Alex Steer

1705 words | ~9 min

The stakes have been raised in the online privacy debate again. The White House recently announced plans for a data privacy bill of rights, which together with the EU's data protection reforms mean that it will be increasingly difficult to collect behavioural data from internet users without their consent. It's increasingly likely that the law will require users to opt in before their online behaviours can be tracked, stored and used for targeting.

When issues start to reach the attention of high-level policymakers, it's usually a sign that their time has come. Another sign of the times is the sudden appearance of pieces on online behavioural targeting in the business press. To their credit, the Wall Street Journal have been running with this for the last couple of years with their excellent What They Know site. But they're now being joined by a wave of other voices, including Jerry Michalski's in his piece for Forbes from a few days back, Big Data and the Stalker Economy:

Big data is strategic now. Facebook is valued at around $100 billion because it has collected a treasure trove of data that may unlock the secrets of selling more things to more people. Most other companies would like to have whatever they’re having. Google offers free email, word processing, mapping, analytics, video, videoconferencing and much more because they’re selling us to advertisers. The byword these days is, “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re the product.”

Not all commentators are as even-handed as Michalski. Expect to see a lot more pieces over the next few months like this one from Molly Wood at CNET, which takes data mining far more personally, and conjures up a cast of 'shadowy data brokers slurping up every last byte about you'.

As Victor Hugo put it (only in French), nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

It's time for those of us who work in the marketing technology industry to get serious about data, privacy and permissions.

Data panic: a history

Let's get this out in the open. I'm one of those shadowy data brokers (apparently). I work in digital marketing, in a part of the industry that relies heavily on using information about people's online behaviour to help organisations make decisions and respond to their customers faster, more efficiently, and (I hope) more effectively too.

So what does that mean? It means I absolutely have a stake in this game. So if you're looking for an entirely even-handed commentary you might not come to me first. But it also means I understand a lot of the uses of this kind of information, I know what gets collected and what doesn't, and I know some of the range of attitudes to people's data that exist within the industry. The problem with a lot of the commentary we're seeing it's that it's classic 'first draft of history' stuff - timely, urgent, powerful, but not always well informed. Of course, you don't just want to rely on experts when evaluating the social impact of a new technology. Experts, by definition, are always implicated, often very close to their subject, and can find it hard to step back. But when a debate's important (and I think this one is), it's important to scale up the expertise of non-specialists as quickly as possible, so that the debate is informed as well as lively.

For what it's worth, I'm more of a scaled-up non-specialist than an expert. As readers of this blog will know, my background's not in data science and analytics but in advertising, strategic planning and futures with a technology angle. My current interests are in helping clients make the best use of all this information, rather than in the complexities of statistics or modelling.

I'm close enough to my subject, though, to know that we're going through a period of what I call 'data panic' at the moment. If you know where to look, you can chart its mainstream evolution back over a period of about five or six years. Here are what I think are some of its important stages so far in the US and Europe (where it's most prevalent):

1. Several high profile public-sector data leaks (including this one in 2007, and endless stories about civil servants leaving laptops on trains) provide easy headlines in the classic 'incompetent public management' mould we know and love. They also start to highlight the scale of data collection by the state, and the lack of training and safeguards associated. A few similar leaks in the private sector hit headlines, including the huge leak of AOL search data in 2006.
2. Around 2009/10, the scale of social network use got impressive enough that social phenomena became observable. One of these was the possibility of embarrassment (or indeed unemployment) arising from your drunken photos turning up in front of your parents/loved ones/prospective employers.
3. The public-sector data leaks (point 1) lead to growing pressure against the expansion of public-sector data collection, and concern about proposals to join together existing databases held by different public bodies. The scrapping of the UK's ContactPoint database of children's personal information in 2010 is a case in point. At this stage, there is still little scrutiny of, or interest in, data collection by the private sector.
4. Not until about  late 2010/early 2011 does private-sector data become a hot topic. It starts, in the UK at least, with the kinds of loyalty card data that major retailers keep on their customers. Brands like Tesco become early targets for scrutiny.
5. At around the same time, social networks (especially Facebook) are really hitting their stride and coverage is starting to focus on the downside of their enormous popularity. Much of the early conversation is around the idea of 'context collisions' - as coined by BT's Bruce Schneier, mentioned in point 2 above - and the idea that parts of your life that were previously separate are forced together online. (This insight drove the development of Google Plus's 'Circles'.) But the scale of the issue starts to get attention too. That means journalists and analysts start looking not just at individual scare stories, but at the business models of social networks which depend heavily on collecting data, and often seem to make their privacy settings complex, hidden, and very open by default.
6. We come full circle with some high-profile data leaks and hacks - but this time with the focus on the private sector. Headline events like the Playstation Network hack and the Epsilon email marketing database reinforce the idea that personal data is both widespread and fragile.
7. Last but not least, as 2011 drew to a close, came a renewed focus on the unnoticed scale of online behavioural tracking. The WSJ, as noted, had run with this one for a while, but stories like the iPhone location file and Android keylogging gave it further momentum.

There are two strands to the story above. The first is surprising scale and the second is surprising exposure. As the two storylines have progressed over the last few years, the public has been left with the sense that more of their personal data is out there than they realised, and that it's in the hands of people who can't necessarily be trusted with it.

Now, as we move into 2012, let's throw another element into the mix: advertising. Let's face it, lots of us find the idea of advertising (as distinct from individual adverts) either boring, or patronising, or disturbing, or all three. Few of us like to think our attitudes - or behaviours - are influenced by the ads we see, and we don't want to volunteer to see more of the humdrum hard-sell that the A-word conjures up in our minds.

So there's a perception that we now live in a world in which the people who make ads are secretly tracking our every move, piling up our private data and selling it to each other... so they can show us more ads. This perception gets confirmed by those stories (which are now primed to hit headlines and be shared in a climate of real concern) in which the scale of data, the risk of exposure and the annoyingness of advertising come together in a perfect storm - like the recent one in which Target identified that a young woman was pregnant from her purchasing behaviour, before her father knew.

It feels intrusive and dangerous and underhand and wrong. And that's the context in which legislators are under pressure to make changes.

The next post in this series will deal with the short- and long-term risks of the current privacy environment, some likely developments in legislation and in public perceptions of data, and the need for some realism and honesty from marketers.

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How many digital agency pitches have you seen recently that started with some Big Scary Trends? Trends like the adoption rate of smartphones, or QR codes, or augmented reality, or geolocation, or microblogging, or the latest social network. Trends about media fragmentation or time spent online, telling you that your audience is falling away into a maze of channels, and paying less and less attention to messages from brands. Trends that would make any marketer nervous.

The Big Scary Trend is a staple of modern digital agency pitching. They’re designed to leave you with the impression that the marketing environment is increasingly out of your control, to leave you with that dizzying sensation that convinces you that your existing agency relationships (with ‘traditional’ agencies) are completely unequipped to deal with the baffling, scary, complicated and breakneck world of digital. So you’d better sign that contract.

And once you’ve signed, what’s the answer? More and more, the answer that comes back from digital agencies is ‘content marketing’. All businesses, however they generate their profits, must spend their marketing budgets producing ever greater quantities of content and publishing it to an ever-growing range of digital channels. It’s no longer enough for a soap-powder company to engage consumers with a product truth and an emotional connection. Now, it seems every business must also develop a large-scale publishing sideline and run it out of the marketing department, in the mere hope of grabbing some tiny sliver of a consumer’s attention for long enough to create an impression that might, one day, lead to them buying some soap powder.

But hang on. Is this really the inevitable future of marketing, in which the value-to-effort ratio falls through the floor in the face of inattentive, hostile and distant customers? Or is all this Big Scary Trends stuff, in fact, just bad client service? Shouldn’t agencies, with access to an increasingly powerful range of analytical tools, be first of all advising their clients on how to get those ratios back under control – in other words, how to get value for money?

The content marketing explosion

At risk of sounding like one of those pitches, this is what happens if you graph Google searches for ‘content marketing’ over the last few years.

Content marketing is itself a Big Scary Trend. Searches for it have rocketed in the past year and especially since the start of 2012, a sure sign of a phenomenon hitting the marketing mainstream. Brands now have Chief Content Officers and content strategies, and 61% of marketers plan to spend more on content marketing over the next year (according to the Content Marketing Institute).

It’s true that online content can deliver value for brands and businesses, and drive efficient reach in social channels where advertising-type messaging might not gain traction. But it’s also hugely time-consuming and expensive – and an increasingly crowded field. Businesses can burn through huge amounts of marketing budget creating branded content they hope will stand out, while all their competitors are doing the same, and flooding the web with content that (let’s be honest) will rarely compare favourably to the output of publishers or TV companies. When we’re all producing content, the returns on your content will diminish fast.

The right content, not more content

New media channels do pose new challenges for advertising and marketing. Branded messages now compete for attention not just with other ads but with TV shows, newspaper articles, and home videos of cats playing the keyboard – with all the riches of the web. In an open field, no brand stands a chance. No wonder the ‘make all the content you can’ approach can feel like the answer.

I'm lucky enough to work somewhere (Fabric Worldwide) that believes the opposite. Brands should create only as much digital content as they absolutely have to, to reach the right consumers with the right stimuli in the right channels at the right time. That means that every digital marketing strategy should start, not with a Big Scary Trend or a shiny new channel, but with a clear business objective, a robust and consistent view of target audiences’ needs and behaviours, and client/agency relationships that are strong and honest enough to ensure you’re all working towards a common goal of delivering efficient marketing-driven growth.

Looked at this way, content marketing isn’t a terrifying new world of increased effort and diminishing returns. It’s simply marketing: in new forms and in new channels, but with the same clarity of purpose and rigour of measurement. As for the task of choosing agency partners, marketers should still be looking for the great client service, strategic counsel and creative thinking that they can rely on in the long run. These skills should be joined with the technology and data expertise needed to find customer insights, deliver campaigns and measure effectiveness consistently across the growing digital landscape.

The future of digital marketing isn’t about churning out more and more work and living in fear of Big Scary Trends. It’s about reliable partnerships with great marketing technologists who can make the complex simple, and help you act on opportunities faster.

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The third part of Kantar's series of whitepapers on Putting Social Media in Context has been published. It opens with my piece on the future of social networks, based on the work I did at The Futures Company last year.

My piece argues that businesses need to take a more structured approach to understanding how people want to interact online, because this - rather than technology change - will mainly decide whether different social networking models succeed and fail. There are implications for marketing strategy, media investment, and product and service design.

Speaking of the design, the data visualisation work in these reports is lovely.

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There's an interesting thought in a piece in The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal:

What an API does, in essence, is make it easy for the information a service contains to be integrated with the wider Internet. So, to make the metaphor here clear, Occupy Wall Street today can be seen like the early days of Twitter.com. Nearly everyone accessed Twitter information through clients developed by people outside the Twitter HQ. These co-developers made Twitter vastly more useful by adding their own ideas to the basic functionality of the social network. These developers don't have to take in all of OWS data or use all of the strategies developed at OWS. Instead, they can choose the most useful information streams for their own individual applications (i.e. occupations, memes, websites, essays, policy papers).

The elaboration of the thought feels a bit overdone to me, suggesting various aspects of the movement as GET and POST calls, etc. - I'll let you read it and decide for yourself.

But the idea's stuck with me today, and has been elaborated by something completely unrelated, as so often happens. The something was Microsoft's announcement of the Kinect Accelerator program that it's launching to fund startups that take advantage of the Kinect user interface technology. This is an astonishingly smart piece of thinking from MS, who have continued to demonstrate that you can create far more value by incubating a technology platform than you can by just launching a product.

What's really nice about it is that it embraces the fuzziness - the hackability, if you like - of the Kinect concept. So many companies are fiercely protective, not just of their IP and their patents, but of their ideas about how people should use their products and services. (This is a hard habit to break - when you spend ages making something, whether it's an ad, an app or anything else, your first instinct is to be so protective when you release it that you want to shout, 'You're doing it wrong!', when you see how people respond to it.) What many companies treat as warranty-voiding behaviour, Microsoft supports, and is now backing financially. Good on them.

Which made me think. The one thing I keep hearing from observers of Occupy Wall Street and its family of protests is the idea that it's all very laudable, but if only they'd be a little bit more coherent. To use Alexis Madrigal's geeky analogy, if only we could see the underlying well-formedness of the API. If only it were making clearer calls.

I don't agree. Treating OWS as if it's a slightly dodgy hack of mainstream political philosophy, and therefore voids the warranty of serious debate, misses the point. Not the point of these protests, but the point of all protests. Protests exist to say, something's wrong, and to gather together a lot of people who agree with that simple sentiment. It's tough for smart people who care about quality of argument to hear, but protest isn't a mechanism for advancing a high-quality, well-defined argument. It's a device for amplifying the quantity of contention in a society: to make noise in the hope that others will make noise, and force a change. The mechanism for deciding which changes get made is politics, not protest.

Protests are platforms - designed to be extended, designed to be hacked. (The flip-side of this is that it makes little sense when the organisers of protest events disclaim all responsibility if they get turned into riots. You can't control a protest event, so you shouldn't imagine you can when you organise one.) They are not build for neatness, and insisting that they articulate themselves neatly means you end up hearing nothing, or a small something, when many discordant things are being said. That, of course, puts you at risk of being surprised by an unpredictable future.

There's an obligatory 'So what does this mean for communications?' note at the end, and this is it. What it means is that most 'movement branding' is getting it wrong because it still insists you can manage and 'own' social conversations. Getting it right means building a platform and letting people hack it, and not trying to own it. Of course, marketers and communicators also need to promote their own agenda, which is difficult in a platform. To do that they need to be good at politics, too - the art of advancing their own agenda while acknowledging the noisiness of the public sphere. Most marketers, even most advertisers, remain bad at that.

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This is a short post to draw your attention to The Futures Company's blog, where over the course of this week we're launching our work on the future of social networks. I've been leading this work, and have been busy on it for the last few months, and I've written a series of posts which we'll be posting on the blog over the course of this week, and which will be available after as a short paper giving an overview of the full report.

In a line or two, we suggest that too much attention is paid to technology change in online social networking, and not enough to changes in how people want to interact online. We identify six 'Pivot Points' - points of tension based on the choices people make when they engage online, and the conflicts they experience – that will shape the future of social networks. These decision points – around scale, privacy, specificity, pervasiveness, utility and worldview – will have different outcomes for different people across the world, but their different combinations will shape the future of online social networks. So rather than making big bets based on technology (or luck, or the latest fads in advice), business should understand what these Pivot Points are, and use them to see what decisions their customers are making about how they want to interact.

So there. If you want to know more, drop me an email or tweet, or go through more official channels and talk to @futuresco or sales@thefuturescompany.com.

276 words | ~1 min

Just a quick post. I was sad to hear of the very early death of Amy Winehouse yesterday, and interested at the speculation it had prompted about dying young, and particularly drug overdoses, among musicians. (Note, the cause of death isn't confirmed at the moment.)

Impressively, National Statistics gets us pretty close to an answer with its Occupational Mortality in England and Wales series, and its datasheet on Occupational Mortality: Women Aged 16-59 for 1991-2001 [ZIP file, 2.6MB]

For the period 1991-2000, 13 women in literary and artistic professions in the England and Wales were recorded as having died from accidental poisoning by drugs. National Statistics puts the ratio of observed to expected deaths at 126, when standardized by age and social class. This is high: of the 188 occupations for which a ratio was provided, it ranks 13th highest. (Note that the nature of the 'accidental poisoning' is not specified.)

A further 2 women in literary and artistic professions in the England and Wales died from drug dependence, with an observed-to-expected ratio of 127.

In case you were wondering, the highest ratio of observed-to-expected deaths from accidental drug poisoning is among carpenters and joiners (927, but from a very very small sample of one death); the highest absolute number of deaths was among office workers and cashiers, at 136.

Note: I originally said 'in the UK' here a couple of times. I meant, of course, 'in England and Wales', and have corrected.

1373 words | ~7 min

I don't normally talk about politics on this blog, largely because I'm not very good at it; and US politics, in particular, is a crowded space that you don't wade into lightly if you don't know what you're talking about.

However, I have spent a lot of this year tracking and trying to make sense of the attitudes, sentiments and values of people in the US on different issues (no easy task for a Brit). And I reckon whoever's running the Republicans' political strategy at the moment is basing it on flawed insights.

Even beyond the Tea Party movement, there's a new wave of Republicans in the House of Representatives who are trying to focus the political agenda on public debt, spending and the deficit. These more activist Republicans in Congress have forced the issue of the debt ceiling, and generated an equally stiff response from Democrats and the White House, leading to the current deadlock in debt talks - and, today, abandonment of the talks by the Speaker of the House.

The strategy, if you hadn't guessed, is to make the most of control of the House by showing some muscle, roadblocking initiatives coming out of the White House, and taking a firm and very simple line on debt, deficit and spending (summed up neatly, if cheesily, in the term 'cut, cap and balance'). I think the intended message to the American people from all this activity is: 'In a tough economy, you're learning not to spend more than you have; you expect the federal government to do the same; we're going to make sure government lives within its means.'

But that's not the message that's getting through. The reason is a combination of old insights and flawed planning.

When I say old, I don't mean that old - but that's the problem with public attitudes: they do have that awkward habit of changing on you. The Republicans seem to be assuming that, because economic conditions and consumer behaviour haven't shifted all that substantially since about mid-to-late 2009, insights into people's values around the economy and personal and public finances haven't changed all that much either. The thing is, that's not true.

When the shock of the recession first hit, people reacted by battening down the hatches - spending less, aggressively paying down debt (though, admittedly, only to about 2006 levels), trying to balance their personal budgets. It was around that time that sentiment began to shift away from the idea that decisive collective action was the best way to redress the balance of a catastrophic market failure: by December, when Time named Ben Bernanke their Person of the Year, the idea of celebrating Big Government's Mr Fix-It already seemed a little out of date.

The later part of 2009, and much of 2010, was characterized by exactly the kind of attitudes that the Republicans are currently betting on. Trust in institutions - government as well as business and finance - fell through the floor. Just as one of the purest expressions of the 'collective response' stance had been Obama's election victory, so this new 'won't get fooled again' self-reliance was captured in the emergence of the Tea Party movement into mainstream discourse (regardless of the very atypical demographic makeup of its support base). In 2009/10, the idea that the best thing government can do is pay its late bills and cut up its credit cards would have felt just right to a lot of people.

But in mid-2011, the landscape of attitudes has changed. In part, it's changed precisely because conditions have not. In July, when the latest employment data came out and showed that only 18,000 jobs had been added, instead of the roughly 101,000 predicted, it signalled another period of 'same old, same old': depressed growth, no jobs, low security. So it's easy to assume, looking at those numbers, and at consumer spending and economic confidence, that people will still be huddling from the howling storm, receptive to the same messages about fixing the roof and getting the house in order. Ask about people's attitudes, though, and it's a different story. I've mentioned before, in a post about the problem with consumer confidence, that pollsters too easily assume that attitudes are tied to hard numbers in the economy, and that consumer confidence in the economic future is a good barometer of the kinds of ideas and actions they will respond to in the present. That's broadly true of consumer behaviour (though even then it assumes that the conditions for consumption don't change much, and that businesses are largely reactive - in fact, they can create the conditions for stronger or weaker consumption, but that's another story). For attitudes, there's no such short-cut, and we're seeing that now. Yes, the economy's as bad as it was. Yes, job security and availability are unlikely to improve. But no, people are not still focusing on 'panic cutting' in the immediate present as their priority response.

Instead, people are starting to think about the future. It's clear there's no light at the end of the tunnel, so people are learning to live without it. I've described the mood in the US at the moment as 'post-optimistic', and I still think that's right. Rather than focusing on the immediate situation and waiting for things to change, people are adjusting their lives and their spending to equip them to cope with a longer-term future whose outline they can't yet see. I'd describe this as planning for everyday resilience. It's the reason why New Yorkers pack an umbrella, even on a sunny day (except me, apparently), or why you always carry a few notes in your wallet in case you end up somewhere that doesn't  take your debit card (note: not a credit card, not these days).

Post-optimism is driven in part by lack of trust, just as panic cutting was. In the last year or two Americans have felt let down by powerful institutions in all sorts of ways, from mortgage lenders to banks, to oil companies, to banks again (bonuses), to government (ask those teachers in Wisconsin). But planning for everyday resilience doesn't mean people expect government to just step aside. There's a recognition that government can help build resilience, file smooth some of the spikes of a market economy. It has to be accountable, and measurable, and it has to show that, in the face of uncertainty, it's focused on making the country tougher - not just cheaper.

And that's the problem for the Republicans. By making the conversation all about cutting the deficit and paying down debt, they've forgotten to remind people why any of those things might be a good idea when it comes to planning for everyday resilience, and trying to get a fairer deal for the next generation (and this generation as it ages). That's the big flaw in the strategy, and it's led to an even bigger flaw in the execution. By treating this as fundamentally an issue about public spending and government now, and not about securing the future, the Republicans in Congress have opened themselves up to accusations of grandstanding. People look at the situation and see it as a vast, remote political game, played for its own purposes, irrelevant and childish and stubborn. When they stop caring about the outcome of that game, they will support its fairest and most pragmatic player, not its victor.

If you happen to be reading this, and you happen to be a Republican political strategist (unlikely, I know, but possible), you need to start talking about the future in ways that are meaningful to the rest of us. You should know that I'm not a natural supporter of yours, but the current deadlock is self-serving and will do the opposite of what you intend in terms of sentiment and support.

717 words | ~4 min

There's wisdom in two recent short pieces from the Ogilvy PR blog. The first is in Claire Lekwa's You Are What You Share: Why Pitchfork Gets It:

Today, sharing content is easy. But sharing goes beyond what happens online. Everything we choose to share about ourselves, in social media or face-to-face, defines who we are to others.

The second is in Maury Postal's The Medium Is Now More Than Ever The Message:

[McLuhan's] concept [that the medium is the message] has been refined and reborn in many forms and has underwritten the success of platforms like tumblr—by far the best self-expression mechanism in the known-universe—by allowing people to discover content they truly care about and claim ownership of in an active, vibrant community—one that fosters their personal growth and validates their actions or feelings.

[My emphasis.]

The implication is bigger than the individual points. It's that there's a growing emphasis on sharing and curation as a form of creative act. This is the sort of thing that divides people, obviously. I've heard it said that the emphasis on clipping and copying, made possible by platforms like Tumblr, is becoming a poor substitute for creativity. We're not writing, we're just pinching.

On the offchance that you read a lot of 18th/19th-century cultural history, you might recognize this argument as the sort of privileging of individual creativity and the originating genius that's cited as one of the defining traits of Western European romanticism. There's a tendency to think of the obsession with original creation as a Renaissance thing. It's not - it's much more strongly linked to romanticism. Anyway...

I'm in the opposite camp. I think it's hard to look at something like Dads Are The Original Hipsters, a very self-consciously curated thing, and not see some creativity in the selection and arrangement. If the 'original creativity rules' camp can be called the Romantic Mindset, I'm going to be just as cheeky and call this 'cut-and-paste creativity' model the Bonaventure Theory.

During the explosion of manuscript production in Europe in the central Middle Ages, the clerics who were churning out material didn't have Tumblr, but they did have a pretty elegant theory of the different ways in which you could contribute to the creative process. Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century bishop of Albano, pointed out four different modus faciendi librum (ways of making books):

Sometimes a man writes others' words, adding nothing and changing nothing; and he is simply called a scribe [scriptor]. Sometimes a man writes others' words, putting together passages which are not his own; and he is called a compiler [compilator]. Sometimes a man writes both others' words and his own, but with the others' words in prime place and his own added only for purposes of clarification; and he is called not an author but a commentator [commentator]. Sometimes a man writes both his own words and others', but with his own in prime place and others' added only for purposes of confirmation; and he should be called an author [auctor].

[Translated by J.A. Burrow in Medieval Writers and their Work.]

I like this model of the creative process. You'll notice it doesn't say anything about which kind of creation is best. It certainly doesn't privilege individual creativity- there's no option for writing something completely original in the bishop's scheme. The implication is that writing is to some extent always sharing - and that sometimes just sharing is enough. Bonaventure's thinking was hugely influential for several hundred years. You can see later medieval writers - including John Gower and Christina de Pizan - using it to humbly suggest that their very original creations were just cut-and-paste jobs - I'm just a humble compiler, not a real author at all, they'd say.

The simple, powerful idea is that individual creativity is beautiful, but sharing creates culture. It's good to see that idea coming to life again.

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I was a bit confused by this paragraph from Rohit Bhargava over at the Influential Marketing Blog:

Fast forward several years and you will really appreciate this stunning statistic - the "Like button" is clicked a total of 91 million times every month. And many of those clicks are for brand sponsored pages. Earlier this week I was lucky enough to be invited to attend and speak at Intel's internal conference focused on social media. More than 125 social media pioneers from within Intel came from around the world to participate, and one of the speakers was Aimee Westbrook from Facebook. Among the many interesting facts about brands working with Facebook that she shared was this data point which should make any marketer sit up in their chair: 50% of all the people on Facebook have clicked the "Like" button on a brand page in the last 30 days.

So how does that work? Facebook has over 750 million active users according to today's statistics page. For 50% of all users to have liked a brand page in the last 30 days would take 375 million likes just for brand pages; earlier in the same paragraph the total number of likes per month, for everything, is 91 million. Does anybody know something I don't about these numbers?

Sounds like we marketing types may just be fooling ourselves.

But even if we weren't fooling ourselves about the numbers, would we be fooling ourselves with the analysis? Much as planners, creatives, brand managers etc. like to be liked (and 'liked'), I'm dubious about how much love - let alone intent - is conveyed with a click of the 'like' button.

Bear in mind that likes show up in your news feed - and, more importantly, in your friends' news feeds. Liking something (anything) can be a way of signalling something to those third parties whose social validation you crave, not just the person or brand whose thing you liked. In other words, if someone likes your brand, they may not be trying to tell you something - they may be trying to impress something else.

In itself, this can be very powerful. If people use your brand as a way of signalling something to third parties, you want to know what that is. But just patting yourself on the back and feeling loved won't help you work out your role, and how to make the most of it.

868 words | ~4 min

My post on 'advertising after messaging' is on the Futures Company blog at the moment. It's not perfect, but the gist is that a lot of the rubric about advertising shifting to ongoing brand engagement is wrong, because it under-prices people's attention. (To their huge credit, Influx Insights summarizes my post better than I did.)

Bad insights and bad ideas get a lot of stick for generating bad advertising, which is fair enough. A planner will typically tell you your insight is awful, and a creative will lay into your idea. But I don't think enough blame gets laid at the door of bad theory: faulty ideas about how and why advertising has effect.

Marketers, to their credit, tend to have pretty robust ideas about the contribution of advertising. This isn't surprising, as their jobs/bonuses/reputations are rather pinned to the business success of whatever marketing activities they do (or pay for). The problem is, and this is a huge generalization, marketing theories of advertising effect tend to focus on the different kinds of effect advertising can have, rather than on how advertising achieves those effects.

That kind of theory could be - and often is - within the domain of planning. That doesn't mean it has to be done by planners. (At best, I tend to think, planners are the people who make sure planning happens, not merely the people who do planning.) Where it's there, it can be an effective check and balance against faddish thinking. Those checks and balances can be very old: it's fashionable to knock the idea of the USP, and it's not always right for every product, brand or campaign - but bearing it in mind can help guard against producing campaign that are laden with insights and glinting with ideas but are nonetheless ships in the night and pass unnoticed. They can also be very new. Even if it contributes nothing more, a lot of the research from behavioural economics is reminding advertisers of the heuristics and biases in how people pay attention and how they decide.

A campaign needs insights and ideas, but it also needs theory, even though theory is not terribly fashionable among planners. Maybe this is because it reeks of grand theory, some all-encompassing, intricate, mad model of reality - like those Afghanistan war PowerPoint slides - that can clutter up a campaign brief, never translate into an idea and not sell a thing. But I'm not talking about cultural or critical theory (which I'm sure many planners schooled in the humanities are better versed in than they'd like to admit), I'm talking about communications theory - a point of view on how you get attention, how you get remembered, and how you get people to act on those memories when it comes to parting with their money.

The short version of the above is: if you want to sell something, you need to know how to sell it. (Sometimes theories can be obvious.)

Each campaign needs its own theory of advertising wired into it, like the detonator in a plastic explosive. Everything else can be shaped around it, but without it you're in dereliction of duty, however many insights or ideas you might have. The theory won't always be the same - it needs to be built on a specific business challenge, after all. But with a theory in place, you can stop bad insights at the gate.

One of the pleasures of working in trends and futures consulting this year has been finding concise ways to express big social changes. But trend insights, however neatly put, can generate either great advertising or terrible advertising - so for a consultant, seeing an ad that's clearly based on a trend insight is a game of chance. It's a flip of the coin whether the ad will be good or terrible. Before you even get to judging creative, what sets the 'good ads with good insights' apart from the 'bad ads with good insights' is the presence of a theory of advertising.

Without one, it's easy to make your trend insight the grounding of your campaign, and then just ladder it up to abstraction. Insights, like genes, are selfish - they want to be the centre of attention. So you have an insight that says 'older people have more money and are healthier...', and you ladder it up to 'older people want to live life to the full...' and then, 'the most important thing to our target market of older people is being in control of their destiny...' and you end up with a soaring, lofty campaign about destiny which sells none of the tins of Premium Spam that your clients asked you to shift off the shelves. If you'd stayed grounded, and built in a theory of how advertising catches the eye in the moment and the memory on the shop floor,  you could have made something that would have had the spam aisle looking bare in a week.