Back Up the Rabbit Hole: an Interview with Jeff Einstein

Pete – Welcome, Jeff. What evidence can you cite to support
your assertion that we’ve passed through the looking glass
and plunged down the rabbit hole?

Jeff – We can begin with a litany of online performance
indicators, including the prevalence of sub-$1 CPMs, click-
through rates firmly ensconced at statistical zero, click
fraud estimates of anywhere from 25-85% (depending on your
choice of networks and industry experts), not to mention
the insolvency and failure of thousands of media franchises,
many of them brand names with long, distinguished track
records. In more sober environments with more sober leader-
ship such massive failure and systemic collapse might give
us pause, but as an industry we’ve responded instead by
speeding up, doubli ng down and plunging ourselves even
deeper down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s vision of
madness, a world where up is down and down is up. If any-
thing, we’ve accelerated our commitments to the very same
insanity that got us here in the first place.

Pete – That’s pretty harsh. Aren’t many of our problems
right now simple byproducts of a deep recession?

Jeff – No, I don’t think so. While the recession certainly
hurts like crazy, our problems don’t result from the
recession as much as the recession results from our
problems. Performance across all channels has actually
been in decline for a couple of decades now, regardless
of the economy and in spite of explosive industry growth.

Pete – Then why do you think media performance is so anemic
these days?

Jeff – Mostly because media performance is a myth to begin
with. We’re chasing a great white whale. Media aren’t
supposed to perform. The message should perform, not the
media. The onus to perform should weigh on the advertisers
and the agencies, not on the publishers and content
providers; their only job is to aggregate and somehow
entertain or inform an audience, the same now as it was
fifty years ago.

Only with the digitally-driven ascent of discrete media
agencies as the crown jewels of global media holding
companies did we suddenly discover an excuse to divorce
the medium from the message and shift the onus of
performance from the message to the medium in the process.
But in truth, the media simply can’t perform because they
were never designed to. And that’s why, despite all the lip
service, advertisers and agencies don’t buy performance.
They buy ubiquity, the exact opposite. Rather than assume
responsibility for their own lack of performance,
advertisers and agencies would rather hedge their bets and
buy more and more of something that’s worth less and less
with each passing day. Big advertisers and big agencies
talk performance, but they buy ubiquity because they know
the media can’t perform.

Pete – Lots of industry folks are calling for a complete
online marketing overhaul, including new metrics, more
sophisticated targeting technologies, more research, more
data-based marketing, and more social media. What do you
think?

Jeff – I think new metrics are just another way to shoot
the messenger, another way to rearrange the deck chairs on
a sinking ship. Besides, in marketing applications metrics
never really describe what works as much as they describe
what can be sold. We already know that the continued growth
of online ad budgets will rely increasingly on our ability
to sell more branding, in no small part because we’ve
invested so heavily in ad serving technologies and infra-
structure over the past 15 years. The perceived need to
sell more branding explains why the new metrics being
proposed now all seek to measure the very things the
industry arrogantly dismissed as useless and effete back
in the mid-1990s, all the intangibles that drove the
growth of great branding media like print, radio and TV
for decades. We cut off our noses to spite our faces 15
years ago in a foolish and immature effort to distinguish
digital media from their analog counterparts, and now the
bed we’ve made for ourselves is wrecking everyone’s sleep,
our own not least. Each new metric just adds another rifle
to the circular firing squad.

Pete – What about behavioral targeting?

Jeff – Anyone with any historical perspective will right-
fully conclude that each additional layer of targeting
technology increases costs and reduces performance. As
a result, each additional layer of targeting technology
further burdens publishers and networks alike. The promise
of digital scale starts working against them; the more
traffic they attract and the more advertising they sell,
the faster they go out of business. McLuhan had it right:
any medium pushed to extreme will begin to operate in
reverse.

Sophisticated targeting technologies don’t work because
commercial media are now and always have been on-demand,
and in an on-demand media universe it simply makes far
less sense to target the audience and far more sense to
let the audience target us instead, exactly why search
works so much better than display advertising, and exactly
– despite industry claims to the contrary — why neither
search nor targeted display advertising is scalable at the
end of the day. This much we know with absolute certainty:
no one demands more advertising, relevant or otherwise,
and everyone is equipped to avoid it. That’s the primary
reason why online advertising fails at least 99.9 percent
of the time, and why TV and radio executives are having
nervous breakdowns.

Pete – Should I assume from your aversion to behavioral
targeting that you’re also no fan of data-based marketing?

Read the full interview here…
Back Up the Rabbit Hole: an Interview with Jeff Einstein

————————————————————
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End of MEDIA PERSPECTIVES
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Thinking Out Loud: Relevant or Wrong
By: Jaffer Ali

Behavioral targeting (BT) is the new snake oil, a veritable
cure-all for the online marketing industry. There is a
difference, however, between BT and 19th-century snake
oil; those touting BT actually believe they have a magic
elixir, while the itinerant salesman in the Conestoga wagon
knew full well that he was fleecing the unsuspecting and
gullible town folk.

Upon closer examination, the rancid formula of this “BT
elixir” should give any and all in the media food chain
pause for concern before ingesting. And in the long list
of what’s wrong with targeting ads by behavior, three
elements stand out as particularly toxic.

Let’s use the FTC’s definition of behavioral targeting:
“…the tracking of a consumer’s activities online –
including the searches the consumer has conducted, Web
pages visited and content viewed – in order to deliver
advertising targeted to the individual consumer’s
interests.”

BT is an invasion of our privacy, for even if we opt in
to the process, we’re often exposing personal data then
obtainable by the government via subpoena. The purposely
stealth nature of this pseudo-science evokes chilling,
Big Brother-esque imagery, and defies the notion that
something of such questionable moral foundation could
proceed this far unchallenged.

The fact that private industry now works in tandem with
the government to stalk and track us online may deflect
but cannot dilute the moral argument. It seems little
considerations like the prohibitions against “unreason-
able search and seizure” enshrined in our Bill of Rights
never made it onto the BT agenda.

BAD PREDICTORS

Besides being creepy, targeting relies on spurious
predictors. Once, Wall Street hired thousands of learned
mathematicians to portend the future of the financial
markets. They poured over millions of transactions and
developed sophisticated algorithms to predict market
trends. Science was heralded as a welcome savior capable
of taming the chaos of the stock market. The underlying
principles of the mathematics were developed by John Nash,
who found that there was an underlying predictive order to
minute human interactions.

Amass enough data, they said, and the Ph.D.s could ferret
out the predictive variables that made people do what
they do.

Only one problem: They were all wrong.

None of the models that identified predictive variables
envisioned the bus careening off the cliff because all
of these models were conceived through the rearview
mirror. The flawed variables derived from past, irrational
behavior did not (and could not) predict the devastating
financial collapse that ensued.

Thousands of suddenly unemployed Ph.D.s left Wall Street.
Where did they end up? Next stop: Madison Avenue, Google
and BT shops.

The underlying mathematical ingredient of BT is snake oil,
but with “a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go
down.” (For a thorough examination of the mathematical
nonsense, see Nicholas Taleb’s two books, Fooled by
Randomness and The Black Swan.)

As instability increases, mathematical reductionism renders
predictions of future behavior untenable. Simply put,
driving by looking in the rearview mirror is a sure recipe
for disaster.

RELEVANCE IRRELEVANT

The main ingredient in this serpentine concoction is
relevancy, the composition of which comprises “getting the
right ad in front of the right person at the right time.”
It sounds so logical and reasonable.

Of course, witch trials were also considered logical and
reasonable once upon a time.

What the relevancy ingredient assumes is that people want
relevant ads. In truth, the data suggests just the
opposite. They don’t want ANY ads at all! But by asking
questions in a subjective, self-serving manner, you can
pervert the Socratic Method to get the answer you want.

Former FBI director Louis Freeh said: “Ask the American
public if they want an FBI wiretap and they’ll say, ‘no.’
If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone
that helps the FBI find their missing child they’ll say,
‘Yes.’”

If audiences are asked, “Do you want more ads?” all data
suggest they will answer with a resounding NO! But if
they are first asked, “Do you prefer relevant ads over
irrelevant ads?” they may reasonably, albeit reluctantly,
say yes. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

In an on-demand world, nobody demands more advertising.
An audience so empowered makes advertising a challenging
endeavor, especially when all this snake oil leaves such
a bad taste in our mouths.

————————————————————
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Copyright 2010 by NextEra Media All rights reserved.

In Search Of Digital Simplicity
by Jaffer Ali

As Einstein once said, “I wouldn’t give a nickel for
simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give
my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.”
It has taken me thirty years of my professional life to
become a simple guy. Starting in the home video business
in 1980 and progressing from analog to digital, in
retrospect it seems that business was an ongoing exercise
in complexification.

Nowhere is “complexification” more apparent than in online
marketing circles. Here, jargon is supreme. A visit to
half a dozen websites only serves to prove the point.
Marketing problems can’t be solved, let alone even
explained through complex, tortured language, despite the
fact that the digerati have elevated double talk to an art
form.

In fact, complexity often seems to be the end goal for
digital mavens.

But as is the case with most things, what we need is some-
thing quite different. We notice that everything is rushing
by us at increasingly faster speeds. Time frames for every-
thing have grown shorter. Our digital tools were supposed
to help us cope with the faster pace of life and all they
have done is pave the way for even more frenzied activity.

I suggest we heed the advice of the late British economist,
E.F. Schumacher, who said “any intelligent fool can make
things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a
touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the
opposite direction and contemplate a wholesale change in
thought and attitude.” The more you ponder this, the more
sense it makes, because the more deliberate we are in our
pursuit of simplicity, the better able we are to separate
the wheat from the chaff between our ears and recognize
the challenges that confront us.

Deliberate simplification doesn’t come easily. It took
Albert Einstein a lot of work to arrive at e=mc2.
Deliberate simplification means stripping away the
nonessential to discern what is important. But the online
media landscape is anything but simple or discerning.
Indeed, complexity has become a virtual means to its own
end. Behavioral targeting is just the latest manifestation
of this reactionary complexity that in reality creates
more problems than it solves.

As our lives have become systematically more complex,
we have replaced essential human pursuits with mindless
activity and details. Is it any wonder why the great
spiritual traditions always speak of the virtues of
simplicity? Is it any surprise that in an ever-more
complex world this simple truth falls on deaf ears?

In my opinion, moving to the other side of complexity makes
good marketing sense. I want you to think of the last five
marketing campaigns that made an impression on you. Dollars
to navy beans you are thinking about a jingle or catchy
phrase. Messaging was and will always be primary in the
marketing hierarchy. But any cursory glance at a typical
agency website reveals one specious technological solution
after another, with no emphasis whatsoever on the message.
This growing complexity, in a vain attempt to harness
accountability and scale, in actuality achieves the exact
opposite and only serves to further obscure and confuse
the big picture and drive performance down.

Case in point, Google is not a scalable marketing platform.
That’s why it needs 1.5 million advertisers. The more
complex solutions become the less genuine scale they
engender. Television scales precisely because it is so
simple.

To the MBAs still reading, here’s a little secret:
Simplicity not only works better than complexity, it
costs less. Complexity adds costs and that’s why the
intermediaries in the media ecosystem – the media
agencies, ad networks and technology vendors — continue
to champion it, and why content players and publishers by
the thousands can’t afford to stay in business.

Listen to Thoreau: “Our life is frittered away by detail…
Simplify, simplify, simplify! …Simplicity of life and
elevation of purpose.” Deliberate simplification is a
matter of looking inward; a process of rediscovering
essence and harmony. It is authenticity in action and the
necessary basis for any worthy marketing campaign.

Let me leave you with a quote from the linguistic
philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein that simply says it all:
“The aspects of things that are most important to us are
hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity.”

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Having been in online advertising since 1996 (I know, this
makes me old!), I’ve seen the maturation and different
machinations of the industry for more than a decade and
frankly, where we’ve ended up isn’t too impressive or
inspiring.

Traveling around the country speaking with marketers, it
seems the industry continues to fall deeper and deeper
into the buzzword abyss of audience-based targeting,
behavioral targeting, ad exchanges, ad networks, retarget-
ing, CPX, etc.

It seems like the art of advertising has devolved into a
mundane process of dropping cookies, tracking consumers,
then hitting them with bad creative through small squares
and rectangles on a digital screen – all of which doesn’t
make the following recent statistics too surprising:

- Only .02% of people who see an ad click on it; this
inversely shows we have a 99.8% failure rate (that’s a
statistical 100% failure rate)

- 8% of online users account for 85% of all clicks
(”Natural Born Clickers,” comScore, 8/09)

- Only 16% of users clicked on any ad; this means 84% of
the online population didn’t click on an ad (”Natural
Born Clickers,” comScore, 8/09)

- More than 50% of impressions and 90% of clicks placed
through ad networks are fraudulent (”Identifying and
Combating Fraud,” Mpire, 9/09)

Hence, the decisions marketers are making when it comes to
online advertising don’t make any logical sense. We know
how advertising works. We know what it takes to build
great brands over time. Although the web represents a
different medium, it is still advertising and the
fundamentals of incredibly successful advertising are the
same today as they’ve always been.

The five immutable pillars of great marketing are:

1) Right Product: the business produces a product or
service that meets a need in the marketplace

2) Right Positioning: the marketing team knows how its
product or service fits with respect to its competition

3) Right Creative: once the product and positioning are
right, it comes down to how it’s going to be communicated;
the right creative strategy in tandem with GREAT creative
execution is vital to success

4) Right Audience: marketers must ensure their great
creative is being seen by the right audience

5) Right Environment: the environment in which an advertise-
ment is placed is critical to how that brand and message
are perceived by the prospective consumer

The first two pillars are related to marketing and the
last three are related to advertising. Unfortunately, in
the online world, marketers are missing two out of three
advertising pillars. Everyone gets the audience part as
evidenced by all the BT, cookies and ABT industry hubbub,
but without great creative and the right environment the
campaign will not be successful.

This leads me to such questions as: how did we get here?
When did the industry decide to stop being creative and
start relying on algorithms and cookie tracking as our
marketing idols? Is this the best we can do for the brands
we love and represent? What happened to great advertising
and the building of great brands—can’t we use the Internet
for this also?

It’s time we end the delusion the online world is living
in. It’s time we start being creative again and produce
really successful advertising. Although there is a place
for cookie tracking, behavioral targeting, and algorithmic-
based targeting, without great creative and the right
environment, the campaign will not work.

Let’s get creative. Let’s remember why we chose to be in
advertising in the first place. Let’s challenge each other
and let’s look upon the web as a digital palette to create
great brands that resonate with audiences. Most of the
greatest artists in the world work in the creative depart-
ments of advertising agencies. We need to help them
unleash their creativity.

At Centro, it’s what we enjoy doing. It’s the challenge
we live for. We love coming up with creative ideas and
ways to help your message resonate with the right audience.

We look forward to doing something interesting with you.
Have a great day!

Sincerely,

Shawn Riegsecker
Founder and President

———————————————————–

Behavioral targeting (BT) is the new snake oil, a veritable
cure-all for the online marketing industry. There is a
difference, however, between BT and 19th-century snake
oil; those touting BT actually believe they have a magic
elixir, while the itinerant salesman in the Conestoga wagon
knew full well that he was fleecing the unsuspecting and
gullible town folk.

Upon closer examination, the rancid formula of this “BT
elixir” should give any and all in the media food chain
pause for concern before ingesting. And in the long list
of what’s wrong with targeting ads by behavior, three
elements stand out as particularly toxic.

Let’s use the FTC’s definition of behavioral targeting:
“…the tracking of a consumer’s activities online –
including the searches the consumer has conducted, Web
pages visited and content viewed – in order to deliver
advertising targeted to the individual consumer’s
interests.”

BT is an invasion of our privacy, for even if we opt in
to the process, we’re often exposing personal data then
obtainable by the government via subpoena. The purposely
stealth nature of this pseudo-science evokes chilling,
Big Brother-esque imagery, and defies the notion that
something of such questionable moral foundation could
proceed this far unchallenged.

The fact that private industry now works in tandem with
the government to stalk and track us online may deflect
but cannot dilute the moral argument. It seems little
considerations like the prohibitions against “unreason-
able search and seizure” enshrined in our Bill of Rights
never made it onto the BT agenda.

BAD PREDICTORS

Besides being creepy, targeting relies on spurious
predictors. Once, Wall Street hired thousands of learned
mathematicians to portend the future of the financial
markets. They poured over millions of transactions and
developed sophisticated algorithms to predict market
trends. Science was heralded as a welcome savior capable
of taming the chaos of the stock market. The underlying
principles of the mathematics were developed by John Nash,
who found that there was an underlying predictive order to
minute human interactions.

Amass enough data, they said, and the Ph.D.s could ferret
out the predictive variables that made people do what
they do.

Only one problem: They were all wrong.

None of the models that identified predictive variables
envisioned the bus careening off the cliff because all
of these models were conceived through the rearview
mirror. The flawed variables derived from past, irrational
behavior did not (and could not) predict the devastating
financial collapse that ensued.

Thousands of suddenly unemployed Ph.D.s left Wall Street.
Where did they end up? Next stop: Madison Avenue, Google
and BT shops.

The underlying mathematical ingredient of BT is snake oil,
but with “a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go
down.” (For a thorough examination of the mathematical
nonsense, see Nicholas Taleb’s two books, Fooled by
Randomness and The Black Swan.)

As instability increases, mathematical reductionism renders
predictions of future behavior untenable. Simply put,
driving by looking in the rearview mirror is a sure recipe
for disaster.

RELEVANCE IRRELEVANT

The main ingredient in this serpentine concoction is
relevancy, the composition of which comprises “getting the
right ad in front of the right person at the right time.”
It sounds so logical and reasonable.

Of course, witch trials were also considered logical and
reasonable once upon a time.

What the relevancy ingredient assumes is that people want
relevant ads. In truth, the data suggests just the
opposite. They don’t want ANY ads at all! But by asking
questions in a subjective, self-serving manner, you can
pervert the Socratic Method to get the answer you want.

Former FBI director Louis Freeh said: “Ask the American
public if they want an FBI wiretap and they’ll say, ‘no.’
If you ask them do they want a feature on their phone
that helps the FBI find their missing child they’ll say,
‘Yes.’”

If audiences are asked, “Do you want more ads?” all data
suggest they will answer with a resounding NO! But if
they are first asked, “Do you prefer relevant ads over
irrelevant ads?” they may reasonably, albeit reluctantly,
say yes. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.

In an on-demand world, nobody demands more advertising.
An audience so empowered makes advertising a challenging
endeavor, especially when all this snake oil leaves such
a bad taste in our mouths.

————————————————————

You’ve heard it said a thousand times before: Ask a stupid
question, get a stupid answer. Seems like a simple and
unassailable hypothesis – at least for those with half a
brain. Suitably equipped and ever the contrarian, there-
fore, I set out the other day to challenge conventional
wisdom yet again, this time armed with my OBERSC (Official
Brothers Einstein Research Survey Clipboard) and not one
but two appropriately stupid questions:

Question #1: Do you want more or fewer ads?

Question #2: How do you want your ads, relevant or
irrelevant?

What amazes me in retrospect is not that those with clear
vested interests in behavioral targeting technologies
persist with silly claims that consumers actually want
relevant ads, but that they a) can find enough unwitting
pigeons willing to stand still long enough to answer such
abysmally stupid and patently self-serving questions in
the first place, and b) are willing to pay for the results.

My amazement is predicated in part on responses to my
admittedly unscientific survey of 52 individuals, all of
whom I queried recently either at the Queens Plaza Mall
(32 respondents) or the Noguchi Museum (20 respondents),
both in New York City.

In response to question #1, only 42% said they want fewer
ads, good news for advertisers — at least at first blush.
The other 58%, however, told me to get lost (or less civil
words to that effect). Not a single respondent stated a
preference for more ads (even among those who didn’t
threaten me right away with bodily harm). Of course
reaction to the first question all but eliminated any need
to ask the second question; one blatantly stupid question
seemed more than sufficient.

Upon meticulous and painstaking cross-tabulation of the
resulting survey data, a number of possible extrapolations
emerged:

1) You don’t always get a stupid response to a stupid
question (those who refused to answer my stupid questions
spoke volumes simply by walking — or running — away);

2) It’s critically important to incentivize (bribe) survey
respondents (or at least seal off their escape) if you
intend to ask more than one stupid question; and

3) The only way to justify stupid research is to ask the
wrong stupid question first.

————————————————————

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And so it is with behavioral targeting advocates who claim
consumers actually want relevant ads: they prove their
hypothesis by asking the wrong stupid question first.
Still, it’s a brilliant and time-honored agency strategy
designed to exploit the fears, uncertainties and doubts
(the FUDs) of the only ones insipid and lazy enough to
foot the bill for it all: the advertisers. Those of you
who have any agency experience already know that no agency
ever went broke by overestimating the intelligence of its
own clients. You also likely know that virtually all
performance metrics are devised by agencies as a means to
bill for the research required to justify and defend the
metrics, however specious.

Failed metrics that agencies can no longer defend and sell
to their hapless clients (like CTRs that now hover at
statistical zero) will be swapped ASAP for those that can
– like black box metrics designed to promote and sell
“relevancy.” Of course the new generation of metrics to
support behavioral targeting technologies and the pursuit
of relevancy will require truckloads of research and
analysis to defend, not to mention tons of user data
collected from thousands of disparate sources. Ironically,
however, the relevancy of the message becomes entirely
irrelevant the very moment data replaces media as the
dominant commodity in the pipeline. Because who needs
relevance if the real product being sold is data?

Of course advertisers who invest in behavioral targeting
are perfectly free to waste their advertising and market-
ing budgets any way they want. But their investments in
behavioral targeting technologies come with a perfidious
hidden tax, one no longer measured merely in standard
currencies, because the currencies at risk this time
aren’t just their money and their brand equity. The true
currencies at risk this time are our privacy and our
freedom.

———————————————————–

Jeff Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with very select rapid-growth clients to
help define and execute healthy brand strategies in a
toxic media environment.

———————————————————–

The following is Part 2 of a fictitious interview with
George Orwell and Paddy Chayefsky; Part 1 appeared in
this same column space last week.

JA: With all due respect, Mr. Orwell, I’m not sure I agree.
Isn’t everyone, including Behavioral Targeting advocates,
worried about government encroachment, just like YOU were?

GO: While it’s true that I never envisioned the private
sector assuming the role of Big Brother, what people seem
to be missing is that the very act of snooping constitutes
the violation, regardless of which sector – private or
government – does the actual snooping. Once you go online
there is no way of knowing whether you are being watched
or tracked. You essentially surrender your privacy to a
level of trust that hasn’t been demonstrated, let alone
earned. And it matters not how often or on what system
you’re engaged, BT can follow you and record your behavior.
It’s even conceivable that “they” are watching everybody
all the time. Morality doesn’t care who “they” are. But
the fact remains that “they” can now eavesdrop on your
private thoughts wherever and whenever “they” want to. We
have now reached the point where we must assume that every
online post, search, and Website visit is being monitored,
every movement scrutinized. It is this covert scrutiny
that violates our dignity and menaces our trust.

PC: There are many people who howl about America and
democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy.
There is only Microsoft, and Google, and AT&T, and DuPont,
Dow and Exxon. They are the true power in today’s world.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils
of state, Karl Marx? We no longer live in a world of
nations and ideologies. The world is a college of corpor-
ations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of
business. The world is a business. It has been since man
crawled out of the slime.

JA: Wait a second. I am a serial entrepreneur who also
happens to be libertarian. In keeping with our personal
freedom of choice, couldn’t we just ask online audiences
to choose whether or not they want to be tracked? Wouldn’t
this get around the morality issue? After all, some folks
are perfectly willing to have their online behavior
tracked.

PC: Mr. Ali, I fear you’re beginning to believe the
illusions being spun here. To be morally relevant, choice
must be both free and informed. For example, 75% of U.S.
citizens believed Saddam Hussein had something to do with
9-11 before the U.S. attacked Iraq. What this tells us is
that our opinions and the resulting choices can be manu-
factured, which makes them not free by design. Given enough
money, you can buy off the media pundits…you can control
editorial policy…you can, as my good friend Noam Chomsky
suggests, manufacture consent.

GO: Those with enough resources can make lies sound truth-
ful and even murder respectable, and to give an appearance
of solidity to pure wind.Yet online audiences are far from
being informed. Ever read one of those15-page privacy agree-
ments? I think people would be shocked to discover just how
much information about them has been collected, stored,
bought and sold. Informed consent is now nothing more than
a lofty ideal buried somewhere in the fine print.

JA: I would like to go back to something Mr. Orwell said.
“Unconsidered technology is inherently dangerous.” I am
not sure I understand this fully.

PC: May I jump in? When the Manhattan Project began, a
cadre of twenty-something, brilliant PhDs got caught up
with what was possible. They did not stop to consider the
moral implications…

JA: But they eventually did if I recall. The Chicago group
wanted to halt the project, didn’t they?

PC: Yes, that’s true. However, I was speaking of the
initial rush of enthusiasm for the project. The morality
of the technology was almost entirely unconsidered. Like-
wise, I believe the young tech marketers today have not
yet considered the moral implications of BT, and few of
the older generation even understand how BT works, so
where are the checks and balances necessary to protect
us from ourselves?

JA: But Mr. Chayefsky, many BT proponents say that they
only want to deliver relevant information. They say they
are doing online audiences a favor.

GO: Spare me those favors. We have seen over and over how
the private sector hands over information to the govern-
ment. All that is required is a subpoena.Besides, the
gathering of informationis not a means to an end, it is
the end! The object of information is information. The
object of persecution is more persecution. The object of
torture is torture. The object of power is power.

GO: I have observed the growing discourse among BT
proponents, and more often than not, they will admit to
collecting information for which they presently have no
use. They are collecting it “just in case” they ever find
a buyer for it. The collection and mining of personal
data has become a technological imperative.

JA: I have spoken with my oldest son who is in college and
he doesn’t see what the big deal is regarding Facebook,
Google, Choicepoint and others engaged in the harvesting
and brokering of personal information. Apparently there
are a lot of young people who simply do not care about
that which you both believe violates their dignity.

PC: That’s understandable. Right now, there’s an entire
generation that never knew anything else. Technology is
the gospel, the ultimate revelation. Since they have
grown up under complete surveillance, they don’t even
notice it — kind of like an animal born and raised in
captivity. It knows nothing of the joys and dignity of
freedom.

GO: Just as driving while intoxicated poses a moral and
legal dilemma, regardless of whether or not you crash
into someone, the act of driving drunk is unacceptable
and justifiably assailable behavior. Having our privacy
violated through the stealth maneuvering of some faceless
technology, regardless of intent or purpose, breaches our
existential core in much the same manner as the drunk
behind the wheel. BT’s chimerical pursuit of “one-to-one”
marketing can’t justify the creepy practice of scrutinizing
our every online movement.

GO: My fear is greater today than it was sixty years ago.
Big Brother was obvious. Totalitarianism has given way to
a generation that not only wears their chains gladly, but
sees no reason to question the status quo.

JA: I want to thank you both for taking the time to share
your thoughts with our readers. Your words and opinions
are as timely today as they were when you first uttered
them. It is an honor to view today’s reality in light of
your work.

JA: Is there anything you want to say in closing?

PC: Thanks for the opportunity to virtually speak from the
grave. I know it’s tough out there. Everybody’s either out
of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a
nickel’s worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a
gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street
and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do,
and there’s no end to it.

GO: In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth
becomes a revolutionary act. If liberty means anything at
all, it means the right to tell people what they do not
want to hear. Indeed, we are obligated to protect and
defend our freedoms from those who would rob us of them,
be it out in the open at the point of a knife, or at the
hands of a technological predator lurking in the shadows.

———————————————————–

About Jaffer Ali Jaffer Ali is CEO of Vidsense, The Video
Snack Network. With more than 100,000 advertiser-friendly
video clips licensed from major film and TV studios, the
Vidsense Video Snack Network of more than 50,000 safe-for-
work websites delivers millions of qualified visitors
directly to advertiser websites on a pure Pay-Per-Visitor
(PPV) basis.

———————————————————–

Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful
government and in an increasingly powerful private sector
will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should
give way to national security, to law and order, to
efficiency of operation, to scientific advancement and
the like.
– Justice William O. Douglas

My last article and theme on the immorality of “behavioral
targeting” (BT) drew some interesting comments and
critiques. I must say I was surprised by some of the
comments. Some remarks included personal attacks, some
questioned semantic terminology regarding the difference
between ethics and morality, while others mostly just
wanted to change the topic of discussion.

I obviously must take full responsibility for the short-
comings of my writing. Unfortunately, ideas do not
necessarily end up on the page exactly as intended. Our
own minds flawlessly plug in what we omit, but readers
are left having to fill in the blanks.

Because the topic of the morality/ethics of what we
do for a living is of great importance, I will try to
clarify for whomever cares to read why BT represents a
moral black hole that draws otherwise good people into
its sphere.

BT has many different definitions. For the purpose of
this article, let’s use the FTC definition:

“… the tracking of a consumer’s activities online –
including the searches the consumer has conducted, the
web pages visited, and the content viewed – in order
to deliver advertising targeted to the individual
consumer’s interests.”

Now, most marketing professionals understand that huge
databases are being built comprising what was originally
thought to be anonymous information. In other words,
searches, Web sites visited, content viewed, and even
comments left on blogs were originally considered to be
unconnected to PII (Personally Identifiable Information).

That original intention and assumption has been rendered
inoperative. Even though data may not reside on one server
within one marketer’s control, with very little effort it
is conceded that PII and behavioral data can be matched.

Matched by whom you might ask? Can Google match data to
PII? Can ad networks? Can the government?

Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous
surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date
complete files containing even the most personal
information about the citizen…
– Zbigniew Brzezinski

The government only needs to subpoena behavioral data from
multiple sources to create the fertile grounds for PII
matching. Has Brzezinski’s “soon” already become a reality?
With the collusion between corporations and government
becoming more and more apparent, this is not some fantastic
conspiracy theory. As my previous article noted, we have
witnessed:

1) Amazon complying with subpoenas to release transactional
purchase history

2) Phone companies turning over phone records

3) Billions of search records turned over to government

The above illustrates the already entrenched practice of
the private sector harvesting or collecting information
and the government seamlessly obtaining that information.
It is a mistake to think that surfing behavior, click
stream data, viewed content, etc., will somehow be immune
from government subpoenas. Since we already have behavioral
data (transactions) being turned over to the government,
the die is cast.

BT was not created with nefarious intentions. It was
created to advance efficiency of marketing dollars with
the intention to provide relevant ads based upon one’s
profile. That seems innocuous enough.

But as we’ve seen over and over, the road to Hell is paved
with good intentions. Intentions migrate. There is always
the law of unintended consequences. How many purveyors of
BT actually thought that the collection of data would be
used for government snooping? I bet few thought things
through that far.

As a side note, since my last article, Amazon was caught
deleting digital copies of 1984 without Kindle consumers’
knowledge. It was strangely reminiscent of the “memory
hole” envisioned by Orwell, into which books would simply
disappear. In Orwell’s vision back in 1949 when he wrote
“1984,” books were incinerated by the government. In 2009,
they are deleted with a keystroke by the private sector.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, to his credit, was moved to
apologize.

It may be the case that the government no longer needs to
scrutinize our virtual, digital lives. Why? Because our
lust for and pursuit of behavioral targeting does it for
them. Orwell was worried about Big Brother… but to
believe that the scrutiny of every movement, every thought,
every behavior is only a government vice is to take leave
of one’s senses, and turn a blind eye to morality.

Justice Douglas had it right when he saw the twin dangers
of government and the private sector assaulting our
privacy. BT Marketers would like folks to concentrate on
only governmental Big Brother. The subpoena makes this
distinction largely moot.

There is no longer a hard edge between government and
corporate information. As the bailouts demonstrated,
there is barely any such distinction at all. They are
merging in an unholy alliance faster than you can say
9-11. Orwell wrote his morality play in 1949. Today in
2009, we need to examine the morality of the private
sector scrutinizing our digital lives.

BT is a methodology that stalks and threatens our private
lives. And make no mistake, privacy and freedom are
inextricably entwined. As Justice Douglas said, “The right
to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.”

We will leave for another time how it is even conceivable
that our loss of freedom, our slavery, becomes suddenly
ethical if we opt to wear the chains that keep us enslaved.
Until then it is necessary for us to open the debate to
the light of day as to whether the very act of digital
stalking threatens, indeed violates our dignity. As author
Katherine Gerould proclaims: “All violations of essential
privacy are brutalizing.” Will we heed her sage advice, or
will our greatest fears be realized, perhaps without us
even knowing?

———————————————————–

About Jaffer Ali Jaffer Ali is CEO of Vidsense, The Video
Snack Network. With more than 100,000 advertiser-friendly
video clips licensed from major film and TV studios, the
Vidsense Video Snack Network of more than 50,000 safe-for-
work websites delivers millions of qualified visitors
directly to advertiser websites on a pure Pay-Per-Visitor
(PPV) basis.

———————————————————–

Current behavioral targeting (BT) controversies among
consumer advocacy groups and government agencies focus
primarily on how these aggressive new technologies affect
consumer privacy (and there’s plenty of cause for concern
among privacy advocates and legislators alike). But I’d
like to focus this article instead on how behavioral
targeting affects advertisers — where the proverbial
buck to fund BT campaigns literally begins and ends.

So here’s my first BT question to advertisers and their
agency proxies: What the hell are you thinking? Where
do you find any evidence whatsoever to suggest that
subsequent layers of targeting technology do anything
except raise costs, drive down performance, and reinforce
the one thing that we already know for certain about
on-demand media: that no one demands more advertising?

Contrary to industry claims, behavioral targeting isn’t
marketing at all; it’s virtual stalking, a predatory
behavior that relies almost exclusively on stealth
(because no one would tolerate the overt collection of
sensitive behavioral data). How desperate are we that
we feel the need to lurk in the shadows like digital
stalkers and hunt our prey? Desperate enough apparently
to risk association with a technology that’s already
squarely aligned in the crosshairs of lawmakers,
government agencies and consumer advocacy groups alike.
The most relevant question for advertisers to ask them-
selves about BT is not how to make it work, but what to
do after it fails to work. Where do advertisers turn
next?

Advocates of BT claim that consumers want relevant ads.
But that’s patently false and self serving, not to
mention utterly absurd (right up there on the Alice in
Wonderland index with the myth of consumer demand). In
fact, I would challenge any proponent of BT to identify
even a single consumer advocacy group that embraces it,
or even accepts the notion that consumers want ads at
all, relevant or otherwise. No, this is clearly not at
all about what consumers want. And it’s clearly not about
what actually works – not when average clickthrough rates
are 15-20 times lower than they were less than a decade
ago, when the first BT technologies appeared. This is
only about what BT providers and agencies can sell to
advertisers, the guys who foot the bill. And advertisers
who buy BT are buying a pregnant pig in a poke, a porcine
technology loaded with more legal liabilities than
thalidomide and tobacco combined.

The fact that so many marketing and advertising trade
associations have suddenly rallied around BT to ward off
potential government regulation of the digital marketing
industry is not only a measure of our desperation, but a
measure of our profound disconnect from reality. To think
that we can justify such hyper-aggressive behavior as a
means to initiate or sustain meaningful relationships
stinks of Orwellian Newspeak. BT will make industry faux
pas like spam and malware seem in comparison like choir
boys, and in the end the only ones whose behavior will be
targeted is our own — when we suddenly find ourselves
subpoenaed to testify before Congress or a judge and jury.
We are playing with fire.

Legal liabilities notwithstanding, what evidence out there
suggests that BT works for advertisers (or for anyone
except the agencies and BT technology providers)? What
evidence can agencies and BT technology providers offer
to justify the added commitment, expense and significant
risks associated with their products and services?
Advertisers, before you throw more good money after bad,
ask yourselves how BT suddenly makes knowable what the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle – a mainstay of quantum
physics theory — says we can’t know with any certainty.
Financier George Soros discusses his variation on the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (what he called the Human
Uncertainty Principle)in his book, “Alchemy of Finance”:

“People’s understanding of the world in which they live
cannot correspond to the facts and be complete and coherent
at the same time. Insofar as people’s thinking is confined
to the facts, it is not sufficient to reach decisions; and
insofar as it serves as the basis of decisions, it cannot
be confined to the facts. The human uncertainty principle
applies to both thinking and reality. It ensures that our
understanding is often incoherent and always incomplete
and introduces an element of genuine uncertainty – as
distinct from randomness – into the course of events. “The
human uncertainty principle bears a strong resemblance to
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which holds that the
position and momentum of quantum particles cannot be
measured at the same time. But there is an important
difference. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does not
influence the behavior of quantum particles one iota;
they would behave the same way if the principle had never
been discovered. The same is not true of the human
uncertainty principle. Theories about human behavior can
and do influence human behavior. Marxism had a tremendous
impact on history, and market fundamentalism is having a
similar influence today.”

The observer effect described above states that the very
act of observing something (or someone) changes the object
of our observation, an effect not lost on Internet founder
Sir Tim Berners-Lee in recent comments on BT…

“We use the internet without a thought that a third party
would know what we have just clicked on. Yet the URLs
[webpages] people use reveal a huge amount about their
lives, loves, hates and fears. This is extremely sensitive
information.

“People use the web in a crisis, when wondering whether
they have a sexually transmitted disease, or cancer, when
wondering if they are homosexual and whether to talk about
it… to discuss political views.”

According to Berners-Lee, we “use the internet to inform
ourselves as voters in a democracy… we use the internet
to decide what is true and what is not.

“We use the internet for healthcare and social interaction.

“There will be a huge commercial pressure to release this
data,” he said. “The principle should be that it is not to
be collected in the first place.”

The implications are clear: Consumers will change their
behavior if they suspect that sensitive data will be
shared with third-party interests.

Nothing about BT makes it immune to the otherwise immutable
laws of physics. Instead, we should recognize it for what
it is: pure, unadulterated, high-tech snake oil — an
arrogant subset of the same convoluted logic that suggests
that who you talk to is somehow more important than what
you have to say.

All of the above notwithstanding, the potential for abuse
inherent in BT is staggering, and far outweighs any
presumed benefits. And speaking of benefits, where exactly
is the BT upside, a 17% lift on an already subatomic .2%
clickthrough? Advertisers, get serious: BT does nothing
for you except insult your customers, drain your budget,
and potentially injure your brand in the process. Much
better instead to pause and reconsider our obsessions with
targeting technologies — all of which have done nothing
in aggregate but conspire to drive down performance and
drive up costs.

Much better instead to reinvest your time and money in
the fundamentals of a good message and better online
destination experiences. Challenge your agency to explore
and learn how — in an on-demand media universe — to let
your audience target you.

———————————————————–

Jeff Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with select rapid-growth clients to help
define and execute healthy brand strategies in a toxic
media environment.

———————————————————–

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and
weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten
lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came
a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my
chamber door. ‘Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at
my chamber door – Only this, and nothing more.’
– “The Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe

Let’s talk about behavioral targeting (BT), loosely defined
as: an advertising methodology in which an advertiser’s
creative is shown to users based on the sites they visit
and/or what the user does on those sites.

Conventional wisdom (…pondered weak and weary) dictates
that you need to know your target before you can reach it.
This is the same conventional wisdom which, in concert
with the latest BT data, has produced industry-average
CTRs of a whopping .3% (that’s 1-in-333 for anyone who’s
counting).

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But wait just a second…how can that be? How can we know
exactly where our prospects are, where they’ve been and
what they’re thinking, yet still fail to engage them 99.7%
of the time? Maybe it’s time to ask ourselves a more cogent
question about behavioral targeting: Why bother with it at
all? Besides, we already know that video viewing is the
dominant (and still growing) online behavior, and that
video snacking is the dominant form of video viewing. So
do we really want to target consumer behavior in the hopes
of guessing right, or do we simply want to tap the behavior
we know for certain already exists (…and nothing more)?

Allow me to introduce you to Vidsense, the first and only
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marketing — taps consumer behavior instead of targeting
it. Vidsense takes its cue from the early days of radio
and television (…many a quaint and curious volume of
forgotten lore), when advertisers hosted their own branded
content and the audience came to them — by choice, of
course. With video snacking now the dominant online
activity, Vidsense is the only video ad network capable
of tapping this demonstrated behavior and putting it to
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Vidsense engages users through a simple process that places
thumbnail links to popular TV and movie clips (from its
archive of more than 80,000 fully licensed, family-friendly
video clips) across an extensive network of more than
50,000 safe-for-work websites. Each time a video-hungry
consumer clicks on one of these virtual treats (…suddenly
there came a tapping), a new window opens (…rapping at my
chamber door), transporting both snacker and snack to a
demographically compatible advertiser’s website where the
clip is then viewed within the exclusive confines of that
advertiser’s branded surroundings. The result is a
satisfied prospect whose random appetite for video snacks
has been fulfilled, courtesy of the host advertiser — a
triumph of human nature over technology (…only this, and
nothing more).

With Vidsense you can forget everything you ever heard
about targeting your audience. Remember, your only
objective is to attract visitors to your site. Once
you see Vidsense in action you’ll understand that success
online has nothing to do with putting your ad in front of
the right people and everything to do with putting the
right people in front of your ad. And what better way to
lure prospects to your site than with the iconic sights,
sounds and personalities that define who we are and what
we feel?

Do yourself a big favor. Throw your BT software in the
recycle bin and cancel the updates. Stop targeting behavior
(…never — nevermore)and start tapping it instead, with
Vidsense.

————————————————————

Mike Einstein is one-half of the Brothers Einstein, a
creative strategy and branding boutique. The Brothers
Einstein work with select rapid-growth clients to help
define and execute healthy brand strategies in a toxic
media environment.

————————————————————