Why The Online Ad Community Needs To Redefine Reach
by Jaffer Ali

When bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed
banks, he reportedly replied, “because that’s where the
money is.” As online marketers we adopt a variation of
Mr. Sutton’s theme each time we assume that ad dollars
will follow the flocks to the Internet. Alas, only half
that assumption has proved true. The flocks continue to
show up — but the ad dollars don’t. That’s like showing
up to rob the bank only to discover that the bank has no
cash.

But digital marketers need to ask the inconvenient
question: Why haven’t online ad dollars kept pace with
audience growth? We know that we can reach a lot of
people online, and theoretically, ad dollars should
accompany that reach. So, maybe we need to revisit our
definition of reach.

Reach doesn’t just equal exposure

In August 2009, Microsoft, via the Atlas institute, issued
an online advertising research report that defined reach
as “…the number of people exposed to a particular ad.”
Microsoft’s definition of reach describes a media universe
that simply no longer exists. It describes a world where
exposure alone equals reach, and where consumers are
compelled to tolerate advertising because they aren’t
equipped yet to avoid it.

Adding insult to injury, the same Microsoft media experts
then describe reach as “…a critical metric to advertisers
for planning and measuring the success of campaigns.” In
short, they start with a ridiculously outdated premise and
then bet the farm on it. But they’re not the only ones —
we as an online advertising community seem to be doing the
same.

We all know that branding is a function of reach. But if
what we call online reach (for lack of a better term)
isn’t really reaching anyone, how and where is the brand-
ing supposed to happen, and why are we using the term at
all? We need to redefine reach if we expect to brand in
scale online, because the current advertising-as-inter-
mediary model doesn’t really reach anyone and isn’t
scalable. What actually is scaling is “non-reach” because
our banner ads are so readily ignored.

A stab at a new definition

What if we redefine effective reach as “the number of
authentic visitors delivered to a branded website?” What
if we then use our new definition of effective reach to
replace the current CTR entirely (and all but eliminate
the potential for massive click fraud in the process)?

But is the above definition of reach scalable? Not under
the current advertising-as-intermediary model — a bless-
ing in disguise, since the wherewithal to scale a model
that delivers a product no one wants and everyone is
equipped to avoid is a sure road to ruin. Contrary to
current industry myopia, the answer isn’t to provide more
relevant reach prospects with more archived content. I’ll
be a little self-serving here. The more consumers get
access to broadband, the more they want more video.

The next question is how do you target them? The answer
is simple: you don’t. All commercial media are now and
always have been on-demand. Your prospects will target
you for the same reasons and in the same ways that they’ve
flocked to their favorite radio and TV programs for the
past eight decades: good content. Good content not only
aggregates eyeballs, it attracts specific audience demos
as well – all of them self-selecting. Apparently, not only
do we need to redefine reach, but we need to redefine who
does the reaching as well, because it sure as hell isn’t
the advertisers and marketers, and never was. We don’t
reach the audience. They reach us.

Better content creates better “reach”

We don’t need to target and hunt down an online audience
that’s already more than happy to target us. We just need
better bait to capture their attention. We need quality
unbranded bait that doesn’t put prospects off right away
and doesn’t put the brand at risk in rented third-party
environments full of competing brands and stealth tracking
technologies.

By contrast, a single unbranded video thumbnail culled
from a great classic movie clip on a website is far more
compelling than any ad and far more scalable for the same
reason. Besides, we can’t scale something no one wants,
and we’d have to forgive those who would call us idiots
for trying.

All along we’ve tried in vain to insert the ad in the
content environment when it makes far more sense for all
players — advertisers, publishers and content producers
alike — to insert the content directly in the ad environ-
ment on the advertiser’s branded website instead, and use
unbranded video thumbnails across the networks to deliver
self-selecting audiences to the branded destination sites.

Don’t reach out to them, let them “reach” you

In other words, don’t post your ads on publisher sites;
consumers clearly don’t want them. Find a way instead to
bring self-qualified consumers to your own brand message
on your own website where you control the brand environ-
ment. The best place for brands to assert and maintain
true relevance is on their own sites in their own
environments.

This means a simple, yet radical departure for media and
advertising brands. It means having Sports Illustrated
articles read on Adidas or Nike sites. It means having
The New York Times’ Paul Krugman read on Chase.com. It
means having viewers of Walter Payton video clips delivered
to a Just For Men microsite.

“Reach” re-defined as the audience delivered to consume
chosen content on an advertiser’s website portends a more
meaningful metric whereby brand advertisers own the eye-
balls instead of just renting them – exactly as it was
back in the golden years of radio and TV. It’s all about
engaging the audience on its own terms, and history has
shown that once you capture their hearts and minds, their
wallets will follow.

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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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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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Woody Allen And The Dying Spirit Of Innovation
by Jaffer Ali

It was Woody Allen who said, “if you’re not failing every
now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very
innovative.” And he clearly knew his stuff. As a young
writer for Sid Caesar, he — along with fellow comedy
cohorts like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and MASH’s Larry
Gelbart — created the most innovative environment in
the Golden Age of Television.

In theory, the Internet, too, was supposed to be a model
of innovation. But in reality, we instead find more and
more Internet businesses content to pursue that “most
sincere” form of flattery better known as imitation.

Startups need funding, and funding means too many copycats

What drives the bus for most start ups is funding–not
innovation. To get funded, business planners incorporate
carefully crafted language that appears innovative, yet
purposely doesn’t stray very far from models that have
already been funded. After YouTube, how many video
portals received significant funding? In the ad network
heyday, how many such networks got funded? Lead generation
businesses? Blogs? The list of copycat companies that
were funded is a mile long. The adage that “nothing
succeeds like success” may be the road to funding, but
it’s certainly not the road to innovation.

Ironically, it may be the exact opposite of success that
leads to innovation — namely failure. Newton’s view of
physics gave way to a better model, only after it failed
to account for various phenomena. In other words, its
failure to describe light and subatomic reality led to
innovation.

Walt Disney reportedly declared bankruptcy twice before he
became a successful innovator. Nobody likes failure, but
the aphorism that “every dark cloud has a silver lining”
contains great truth if we can “successfully” reorient
ourselves to failure. We often fear failure so much that
we refuse to acknowledge it, let alone learn from it.

From failure to innovation

If we don’t recognize and embrace failure, we’ll be
condemned to repeat it over and over. Case in point: Our
government budgeting process is a failed enterprise, but
until those responsible acknowledge its failure, we will
remain saddled with the same flawed premises and failed
processes that got us here.

And whereas failure in the public sphere may seem glaring
and obvious, it is less apparent in the private sector,
where self-interest trumps objective scrutiny. Fearing
the unknown, and with safety in numbers, online marketing
professionals would rather cling to an ad model that
clearly fails on so many levels. Indeed, our industry’s
practiced ability to turn a blind eye to failure would be
the envy of any government bureaucrat.

The click-through rate for online display advertising has
suffered a precipitous slide from 5% to less than .1% in
just ten years, yet how many companies still rely on this
failed metric? Many herald pre-roll video commercials as
the salvation for online advertising. But pre-roll
proponents are exhibiting the same myopia as their banner
brethren. They can’t see the failure forest for the self-
interest trees.

The sooner we admit failure, and the sooner we begin to
deliberately discard what doesn’t work, the sooner we
we’ll find ourselves on the road to innovation. It takes
courage to look failure in the eye. The key is not to be
the first one to blink.

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An Ode To Corporate Friction
by Jaffer Ali

As is my habit, I like to begin each of my articles with
a quotation that goes to the heart of what comes after-
wards. Today we borrow from the 18th Century poet, William
Collins, who said: “That willingness to slow down and
examine the mysterious bits of fluff in our lives, that
is the poet’s interest.”

I’m not suggesting that every organization hire a poet
tomorrow (though that may not be such a bad idea), however
it seems clear – at least to me – that weneed to find a
way to reintroduce more mystery and more wonder into our
corporate cultures. After all, great marketers are – like
great poets – sharply intuitive first and foremost. But
what does this have to do with the digital ecosystem?

I have spent the last twenty years trying to reduce
friction in my companies. It made perfect sense on one
level. Reducing friction meant automating, lowering
costs and saving time. Speed became all important.

But something unintended happens when you force unchecked
momentum on a frictionless environment, something
disastrous. Permit me to clarify: the stock market has
become a virtually frictionless exchange in which millions
of trades are executed daily with digital, nanosecond
efficiencies. What happens when frictionless automation
on this scale collides with investor attitude (momentum)?
Huge, wild swings, margin calls, and – ultimately –
disastrous market collapses of unfathomable scale and
consequence.

We are we so hell-bent on automating systems and creating
digital efficiencies (reducing friction), that quantifi-
cation becomes the fanatical means to its own misguided
end — a technological imperative utterly divorced from
the holistic goals of a company and culture.

We need to introduce a means to throttle our irrepressible
urge to accelerate faster and faster. We need to know where
we’re headed and why we want to go there before we rev up
our engines and hit the road at hypersonic speeds. While
this may seem obvious, it becomes increasingly critical
once we understand that instability accrues as a natural
byproduct of unrestrained digital acceleration. Few of us
have the vision, let alone the desire to know what lies
ahead, yet the imperative to get there ever-faster seduces
us like a siren’s song.

It’s clear that what we need to do is slow down and impose
purposeful friction on the system. We need time to catch
up with our tools. We need time to deliberate over and
decide what’s important to us in our changing environment
so we no longer consign ourselves to a permanent state of
crisis management and reactionary foolishness. Deliberate
restraint is critical in an age of such immensely powerful
tools of scale, and needs to become the number one job
function of all senior executives.

There are undoubtedly some misguided critics and otherwise
lazy people out there who will misinterpret my call to slow
down as an excuse for inaction. But quite the opposite: I
merely call for deliberate action to counter a digital
culture of almost pure reaction. Imposing friction and
slowing down, while simple in theory, is by no means easy
in practice. It requires a rare and judicious blend of
deliberate thought and the courage to challenge our assump-
tions. Slowing down is hard work.

Unfortunately there’s no scientific way to determine the
right combination of friction and momentum for a company,
no magic algorithm. Indeed, these dynamics change within a
company as the environment changes.

Deliberately slowing down affords us the time and space
to find new patterns in our environment; patterns that
our brains are innately wired to seek out. These patterns
inspire our hopes and dreams and give purpose to our
actions. Try it for yourself. The next time you feel
compelled to pursue speed for speed’s sake, take a deep
breath, slow down, and think about adding a little healthy
friction to your life.

Our corporate culture columnist says we need to slow down
a little bit and take a look at where the digital content
and advertising business is headed. Deliberate restraint,
he says, is critical in an age of such immensely powerful
tools of scale, and needs to become the number one job
function of all senior executives.

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The Way Out For Publishers, Part 2 of 2
by Jaffer Ali, CEO of Vidsense

I must admit that anyone reading Part 1 of The Way Out
For Publishers, would be hard-pressed to find therein a
prescription for what ails us. That’s because I felt it
necessary to first triage the patient, who it turns out is
much sicker than we thought. The results indicate the need
for a radical yet simple restructuring of the media eco-
system.

For publishers, it means admitting the truth behind what
the miserable click thru rates suggest: Advertising is
no longer a viable intermediary. What does this actually
mean?

It means that advertising is no longer a welcome and
trusted middleman between audience and advertiser. Click
rates of less than .1% illustrate a total breakdown of
this essential engagement process. The advertising model
is broken. Advertising cannot deliver the message when
it is being ignored in every medium.

Advertisements have been the carrier wave for the message.
Online advertising has seen the decline of banner click
thru rates from 5% in 1998 to the miserable .1%. So if
advertising cannot deliver the message, advertising must
become the destination.

Once we admit the model is broken, we can move to a
solution. Simply put, PUBLISHERS NEED TO USE THEIR
CONTENT TO DELIVER THE AUDIENCE TO ADVERTISERS. I use
bold type here for a reason, and I repeat: PUBLISHERS
NEED TO BUNDLE CONTENT WITH VISITOR AND DELIVER BOTH
TO THE PAYING ADVERTISER.

For example, imagine a Sports Illustrated cover story on
Tiger Woods. Now further imagine that when you visited
SI.com there was a headline for the story, a brief
paragraph about it, and a link, which when clicked on,
sent you to a special landing page on Nike.com where you
could view the chosen article in its entirety.

You have just bundled the content AND the visitor to Nike.
And Nike will pay on a per-click or per-visitor basis for
that content AND the visitor. Content + Visitor to the
Brand website = SUCCESS.

Publishers need to view content as a means to an end, and
not as the end itself. As has become painfully apparent,
content for content’s sake has no dollar value. It only
assumes business dimension if and when it drives traffic
to a paying advertiser. This diversion of your own traffic
may seem counter intuitive, but ask any brand if they will
pay more for content IF THE VISITOR IS ALSO ATTACHED? Of
course they will!

Publishers need to appreciate that they are in the
advertising business, not the entertainment business,
and that the audience doesn’t care where they consume
content as long as they get what they want. In fact,
they prefer sites with less ad clutter (See Google and
DrudgeReport.com for an idea of minimal ad clutter).

Of course publishers cannot effectuate this change without
the active support of brands and advertisers. For brands,
this means understanding that their online futures will
be better served by challenging the popular albeit false
assumption of advertising as intermediary and by re-
positioning themselves instead as welcoming destinations.

It means that marketers and brands must view their
websites as the real nexus of engagement. Once they do,
the rest is easy.

Is this a huge leap of faith? Absolutely not!

This is the way it used to work and the way it still can
work today. P&G’s soap operas, Hallmark Theater, Texaco
Theater, Geritol’s Ted Mack Amateur Hour, Mutual of Omaha’s
Wild Kingdom…trusted names all that understood the value
of brand as destination.

Some brands are already nibbling at the edges of this
renaissance in theory and practice. Coca Cola has built
numerous microsites to engage audiences. Lexus uses
webisodes that engage the audience and drive traffic to
their site.

I understand this road is not without pot holes. But
utilizing quality content as the mechanism to drive
engagement has ALWAYS worked, and will work again. The
economic equation for bundling the visitor PLUS the
content portends a clean bill of health for the entire
media ecosystem.

Publishers seeking to control the branding process on
their own sites have a losing hand. Advertisers who
have bought into this failed model have faired no better
and are missing real opportunities. Engagement should
rightly occur — and reasonably can only succeed — within
the exclusive, controlled environment of a brand’s own
website.

If any publisher or advertiser wants to discuss this
further, feel free to email me at j.ali@vidsense.com
or give me a call. We can create our own future together.

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The Way Out For Publishers, Part 1 of 2
by Jaffer Ali

The debate rages on between two content camps. In one
corner is “free content”, the monetization of which
requires the development of ever more invasive advertising
methodologies. And when that fails? Why, simply add more
of what doesn’t work, of course.

In the other corner is “paid content”, led notoriously by
Steve Brill and Rupert Murdoch. This camp seeks to super-
impose a cable television model onto the Internet.

Both camps are locked in a psychological version of
Maslow’s oft repeated slogan, “To the carpenter, all
problems can be solved with a hammer.” And meanwhile, as
the two camps fiddle their own tunes, Rome is burning.

But before we get to a workable solution for what ails our
media ecosystem, let’s briefly recap why neither camp’s
solutions work.

Traditional Advertising Subsidy of Content Camp

We are in an advertising free fall. Trust between
advertiser and audience has been broken. Advertisers do
not respect audiences, and in fact, only treat them as
customers. In a perverted rush to consummate sales right
now, they have alienated audiences as never before.

This spreadsheet-driven, transaction-obsessed mentality
has seen click rates plummet to an industry average of
less than .1%. That’s fewer than one-per-thousand (other-
wise known as statistical zero.)

To counter the withering click rate, “clever” folks are
doing three things:

1) Redefining performance with the latest, greatest metric
du jour…

2) Adding more and more ads resulting in more and more
clutter and more and more of what doesn’t work…

3) Violating the audience’s privacy through desperate and
disingenuous attempts to target behavior.

In my opinion, these three pseudo solutions can only ensure
a continued slide for online publishers.

The Paid Content Camp

When I started out in the home video business, music
distributors treated home videos like records. Book
distributors treated videos like books. And periodical
distributors treated home video cassettes like periodicals
(before DVDs there were these things called VHS and Beta
cassettes!).

They were all wrong of course. Home video had its own
personality and its own set of rules.

And now Messrs. Brill, Murdoch et al want to treat the
online landscape like cable. But the Internet has different
rules than cable, and the paid content camp is ignoring
some fundamental economic issues. The consumer is tapped
out. Real unemployment is over 16%. One only need look at
the declining fortunes of premium cable channels to under-
stand that new economic realities require new thinking.

Shifting the economic burden directly to fatigued consumers
will not work. In fact, it will soon be a case of “much ado
about nothing”, because the moment what now masquerades for
news goes behind a firewall, a new industry will emerge
that will rewrite news stories utilizing the facts. Facts
cannot be copyrighted and this information will be free to
the public.

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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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Let’s introduce a new unusual suspect into the social media
discussion. His name, C.G. Jung, who said “…there exists
a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and
impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.”

Think about that. I’ll come back to our Swiss doctor
friend, and I have to tell you that he was in my mind when
one of the discussion lists I belong to had a recent and
spirited exchange regarding an alternative name for “social
media.” The dialogue was festooned with imaginative offer-
ings, but there seemed to be a lot of confusion regarding
exactly what social media is all about.

I’d like to throw my hat in the ring in a vain attempt to
describe this elusive phenomenon. Let me start by citing
some examples of social media cause and effect, and then
possibly we can develop a better working definition.

In 2009, the video clip that garnered the highest number
of online views featured Susan Boyle of “Britain’s Got
Talent” fame. Reportedly, her video was seen by more than
165 million people. Back when the Hula Hoop was first
introduced to the American market, word of mouth created
a buying frenzy that resulted in the sale of over 25
million Hula Hoops in the first 4 months! And on one
day (12/18/09) Ashton Kutcher tweeted 13 times for an
accumulated number of impressions to followers totaling
53,770,561. Add re-tweets to the equation and Kutcher’s
reach and potential influence was overwhelming.

A couple of other disparate yet similar examples are in
order: In 1979, Khomeini created audio recordings from his
exile in France. These recordings, along with numerous
related speeches and sermons, were widely distributed
throughout Iran, feeding a revolution that overthrew the
US supported monarchy. And of course, who can deny that
Rock ‘n Roll spread like wildfire throughout the world in
the sixties. Now, if you find yourself scratching your
head and wondering what a viral video, a plastic hoop that
sold for $1.98, a celebrity tweeter, Rock ‘n Roll and the
Iranian revolution have in common, take heart because you
are not alone. In fact, if we invoke the old master, Carl
Gustav Jung, we just might be able to get our arms around
this social media thing.

But before we do, please note that every one of the social
constructs listed above employed, indeed required,
different tools. From online video, word of mouth, audio
cassettes, etc., the technologies were distinctly different
from each other. We spend so much of our time discussing
and analyzing our tools, we sometimes lose sight of what
it is we’re trying to build. It’s like describing an
appendectomy by its tools: scalpel, laparoscope, forceps,
etc.

As my opening quote here attests, Jung believed that there
is something that binds all of humanity. We are all part
of the family of man to be sure. But Jung believed that we
are connected to each other in more than just a physical
sense. Jung went way beyond the concept of human biological
similarities, noting that many cultures share symbols and
archetypes. It is this act of sharing that produces the
social contract we have with ourselves and each other.

There is something truly primordial that binds us; a
vibrational connection that we acknowledge as having “stuck
the right chord”. Consider again the anecdotes above and
you will see this psychological “second system” manifest
in each of them. Rather than obsess about the tools that
enable “social media”, or worse, confuse the tools with
the objective, we would do well to understand what we are
trying to accomplish. So here I go with a humble attempt
to define “social media.”

Social media attempts to transcend “one-to-one communi-
cation” by tapping into the shared psychic system
described by Jung as the collective unconscious. We share
media for compelling personal and/or social reasons. The
message or information shared reverberates (vibrational?)
not just inside the individual, but among and within the
collective.

The more a message resonates, the more “social” it becomes.
We have many “tools” to facilitate this sharing: email,
Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, etc. But it’s imperative
that we not confuse our tools with our goals. It is the
connection to the “second psychic system” that remains the
essential component of “social media”. Understanding this
reintroduces the notion that what we say is more important
than how we say it. Empty messages don’t connect because
the collective deems them not worth sharing. But who —
even a radical Ayatollah — doesn’t like a nice Hula Hoop?

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I have spent my entire adult life in media. Buying and
selling advertising is only one part of my resume. My
real love is creating content. I have written four books,
produced nine documentaries, been the CEO of an e-zine
company that published 78 e-zines and recently created 21
micro-publications on Twitter. These micro-publications
will soon make their appearance on Facebook.

This personal journey started thirty years ago in the home
video business. And despite all the twists and turns, I
believe there are still a few more miles to travel before
I run out of road. The start of a new year is always a
time of renewal. For me, this follows an annual rite of
deconstructing the past.

In 1980, our industry was forced to confront the emerging
technology of “video”. In knee-jerk reaction, studios
began suing Sony out of fear that new video duplication
technologies would lead to their demise. Thus began a
wild-goose chase between efforts to protect copyrighted
materials and new technologies developed to break the
“copy guard”.

My company spent over $1 million creating a state-of-the-
art editing facility — a capability that can be achieved
far less expensively today with a laptop and some off-the-
shelf software. As is its wont, technology has advanced
faster than our ability to properly assimilate it, let
alone comprehend its business and/or social impact.

“In fact, more technical data have been collected in the
past year alone than in all previous years since science
began,” says John Hopkins astrophysicist Alexander Szalay,
an authority on large data sets and their impact on
science. “The data is doubling ever year.”

When we moved from analog to digital media, the geeks
assumed greater and greater influence in organizations all
over the world. And the die had been cast in a most loaded
fashion. Disturbingly, albeit predictably, content is now
synonymous with “data” in many minds.

The move from “content” to “data” is revolutionary. Data
is raked over by technology while content is consumed by
humans. And because data is increasing at a pace that
overwhelms us, we feel compelled to entrust even more
faith in ever-newer technologies to manage it.

“Our ability to collect data now outstrips our ability
to maintain it for the long run,” says William Michener,
professor and director of e-science initiatives at
University of New Mexico.

Enter the geeks…

Geeks have invaded every layer of the media chain. As the
perception that content was nothing more than data took
hold, the geeks carried the day. And with so much data
now clogging the communications pipeline, content curation
has assumed an increasingly important role in the media
ecosystem.

Not surprisingly — with some notable exceptions like the
Drudge Report — curation has now fallen under the spell
of “geekdom.” Instead of human editors, the geeks are
using technology to curate content, often clumsily referred
to as “automated content” or data.

Algorithmic selection and its human counterpart will both
survive. And whereas my own tastes tend toward human
editing versus “algorithmic editing”, the future does
not turn on my particular tastes. The geeks are in full
swagger; secure in the knowledge that as information
continues to explode, we will react with new technologies
that create more questions than they answer and further
delay our day of reckoning with ourselves.

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