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

————————————————————
Questions? Comments? Email me at: quote (at) Quotes2u.com
————————————————————

Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!

————————————————————
End of MEDIA PERSPECTIVES
Copyright 2010 by NextEra Media All rights reserved.

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.

———————————————————–
Questions? Comments? Email me at: quote (at) Quotes2u.com
————————————————————

Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!

————————————————————
End of MEDIA PERSPECTIVES
Copyright 2010 by NextEra Media All rights reserved.

The end of the year is always a good time to reflect on
the past. The older we get, the farther we travel. The
road to our present business has been one of buying,
owning and selling media of just about every type. Follow-
ing is a short list of media that we have bought and/or
sold over the years:

Billboards Radio Newspapers
Television Magazines Catalogs
Online E-zines Banners Online video
Subway Posters Local Cable National Cable

I’m sure the above list is not complete, but you get the
point: when it comes to media buying and selling, we’ve
pretty much tried them all, been there and done that.
You’d think after all these years of buying and selling
media across so many different channels that I’d find a
softer place in my heart for advertising. But in fact,
I’ve reached the conclusion in recent months that
advertising has outlived its usefulness as an effective
tool to influence people. Influence is not a pass-fail
issue, rather one that like most everything else rides
a continuum.

There is a point at which a quantitative loss or gain
ushers in a qualitative change or ‘leap.’ Start pulling
out your hairs one at a time and eventually you become
bald (high-minded theory aside, my own scalp crossed
that threshold some years ago).

Over the past several years, the advertising industry has
suffered a huge loss in “influence” and now has so few
hairs left that the model looks like the top of Mr. Clean’s
head.

If, however, you don’t believe advertising effectiveness
is declining then you should stop reading this article
immediately. Reason will not make you see. Only continued
pain might awaken you from the nightmare of a failed model
and misplaced sympathies.

So what are marketers, brands and, yes, even politicians
doing to counter this metaphorical hair loss? Their first
reaction is to “double down” and increase impressions.
After all, if what you’re doing doesn’t work anymore, it
only makes sense to do more of it, right? If shampooing
twice a week with doesn’t stimulate hair growth, imagine
if you used it every day!

It is “magical thinking” that doing more of what doesn’t
work suddenly works. We experience this “magical thinking”
with our economic policies that solves our debt problem by
piling on more debt. So it is not surprising that magical
or delusional thinking is gripping our advertising industry.

But there are some folks confronting reality and dealing
with a transition that eschews traditional advertising and
uses content instead of commercials to build and deliver
audiences. And they’re doing it in different ways: product
placement and content curation are just two ways of using
content instead of traditional advertising to build and
deliver audiences.

Now entering its third generation, the digital era has
precipitated two powerful truisms:

1. no one wants more advertising,
2. everyone wants more high-quality content

Perhaps not surprisingly, the above are the same truisms
encountered by print, radio and TV as well. Yet marketers
across all media insist on investing in more ways to
deliver advertising messages that a) no one wants, and
b) that everyone is now equipped to avoid.

Do you require proof that content works better to build and
deliver audiences than advertising? Consider how the Bush
team perfected the use of content to nudge a nation toward
war, despite the fact that no one can recall a specific
marketing message to that effect. What we saw instead was
a $250,000-richer Armstrong Williams on network cable
touting the Bush company line. What we read instead was the
NY Times’ Judith Miller presenting Pentagon views on WMDs.
Was she also paid for her “reporting”? And how about those
150 retired generals flown to Washington DC, briefed with
talking points and dispatched as “expert sources” to
newspapers, television and cable news outlets? Heck, you
don’t expect these guys to work for free, do you?

$1.6 billion in expenditures by the Bush administration to
“sell” or “influence” a nation into war… without a single
ad! At this very moment, the Obama administration is
invoking these same lessons as they condition the public
to support the Afghan surge. Governments and propagandists
the world over have long understood the powerful sway of
content. So why is the advertising ecosystem still trying
to cover its bald pate with such a lousy toupee?

No one watches TV, listens to the radio, reads a magazine
or surfs the web for the advertising. That era started
winding down the moment the TV remote control eliminated
the need to get up from the couch to change the channel.
Advertising has been in a perpetual state of declining
performance ever since, as each new digital device
designed to facilitate more media consumption also
equipped consumers with the additional technology to
avoid more ads.

I will end with an invitation for a dialog. If you want
to discuss how you can not just build audiences, but
deliver them utilizing content, give me a call. My direct
line is 708-478-4500 ext. 105.

————————————————————
Questions? Comments? Email me at: quote (at) Quotes2u.com
————————————————————

Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!

————————————————————
End of MEDIA PERSPECTIVES
Copyright 2009 by NextEra Media All rights reserved.

It happens every time a new type of media emerges. For
example, and this dates me a bit, when I entered the home
video business, beta was king! Back then, music industry
executives-turned video executives treated the video
industry as if it were the record industry.

Book distributors also jumped in, and, guess what? Yep,
they treated video like books.

Periodical distributors entered the fray and, well, you
know what happened…

It is undoubtedly true that we view life through the lens
of our own experiences. There is nothing wrong when these
experiences inform our viewpoints. But it is another
matter entirely when we become slaves to our own narrow
perspectives.

Steve Brill, creator of cable’s Court TV, is a slave to
his past and thus he is touting a model that has very
little chance to work online. Online is not cable. People
will not pay for information that is readily available
for free.

Online distribution platforms like Twitter, Facebook,
Hotmail, Gmail, etc. have made the physical distribution
of information either free or very close to free. Yes,
someone still needs to create that information. But when
it comes to news, this information is ubiquitous and free,
if you know where to look.

Give me open access and 140 characters to play with and I
will give you the Internet—Absolutely FREE!

Mr. Brill wants to superimpose a cable TV model onto the
online space. He is being led by his arrogance that makes
him believe that certain mainstream media outlets actually
have enough trust equity to pull off a paid model. But
chew on this for a moment:

1. The Bush Whitehouse brought in 150 retired Generals and
briefed them on the Iraq war to become analysts for all
MSM outlets. The MSM dutifully reported what these Generals
had to say.

2. Armstrong Williams was paid $250,000 by the Bush
administration to appear almost nightly on cable to
promote a POV.

3. The PR budget to sell the Iraq war for the Bush Admin
was $1.6 Billion

4. Carl Bernstein reported years ago that over 400
journalists in the US were on the CIA payroll

5. Judith Miller of the NY Times was essentially exiled
after being the Pentagon “go to” gal for promoting WMDs
in Iraq

This is not an anti-Republican diatribe, but an anti-MSM,
anti-foolishness diatribe. Only an arrogant cuss like
Brill would think that the editorial prowess of the MSM
news organizations is so profound that people will pay
for the privilege of being hoodwinked.

With the Internet, any and all of what we ultimately deem
important and “newsworthy” is revealed in due course, the
operative word being “we”. And it’s free! Bloggers on the
ground in Iraq tell a better story than embedded hacks.
And with Twitter and Facebook, one has the potential to
build large audiences and share information across the
globe in a matter of seconds.

News is reported, not created. Propaganda is created. With
free news outlets in Iran, China, Russia, Israel, Lebanon,
etc., the challenge is not finding the news. The challenge
– and the opportunity it represents – is in the distilling
of the vast amounts of free information and opinion at our
fingertips. The real stars of tomorrow’s news industry
will be those whose editorial taste we admire and whose
viewpoint we share.

Brill’s dream of charging for his version of the news has
the feel of fantasy, soon to become a nightmare.

———————————————————–
Questions? Comments? Email me at: quote (at) Quotes2u.com
————————————————————

Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!

————————————————————
End of MEDIA PERSPECTIVES
Copyright 2009 by NextEra Media All rights reserved.
Feel free to forward this, in its entirety, to others.

In a recent article here on MediaBizBloggers, The March to
Addressability, Universal McCann’s David Cohen intones,
“Delivering the right message to the right consumer at the
right time is the holy grail of advertising.”

In another article, The Three Rs of Engagement, Catalyst
SF’s Cory Treffiletti labels these three Rs as “…recency,
resonance and relevance.”

Both are saying the same thing: Right message is to
resonance what right consumer is to relevance what right
time is to recency. More Rs, more fun! Six Rs!

But with all due respect to my esteemed colleagues, I
believe it’s a matter of close but no cigar in each case.
Neither hits the mark, and both miss it for the same
reason. Because addressability and engagement can only
occur in the right place.

Addressability and engagement are properties of the
message, not media targeting. Targeting neither addresses
nor engages anyone. Case in point, industry-average CTRs
that are now less than .1%. If the holy grail of
advertising is indeed found within the Three Rs of Engage-
ment, then why do the data reveal the exact opposite?
Anybody looking at the numbers would reasonably conclude
that we are bound and determined to foist the wrong message
on the wrong consumer at the wrong time – The Three W’s of
Unholy Disengagement!

The sober reality is that in an on-demand world, nobody
demands more advertising. That’s why response rates for
banner and text ads have now reached statistical zero. We
have the means to avoid the message, so we do.

But what about relevance? Messrs. Cohen, Treffiletti, et
al, would have us believe that consumers actually “want”
relevant ads and that given a choice between relevant and
irrelevant will respond accordingly. Which consumers are
these? Everything I read — including the latest from
comScore, Inc. — tells me that more than 999 out of every
thousand consumers choose no ads at all, relevant or other-
wise.

Let’s cut to the chase: The only place addressability and
engagement can occur is in the controlled environment of
an advertiser’s own website or branded landing page. There
are precious few brands and even fewer agencies that
understand this, although some – like Coca-Cola, Lexus
and Unilever (catch their engaging new Breyers Ice Cream
campaign at www.smoothandcreamy.com) – have begun to
experiment with it.

Advertisers need to cease their reliance on advertising as
intermediary and embrace advertising as destination through
the creation of environments to buy that, like the brand
examples above, engage the senses. To see exactly how to
achieve this seemingly elusive media symbiosis, I invite
you to spend a few minutes here perusing our Brothers
Einstein archives. Or, go to www.vidsense.com and see this
theory at work in proven practice.

Better yet, I welcome anyone so interested to call me at
(219) 878-1006 to discuss the possibilities. I won’t
promise you the holy grail (that, as the Hebrew National
folks might suggest, is better left to a higher authority),
but I will provide some needed relief from what doesn’t
work by offering you something that does.

————————————————————

Mike 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.

———————————————————–

We see and hear a lot these days about declining media
performance. Since when is it the media’s job to perform?
I thought that was the ad’s job.

Late last year in this space, prior to the government
bailout of all those businesses that were deemed “too big”
to fail, I bemoaned the dearth of creativity across the
advertising landscape, to wit: “The beginning of the end
was the disappearance of original jingles from the air-
waves. I can see the empty suits sitting around the table
at GM now extolling the virtues of “Like a Rock” as a more
expedient path to consumer top-of-mind than Dinah Shore’s
iconic See the USA in your Chevrolet. And heaven knows
that GM could shore use a little Dinah these days.”

In the ensuing 9 months, media “performance” has continued
its inexorable march backward. GM has gone into and come
out of bankruptcy, and now exists on subsidized bribery
(not exactly the USP they were looking for, but arguably
their most successful campaign in years). Is our lousy
economy to blame, or did GM simply fail to communicate a
decent reason to buy a Chevy?

I think the two go hand-in-glove. It’s tough enough to
break through the growing clutter with a good message,
and, as we’re seeing, clearly impossible without one.

Then there’s this whole “on-demand” thing and the sober
reality that, given the choice, nobody demands more
advertising, let alone the insipid crap that clogs the
bandwidth these days. This mess reminds me of Curly Howard
in A Plumbing We Will Go, when he mistakes an electrical
conduit for a water pipe: “Hey, no wonder the water don’t
work,” he exclaims. “The pipes are clogged up with wires!”
To which Moe replies, “A fine place for wires!”

————————————————————

================ YOUR VIDEO SNACK BAR… ==================
Top Videos Of The Week

1. Marine Silent Marching
http://c.gophercentral.com/L6Ba

2. NFL Greats – Walter Payton
http://c.gophercentral.com/wFU2

3. Hendrix at Woodstock
http://c.gophercentral.com/xXo9

4. Blue Hawaii – Elvis
http://c.gophercentral.com/Izaj

5. Incredible Shark Jump
http://c.gophercentral.com/94gj

6. Parrot Talk
http://c.gophercentral.com/Zz6H

————————————————————

So, what’s a brand to do?

Well, for starters, brands need to get out of the who,
what, how, when and where business and get back into the
why business. And that means shifting emphasis from the
media back to the message. The media can’t convey a
benefit. Only a good message can do that.

A good place to begin this creative renaissance is to fire
anyone who uses the words algorithm and advertising in the
same sentence. Insist on writing samples of more than 140
characters from the folks working on your account, and if
you don’t see anything you like, keep looking and listen-
ing until you do (attention Home Depot, time to fix that
radio ad where if you get to the such-and-such aisle you
went too far).

Don’t focus on an ad’s relevance to your audience, focus
instead on its relevance to your brand.

Don’t target consumer behavior, tap it with a clever call
to action. Remember, brands don’t want consumers with good
taste, they want consumers who taste good.

Most importantly, don’t spend another penny on media until
you have something worth saying. In the meantime, soothe
that ache in your gut with a good antacid. And be sure to
study the label carefully. Because that’s how you spell
relief!

————————————————————

Mike 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.

———————————————————–

Publisher’s Note: This blogs reflects a fictional
narrative.

What follows is an imaginary discussion with Paddy
Chayefsky, who wrote the script for the award winning film
Network, and Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen
name, George Orwell. Whenever possible, their words were
taken verbatim from their respective and considerable
bodies of work.

I hope you see their relevance to today’s media and online
marketing industries. Their eloquence necessitates splitt-
ing this discussion into two parts.

Jaffer Ali: Today we are honored to bring two literary
giants together for a long overdue discussion. These
prolific writers and social critics left behind much for
us to digest. For our purposes here, we asked Mr. Orwell
and Mr. Chayefsky to contrast and compare their respective
seminal works, 1984 and Network,with an eye to what is
happening in today’s media-driven world. Thank you gentle-
men for taking the time to share your thoughts with our
readers.

Paddy Chayefsky: I would first like to say how much in
debt I am to Mr. Orwell. I was a young man when I first
read 1984 and I had regular nightmares about one day
waking up in a place called Oceania.

George Orwell: That is very kind of you Mr. Chayefsky.

PC: Please call me Paddy

GO: Thank you. And I must say, when I first viewed Network,
I experienced a curious sense of déjà vu.

JA: If we can break from this love-fest for a few minutes,
I’m sure our readers would like to know just how prescient
each of you believe you were with 1984 and Network?

GO: Well, thankfully I didn’t live long enough to hear
my nom de plume associated with all things oppressive.
Apparently it is rare indeed these days to avoid references
to this or that being “Orwellian.” But on a more serious
note, it is difficult to observe 21st-century thought and
attitude and not conclude that societal and technological
perversions have exceeded my wildest dreams… or I should
say nightmares?

JA: How so?

GO: Well, for starters, this generation imagines itself
to be more intelligent than the one that preceded it,
and wiser than all those that will follow. As Mark Twain
reminds us, this happens with every generation, but today’s
generation has such a lack of historical perspective, the
past, for all intents and purposes, has been figuratively
wiped out.

PC: George, can I call you George? I think I know why this
is the case. Because less than three percent of the people
read books! Because less than fifteen percent read news-
papers or even consume news online! The only truth folks
know is what they are fed over the television or computer.
Right now, there is a whole generation that never knew
anything that didn’t emanate from some virtual source.

GO: It certainly is the case that to see what is in front
of one’s nose requires a constant struggle. I once said,
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls
the present controls the past.” When I wrote 1984 sixty
years ago, the techniques of controlling information were
nothing like those we see today.

PC: I am glad you said that. I do not believe your novel
envisioned such collaboration between government and the
private sector. Back when you were writing, totalitarian
governments controlled media out in the open. Everybody
knew it. But not so today. Case in point, just a few years
ago the U.S. government briefed 150 generals on exactly
how the Pentagon wanted to sell the war in Iraq. They were
then dispatched to be the sanctioned sources for all media.
George, if you don’t mind me saying this, you idealized
the media because you trusted people like Edward R. Murrow.
You never envisioned the private sector as government
propagandists .You never considered how or why The New
York Times would hire someone like Judith Miller (Pentagon
groupie) to promote a government agenda… or imagined
someone like Karl Rove paying $250,000 to a journalist
(Armstrong Williams) to promote the party line. As far
back as 1979, my friend Carl Bernstein broke the story
that 400 journalists were on the CIA payroll. Propaganda
has now become even less transparent than it was in the
days of Stalin when EVERYONE knew the news was “cooked.”

GO: Your point is well taken. Totalitarian government was
the burning issue of the day back in 1949. Today I see the
collusion between government and the private sector spawn-
ing a new breed of oppressive fascism, the offspring of an
inseparable union between business and state.

PC: Precisely. You and yours perceived world events in
terms of nations and peoples. But today there are no
nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There
are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West.
There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast,
interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational
dominion of currencies. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars,
multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and
shekels. It is this nameless, faceless global currency
exchange that defines the totality of life on this planet.
That is the nature of the world we have created for
ourselves.

JA: That’s quite an impassioned response, Mr. Chayefsky.
Are you suggesting that the private sector has replaced
the public sector as society’s villain?

PC: Now is not the time for naiveté. Public officials are
bought and sold like any commodity. If you wanted to
maintain illusions, you should have interviewed Judith
Miller and Karl Rove, rather than George and me. Those
who perceive any meaningful daylight between government
and big business are either not paying attention, or are
selectively blind.

PC: Ask yourself: Who received $700 million in bailout
money from the Bush Administration? The very same guys
who received three times that amount from the Obama
Administration, that’s who! Our capacity for trust allows
us to be easily seduced through clever political language
and a media that appears free, when in reality it’s all
theater, bought and paid for by the highest bidder.

GO: Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill
bucket.

JA: Mr. Orwell, I believe you’re exaggerating. Do you also
feel compelled to indict the free-market processes that
fuel our consumer culture?

GO: Please remember, all this cyber nonsense is new to me.
But it doesn’t take a genius to understand that behavioral
targeting is about as bad as it gets. I’m not sure it’s
even advertising. What I do know for certain is that
behavioral targeting represents a complete violation of
our personal lives. And it gets worse the more we expose
ourselves to its misguided purpose.

PC: I must caution you George, when you mention behavioral
targeting, you’re meddling with the primal forces of
nature. You may think you’ve merely commented on an ill-
conceived business practice, but in reality an entire
online industry has placed its eggs in this one basket.
Take companies like Choicepoint, Datran Media and Axciom
for instance. They have accumulated huge databases of
personal information on private citizens. I know that at
least two of these companies have large contracts with
the government to furnish this very information.

JA: Are you both in agreement that behavioral targeting
technologies are unethical, perhaps even immoral?

GO: I believe the potential consequences of this new
science extend beyond their moral implications. Ill-
considered or unconsidered technologies are inherently
dangerous. I have read what purveyors of behavioral
targeting (BT) have to say about their craft and they’re
either impervious to the truth, or purposely silent
regarding their own fears.

To be continued next week…

———————————————————–

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.

———————————————————–

Call me Ishmael. Our obsessive quest for precision and
certitude via all things digital is a great white whale
that — like Ahab — we chase at our own peril. Of course,
great white whales aren’t designed to be caught, only
chased. But now — fifteen years later and well past the
point of no return — we find that our ability to innovate
in the overwhelming evidence of diminished performance
across all media channels is likewise compromised and
greatly diminished.

We need to disabuse ourselves ASAP of the narcotic but
tragic notion that industry innovation is a byproduct of
technology, and that every problem will be solved as better
technologies inspire better metrics, better methodologies,
and better management decisions. This blind and backwards
faith in better business through better technology inhibits
and truncates our true ability to innovate in much the same
manner that our massive inventories of time-saving devices
now consume and steal so much of our precious time. As
Dr. Phil might ask: “How’s it workin’ for ya?”

In response to the above, I’d like to re-introduce my
formula for innovation, the same formula I introduced
several years ago when it was already painfully apparent
that we had surrendered our individual and collective
futures to swarms of youthful, well-funded technologists
who — predictably and without delay — converted the
financial, media, marketing and entertainment industries
into ersatz extensions of global technology companies. So
here’s my formula for innovation: Ignorance + Intent =
Innovation. Translated into less secular terms, the same
formula might read: Uncertainty + Faith = Inspiration.
Both are predicated on our willingness to embrace what we
don’t know as the path to wisdom.

Despite what those with vested interests in the vast,
technology-driven knowledge industry may claim, few of
the world’s intractable problems remain so for a lack of
knowledge, and in the end our failure to resolve them
has little to do with how much we know or don’t know.
Our failure to resolve them is largely a failure of
imagination. Some would say that we lack the will as well,
and that may be perfectly true. But the will to do some-
thing assumes something to do, and we can’t begin to do
something that we can’t imagine first. Contrary to the
claims of experts (those who promote knowledge as the
panacea for all things), the key to imagination and
innovation is uncertainty, not knowledge.

Uncertainty, not knowledge, is the essential human
condition for a reason, just as knowledge is the Godhead
for a reason. The Big Bang and Creation were God’s jobs.
The tasks to imagine, explain and replicate them (albeit
on a far more modest scale — until recently) are ours.
Imagination is our very own little big bang, and nowhere
is our imagination more threatened than in the reductionist
arrogance of our own digital media world, where — for
some reason — we seem perfectly content to take our little
big bang and render it ever smaller at every opportunity.

There are two great battles currently in progress in
digital media: the battle for bandwidth, and — more
recently — the battle for data. The battle for bandwidth
is a face-first battle for brute power while the battle
for data is a backdoor skirmish for knowledge that will
translate into brute power. Neither, however, have much
to do with marketing and advertising — which are really
all about wonderment and mystery, the offspring of
uncertainty.

Consider the words of King Solomon, certainly among
history’s wisest of men, on his own mastery of knowledge:

I said to myself, “I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing
all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had
great experience of wisdom and knowledge.” And I applied
my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I
perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind. For
in much wisdom is much vexation, and those who increase
knowledge increase sorrow. – Ecclesiastes 1:16-18

We shouldn’t delude ourselves: The battle for data is —
first and foremost — a battle to obliterate uncertainty
via the attainment of absolute knowledge and absolute
power. Now consider the words of Jacob Bronowski, author
of The Ascent of Man, as he stands ankle-deep in the ash
ponds of Auschwitz:

To this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million
people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by
arrogance, it was done by dogma, it was done by ignorance.
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge,
with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is
what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.

Science, is a very human form of knowledge. We are always
at the brink of the known. We always feel forward for what
is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the
edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to
what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the
words were said by Oliver Cromwell: ‘I beseech you in the
name of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’

…I owe it as a human being to the many members of my
family who died at Auschwitz, to stand here by the pond as
a survivor and a witness. We have to cure ourselves of the
itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close
the distance between the push-button order and the human
act. We have to touch people.

The battle for data is nothing less than a battle to
acquire the knowledge of gods, a battle to reduce the
hearts, minds, and souls of men, women and children to
commercially parsed and endlessly brokered bits and bytes.
The battle for data — like all great power struggles —
is a battle characterized over and over again by arrogance,
dogma, and ignorance.

There’s a far better, far more effective way. It begins
by accepting that the true opposite of knowledge is not
ignorance, but uncertainty, and that wisdom (the true
opposite of ignorance) only begins to accrue when we
fully embrace how little we can know with any certainty
at all. Wisdom begins to emerge with a more explicit
understanding that pride comes before the fall.

Those who wish to succeed in marketing and advertising in
the years ahead will embrace and invest in uncertainty,
not knowledge, as our most potent and plentiful resource
for success. The best way to restore advertising and
marketing performance to the media channels (now that
we’ve polluted them so thoroughly with technologies that
have so little to do with advertising and marketing) is
to cure our itch for absolute power and knowledge, and
pursue instead a more profound sense of wonderment in
ourselves and others — something that will only happen
if and when we embrace our own uncertainty. Otherwise,
we will lose our ability to touch people entirely (as
witnessed by the current collapse in performance across
virtually all media channels), and the only human act we
are likely to encounter in our desperation to recover
what we’ve already lost is the callous disregard that
further reduces our hopes and dreams to oceans of face-
less data.

Rather than devoting our time and money to technologies
that target and hunt down those we want to engage, we
should be devoting our time and money to the creation of
things worth engaging in the first place. Translation:
Stop thinking quantity and start thinking quality. Once
we turn that switch between our ears we’ll realize that
we don’t have to spend our time and money hunting down
our audiences because they’ll be hunting us down instead.
We need only make ourselves easy to find, and set a nice
table for our guests. The true feast begins when we
embrace our uncertainty. Or we can settle for more table
scraps and call it performance…

———————————————————–

About Jeff Einstein and the Brothers Einstein

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.

———————————————————–

“What’s this whole world coming to?
Things just ain’t the same,
any time the hunter gets captured by the game.”
– Smoky Robinson

Back in 1994, I devoted one of my weekly MediaDailyNews
columns to the unsuccessful search for an antonym for the
word predatory — used by a friend to describe the entire
digital marketing industry. Now, half a decade later and
no closer to success, it’s time to revisit the whole
marketer-as-predator theme…

Predators are hunters; they target, stalk and attack –
just like digital media professionals. Evidence of our
carnivorous behavior is found everywhere we look. Even
the most casual survey reveals that the vast majority of
digital marketing trade articles introduce, explore and
debate technologies designed to target and deliver market-
ing messages — this, despite the fact that our intended
prey seems more than ever determined to avoid them at all
costs. More disturbing still is the reverse technology-to-
performance ratio that accompanies this massive cat and
mouse game; the more time and money we invest in targeting
technologies, the more performance declines.

————————————————————
“This is a love story. A true love story” – Barbara Walters
Christian The Lion DVD – The Full Story of Christian

List Price: $49.99
Our Price: $19.99

Here is the beautiful, all true story, about Christian the
Lion. After years of being raised around humans, Christian
considers himself a human too. Follow his story as he is
introduced to the wild African plains for the first time
in his life. And then the whole, full story of the reunion
of Christian with the folks who raised them…. You won’t
believe how your heart will melt!

“More than 40 million people have viewed this
very special love story” – Oprah

“It’s something to see”- Joy Behar, The View

“It’s so uplifting… I Wept Like A Baby”
– Meredith Viera, Today Show

SPECIAL BONUS: You Get two bonus movies free:
- The Great Dan Patch – Cute & Cuddly Critters

That’s three movies on two DVDs for $19.99… a $30 savings.
To see a video clip from the DVD or order, visit:
VISIT: Christian The Lion DVD – The Full Story of Christian
————————————————————

The jury is in, folks, and the verdict against the digital
marketing industry is guilty by reason of insanity
(defined as doing the same thing over and over and expect-
ing different results). Our industry labors under a self-
imposed mass psychosis that somehow convinces us that
stupidity is okay as long as everyone is stupid. Don’t
get me wrong: I’m a big believer in ignorance as a key
component of innovation and faith, but stupidity is a
whole different creature. In an on-demand world where
advertising seems to be the only thing no one demands, the
whole concept of targeting an audience that resists every
effort to do so seems not only archaic and non-sequitur,
but downright stupid and self-defeating.

We are so immersed in and enthralled with our own
technologies and corresponding mythologies that we fail
to see what’s been in plain sight all along: In an on-
demand world it makes far more sense to let the audience
target us. To do so, however, requires a tectonic shift
in our own thinking and a willingness to put our obsessions
with all things digital on hold just long enough (on
occasion) to entertain the rarest of jewels in a world gone
mad: common sense.

Common sense dictates that we learn to distinguish between
hunting and fishing. As mentioned above, hunters target,
stalk and attack. By contrast…

“Any fish bites if you got good bait.
Here’s a little something I would like to relate…”
– Doc Watson

————————————————————
Karada Cleansing/Detox Foot Pads

Retail Price: $19.99
DEAL PRICE: $9.99 (for package of 10)

Over 18 million foot patches are sold every month in Asia,
see what they can do for you. Japanese Detox Foot Patches
are all the rage and now you can get them without paying
an outrageous price… get them for 1/2 price while you
can.

The Karada Cleansing Foot Pads are made from bamboo
vinegar, an ingredient Japanese scientists have proven
has the ability to draw out toxins from the body.

These foot patches are said to stimulate nerve endings
on the bottom of your feet which in turn stimulate the
secretion of lymph fluid. Using the Karada Foot Pads you
have the ability to pull out the impurities in your body
by focusing on the acupressure points in your feet. Best
of all, they are so easy to use.

Features:
- Helps cleanse your body by drawing-out chemicals & toxins.
- Includes 10 Patches
- 100% All-Natural formula made with real wood & bamboo
vinegar.
- Easy-to-use individual wrapped packs

Get a 10-Pk for the low price. Save even more and get two
packages (20 pads in total) for $15.98.
Visit: Karada Cleansing/Detox Foot Pads
————————————————————

Common sense is what the Yaqui shaman Don Juan exhibits
in Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui
Way of Knowledge when he sets out to hunt a rabbit. Like
today’s fathomless media landscape, Don Juan’s native
desert habitat is far too vast to cover and his prey too
wily to stalk and hunt efficiently. So he doesn’t stalk
and he doesn’t hunt at all. Instead, he sets a trap and
invites the rabbit to make a choice: enter or don’t.
Thus he fulfils his own needs by honoring and respecting
the free will of his perspective dinner. Likewise,
wouldn’t advertisers be better served in an on-demand
world by a model that invites us to participate rather
than by one that hunts us down like animals? Wouldn’t
advertisers be better served in an on-demand universe by
a model that transforms them from hunters into the hunted?

Advertising is an art, not a science, no matter what the
MBA-driven technocrats say. And in the art of persuasion,
good bait trumps good ammo every time. On-demand media
demand good bait, but we respond instead with more
sophisticated ammo and launch the equivalent of laser-
targeted carpet-bombing campaigns that not only further
alienate our prospects, but convert the media landscape
into a scorched wasteland in the process.

Wouldn’t you know it? Just when we need it most, common
sense goes fishing…

———————————————————–

About Jeff Einstein and the Brothers Einstein

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).

————————————————————
WIRELESS HEADPHONES
w/ Built-In FM Scan Radio

TV & Store Price: $14.99
OUR PRICE: $5.99
Get two for $9.98

These Wireless Headphones With Built-In FM Radio allow you
to enjoy music anywhere in your home or office without any
wires for up to 30 feet in distance.

They’re Easy To Use… The transmitter quickly connects to
any receiver, DVD player, gaming systems, computers and
more with the RCA adapter (included).

FIVE (5) FUNCTIONS IN ONE:
- Wireless Headphones
- Internet Chat/Gaming
- Audio Monitoring
- FM Auto-Scan Radio
- Wired Audio Connection

This is one of those items that always sells out… grab
one ($5.99) or two ($9.98( while you can.
WIRELESS HEADPHONES w/ Built-In FM Scan Radio
————————————————————

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
performance-based video ad network that — like search
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
work for you.

————————————————————
SPECIAL BUY – The Necklace Collection…
Genuine Amethyst & Blue Topaz necklaces – TWO For JUST $2.99

Normal Price: $39.99
LIQUIDATION PRICE: $2.99

WOW That’s what you’ll say when you get your shipment of
these TWO stunning necklaces. Both are GENUINE GEMSTONES
that are discounted to well below cost. The simple design
is stylish and completely elegant.

Pick up a couple of sets while you can… they make great
gifts for anyone who loves jewelry but most of all, you’ll
want a set for yourself. (Sorry there is a limit of 5 sets
per order)
VISIT: The Exclusive Necklace Collection
————————————————————

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.

————————————————————