruption There is a revolution afoot and the BS just won’t cut it anymore

After the Last Sky

Published 10/18/11

“Where does the bird fly,

After the last sky?”

- Mahmoud Darwish, Palestinian Poet

“I have flown up like the primeval ones

I appear in glory with the strides of gods

As for him that knows this pure spell,

it means going out into the day after death

and being transformed at will.”

- Ryewolf, ‘Legend and History of the Benu Bird and the Phoenix’

Trying to make sense out of a troubled media ecosystem, it behooves us to seek answers wherever we can find them For me, a dyed-in-the-wool direct marketing quant that pushed the limits so hard and far that in Marshall McLuhan’s words, they began “to operate in reverse”, poets like T.S Eliot, Yeats, Kipling and Darwish, above, have each helped me in different ways What an odd journey!

In both Islamic and Jewish mystical traditions, there are seven heavens The colloquial “seventh heaven” is the final destination, if you will In Buddhist meditation, there are seven layers of consciousness on the road to universal enlightenment, where the seventh level is the field of universal knowledge; “the last sky” so to speak

Darwish uses “sky” and “heaven” interchangeably, and in Semitic languages they are indeed from the same root So what is a bird to do after soaring the last heaven? And this ultimately is the question for media and marketing folks Where do we go after we have explored all of what appears on our horizon? After we have visited the last sky?

For the handful reading these musings of mine, you know that I believe that present online marketing

methodologies have hit the last sky We marketing and media birds have migrated from search to every

conceivable targeting methodology I might have used the metaphor of Dante’s descent into Hell to describe our marketing journey, but I thought the above title was catchier and more hopeful

Some people misinterpret my writings as gloom and doom Not true Only if you want to continue doing what is futile will you find pessimism But there is a way out There is a way for this bird to stay aloft and keep flying

What is needed is nothing short of a transformation For any that have experienced the ‘pure spell’ of

transformation, you know the resulting exaltation So, what the heck am I talking about?

The present media ecosystem is dysfunctional We all know that advertisers subsidize the ecosystem But the ecosystem has become so unwieldy, things have gone terribly wrong The basic problem is that the relationship between audiences and advertiser has fundamentally eroded

Media outlets get government subsidies to stay afloat to promote the prevailing political mythologies (see Iraq WMDs as an example) But audiences are buying the propaganda less and less and fleeing the mainstream

media in droves Advertisers are in a quandary because the media landscape is so complex and fragmented that achieving authentic reach is problematic.

The great “pay wall” debacle attempts to shift the economic burden from advertiser to exhausted and financially strapped audiences That “sky” did not take long to close For the past few years, the targeting “sky” has

attracted a tremendous flock The behavioral targeting folks dominated the trades and conferences

Besides employing voodoo math, targeting methodologies attempt to turn all media into accountable, direct marketing opportunities But treating all media from a direct-marketing perspective does not scale for

advertisers and certainly does not create demand It relies on existing intent instead of creating that intent Advertisers utilizing targeting methodologies stalk audiences, when they should be enlisting them in a common cause

Meanwhile, audiences continue to turn a blind eye to the growing marketing clutter As we built this on-demand media universe, we discovered that audiences have no demand whatsoever for advertising Worse, they are repelled by it The media ecosystem is increasingly stressed because the ‘solutions’ offered usually mean

doubling down on what clearly has not been working - more targeting and more ads

So where do we go from here? How can we rise from the ashes like a Phoenix?

The answer is actually quite simple, albeit transformative Instead of putting more ads into content, put the content into the ads Stop a moment and read that again, and ask yourself: What is the only reason anyone ever visits any website? The answer: For the content they expect to find there Ergo, instead of using ads to attract audiences, use content instead, and surround the content with the ad! We do this with licensed video clips all the time and make six times more money than we did with pre-roll, which is why we’ve stopped offering pre-roll completely We have been transformed, so-to-speak

This can be done with text articles as well Imagine a Drudge Report headline on “Hairy Ants” going to a Raid

website Audiences don’t care where they consume the content They just want it Publishers should be

bundling audience and content together, and delivering both to advertiser websites

Imagine giving audiences what they really want - content - and surrounding that content with a brand message What a great idea! Essentially this is how it was done in days of old, back in the early days of radio and

television The role of content was and has always been a means to deliver audiences for advertisers Somehow, this simple idea has been lost over time

So where does the bird fly after the last sky? Right back where it started, that’s where I have no illusions about the media ecosystem adopting this simple proven solution, because so many are in denial and too busy doubling down on what doesn’t work

The Internet’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Published 4/28/10

“All men dream: but not equally Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

- T.E Lawrence (AKA Lawrence of Arabia)

First, why did I choose today’s title, “The Internet’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams”? The simple answer is that most publishers entered the Internet space filled with dreams of carpets of gold strewn beneath their feet The problem was, too many dreamed only at night with their eyes closed

The first prescription today is to open your eyes when you dream This means taking a look at reality If you are

a publisher, ask yourself the following question: Who are your customers? Seems simple, doesn’t it? Yet many publishers will answer, “My audience.”

Unless your audience comprises paying subscribers, they are not your customers Whoever pays you are your customers and in most cases, it’s advertisers picking up the tab If you feel differently, you’re a hobbyist, not a businessperson This is not to denigrate your hobby or passion But there’s no excuse for not knowing what business you’re in For online publishers who depend on ad revenue, your business is advertising, and to not understand this is an exercise in vanity, nothing more than self-indulgent dreaming at night

Like the slew of folks peddling narcotics to keep you sleeping and dreaming at night, one-to-one marketing gurus promise publisher and advertiser alike that they have the magic formula for delivering the right ad to the right person at the right time Their claim is to offer a better return for all parties

Wake up! One-to-one marketing (and all of its derivative cousins like behavioral targeting) is based on the false assumption that human behavior is rational and that purchasing decisions are rational Furthermore, these

technologies want to turn your advertising ad space into direct marketing inventory

Opening your eyes to companies turning your entire business into a direct marketing medium requires you to understand what is going on Sleep walking your way through the day will not get you out of the mess Few, if ANY, publishers can survive by turning their entire media inventory into DR media Intermediaries can make a killing, but not you, the publisher

I can hear the niche publishers now: “But long-tail marketing will save me.” At least that’s what Wired’s Chris

Anderson (author of The Long Tail) would have every marketer and publisher believing But the era of super

niches and self-indulgent narcissism is eroding far faster than you can chase your own long tail

Publishers catering to that “long tail” must wipe the sleep from their eyes and drink some coffee We are at the dawn of a return to mass marketing And this marketing imperative means dollars will go to those who

understand what business they’re in and who their customers are What? Sacrilegious!

Brands with huge budgets that have also been distracted by “conventional digital thinking” and offered a bed they could never be comfortable in will once again assert their needs.

But necessity is more than the mother of invention It is the driving force of nature and the folks with the most money to spend on advertising — large brands — truly want and need to reach the masses, no matter how much lip service they pay to things like CRM and social marketing Publishers better wake up Solutions begin the moment we open our eyes and dream in the full light of day

Rescuing The Internet From Infocrats

Published 8/10/99

If the true commercial possibilities of the Internet are to be realized, the medium must be rescued from the

“Infocrat” who believes in “information uber alles.”

It is common to hear within Internet marketing circles that the key to future commercial possibilities will be in

“perfect information flow.” With smart bots searching the web for the lowest prices, sites adding yet more content, and the ease of getting information from myriad sources, information is seen to be the salvation for sales

This is simply ridiculous Adding more information is not necessarily the key to closing the sale In fact, too much information can interfere with the sale The Internet may be a new medium, but it’s wrong to believe that human nature will be transformed by the medium, regardless of changing behaviors A sales transaction will always be an extraordinary event It’s an emotional decision when we humans are doing the buying

Failing to grasp the emotional dimension of the sale leads to a sterile transaction that assumes rational behavior

It also leads to rational solutions add just one more bit of information lower the price just a few more

pennies below my competition and so forth Infocrats are notoriously devoid of a transactional sales

imagination

What is a “transactional sales imagination?”

It is what comes to the heart of most sales To complete a sale, one needs to discover what makes a potential consumer tick One needs to find compelling, emotionally charged methods of communicating Have you ever wondered why the 800-number Ginzu Knives commercials have so much energy? You may not like them, but they work! People need to be motivated to buy

I remember a Triple Edge Windshield Wiper ad on television (it sold over 7 million pair) that worked because they smeared mud on the windshield and cleaned it with the wiper blades Or remember the Crazy Glue ad with the guy (John Goodman before he was a star) hanging from his hard hat?