#340 / June 1, 2025

THE NIGHTMARE SCENARIO

As we know, the worst governments in recent history were the ones that had state organs spying on the population: the Stasi, the KGB, the Gestapo. They maintained secret files on individuals and used surveillance to brutally oppress and punish their political enemies.

Until recently, the government in the US has been expressly prohibited from spying on its citizens. But the current love affair between the Trump administration and tech industry billionaires have made these prohibitions essentially moot. 

According to The NY Times, "In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power." This is the man who on Memorial Day called his political opponents 'scum.'

According to the Brennan Center for Democracy, "Americans leave a trail of personal data with almost every action we take — every website visit, credit card payment, browser search, and online message generates data. Third parties like cell phone companies, internet service providers, social media platforms, and app developers collect and hold this information, often without our knowledge... This data also finds its way into exhaustive dossiers, compiled by data brokers, that reveal the most intimate details of our lives: our movements, habits, associations, health conditions, and ideologies.

...The lack of comprehensive data protection in the United States ...have fostered...a shadow digital economy of platforms and third-party data brokers that collect and commodify users’ data. This underregulated data broker ecosystem, built to target consumers with ads, also engenders ever-increasing risks of... dragnet surveillance by government agencies that can acquire vast amounts of personal information without legal process."

Tracking is anathema to democracy. It was bad enough when the adtech platforms had vast, secret files on every one of us. But now that the tech billionaires have crawled into bed with government squids, we are facing a unique crisis.

I don’t care what end of the political spectrum you are on, there is no model of democratic governance that can include a system in which we are being spied upon every minute of the day by government. The KGB, the Gestapo, the Stasi could only dream of having the depth of information about individuals that Google, Meta, Amazon, and X have. And if you think the heads of these companies have the balls to resist coercion from Washington you’re delusional.

It is hard to imagine that a business as silly as advertising can become an existential threat to a system of government.  Maybe that’s why we have ignored the warning signals for so long. But time is running out. If we don’t put an end to tracking soon, we will regret it forever.

In politics there is no such thing as the future. All there is is the past re-inventing itself. 

The Facebook Fraud Empire

Here's a stat that should blow your mind. According to The Wall Street Journal, between the summer of 2023 and 2024, Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) accounted for almost half of all reported scams on Zelle for JP Morgan Chase. One company, almost half the scams.

According to the Journal... ​​​​​​

• "British and Australian regulators have found similar levels of fraud originating on Meta’s platforms".
• "An internal analysis from 2022...described in (Meta) company documents... found that 70% of newly active advertisers on the platform are promoting scams, illicit goods or 'low quality' products."
• "Fed by the rise of cryptocurrencies, generative AI and vast overseas crime networks ...the immensity of Meta’s scam problem is growing and has been regularly flagged by employees over the past several years."

Employees say that one of the reasons scams have grown so huge on Facebook is that nobody gives a shit. Facebook's ad revenue grew 22% last year and no one wants to mess with that.

"Documents reviewed by the Journal show that Meta has deprioritized scam enforcement in recent years...The company has also been cutting costs and shifting resources to other issues in the reshuffling...The company abandoned plans for advertiser verification requirements...on the grounds that it worried about losing revenue from marketers unwilling or unable to pass identity checks."

An internal document reviewed by the WSJournal revealed that Facebook will allow an advertiser between 8 and 32 instances of fraud before they finally kick them out.

Lovely people.

Being a glass-is-half-empty kind of guy, I want to spend a minute on some of the dangers.

We advertising people have been desperate for science for decades. We have had the smell of ‘airy-fairy’ around us since the dawn of time. No one trusted our 'gut instincts.' When questionable technology came along to 'quantify' our efforts we went berserk. We swallowed every bit of horseshit that looked like science regardless of its relevance, reliability, authenticity, or integrity. And we're still at it.

The result is that we have become every con man’s dream — a sucker who thinks he knows things he doesn’t really know. The result is that we are leaking hundreds of billions of dollars annually to crooks, charlatans, and crackpots through ad fraud, made for advertising sites (MFAs), hidden middleman fees, crooked  publishers, unreliable data, dubious reports, viewability issues, click fraud, false attribution, consumer inattention, and an utter lack of transparency (for details, download my free book 'Inside The Black Box' )

And like every sucker who's ever lived, it’s easier to cheat us than to convince us we’re being cheated.

Soon AI will geometrically increase our confusion. What's real and what ain't? AI is going to be a total shit show for the ad industry once the bad guys get the full hang of it.

And yet, for a discipline so fraught with contingencies, it is remarkable how certain so many people are about their precious ideologies. Or, even worse, about the pet ideologies of others.

Among the many attributes that harm marketing and its bastard son advertising is the unwillingness of practitioners to stray from the received wisdom of our  ‘thought leaders” and use their own damn brains.

A truly dispiriting experience is to go to LinkedIn and read the daily musings of ‘chief strategy officers’ and ‘marketing innovators’ and ‘global brand advisors’ and see the same language, the same experts, and the same questionable certainties quoted over and over without an original idea anywhere in sight.

As in all endeavors, it’s not hard to be mediocre at this game. Just memorize a few clichés and repeat them endlessly. But to be good at it you have to think for yourself. This means taking the notions of the geniuses and pundits and spinning them around, turning them inside out, and throwing them against the wall until you come up with some original ideas of your own.

Will this lead you to be a better marketer?...It depends.

As I said last November when their insane so-called 're-brand' became the darling of the advertising buffoon crowd, "It is beyond description. Well, maybe not beyond description, but certainly beyond comprehension...It looks like an art director's wet dream." 

For a good laugh, search "Jaguar Rebrand Genius" and have a look at the 'branding  experts' who slobbered over this idiotic nonsense.

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