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TOTALITARIAN MARKETING
A common aspect of some of the world's worst ideas -- nazism, communism, jihadism -- is that they all started with utopian principles: racial purity; perfect equality; God's law on earth.
Utopian movements have a very unpleasant habit of devolving into the worst forms of tyranny.
We all know what totalitarian forms of government look like, and the misery and harm they produce. Naturally we are wary of them. We know how their leaders have been obsessed with collecting information on citizens. We know they have an obsession with surveillance and secrecy. We know they produce hidden files about every citizen. If our governments were found to be guilty of this we would be outraged.
As far as we know, our governments are not doing this. But someone is. It's the online marketing industry. They know virtually everything about us -- who we associate with and what we talk about. Who we sleep with and what drugs we take. They know our political beliefs and our sexual orientations. They have files on us which we don't have access to. They track us everywhere we go online, relentlessly. As you read this they are tracking you.
But we don't know what to make of this.
The most frequent question I get asked about my new book is, "Why isn't the public more upset about this?" And the answer is, I don't know.
I guess the reason is that we know the evils that occur when governments know everything about us, but we don't know what happens when marketers do. There's no precedent.
Also, the vulnerabilities we face in a world of "big data" and surveillance marketing is probably far beyond what the average person imagines. Consequently, there is not much resistance from the public to the ongoing creation of centralized information networks in which every imaginable aspect of our lives is filed, stored, categorized and offered for sale.
We are not very far from totalitarian marketing and it seems to me that we are not nearly worried enough.
MYSPACE BECOMES FRAUDSPACE
Myspace, the once high-flying and recently moribund social media network, seemed to be making an unlikely rebound this summer when suddenly there were millions of viewers going to its new video page. But what looked like a remarkable turnaround has turned out to be an astounding case of fraud.
As fraud becomes the dominant theme of online advertising in 2017, this remarkable story is well worth a read.
ARE BIG BRANDS DYING?
Prof. Byron Sharp, the brilliant author of "How Brands Grow" has taken a whack at the baloney being dished out by the marketing-conference-keynote-speaking crowd who are very fond of telling us how "big brands are dying" and small "disruptors" are taking over the world. The full report can be found here. A summary from the report is below.
