The following interview was conducted by Pete Krainik, CEO of the CMO Club, and was published on the CMO Club website in February, 2010…

Pete – I took the opportunity recently to interview digital industry pioneer Jeff Einstein, co-founder of the first interactive agency way back in 1984, and now a partner with the Brothers Einstein, an extremely contrarian brand strategy boutique.  The interview was conducted via email over the past couple of months, then edited down at my end.  While many of the emails back and forth between us were notable in and of themselves, what I discovered in my hands after reading the finished product for the first time was nothing less than an alternative digital manifesto that — I believe — stands utterly alone in its devotion to historical perspective and common sense.

In it he describes among other things the myth of media performance, metrics as deck chairs on a sinking ship, letting the audience target us, digital bubbles and collapse as the price of unchecked acceleration, how to fashion wisdom from knowledge, social media as the success of social and the failure of media, the efficacy of bait over ammo, the wisdom of fishing versus hunting, innovation as a process of subtraction and disintermediation, and – remedially – the need to grow up, slow down, let go of failure, and embark on what he calls a process of deliberate simplification.

First, a little background information about Mr. Einstein: Over the years, his strategic marketing and business development initiatives have driven the acquisition of two agencies, the global growth of a third, and a high-tech IPO, and have appeared in virtually every major business venue, including two front-page stories in The Wall Street Journal, and cover stories for Red Herring Magazine, George, PC Magazine, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

He has appeared as a featured speaker at more than 200 media and marketing industry tradeshows, seminars and workshops, and as a media industry expert on dozens of radio and TV programs, including The Today Show with Katie Couric, CNN’s 360 with Anderson Cooper, and CNN’s Moneyline with Lou Dobbs.

In more recent years, however, Mr. Einstein has re-emerged as a fierce media critic whose writing takes no prisoners and suffers few fools.  He currently asserts that those of us in the marketing and advertising industries have passed through the looking glass and plunged down the rabbit hole, where we now spend most of our time drinking our own Kool Aid and plotting new ways to sell ads that no one wants to see and everyone is equipped to avoid.

So in renewed hopes for a New Year, and in the spirit of positive change we can truly believe in, I present my interview with Jeff Einstein…

Pete – Welcome, Jeff.  What evidence can you cite to support your assertion that we’ve passed through the looking glass and plunged down the rabbit hole?

Jeff – We can begin with a litany of online performance indicators, including the prevalence of sub-$1 CPMs, clickthrough rates firmly ensconced at statistical zero, click fraud estimates of anywhere from 25-85% (depending on your choice of networks and industry experts), not to mention the insolvency and failure of thousands of media franchises, many of them brand names with long, distinguished track records.  In more sober environments with more sober leadership such massive failure and systemic collapse might give us pause, but as an industry we’ve responded instead by speeding up, doubling down and plunging ourselves even deeper down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll’s vision of madness, a world where up is down and down is up.  If anything, we’ve accelerated our commitments to the very same insanity that got us here in the first place.

Pete – That’s pretty harsh.  Aren’t many of our problems right now simple byproducts of a deep recession?

Jeff – No, absolutely not.  While the recession certainly hurts like crazy, our problems don’t result from the recession as much as the recession results from our problems.  Performance across all channels has actually been in decline for a couple of decades now, regardless of the economy and in spite of explosive industry growth.

Pete – Then why do you think media performance is so anemic these days?

Jeff – Mostly because media performance is a myth to begin with.  We’re chasing a great white whale.  Media aren’t supposed to perform.  The message should perform, not the media.  The onus to perform should weigh on the advertisers and the agencies, not on the media franchises; their only job is to aggregate and somehow entertain or inform an audience, the same now as it was fifty years ago.

Only with the digitally-driven ascent of discrete media agencies as the crown jewels of global media holding companies did we suddenly discover an excuse to divorce the medium from the message and shift the onus of performance from the message to the medium in the process.  But in truth, the media simply can’t perform because they were never designed to.  And that’s why, despite all the lip service, advertisers and agencies don’t buy performance.  They buy ubiquity, the exact opposite.  Rather than assume responsibility for their own lack of performance, advertisers and agencies would rather hedge their bets and buy more and more of something that’s worth less and less with each passing day.  Big advertisers and big agencies talk performance, but they buy ubiquity because they know the media can’t perform.

Pete – Lots of industry folks are calling for a complete online marketing overhaul, including new metrics, more sophisticated targeting technologies, more research, more data-based marketing, and more social media.  What do you think?

Jeff – I think new metrics are just another way to shoot the messenger, another way to rearrange the deck chairs on a sinking ship.  Besides, in marketing applications metrics never really describe what works as much as they describe what can be sold.  We already know that the continued growth of online ad budgets will rely increasingly on our ability to sell more branding, in no small part because we’ve invested so heavily in ad serving technologies and infrastructure over the past 15 years.  The perceived need to sell more branding explains why the new metrics being proposed now all seek to measure the very things the industry arrogantly dismissed as useless and effete back in the mid-1990s, all the intangibles that drove the growth of great branding media like print, radio and TV for decades.  We cut off our noses to spite our faces 15 years ago in a foolish and immature effort to distinguish digital media from their analog counterparts, and now the bed we’ve made for ourselves is wrecking everyone’s sleep, our own not least.

Pete – What about behavioral targeting?

Jeff – Anyone with any historical perspective will rightfully conclude that each additional layer of targeting technology increases costs and reduces performance.  As a result, each additional layer of targeting technology further burdens publishers and networks alike.  The promise of digital scale starts working against them; the more traffic they attract and the more advertising they sell, the faster they go out of business.  McLuhan had it right: any medium pushed to extreme will begin to operate in reverse.

Sophisticated targeting technologies don’t work because commercial media are now and always have been on-demand, and in an on-demand media universe it simply makes far less sense to target the audience and far more sense to let the audience target us instead – exactly why search works so much better than display advertising.  This much we know with absolute certainty: no one demands more advertising, relevant or otherwise, and everyone is equipped to avoid it.  That’s the primary reason why online advertising fails at least 99.9 percent of the time, and why TV and radio executives are having nervous breakdowns.

Pete – Should I assume from your aversion to behavioral targeting that you’re also no fan of data-based marketing?

Jeff – Yes, that’s a pretty safe assumption.  Data-based marketing is the end of the road, where we wind up only after we conclude that the message is worth less than the medium, and only after we conclude subsequently that the medium is worth less than the data it generates.  Anything that can’t be measured, quantified and reduced to a mathematical algorithm is excluded by definition — which means we can only measure the smallest, least significant things, and only the things that don’t work.

Unfortunately, however, advertising and branding only work because of the very things that most resist measurement and quantification, those intangibles that can’t be reduced to convenient formulae.  Quite apart from the fact that no one wants more advertising to begin with, the advertising-as-intermediary model can’t possibly perform in the age of behavioral targeting and data-based marketing because advertising performance is all about the message, and marketing nowadays is all about the media and the data.  The good news is that we’ve finally lived up to Oscar Wilde’s brilliant definition of a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Pete – Do you hold out any hope for social media as a marketing or advertising option?

Jeff – Certainly not as a savior, or even as an antidote for prior stupidity.  We need to understand that social media really represent the end state of our trillion-dollar investment in a seamless user interface designed to eliminate friction and move people from one virtual place to another as quickly as possible.  As such, social media represent the logical extension of an on-demand universe; it’s where we wind up when we’re constantly en route to me, myself and I.  Unfortunately, that same seamless user interface is at complete odds with the basic nature of advertising, which seeks first and foremost to interrupt and intrude on our narcissistic cocoons with someone else’s message.  The seamless user interface we’ve built at huge expense simply can’t and won’t tolerate the legacy advertising-as-intermediary model we imported to support it back in the mid-90s, especially not in social media.  That’s why advertising and branding will shift over the next several years from their current status as intermediaries to a far more functional and appropriate status as destinations.

The more operative component of social media for marketers and advertisers is social, not media.  Consumers who use social media couldn’t care less about its potential value to marketers and advertisers.  They see it exclusively as a social tool, not a distribution medium.  Those marketers and advertisers who see social media first for what they really are, sophisticated tools to expedite social exchange and sharing, will understand immediately why a $.05 Facebook CPM is way overpriced, and fare far better than those who see social media as just the latest in a long litany of cheap media opportunities.  The secret to success with social media, as with all media, is to understand first what they don’t do well.  As always, the examination of failure is prerequisite to success.  Fortunately, there’s no dearth of failure to examine.  Unfortunately, no one’s looking.

Pete – So if everything we do simply compounds the problem and drives us deeper into the rabbit hole, what’s the solution?

Jeff – We need to do three things: First, we need to slow down.  Next, we need to let go, and finally, we need to begin a process of deliberate simplification.

Pete – Let go of what?

Jeff – Bless you for jumping the queue, Pete.  But let’s talk first about slowing down, because we can’t possibly hope to institute meaningful change unless and until we first turn down the noise between our own ears.  We need to clear room in our hearts and minds for a better world before we can hope to create a better world, and we can’t possibly find wisdom in the harsh events of the digital era unless and until we first turn down the volume in our own heads.  Failure to do so will only guarantee bigger bubbles and bigger collapses than the three trillion-dollar market crashes we’ve already endured in the past decade alone, not to mention the current collapse of the media and healthcare industries.

Pete – Okay, what wisdom will we find once we slow down and reduce the volume between our ears?

Jeff – We’ll find that the core imperative of all technology is to accelerate itself and everything around it, and that our primary responsibility in relationship to our own technology is to moderate and restrain it at all times, something we’ve utterly failed to do, or even try.  We’ll find that we’ve become – in the words of Henry Thoreau – tools of our tools, that we work and live our lives at speeds determined not by our own conscious deliberation and common sense, but by the digital tools at our disposal.  The default condition of life in the digital era is perpetual acceleration.

Pete – So what do you suggest?

Jeff – Again, we need to slow down, let go of what doesn’t work and initiate a process of deliberate simplification.  We need to institutionalize ways to become more deliberate as an antidote to the toxic effects of the tool-driven acceleration that we know for certain rides shotgun with our digital technology.  We need to slow down frequently and long enough to interject historical perspective into our deliberations, otherwise we have no way to fashion wisdom from knowledge, and no way to identify or put common sense back to work.

Pete – Everyone I know wants to speed up and do more in less time.

Jeff – That’s the technology talking, Pete.  That’s only what we think we need to do in order to reach our real objective.

Pete – Which is?

Jeff – A far simpler, less cluttered life.  Ultimately, what we really want is a rocking chair on a country porch or a hammock on the beach.  What we really want is a safe place to let go.  Our objectives, however, are very much at odds with our means, and very much at odds with the tool-driven perception that we need to do more in less time.  Only in the rabbit hole on the far side of the looking glass can we expect to live simpler, less cluttered lives by speeding up and adding more clutter.

Pete – What are we letting go of?

Jeff – We’re letting go of failure, and the false pride that compels us to hold onto it.  We can’t possibly innovate in any meaningful way unless and until we make room for innovation in our own hearts and minds, and the only way to create enough breathing room for new ideas is to slow down long enough to identify and let go of the old ones we know no longer work, despite our vested interests.  We don’t find innovation as much as it finds us – but only if and when we remove the barriers.  Innovation is a process of subtraction and disintermediation.

Pete – Can you give me a failed idea in the advertising and marketing industries that we should let go of right away?

Jeff – Yup.  Advertisers, agencies, content producers and publishers need to let go of the traditional advertising-as-intermediary model, especially online.  Again, it offers a product no one wants and everyone is equipped to avoid, and the technological and administrative costs to support it are far too cumbersome and onerous for publishers and content producers to sustain.  As I mentioned earlier, the current collapse of the media ecosystem isn’t just a byproduct of a deep recession.  Industry bubbles inflate and burst when the aggregate weight and cost of excess intermediation eclipse and crush the value of the product or service being sold – exactly what happened with the dot com, financial and real estate bubbles.  And that’s exactly what’s happening right now with the media and healthcare industries.  They’re collapsing from the aggregate weight of all the intermediaries who contribute far too little and extract far too much.

Pete – Who would you identify as the primary intermediaries in the media industry?

Jeff – The media agencies, the ad networks, the targeting technology vendors, and the data-marketing vendors.  They’re all in the business of adding costs and complexity to the failing advertising-as-intermediary model whose performance can only continue to decline no matter what.  In the end, none of what they bring to the table can improve performance of a product no one wants, and their collective weight can only further imperil the livelihoods of those who truly belong at the table, the content producers and the publishers.

Pete – Better technology can’t help?

Jeff – Better technology can help a lot of things, but the advertising-as-intermediary model isn’t one of them.  Remember, technology is supposed to simplify our lives.  But the twenty-something technologists who took over the marketing and advertising industries straight out of business school in the mid-1990s simply weren’t mature enough to understand that the secret to success with all technologies is deliberate restraint, the wisdom to know when and where not to use them.  So they went on a collective bender instead and introduced layer after layer of increasingly complex digital technologies, none of which increased the intrinsic value of the work product, and all of which imposed untenable burdens and costs on the ecosystem.

Pete – That was then.  What about now?

Jeff – Now we’re old enough to know better.  Now we know what doesn’t work.  Now it’s time to put aside childish things and grow up.  Now it’s time for us as an industry to slow down, let go of what doesn’t work, and begin the process of deliberate simplification.

Pete – Where do we begin?

Jeff – We begin with a more mature understanding that the ability to defer gratification and exercise restraint is what distinguishes mature behavior from adolescent behavior.  So we begin with the re-introduction of restraint.  We begin by reaffirming that our primary responsibility as senior executives is to teach, institutionalize and practice restraint and moderation up and down the entire food chain.  Job one of all senior executives is to reject the excesses of the past two decades and say no to patently self-destructive and promiscuous behavior, especially when we know it’s powered by several billion microchips.

Pete – Beyond the acts of slowing down and letting go of things that don’t work, what does the process of deliberate simplification look like?

Jeff – Think of yourself and your business on the slick surface of a spinning wheel.  In order to stay in business you must remain on the wheel, despite the fact that it accelerates faster and faster with each and every rotation.  We know from Albert Einstein’s casual observation of a phonograph record that the outer edge of the wheel spins much faster than the hub, which means the centrifugal force you feel on the outer edge of the spinning wheel is far more intense than the centrifugal force you feel at the center.  Think now of the centrifugal force you feel on the spinning wheel as all the day-to-day pressures, inertia and exigencies that conspire in aggregate to steal your resources and sap your strength.

The success and sustainability of your business depends therefore on where you spend your time on the spinning wheel.  The closer you are to the outer edge, the greater the centrifugal force that pushes you towards oblivion.  The closer you are to the outer edge, the more time and energy you must invest in your battle simply to stay on the wheel.  The closer you are to the outer edge, the more time and energy you invest in pure reaction to your environment.  I would submit that tens of thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of senior executives are living wholly reactive lives perched precariously on the edge at this very moment.

The process of deliberate simplification is one that describes a proactive journey from the insanity and fragmentation of perpetual life on the edge to the sanity and wholeness of life in the center.  The process of deliberate simplification — like innovation — is in fact a deliberate process of subtraction and disintermediation, and it’s the only way to emerge from the rabbit hole with our sanity and wallets intact.

Pete – What specifically can we do to begin the journey from the outer edge to the center?  For instance, if you were an advertiser, what steps would you take to introduce a process of deliberate simplification online?

Jeff – Over time I’d cease to use third-party websites to advertise my brand message.  Instead I’d replace the intermediary ads with more compelling unbranded content teasers designed only to entice and move prospects directly to my branded sites.  I’d use bait instead of ammo and go fishing instead of hunting.  The content bait I place on third-party websites would always resolve on my websites, surrounded entirely by my brand with my calls to action.  I’d no longer ask the publishers to do something they’re clearly not equipped to do, I wouldn’t ask prospects to look at or click on something they clearly don’t want, and I’d always know precisely where and on what terms my brand message is being consumed.

Pete – Doesn’t that put advertisers in the content business?

Jeff – Of course.  But lots of advertisers are already in the content business, some quite successfully since the 1930s.  Those who can’t afford or aren’t inclined to create their own content can license someone else’s.  Content producers and publishers get paid on a pure and simple performance basis for traffic and content they deliver directly to my websites, and we eliminate most if not all the front-end targeting technologies that are currently driving them out of business, putting my brand at risk and wrecking my ROI.  The onus for performance shifts back to me where it belongs, and I put my digital agency back to work doing what they should have been doing all along, creating quality destination environments for my brand instead of trying to decide which websites will fail least often.  I’d stop paying them to fail.

Pete – So you’d just replace the ads with content teasers?

Jeff – Yes, and put all the branding on my own destination sites.  It’s the only cost-efficient and scalable way for me to control my own brand exposure and eliminate risk, and it’s the only way not to drive quality publishers and content producers straight to the poor house in the process.  Instead of the current site-targeting insanity that presumes to know which ads my prospects won’t avoid, I can now entice them with something they truly want to consume.  Instead of paying for what I know will fail at least 99.9% of the time, I’ll pay only for success, and I won’t be forcing publishers or content producers to foot the bill for my failures anymore.

Pete – Do you think publishers and content producers will play along?

Jeff – Publishers and content producers don’t set policy.  Ultimately, only the advertiser — the guy with the cash in hand — sets policy.  That aside, publishers and content producers need to slow down, let go, and embark on a process of deliberate simplification also.  Publishers need to let go of the performance myth imposed upon them by advertisers and feckless agencies.  In fact, they not only need to let go of their traffic, but they need to let go of their content as well.

Pete – How do you mean?

Jeff – Publishers need to send their content and their traffic directly to paying advertiser sites, rather than trying to hold on to both.  They simply can’t deliver brand messages in an age when no one wants to see them and everyone is equipped to avoid them, and — as a result — they can’t afford to keep quality content on-site any longer.  The advertising-as-intermediary revenue model can no longer support the requisite costs to aggregate and target audiences.

Pete – What do you suggest?

Jeff – I suggest they retain the dot com model to aggregate eyeballs, but function as gatekeepers rather than curators.  Publishers should take the same content that attracts advertisers now to their sites, put it directly on a paying advertiser’s website, link to it then get paid for both the traffic and the content on a CPC basis.  Much simpler, much more direct, and much less expensive than trying to figure out year after year how to compel visitors to view ads they simply don’t want to see.  Publishers get to do exactly what they’ve always done so well: create great content and aggregate audiences.  And they get to do it with none of the invasive targeting technologies that can only add costs, erode performance, and piss people off the moment they accidently learn about them.

Pete – So you don’t think the new IAB campaign to educate consumers on the benefits of behavioral targeting will work?

Jeff – Hardly.  I think it’s like conducting tours of a sausage factory, but without the tasting room at the end.  The IAB is trying to convince folks that what they don’t see behind the ads won’t hurt them, when in fact no one but the IAB and other industry intermediaries wants the ads in the first place.  The Mad Hatter would be proud.  But again, deliberate simplification is a journey of deliberate subtraction and disintermediation.  We need to remove the layers of technology-driven intermediation that currently stand between visitors and brands.  We need to remove the intermediaries that drive publishers and content producers out of business.  In short, we need to invert the current model: instead of taking the ad and immersing it in the content on the publisher’s site, publishers should immerse both the content and the visitor in the ad directly on the advertiser’s site.  It’s the only ad model that plays in scale to the distributed network strength of the medium, the only one that will deliver the branding advertisers want without the risk and waste, and the only one that will protect the interests of publishers and content producers as well.

Pete – Any final calls to action?

Jeff – Just one: anyone who’s slowed down long enough to read this entire interview is likely ready to emerge from the rabbit hole, and should drop me a line…

Pete – Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff – Thank you, Pete, and Happy New Year.

The following article by Jeff Einstein was published 08/11/09 on JackMyers.com…

You’ve heard it said a thousand times before: Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. Seems like a simple and unassailable hypothesis – at least for those with half a brain. Suitably equipped and ever the contrarian, therefore, I set out the other day to challenge conventional wisdom yet again, this time armed with my OBERSC (Official Brothers Einstein Research Survey Clipboard) and not one but two appropriately stupid questions:

Question #1: Do you want more or fewer ads?

Question #2: How do you want your ads, relevant or irrelevant?

What amazes me in retrospect is not that those with clear vested interests in behavioral targeting technologies persist with silly claims that consumers actually want relevant ads, but that they a) can find enough unwitting pigeons willing to stand still long enough to answer such abysmally stupid and patently self-serving questions in the first place, and b) are willing to pay for the results.

My amazement is predicated in part on responses to my admittedly unscientific survey of 52 individuals, all of whom I queried recently either at the Queens Plaza Mall (32 respondents) or the Noguchi Museum (20 respondents), both in New York City.

In response to question #1, only 42% said they want fewer ads, good news for advertisers — at least at first blush. The other 58%, however, told me to get lost (or less civil words to that effect). Not a single respondent stated a preference for more ads (even among those who didn’t threaten me right away with bodily harm). Of course reaction to the first question all but eliminated any need to ask the second question; one blatantly stupid question seemed more than sufficient.

Upon meticulous and painstaking cross-tabulation of the resulting survey data, a number of possible extrapolations emerged:

1) You don’t always get a stupid response to a stupid question (those who refused to answer my stupid questions spoke volumes simply by walking — or running — away);

2) It’s critically important to incentivize (bribe) survey respondents (or at least seal off their escape) if you intend to ask more than one stupid question; and

3) The only way to justify stupid research is to ask the wrong stupid question first.

And so it is with behavioral targeting advocates who claim consumers actually want relevant ads: they prove their hypothesis by asking the wrong stupid question first. Still, it’s a brilliant and time-honored agency strategy designed to exploit the fears, uncertainties and doubts (the FUDs) of the only ones insipid and lazy enough to foot the bill for it all: the advertisers. Those of you who have any agency experience already know that no agency ever went broke by overestimating the intelligence of its own clients. You also likely know that virtually all performance metrics are devised by agencies as a means to bill for the research required to justify and defend the metrics, however specious.

Failed metrics that agencies can no longer defend and sell to their hapless clients (like CTRs that now hover at statistical zero) will be swapped ASAP for those that can — like black box metrics designed to promote and sell “relevancy.” Of course the new generation of metrics to support behavioral targeting technologies and the pursuit of relevancy will require truckloads of research and analysis to defend, not to mention tons of user data collected from thousands of disparate sources. Ironically, however, the relevancy of the message becomes entirely irrelevant the very moment data replaces media as the dominant commodity in the pipeline. Because who needs relevance if the real product being sold is data?

Of course advertisers who invest in behavioral targeting are perfectly free to waste their advertising and marketing budgets any way they want. But their investments in behavioral targeting technologies come with a perfidious hidden tax, one no longer measured merely in standard currencies, because the currencies at risk this time aren’t just their money and their brand equity. The true currencies at risk this time are our privacy and our freedom.
Jeff Einstein, the Brothers Einstein, Jaffer Ali, Vidsense, Jack Myers

The following article by Jeff Einstein was published 08/05/09 on JackMyers.com…

The following is a transcript from a phone call between a behavioral targeting salesman and a certain Mr. Faust, CEO of Anything for a Buck Enterprises…

Faust: Hello, and thanks for calling Anything for a Buck. Faust speaking.

BT Salesman: Good morning, Mr. Faust. You don’t know me but have I got a deal for you!

Faust: Great! I’m always interested in a good deal. Tell me about it.

BT Salesman: Well, Mr. Faust, I’ve got this spectacular new technology that will allow you to collect the most intimate details of your customers’ online lives.

Faust: Sounds a little creepy. I like it.

BT Salesman: Exactly! You’ll know every move they make, every Web site they visit, how long they spend there, what they buy, what they do – everything!

Faust: Sounds downright diabolical. But what’s the point?

BT Salesman: You’ll be able to increase your online ad performance by up to 50%.

Faust: Well, hold on for a moment. Let me do the math: A 50% lift of my usual point one percent CTR. Hmmm. That brings my performance all the way up to .15%. But even with the added lift I’m still at statistical zero. Sounds like much ado about nothing to me.

BT Salesman: Well, you know the CTR is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll also be able to sell the data you collect!

Faust: Sell the data? To whom?

BT Salesman: To anyone who asks. You could even give it away to the government!

Faust: Won’t people who come to my Web site object to being tracked like escaped convicts and having their data sold to the highest bidder or given away to the government?

BT Salesman: Naaah. Not to worry. Most folks won’t even know.

Faust: What about those who do?

BT Salesman: We’ll solicit their informed consent.

Faust: Informed consent? What idiot would agree to something like that?

BT Salesman: Anyone who wants relevant ads.

Faust: Relevant ads? Who the hell wants any ads?

BT Salesman: Studies conclude that consumers prefer relevant ads to non-relevant ads.

Faust: Studies, eh? So where’s the informed consent part?

BT Salesman: We’ll provide you with a simple boilerplate privacy statement and consent form.

Faust: Now you’re talking. How long is the consent form?

BT Salesman: Well, the standard privacy statement and form is eight pages, but you can add to it if you want.

Faust: Eight pages? Who the hell’s gonna read eight pages?

BT Salesman: No one I know. But they don’t have to read it to accept it.

Faust: You mean people will consent to something they never read?

BT Salesman: Of course. You think any laws would get passed by Congress if they actually had to read what they sign?

Faust: Good point. But that’s hardly informed consent. Seems more like uninformed consent.

BT Salesman: Informed, uninformed. Let’s not split hairs, Mr. Faust. Whattaya say?

Faust: I don’t know. Sounds a little ethically challenged to me.

BT Salesman: Exactly! I knew you’d appreciate it! Can I write you up?

Faust: Well, much as the idea of spying on everyone who visits my Web site appeals to me, and much as the thought of selling the most intimate details of my customers’ lives to the highest bidder…

BT Salesman: And don’t forget the government.

Faust: Right. Right. Right. And much as the corruptive union of corporate and state power entices me, I gotta say that I just don’t feel right about this one. Just seems way over the top and without any ethical or moral foundation whatsoever – even for me.

BT Salesman: Well, Mr. Faust, I appreciate your candor. Would it be okay if we keep your phone number and email address on file to keep you posted on future product updates?

Faust: I suppose. You need my email address?

BT Salesman: No thanks, Mr. Faust. We’ve already got it. (Click…bzzzzzzzz.)

Faust: Hello?
Jeff Einstein, the Brothers Einstein, Jaffer Ali, Vidsense, Jack Myers

The following article by Jeff Einstein was published 05/13/09 on JackMyers.com…

Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save. — Will Rogers

In Part 1 of Gimme a Break, I suggested that the reason why advertising doesn’t work very well anymore is because we’ve essentially eliminated the commercial break from our lives – especially during the commercial break, which nowadays more closely resembles a digital feeding frenzy, and hence destroys the very ad model it’s designed to serve. In fact, our entire on-demand lives have devolved into extended digital feeding frenzies, with no time for reflection, no tolerance whatsoever for intrusion, and no breaks from the media action.

What bothers me most about the current state of advertising and marketing, however, is how utterly predatory and atavistic we’ve become since the mid-1990s, when twenty-something digital evangelists decided that advertisers and marketers should a) engage in brand dialogues with consumers (mostly because there was suddenly a shitload of new digital technology to foist on them), and b) conduct said brand dialogues in a thoroughly mediated and seamless digital world, which of course renders impossible the requisite intrusion and time to establish and maintain any meaningful dialogue – brand or otherwise – with anyone. Baffled and besieged, older, more sober generations of advertisers and marketers deferred immediately and stepped aside, mostly because they couldn’t reboot their own computers without the help of the twenty-somethings. The days of the commercial break were clearly numbered.

Of course the predatory attribute I assigned above should not be confused with anything or anyone forward-thinking or proactive, and is wholly reactive instead (hence its atavistic nature), far more akin to the desperate pride of lions that haunts a watering hole during a deadly drought than the same willful pride that hunts at night when water and game are plentiful. Thus today’s generation of advertisers and marketers, all clustered like starving lions around the same watering hole, truly believe that they owe their jobs to consumer opinion, and are therefore compelled to react like lemmings as quickly as possible to perceived consumer demand – with every digital technology in their arsenal. By contrast, their displaced predecessors knew otherwise: that there is no such thing as consumer demand except to the extent that marketers and advertisers create it. The good ones knew something else also: that job one in creating consumer demand was to create and protect the integrity of the commercial break, what Bill Bernbach called the environment to buy.

But how can we possibly expect others to take a break long enough to engage our brand messages if we can’t take one for ourselves? Remember, we as marketers and advertisers create and shape consumer demand. And if we can’t control how we spend our own time, how can we as marketers and advertisers possibly hope to influence how others spend theirs?

The following is an excerpt from a recent post I made to the Oldtimers Foundation listserv:

To the question of how we can affect change in the midst of our day jobs and selfish best interests, I would reply, “First, slow down.” Our agendas are already far too full and far too hectic to engage in or otherwise entertain meaningful thought and discourse. We’ve turned time — our only real inventory — into an enemy. We cannot begin to accommodate new thoughts and behaviors unless and until we find a way to intervene in our own lives long and frequently enough to prepare the soil of our souls for new seeds. We cannot affect meaningful change in ourselves or others unless and until we reclaim our time.

Of course the reclamation of our time is easier said than done, but — in all earnestness — I would suggest the following remedial steps:

1. Change your career objective right now. Aspire instead to take a nap, go for a walk, read a good novel or otherwise tune out completely for at least an hour during the course of each work day. No digital devices or electronic media allowed (with the sole exception of music). We spend our entire work lives striving for the moment when we can retire, put our feet up, and take a nap. My suggestion therefore is to eliminate the career middle man and head straight for the nap. You (and just about everyone else you know) will thank me later. It ain’t about money at the end of the day; it’s about time, and how and where and with whom we spend it. The rest of your work day will fall magically into place once you aspire — first and foremost — to take a nap as your new career objective.

2. Be conscious of your tools. Move your personal and professional communications up the emotional impact ladder at every opportunity. In other words, consciously choose communications tools that require more deliberation and deliver more heart and soul — like a phone call or a well-crafted letter or a face-to-face meeting over an email, text message or tweet — whenever possible. Always choose quality over quantity (because it’s always your choice), and always choose deliberateness over speed; don’t communicate on the run except in emergencies. Remember: speed kills.

3. Resist the narcotic impulse to check your email inbox for the first hour of every day. Each time you sit down first thing in the morning to check your email inbox, you automatically put your own agenda dead last behind the collective agendas of all the emails you find there. In doing so you invite a purely reactive mindset that forces you to play catchup for the balance of your day (and life).

Each of the above suggestions requires time and conscious deliberation. But that’s the point. We can choose to intervene in our own lives and industry or someone or something else will intervene for us — guaranteed.

Advertisers, take a nap, and when you wake up encourage your agency contacts to take a nap also. Mandate a no-email period each morning. Get them out of the fire-fighting business and into the fire-starting business. Their performance will improve and so will yours.

Agencies, create a digital media-free area where your employees can sit down and talk quietly, read a book, or just stretch out and take a nap. Their performance will improve and so will yours.

Time is of the essence, but only when we honor it, only when we befriend it. Consider therefore the words of Jim Goodwin and Sydney J. Harris:

“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”

And entertain right now the sage advice of Lily Tomlin:

“For fast-acting relief, try slowing down.”
Jeff Einstein, the Brothers Einstein, Vidsense, Jaffer Ali, Jack Myers

The following article by Jeff Einstein was published 04/29/09 on JackMeyers.com…

A generation or so ago, before the introduction of the World Wide Web, and before broadcast television became the alternative to cable, TV viewers actually took a break during the commercial break. That’s when we went to the can, fixed a snack, chatted with friends or family, and otherwise engaged in more recognizably break-like, flesh-and-bone behaviors.

Fade out, fade in: There is no more commercial break, at least not in the sense that anyone older than thirty might remember or recognize from days past. Today’s commercial break is instead an exercise in media-induced ADD, a programmed license to pick up the nearest digital device(s) and go virtually nuts – text an old friend, make a new friend, make a dozen new friends, make a hundred new friends, tweet, tweet again, tweet once more, fast-forward, channel surf, download a tune, upload a video…ad nauseam. In short, there is no commercial break, no break, in fact, of any kind. There’s only the stress that comes from living life immersed in a break-free media environment, and stress – according to psychotherapist and author Richard Carlson – is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of mental illness.

We functionally eliminate the commercial break from our lives when we populate each and every moment of them with dozens of digitally-driven media alternatives to whatever media we happen to be consuming at the time. In fact, the very page on which this article appears will likely offer no fewer than forty links to other pages, each vying to compete for your already beaten and battered attention. Multiply this single moment in time by the fact that the average American now consumes almost twelve hours of media each and every day. Not only do we now spend our entire waking lives immersed in media, but we do so under relentless pressure to be somewhere we’re not (anywhere, to be precise) each and every minute. The ensuing stress is interpreted by Zen writer Natalie Goldberg as a state of ignorance, a destination of sorts for those who no longer understand that ignorance is a far better place in which to begin our journey than to end it.

Of course, all of these competing interests per moment of media consumption exact a toll on all of us (not least on advertisers and marketers), and drive down performance, especially when we consider that all this digitally-induced neurosis is delivered in a seamless user interface designed explicitly to eliminate any potential intrusion and get us where we’re going (wherever that is) in record time. This is problematic only because advertising relies almost exclusively on its ability to intrude upon and otherwise interrupt our lives.

Some years ago I introduced a term to describe the percentage of each media dollar that ultimately goes towards overcoming the inertia (the sum total of those things that inhibit advertising engagement) generated by each medium. I called it the Inertia Tax, and today it consumes more than 99 cents of every digital media ad dollar spent — a fact that digital media acolytes would rather ignore than confront. Apparently, it’s still easier to sell a .3% CTR than explain a 99.7% failure rate.

Along similar lines, digital old timer and seasoned ad pro Larry Smith recently introduced SOX, a new term to describe an advertiser’s Share Of eXit links on any given digital page. The more exit links per page, the lower the advertiser’s SOX, and the more likely they are at the end of the day to be eaten alive by the Inertia Tax. I wish Larry more traction with SOX than I engendered with the Inertia Tax.

Is it any wonder, therefore, that ads don’t work? Who’s got the time for them and who among us will still tolerate the intrusion? There’s simply no break in the media action anywhere anymore, no breathing room, not even the remotest possibility for intrusion, commercial or otherwise. There’s no time for meaningful relationships to incubate and emerge. Each additional layer of compensatory targeting technology drives performance down a notch as marketers become increasingly predatory in an escalating pattern of digital aggression — behavior that does not go unnoticed by our elusive prey. Behavioral targeting and other hyper-aggressive digital technologies can only further wreck the media ecology as they change the very behavior they seek to track and exploit — the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle amplified by a billion microchips.

We tell our audiences that we only want to engage them, but they know better by now; they know that we want them to capitulate, to surrender, to raise the white flag in utter defeat. We want their heads — like big game trophies — on our office walls, and that’s why we hunt them down like animals. So in self defense they offer up only virtual shadows of themselves for us to target, then they scatter those shadows everywhere all the time to confuse and confound us to wit’s end.

We’ve simply worn out our welcome. In an on-demand media universe, marketing and advertising can survive by invitation only. It’s time to change our vocabulary from “Can I?” to “May I?” It’s time to take a break. Next week, fellow marketers, I’ll explain how, because it all begins with you, and the virtual switch between your ears. Until then, remember the sage words of author Hartman Jule…

Sometimes a headache is all in your head. Relax.

Vidsense, Jeff Einstein, the Brothers Einstein, Jaffer Ali

This article by Jeff Einstein was published 04/13/09 on JackMyers.com.

Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
but that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant,
gorgeous, handsome, talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.

And, as we let our own light shine, we consciously give
other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
– Nelson Mandela

The search for meaning, commiseration, and escape clearly finds motivation in fear and uncertainty, and it’s not for nothing that deep recessions typically witness sharp increases in church attendance, bar traffic, and box office sales. These are deeply evocative days. Why then are we marketers and advertisers of the digital era so fearful of our own power to evoke? Why do we shrink from substance and seek refuge in trivia?

Offered in honor of Easter is a passage in the Gospel of Mark in which Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome go to Christ’s tomb to anoint him, a simple act of respect imbued nonetheless with considerable risk under Roman rule. They find the large rock that had sealed the tomb the previous day mysteriously rolled aside, and inside sits a young man clothed in a white robe, but no Jesus. The young man tells them that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth has risen, then instructs them to tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus had gone ahead to Galilee, where they will meet again, as promised.

The three women had confronted their fears that morning when they went to the tomb of Jesus, expecting to pay their homage, complete their task, and move on with their lives, the terrifying crucifixion of Jesus now behind them. Apparently, however, no good deed goes unpunished, and they are instructed instead to confront their fears once again, this time as disciples in Galilee. What they thought was the end turned out in fact to be just the beginning. The antidote to their fear proved to be their faith – over and over and over again.

What they and other heroes learned over the eons is what successful marketers have known for decades: that the true key to success in marketing and advertising is found precisely in the confluence of fear and faith. The best among us search out those fearsome intersections and confront them with deliberate faith. The best among us will gladly trade true uncertainty for false security any day.

But as digital marketers we’ve lost faith in ourselves and now share our loss with others via technology-mediated, emotionally and spiritually destitute encounters measured in the tens of millions and billions. We are playing impossibly small when we define success as a 17% lift on a .3%, CTR, and we are compelled in the process to redefine powerful words like “relationship” and “friend” downward to meet our own impoverished expectations. We systematically strip all meaning and substance from our own language – just so others won’t feel insecure around us. In the end the medium becomes the sole message, a lonely and soulfully empty place whose only call to action is more of the same.

Marketing and advertising should liberate and inspire others to act. Online marketing and advertising does neither for a simple reason: we cannot liberate and inspire others to act unless and until we first liberate and inspire ourselves. But we choose instead to remain mired in fear. We choose to remain small for fear of our own power.

Recessions should be and typically are opportunities to reaffirm our faith, opportunities to rediscover meaning and recover substance in our lives. Don’t let this one pass you by simply because your email inbox is full or because you’re too busy with social network pissing games. Play big instead. Look for me at the intersection of faith and fear, and together we’ll forge a better future for ourselves, our families, and our industry. Phone me at 347-561-4465 and we’ll get started today. I’ll meet you in Galilee…

Jeff Einstein, Brothers Einstein, Vidsense, Jaffer Ali

The following article by Mike Einstein appeared 3/17/09 on JackMyers.com…

No, I’m not referring to Willie Sutton’s famous response when asked why he robbed banks. I’m talking about our “free” press (a.k.a. media), and the larger lesson contained in Mr. Sutton’s honest reply.

Case in point: Last week the whole country became caught up in the duel between Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and CNBC’s Jim Cramer. Stewart had taken issue with a CNBC correspondent who, in an ill-advised live-TV rant, blamed our economic woes on the over-leveraged “losers” whose mortgages were in default. Sensing a true people-who-live-in-glass-houses moment, Stewart took off on CNBC as a bunch of jock-carrying wannabes who do more to feed the beast than tame it. Jim Cramer, by association, became the de facto poster boy for a network that has always been longer on style than substance.

My problem with all of this is that when Stewart had Cramer and CNBC squarely in the cross hairs, his shot went wide and missed the mark entirely. The only question Stewart needed to ask was the one that would have revealed the only answer that counts: What would your advertisers — you know, those trusted bedrock institutions we just bailed out to the tune of a trillion bucks — do if you told the truth?

Speaking of shots, it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out who calls them at CNBC (the same guys who call them at Comedy Central). So, when Stewart had Cramer right where he wanted him, why didn’t this self-appointed protector of the masses simply tell it like it is and go after the sponsors who underwrite this blatant abuse of the public trust? Sure, he danced around the issue, but that only made it worse. He stopped just short of biting the hand that feeds him — the same hand that ultimately feeds Jim Cramer et al. I guess he figured there was no sense defaulting on the mortgage to his own glass house.

For my money, the only sober reality to emerge from this shameless demagoguery is a better understanding of the real cost of our “free” media. When our global economic meltdown is reduced to a cheap ratings ploy between two comedians, we’re in big trouble, right? Actually, no. In fact, it all becomes clear once you realize that Christopher Dodd and Barack Obama are the two biggest individual recipients of campaign cash from AIG. Who are Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer to let the truth get in the way of a good story? Why shoot them? They’re just the messengers.

Advertisers have always called the shots, which in its own perverted logic, makes perfect sense. After all, it’s not commercials between programs, it’s programs between commercials, and always has been. That’s why soap operas were and are more soap than opera and why Star-Kist preferred tunas that tasted good over tunas with good taste.

This diatribe notwithstanding, let me get off of my high horse (before I fall off) by suggesting that — while legions of spreadsheet-driven quants labor day and night to wreck the marketing industry forever and drive consumers deeper and deeper into smaller and smaller digital retreats — there is one online advertising model that still gets it. It’s called Vidsense, a totally contrarian alternative to the digital status quo. Vidsense takes a giant step back to the future by using the proven power of popular video content as bait to lure prospects to an advertiser’s home turf where a single agenda — the advertiser’s — prevails. Taking its cues from the golden ages of radio and TV (back when advertising actually worked), Vidsense doesn’t put ads in front of people. Vidsense puts people in front of ads. Imagine that! Hmmm, maybe those soap guys were onto something.

With a billion+ channels all competing for the same eyeballs, targeting your audience has become a fool’s errand. It’s like trying to teach a pig to read. It doesn’t work and all you do is piss-off the pig. Doesn’t it make more sense to do your talking in your own showroom? With Vidsense, it’s still all about tunas that taste good, because that’s where the money is…
Mike Einstein Brothers Einstein Vidsense

The following article by Jaffer Ali appeared 3/17/09 on JackMyers.com…

“To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable, but to be certain is to be ridiculous.”
– Chinese Proverb

My modus operandi after graduating college was to eliminate as much uncertainty in my life as possible. Maybe that’s because I believed my only alternative was to be like the feather in the wind at the beginning of Forest Gump.

After becoming the CEO of a direct marketing company, “visibility” became my magic word. I wanted predictable results, predictable processes. I craved the comfort of certainty. When uncertainty reared its head, I armed myself with all the data I could muster and fought back.

But something didn’t feel quite right. I hungered and thirsted for information, yet was starved of real knowledge.

“…rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.”
– Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Our most profitable catalog mailing ever featured over 1500 military videos. It took four months to get this catalog from product selection to mailbox.

Then one day after sending out a few million catalogs, President George Bush (the original) launched a massive military operation named Desert Storm. Our response rates plummeted 80% and nearly bankrupted us. Nobody wanted to watch videos of past wars when there was a brand new one live and in color on CNN.

Yet Albert Einstein’s famous saying, “God does not play dice with the Universe,” remained terra firma for me. Randomness and uncertainty could be tamed by working harder than everybody else. In those years, I often left home before my kids awoke and got home long after they went to sleep. Hey, eliminating uncertainty is hard work!

After selling the catalog operation, the non-compete provision allowed for TV direct response and online marketing. The year was 1996 and we contemplated re-purposing some of the top titles from previous DR campaigns; among which was a Shirley Temple compilation. We tested in early December of 1996 and produced a cute commercial of a very precocious 6-year-old Shirley Temple.

Then on Christmas day 1996, JonBenet Ramsey was murdered and garnered nationwide headlines. Suddenly, our little Miss Temple didn’t seem so “cute” anymore. The promotion died after a promising test, brought to its knees by my old nemesis, uncertainty.

Now, here’s where it gets really interesting: Concurrent to our Shirley Temple debacle, we were also in test with two Riverdance commercials. The results were marginal, but unbeknownst to us, Michael Flatley’s company had made a deal with PBS to air the entire Riverdance performance in late 1996. Conventional thinking suggested that a commercial-free airing would hurt our sales. But just the opposite occurred. Sales jumped AFTER the PBS airing! Riverdance became the hit DR product of 1997, thanks in no uncertain terms to uncertainty. I was beginning to appreciate uncertainty in the context of its alter ego, otherwise known as LUCK.

Fast forward to the world of online marketing…

Online marketers are heavily vested in the notion that predictive modeling of human behavior is a rational process. This is what happens when MBA-driven venture capitalists pour billions of dollars into behavioral targeting methodologies hell-bent on eliminating — or at minimum taming — uncertainty. And yet, what does our most recent report card reveal? Industry-standard click-through response rates of .35%. That’s a 99.65% failure rate for anyone who’s not certain of exactly how to interpret the data.

Thankfully, life’s lessons cured me of my quest for certainty. But I ended up in an online arena which still clings to the illusion that rational behavior is something that can — and should — be measured. Interestingly enough, I came to learn that in the original Sanskrit, “measurement” and “illusion” had the same meaning.

Behavioral Targeting (BT) promised a new way to accountability. But the underlying assumption that humans are rational creatures is flawed; it becomes even more specious the closer we look. We need delve no further than the stock market to see what we get when we place blind faith in BT models that tell us who, what, where and how, but never “why.” As Dr. Phil would say: “How’s that working for ya?”

So let me say as emphatically as I can that eliminating uncertainty is not a strategy. The way out of the mess is to EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY!

“The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.”
– Erich Fromm

We need to manage a portfolio of uncertain futures. Forget about trying to out-think chance. It is a fool’s errand. We live in a quantum reality of almost infinite possibilities. We can let our creative juices flow and pursue an ongoing and unending journey guided by uncertainty.

If we wake up every day open to these possibilities, certain or not, we will go to sleep each night a little wiser. We must welcome and embrace what we do not understand. It is when we question our assumptions that we begin the creative process. It is through uncertainty that greater truths emerge. On that note, I leave you with a precious quote from Van Gogh:

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”
– Vincent van Gogh

The following article by Mike Einstein appeared in the 2/27/09 issue of JackMyers.com.

I think I’ve figured out why I just don’t get this new media thing. It’s because I speak English, and the movers and shakers in the online space have their own language which I simply can’t wrap my brain around.

To wit: the following lead paragraphs from two trade articles today:

“Industry veterans Tim Daly and Al Gadbut are launching a ‘next-generation’ behavioral targeting company called ClearSight Interactive that uses intelligent matching techniques and predictive data strategies that won’t violate user privacy. ‘We have effectively termed our business model permission-based multichannel behavioral targeting, an entirely new concept for the marketplace given that current BT providers have limited permission from the consumer and can only collect data and disseminate advertising through the online channel,’ Daly said.”

“Havas Digital has entered into a multi-level strategic partnership with Media6°, which uses ’social graph’ data to connect marketers to customized potential audiences, Online Media Daily has learned. Under the agreement, Havas Digital agencies will become early adopters of Media6°’s social graph targeting capabilities in order to integrate consumer insights with hyper-targeting.”

No offense, but I defy anyone — in the ad business or not — to read either or both of these paragraphs without his or her eyes glazing over, let alone with a straight face. It’s time someone called the emperor’s bluff and told him to put on some clothes; or to at least take a long look in the mirror before heading out again!

There’s a great advertising parody from the 1960s starring Jack Lemmon and Edward G. Robinson entitledGood Neighbor Sam. The movie’s seminal moment occurs when Jack Lemmon (Sam Bissell), an ad agency lackey turned account savior, counsels agency client Robinson (Mr. Nurdlinger of Nurdlinger Dairies) to forego the “sham and pretentiousness” of modern advertising (remember, this movie was made forty-five years ago) and return to the basics by merely stating: Nurdlinger milk is better! His simple suggestion is greeted with 100% buy-in by the client and kudos from bossman Mr. Burke (played by the inimitable Edward Andrews) who proclaims: “In the face of such truth and honesty, I feel somewhat diminished!” Concludes an agency yes-man played by Robert Q. Lewis: “This could start a whole new trend in advertising!” What would Bissell, Burke, Nurdlinger et al think of“…social graph targeting capabilities in order to integrate consumer insights with hyper-targeting”?

Nearly 30 years ago, I handled the television advertising for an upscale women’s clothing store called Ethel’s. The store owner, a very nice older Chinese lady named Ethel (go figure), asked me what she could do to reach younger shoppers. I suggested that instead of targeting a younger audience she might do better to entice younger shoppers to target her – simply by changing the name of her store. Little did either of us know that all we had to do was wait a few years and let “…permission-based multichannel behavioral targeting” render the entire Ethel’sconundrum moot. Bottom line: Ethel didn’t go for my suggestion and I think her last customer just passed away from old age.(But boy was she dressed for the occasion!)

Let’s be clear: Good advertising begins with the seller, not the buyer. It’s the message, not the medium. Brands succeed on the strength of the feelings we have about them, not through interpretation of the data they have about us.

You’ve read in this same space before the way my brother Jeff and I feel about all this algorithmic erudition that has everything to do with technology but little or nothing to do with advertising. And if it bugs us, imagine, for example, how GM will feel if they ever wake up to realize that their ad agency knows much more about the people who aren’t buying cars than they do about their client who builds them.