Tài liệu Chasing String in the Digital Era docx

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 Time DOJ Asks Court to Keep GOOGLE-NSA Partnership Secret The 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 Everything From 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  Endorsements 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 Dedication 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. Preface 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 Introduction 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 [...]... 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... 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. .. 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... 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,... 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... 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... 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... 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... “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... 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 . the Mind-killer Media and Marketing Beyond The Algorithm 55 About the Author  Endorsements What Are They Saying About Chasing String in the Digital Era? “Jaffer. 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