What’s This Whole World Coming To?
By Jeff Einstein

“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.

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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 expecting
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

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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…

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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.

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