After Peak Marketing

We’ve passed Peak Marketing. That’s what Google Books suggests. You can see marketing peak in the early aughts, then fall off by 2008, when Google got tired of scanning books.

In case you think that’s not enough data, let’s look at Google search trends (which begin with ’04) for the same thing:

The word consumer is post-peak too, right alongside marketing:

Same goes for search trends since 2004:

Searches for both dropped more than 50% apiece, then flattened out at what appears to be a residual level.

The main reason for a decline of interest in marketing is that we now live in a digital age when marketing no longer has the distance it used to have between performer and audience, and the audience is no longer captive — or even an audience.

Let’s face it: while we might be entertained by some advertising (for example, by a few Super Bowl ads), we wouldn’t pay to come see advertising in a theater. This is why “audience” is just one of marketing’s long-held delusional conceits, now fully exposed.

But, since marketing is accustomed to its remove from the actual marketplace, it has become insane. Seriously psychotic. Disconnected from reality. And here’s a fun irony: The bigger the data, the bigger the disconnect from the actual human beings who comprise a market. To disbelieve that, you’d have to live in marketing, rather than the marketplace. (That’s what Bob Hoffman (aka @

adcontrarian

) is talking about in Marketers Are from Mars. Consumers are From New Jersey.)

Perhaps the best example of this distance is “The Big Datastillery: Strategies to Accelerate the Return on Digital Data”, produced by IBM and Aberdeen in 2013. It’s a giant image of a copper-colored vat, like the kind used to make whisky. Into the top go little ones and zeroes pumped in through pipes from transactions, search engine optimization, pay-per-click and many other sources. Then, out of pipes at the bottom, marketing goop gets poured into empty beakers rolling by on a conveyor belt:

Those beakers are human beings. You and me. We’re the “right person” getting the “right offer” through the “right channel” at the “right time.” At the far end of this thing, after each of our beaker-selves metabolizes force-fed marketing shit, we fart flames upward into a funnel that captures the exhaust and flows it back into the top of the hopper.

IBM and Aberdeen present this without any sense of irony at all. And why should they? They’re all part of a marketing campaign to sell IBM’s Big Data solutions to — of course — marketers. It’s all one big B2B fantasy.

These fantasies come easily to marketing, thanks to its isolation from the market itself. To explain how, here’s a passage from The Intention Economy:

Back in the early ’90s, when I was making a good living as a marketing consultant, I asked my wife — a successful businesswoman and a retailing veteran — why it was that heads of corporate Sales & Marketing departments were always Sales people and not from Marketing people. Her answer: “Simple: Sales is real. Marketing is bullshit.”

When I asked her to explain that, she said this wasn’t marketing’s fault. The problem was the role marketing was forced to play. “See, sales touches the customer; but marketing can’t, because that’s sales’ job. So marketing has to be ‘strategic.’” She put air-quotes around “strategic.” She acknowledged that this was an over-simplification, and not fair to all the good people in marketing (such as myself) who really were trying to do right by customers. But her remark spoke to the need to distinguish between what’s real and what’s not, and to dig deeper into why the latter has become such an enormous part of the way we do business.

So let’s ask ourselves: why did we start talking about Big Data all of a sudden? Could it be that suppliers of tech to marketing were being strategic about that? Hmm… Look here:

What happened in 2011? Did Big Data spontaneously combust? Was there a campaign of some kind? A coordinated set of campaigns?

Betcha.

Though I can’t prove it (at least not in the time I have, but feel free to help me out), I believe the main cause was Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity, published by McKinsey in May, 2011, to much self-made fanfare. That report and following ones by McKinsey drove publicity in Forbes, The Economist, various O’Reilly pubs, Financial Times and many others — while providing ample sales fodder for every big vendor selling Big Data products and services.

Among those big vendors, none did a better job of leveraging and generating buzz than IBM. Here is a search for IBM+”Big Data”, for calendar years 2010–2011. Note that the first publication in that search, “Bringing big data to the Enterprise,” is dated May 16, 2011, the same month as the McKinsey report. The next, “IBM Big Data — Where do I start?” is dated November 23, 2011.

Here is a Google Trends graph for McKinsey, IBM and “big data”:

See that bump for IBM in late 2010? That was due to a lot of push on IBM’s part, which you can see in a search for IBM and big data just in 2010 — and a search just for big data. So big data was clearly in the water already, to a small degree. But big data searches, as we see, didn’t pick up until 2011. That’s when the craze hit the marketplace, this search for IBM and another four big data vendors clearly shows:

And who was the big customer for all this big data stuff? At the very least, it was the CMO, or Chief Marketing Officer — a title that didn’t come into common use until the dot-com boom, and grew as marketing’s share of corporate overhead when up and up. On February 12, 2012, for example, Forbes ran a story titled Five Years From Now, CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs Do. It begins,

Marketing is now a fundamental driver of IT purchasing, and that trend shows no signs of stopping, or even slowing down, any time soon. In fact, Gartner analyst Laura McLellan recently predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than their counterpart CIOs.

At first, that prediction may sound a bit over the top. (In just five years from now, CMOs are going to be spending more on IT than CIOs do?) But, consider this: 1) As we all know, marketing is becoming increasingly technology-based, 2) Harnessing and mastering Big Data is now key to achieving competitive advantage, and 3) Many marketing budgets already are larger–and faster growing–than IT budgets.

Here’s Google Books on Chief Marketing Officer:

So, how was a chief marketing officer supposed to understand a customer?

IBM to the rescue again. In June, 2012, IBM’s index page was headlined, “Meet the new Chief Executive Customer. That’s who’s driving the new science of marketing.” The copy was directly addressed to the CMO. In response, I wrote Yes, please meet the Chief Executive Customer, which challenged some of IBM’s pitch at the time. (I’m glad I quoted what I did in that post, because IBM has disappeared all that stuff.)

According to Wikibon, IBM was the top Big Data vendor by 2013, raking in $1.368 billion in revenue. In February of 2015, Reuters reported that IBM “is targeting $40 billion in annual revenue from the cloud, big data, security and other growth areas by 2018”, and that this “would represent about 44 percent of $90 billion in total revenue that analysts expect from IBM in 2018”.

Hard to say how much of the big data craze is just marketing. But you can see it in this graphic here:

It’s from chiefmartec, also known as Scott Brinker, who deserves a medal for getting all those names and logos into one graphic in finite space. (Scott, if you’re reading this, might be fun to animate the changes from year to year, or month to month. Just saying.)

I don’t know how many companies are in that one (for 2016), but it’s more than last year, the year before, and the one before that:

I got that image from a piece called The Advertising Bubble, by Maciej Ceglowski, aka @baconmeteor, a gifted and insightful writer and programmer, now having fun in Antarctica for some reason. )

Back to Scott Binker, to whom we owe another debt of gratitude for pointing us to The absolutely epic Periodic Table of Marketing Signals, by Origami Logic:

Here is the original, a giant .jpg. Click around that to see all the ways marketing talks to itself without actually talking to you. And hey, why should they talk to you, when they “know you better than you know yourself”. (Go ahead: click on that last link and see how much they say exactly that — and try to sell it to everybody else.)

Two problems with this.

One is purpose. All this data crunching work is toward interrupting our lives just to sell us stuff, most of which we don’t want. In fact, most of the time we’re not shopping. We’re just going about our lives. There is a limit to what one can know about somebody if selling them shit is all you want to do with the information.

The other is tendentious math. Nothing makes lying to ones self easier than having lots of numbers to do it with. (Required reading: How to Lie With Statistics, published in 1954 and more relevant than ever in an age when there are more ways to lie than ever — to one’s self and everybody else)

For evidence of how lying with statistics works in our day and age, dig Resisting the Siren Call Of Popular Digital Media Measures: Facebook Research Shows No Link Between Trendy Online Metrics and Ad Effectiveness, by Brad Smallwood in the Journal of Advertising Research. It’s behind a paywall, but Bob Hoffman summarizes it nicely here. Sez Bob, “there is no correlation between these ‘metrics’ and real world effectiveness. As marketing data, they have no value.”

The monster child of marketing’s detachment from its human subjects and its addiction to both big data and tendentious math is adtech: the surveillance and data-fed direct side of advertising in the digital world. Adtech today has become a giant four-dimensional shell game sustained entirely by small successes and a persistent belief by CMOs and their hired agents that the numbers they get are good enough, and the negative externalities small enough, to justify continued investment.

This will end.

In The Big Short (both book and movie), the investor Michael Burry says a sure sign of a bubble is high complexity and fraud. In adtech — and in all of digital marketing today — the only remaining argument for it is the steady upward climb of spending on it.

It’s always hard to argue with success. But one can at least argue against excess and self-delusion, and marketing has had a surfeit of both, especially since Big Data became a thing.

The ones doing the arguing these days are the very targets of all this delusional marketing conceit: individual human beings.

According to PageFair, at least 309 million people are blocking ads on their mobile devices, And that’s atop more than 220 million blocking ads in their desktop and laptop browsers. This amounts to the biggest boycott in human history.

It’s hard to specify the reasons people block ads, but being tracked like animals is one of them. Even when it works, it’s creepy.

Take for example this story (translated from German) about how “psychologist Michal Kosinski has developed a method for analyzing human beings by means of their behavior on Facebook minutely. And helped Donald Trump win.” (For backing on that one, run a search for trump+campaign+san+antonio+facebook, and see what comes up.)

For example, Joel Winston, former Deputy Attorney General for New Jersey, says this in How the Trump Campaign Built an Identity Database and Used Facebook Ads to Win the Election:

“We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” a senior Trump official explained to reporters from BusinessWeek. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.”

The goal was to depress Hillary Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” the senior Trump official said. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

For example, Trump’s digital team created a South Park-style animation of Hillary Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” Then, Trump’s animated “super predator” political advertisement was delivered to certain African American voters via Facebook “dark posts” — nonpublic paid posts shown only to the Facebook users that Trump chose.

Facebook is refusing to release a copy of the animated “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators” advertisement, or any other ‘negative’ presidential political ad that it ran. Facebook is also refusing to release details about the gender, ethnic, or location targeting parameters of these ads. Until further review, it’s uncertain if these targeted political advertisements are fully compliant with federal law.

Mark Zuckerberg is stonewalling this thing, posting a denial that Facebook influenced the election outcome: “Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes. The hoaxes that do exist are not limited to one partisan view, or even to politics. Overall, this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

99%, huh?

Okay, look here. @ev and I have both posted examples of hoax ads running alongside the passage you just read. Here’s Ev’s:

Here’s mine:

All four ads are flat-out frauds, in up to four ways apiece:

1. All are lies (Tiger isn’t gone from Golf, Trump isn’t disqualified, Kaepernick is still with the Niners, Tom Brady is still playing), violating Truth in Advertising law.
2. They were surely not placed by ESPN and CNN. This is fraud.
3. All four of them violate copyright or trademark laws by using another company’s name or logo. (One falsely uses another’s logo. Three falsely use another company’s Web address.)
4. All four stories are bait-and-switch scams, which are also illegal. (Both of mine were actually ads for diet supplements.)

Now, are Ev and I magnets for that 1% of “fake news and hoaxes” that get through Facebook’s filters? Or are Zuck and Facebook disconnected from the very reality they host and nurture — and thus failing to catch obvious examples of fraud such as these?

I vote for the latter. Because this is the kind of thing you see all the time when a company’s customers and consumers are different populations. Here’s what I said about this at Harvard Business Review several years back:

…consider this fact: you are not a customer of Facebook or Twitter. Nor of Google’s search, mail, and other free services. The actual customers of those companies are advertisers, not you. In fact, you and I are the products being sold to advertisers. No matter how well those companies serve us with free goodies, the fact remains that these companies’ consumers and customers are different populations, and we are among the former, and not the latter, because we pay them nothing. In Adam Smith’s terms, we do not employ them.

And, because we are merely consumers of these services, our concerns tend to be dismissed when they are in conflict with the ambitions of those services’ customers, the advertisers. This is why websites, advertisers and third parties take liberties with our personal data, our privacy, and our tolerance for “personalization” of messages that still fail 99% of the time.

This causes two problems. One is abuse of consumers. The other is a lack of what we could bring to the market’s table — besides money — if we were full-fledged customers.

What we could bring to Facebook is intelligence, in the forms of both smarts and good information. But Facebook isn’t interested in that. Neither are Google, Twitter, or any of the other Internet giants to which we pay nothing other than attention that gets sold to parties unknown and then wildly misinterpreted 99.x% of the time.

So I have a hunch about what comes next. Let’s call it a theory, meaning it can proved right or wrong.

Here it is: we are not in a “post-truth” era. Instead, we are at the very beginning of a post-marketing era: one in which connected individuals in markets do more for their suppliers than marketing alone has ever been able to do.

Enough of the datastillery worked to help get Trump elected, and the world is only beginning to cope with the consequences of that, which are persistent and non-trivial. But the mechanisms of micro-targeting, baiting and biasing people are now becoming exposed in a big way. (Example: search for Trump + Cambridge Analytica. Or read this Bloomberg piece.)

Nobody likes to be taken advantage of, even when it’s in service to somebody or something they already like. What will happen when it becomes abundantly clear to nearly everybody that we are all being played, personally, all the time, by unseen forces whose only interest is in manipulating us?

While it is true that we’ve been manipulated for generations by advertising of all kinds, most of that manipulation was through messages to whole populations through the one-way media of newspapers, magazines, billboards, radio and TV. Not through “social media” on the Internet.

This is different. This is personal.

And it will backfire, because the Internet is two-way, while the old media were just one-way. We are already gaining means for keeping what we don’t want out of our castles on the Net, for example through ad blocking and tracking protection. (The former already amounts to the largest boycott in world history.) And dozens of startups are working on ways to intentcast our own ads (safely and selectively) for what we actually want. This information is far more valuable to sellers than any amount of big-data-fed algorithmic guesswork produced by the world’s creepy datastilleries.

What happens to the guesswork business after intentcasting starts to take off?

One big player in the adtech business has already told me to expect it tocrash in Q2 of 2017. The signs (especially complexity and fraud) have been with us for some time.

But marketing on the whole still doesn’t see that, because when it looks at the Net it sees old media done new ways, rather than a completely new environment where individuals have full agency and may not need, or want, marketing at all.

This kind of illusion comes naturally. As a species we have always assumed that any new medium is like old and familiar ones.

Take movies. When that business began, the assumption was that movies were the next form of theater. Thus, the first movie sets were theaters where actors performed on a stage. Here’s one that my grandfather and his crew of carpenters built for D.W. Griffith in Fort Lee, New Jersey:

Griffith’s greatest innovation was taking the camera out of the theater and into the world, which he did during Grandpa’s time with him. Example: The Curtain Pole, a silent movie that in one scene appears to feature the same steps on which Grandpa (lower right) and his crew sit (looking very dramatic) in this shot here:

But, in spite of all its high science, marketing is still stuck at the in-a-theater stage of the market’s evolution. (Even to the degree it still calls us “the audience.”)

That’s because the Internet we know today has only been around since 1995, when its floodgates opened to boundless commercial activity. Adtech as we know it today is much newer, but it’s still just another form of direct marketing, which is descended from junk mail and a cousin of spam.

The simple and vexing fact of the matter is that the Net is too radically new and different to be sensibly understood using any of the old media.

Two key differences are personal connection and personal agency. The Internet graces all of us with the former, and to an absolute degree that was unthinkable with all previous media.

By design, the Net is a giant zero, eliminating distance between everybody and everything — at costs that veer toward zero as well. To be “here” on the Net is to be present without distance from everything else that’s here.This is new to human experience, and we are only beginning to understand it, even as we have come to depend on it utterly.

As my wife describes it, we now live in a virtual space with no gravity, in which any of us can be brought together simply by our interests or by our associates, who can be anywhere in physical space. “Social media” such as Facebook and Twitter can help with that, but are also just silo’d projects that made inflexible by their infrastructures and biassed by their business model in the services they provide. That business model is adtech.

Once we realize how totally we are manipulated by others with no connection to us, or personal interest in us, we will begin to reject what doesn’t work for us. Example: assuming we’re nothing more than beakers on marketing’s conveyor belts.

What comes after that, I don’t know — though I have worked hard for the last ten years to make good things happen for people and their economies in this new world. And some of it actually is happening.

But then, I’m an optimist. To me this glass is almost 1% full, so far. The only argument against that optimism is that we will only continue to submit, en masse, to the manipulations of marketers who see us as less than human — or human only in the worst possible way: as vessels for marketing shit.

We can, and will, do better.

It’s a wide open question whether marketing will adapt to fully independent customers—or if it that’s even possible, given marketing’s legacy as a discipline disconnected from the people it means to influence.

Bonus links:

1. Personalized advertising is an oxymoron, by @Faris. Goes over some of the same territory I visit here, plus much else, and in greater depth. An outstanding post, deservedly graced with a “Best of” from @Medium. It also won an award where it was first published, along with other take-downs of personalization, in Admap.
2. Bob Hoffman, the Ad Contrarian (@adcontrarian), the correctest curmudgeon in advertising history.
3. Don Marti (@dmarti), whose insights about what works and doesn’t in advertising and publishing are without equal.
4. David Carroll, Ph.D, (@profcarroll), whose constant tweetage on all this stuff is required reading and re-tweeting.
5. Augustine Fou, Ph.D, (@acfou), aka Ad Fraud Researcher, a boundless source of research and convincing evidence of ad fraud.