Fourth in a series. Previous installments:
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Leave a comment on The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”
The Standard, Part 2: “The Internet Weekly”
Tag: advertising
Headless Marketing
Yesterday I wrote a piece about the AI-driven “white collar recession,” which felt to me like a bunch of bullshit marketing. This morning as I perused my morning paper I came across this extraordinary example of exactly what I’m on about. The image above is an ad in The Information’s morning tech news roundup. It’s an undisguised appeal aimed at marketing professionals, playing directly to their fears that they’re about to be replaced by AI. The solution, of course, is … “Head” – the “world’s first AI marketer” which, the company claims, is “not a tool, it’s a new species.”
This kind of claptrap is clogging up any reasonable dialog about the role of AI in our economy. On its home page, Head claims to be “hired” by more than 50,000 companies – hey, that’s a lot! But just a bit of legwork reveals Head is … well, the word “questionable” comes to mind.
Read MoreHow Google Can Win the Future
[Second in a series, first post here]
This past week, Wall Street caught up with the rest of us and realized that Google has lost its monopoly grip on search. The trigger wasn’t Google losing an anti-trust case – that happened last summer. Nor was it the first ten days of Google’s ongoing search remedies trial. Instead, it was a statement just two days ago by an Apple executive, Eddie Cue, which led to an almost instantaneous panic amongst investors.
Cue told the court that consumers’ preference for using AI agents had led to a decline in search traffic inside Apple’s Safari browser (Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to secure that traffic – a major focal point of the government’s case).
Read MoreFree the Database of Intentions: Could Google Thrive If It Gives Away Its Data?
Over the past 25 or so years, I’ve argued that Google has built a massive database of intentions – the aggregate result of every search ever entered, every page of results ever tendered, and every path taken (there’s a lot more to it, but that’s the key stuff). I’ve tracked this extraordinary artifact since 2003, and have come to believe that Google’s control over it has become a inhibitor to innovation and flourishing in our society.
The US government – yes, even this one – agrees with me. In the nearly three decades since Google first launched, the company has gone from champion of the open Internet to established monopolist whose principle business is protecting its profits. With the advent of consumer AI, that principle business is imperiled. Google is protecting a revenue stream that it must understand is no longer defensible, either by law or by practice.
Read MoreFacebook Goes Backward. Why?
Earlier this week I met a fellow who, among very many other things, is a member of a bicycling group based where I live. Given that I live in a pretty small community, I was stunned I’d never heard of the club, which has 900 active members and runs four or five organized rides a week. How’d I miss it?
Well, the fellow told me, it’s a Facebook group. You should join! For the first time in ages, I fired up Facebook with the intention of actually doing something useful. I applied to join the group, then promptly forgot about it. I lost the habit of checking into Facebook more than a decade ago, and I have all notifications from the app turned off.
Read MoreCan Bluesky Do Advertising Right? Yes.
I’ve been in the business of making new kinds of media companies, media platforms, and media technologies since before the Web was born, and in every case I’ve partnered with the advertising industry to make it happen – an industry often reviled as the driver of “surveillance capitalism,” the attention-mining, data-driven monster supposedly at the center of the Internet’s enshittification.
So I wasn’t shocked when Bluesky CEO Jay Graber acknowledged last week that advertising might be in the company’s future. The company is growing at a blistering pace, adding tens of millions of users in a matter of months. It costs dearly to service that kind of growth, and the company has investors to appease. Bluesky’s growth mirrors Twitter in 2008 – 9009 – the year that Twitter first raised capital at a billion-dollar-plus valuation. Twitter proceeded to introduce advertising as its core business model one year later, in 2010.
Read MoreApparently, Brand Safety Is Dead. That’s Good For News, No?
If you want to understand where the zeitgeist is headed in Silicon Valley, you have to study The Information, the clubby, well-sourced favorite read of Valley oligarchs. The publication made its reputation by commanding lofty subscription prices back when nearly all tech news was free; it now enjoys multiple revenue streams, including advertising, events, and a “pro” version for $750-$999 a year. I’ve been a subscriber (of the “regular” variety) for years, and I probably always will be.
That said, every so often The Information runs a story that is so clearly aligned with the interests of the plutocracy it begs to be called out. “Advertisers Retreat From Social Media Policing” is its latest entry in this category. The piece opens with a stupendous straw man: “For several years, a favorite tactic of progressives agitating against social media and conservative news outlets has been pressuring marketers to pull their ads.”
Read MoreAds, Ads Everywhere
The advertising world is uncomplicated at its core, and utterly bewildering when seen from the outside. The easy bit stems from a simple axiom: Wherever you can find the attention of potential customers, you pay to get your message in front of them. That’s the essence of advertising: paying for attention. It gets complicated by the details – the medium, the message, the targeting, the tech – but wherever customers gather, advertising will follow. There’s simply too much money to be made for it to be otherwise.
So it was utterly unsurprising to learn, a few hours ago as I write this, that there will soon be ads on PayPal, driven by the data the company collects. PayPal recorded 6.5 billion payments in the first quarter of 2024 alone, according to the Journal. The company plans on creating what’s known as a “retail media network” allowing advertisers to leverage PayPal’s data to target users both on platform and off.
Read MoreNo. TV Advertising Is Not Going to Become “Performance Driven”
Remember the “year of mobile”? That was the five-year period from roughly 2007 to 2012, when industry pundits annually declared that everything was about to change because of the smart phone. Mobile eventually did come to dominate the marketing landscape, but the shift took far longer than anyone expected.
I’m starting to think we’re in a similar cycle with streaming – only the transition from cable to digital television has taken far longer, and has been far, far messier. I recall editing the February, 1994 cover story for Wired, in which we asked – thirty years ago! – if advertising as we knew it was finally dead. We opened that piece with a futuristic scenario in which advertising had changed completely:
Read MoreAdvertising Is Coming To Threads. What Happens Next?
I stopped using Twitter over a year ago, as soon as Elon Musk took control of the place. I don’t miss it – it was already a pretty toxic place, and my tenure at The Recount, a political media company, ensured I had to engage with most of Twitter’s worst attributes.
But when Meta launched Threads, its Twitter clone, I figured I’d give the new service a try. I’d played around with Mastodon, but found it a bit sparse, and Meta’s commitment to the fediverse (still unfulfilled), plus its integration with Instagram (a built in network!) felt worth checking out.
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