precogs and brain balls
Okay, I’m going to throw it way back.
Who remembers the 2002 work of cinematic genius, Minority Report?
A refresher...
Three super pale people float in a shallow pool of water.
They predict the future - specifically murders - and then when they see a future murder, a ball pops out of their brain with the murderer’s name on it.
Tom Cruise reads the Brain Ball and chases the not-yet-a-murderer down and puts them in jail for a future murder.
Totally airtight! Murder Brain Balls prevent all murders!
Until the Murder Brain Ball has Tom Cruise’s name on it (record scratch).
Chaos ensues.
This movie rocked my world in 2002 and honestly has lived in my brain rent free since.
But I want to focus on one particular scene in this floating-pale-people dystopia.
Tom Cruise needs khakis.
Well actually I don’t remember what Tom needs but he ends up in future-dystopian-Gap.
God I love his tank and wide leg combo here.
He walks in and this hologram scans his eyeballs and says something like (paraphrasing here):
“Hey Tom! Good to see you again. Last time you were here you went the wide-leg pleated khaki route? Great choice. Back for more? Since you are, how do you say, suns out guns out, maybe I could show you some other colors? Perhaps a sleeveless vest with no shirt under it? It is 2002 after all. I know your size, your preferences and everything you’ve bought here before so this message is creepily personalized.”
In order to hide from the future-murder-police Tom actually has his eyeballs removed in order to - in 2021 terms - clear his cookies.
Anyone who has been chased around the internet by an ad for something that you have only ever thought about knows that we currently reside in a much more sophisticated (and powerful) version of Tom’s visit to Gap.
In 2002 this kind of advertising was just a dystopian glimmer in Zuck’s eye, but here we are and our advertising landscape has quite literally changed the course of not only wide-leg khaki sales, but global conversation.
I honestly believe that when the 2016 election is taught in history classes the theme will basically be - the year we let robots (or at minimum, algorithims that spread outrage/fear/lies spreads faster than truth) decide who was president - and they chose Donald Trump.
But consumer brands were way ahead of politics in terms of wielding these platforms to find the right eyeballs to build their business. Entire billion dollar companies were built on these platforms before it even occurred to politicians to leverage it. Now political messaging has figured it out…just in time for every, single thing to change.
Let’s talk about the current state of the union.
People give their data to social media platforms and search engines with every single app open, scroll, and click. This data is then pulled into a magical Black Box.
At the same time companies put dollars into the Black Box in exchange for getting their message/product in front of exactly the right eyeballs as determined by the black box.
What’s in the Black Box?
We basically have no fucking clue.
Most people assume it is highly sophisticated AI but what a twist it would be if it was her the whole time!
Whether it is floating pale people with Brand Brain Balls or AI, it fucking works.
Companies who use the black box to meet customers don’t ask questions because it works - and best not to know.
Consumers don’t ask questions about the black box because they either don’t know it exists, don’t know their data is being leveraged, don’t care or are just so addicted to the dog videos they see it as the price to pay to play on a “free” platform.
This was all fun and games when we were just shown ads for khakis. But now this machinery has been used to change election outcomes and politics all over the world and most recently directly tied to inciting violence at our Capitol.
When these tech titans are asked to moderate, this impact the response is a mixture of “we can’t/shouldn’t regulate free speech”, “we don’t want to because we would make less money and our shareholders would be pissed” and “honestly, we can’t.”
The last one is the scariest.
Even when Facebook (fucking finally) decided to moderate some of what was happening on its platform it took longer than expected because the humans could not keep up with the AI it built.
Some scary shit, folks.
Okay, that’s the state of the union. Where are we headed and what do we need to pay attention to?
Well we have some major changes on our horizon…
Now the Black Box is too big and too powerful to ever go away completely. I think we will always need a paid ad strategy for our political messaging.
What I’m saying is that it absolutely cannot be weighted in our portfolio the way it is now.
The time to be gaining muscle memory in other channels is right now. We’ve gotten good at leveraging paid ads as part of our strategy, but from where I am sitting it feels like we are pretty reliant on it....and I’m telling you it is going to look and function differently potentially as soon as 2022 but definitely by 2024.
Marketers like me are already feeling the changes so we are already thinking of ways to reduce our dependence on them in case we can’t afford them, the quality of conversions goes down or we ultimately can’t live with ourselves.
And as the self-appointed voice of consumer marketing for the Democratic party - here are my diversify-your-digital-portfolio suggestions.
Caveat - a lot of this is assuming that we can run political ads at all. Lots of uncertainty here, which just increases our need to be thinking about how we drive messages at scale without these platforms.
Get so much better at operationalizing our data. We have it. We use to for election modeling and voter demographics and polling. Then it is like we run out of gas and communicate with our audience as one homogenous group that likes exclamation points, all caps and the words “dire”, “urgent” and “right now” in our email subject lines. If we used our data to personalize messaging, drive distinct behaviors and segment our audience our marketing would be so much better and we wouldn’t have to rely on the Black Box to find the right eyeballs. We could find the eyeballs without them!
Make opt-in email collection a central strategy. If political ads are a thing, we will (likely) always be able to retarget messages against our lists. This isn’t as scalable as leaning on the platforms to find new eyeballs for us, but if we can get a broad enough list then it will reduce our dependence on the Black Box side of the house.
Related, get much better at fucking email. I’ve already written about this extensively but Holy Christ we could do so much better here. If we can’t pump money into ads the way we can right now then we have to be so much better at using email as a means to communicate.
Spend money now! I wasn’t sure how much of corporations pulling support for Republicans that denied election results was performative, but Microsoft this week announced that it would be through 2022. Guys, that is fucking massive. They don’t know how many companies will follow suit. This gives us an off-cycle advantage, while they wait for the dust to settle - this could be TV, out of home, influencers, etc. Pushing our message out when their hands are tied is such a unique opportunity.
Build an army of influencers. A FREAKING ARMY. Figure out what messages you want them sharing, when and why. Think about them as a new ad platform in case the platform we have now doesn’t work for us any more. How would this look? How could you incentivize them? How do you maintain brand messaging discipline with authenticity that is required for an influencer message to land? All good questions we need to be asking (I’ll probably write a full post on this topic alone).
Invest in targeted TV marketing on streaming services with messaging that isn’t this insanely scary ad that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee put out this week. I mean, points for spending off cycle - but holy shit - can we try something that isn’t in the imminent apocalypse voice over?
In summary this is me trying to be a floating-pale-person squeezing out a predictive Paid Ad Strategy Brain Ball and starting the conversation of how we would motivate and move people if these tools don’t look the same in two years.
The earlier we can build muscle memory here, the better.
If I were a part of this conversation I would look at our goals (vulnerable districts, candidates, etc.) and build an entire strategy without any paid social advertising. Of course we will have it in one form or another, but the practice would be a forcing function to flex new muscles and start investing in a more diversified approach.
