Chasing String in the Digital Era

Chasing String in the Digital Era

by Jaffer Ali

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Jaffer Ali

Contents

Endorsements

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Politics and Media

Behold, Here Comes Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee

The Demise Of Mainstream Media, One Constituency At A Time

DOJ Asks Court to Keep GOOGLE-NSA Partnership Secret

The Decline of the MSM

What Middle East Uprisings Say About Online Marketing

The Egyptian Revolution, Media and the Internet

Is Media Privatization The New Trend?

Chapter 2: On Technology

Our Faustian Bargain

Has Google’s Empire Passed Its Zenith?

Can Eric Schmidt and Marketers Predict Human Behavior?

First, Do No Harm: How Our Need to Intervene Ruins Everything

From Simulated Life To Simulated Marketing

Will the Tallest Midget in the Room Please Stand Up!

Chapter 3: The Online Ecosystem

Sustainability

Media...Evolve or Die?

After the Last Sky

The Internet’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Rescuing The Internet From Infocrats

Inside Plato’s Digital Cave

A Critical Discourse

One More Time - The Ad Model Is Broken

Has Online Advertising Lost Its Schwerpunkt?

The Audience In The Media Ecosystem

Chapter 4: On Privacy

An Interview with George Orwell & Paddy Chayefsky

Big Brother’s Brother

Why Behavioral Targeting Is Immoral

Behavioral Targeting: Putting Lipstick on a Pig

A Brand’s-Eye View of Behavioral Targeting

Chapter 5: Uncertainty Reigns

The Center Cannot Hold

Limits of Knowledge

The Paradigm of Prediction

Embracing Uncertainty

The Pretense of Knowledge

Chapter 6: Sense and Nonsense

Walking the Talk: Count on Yourself

Respecting the Rodney Principle

The Algorithmic Debate Is Over- The Loser Is Clear

Long Tail Marketing – A Field of Screams

Time for a New Thinking Cap

What’s My Job?

Leaked Memo from a Brand Manager – ‘Discovered’ by Jaffer Ali

Chapter 7: The Wonder of it All

Chasing String in the Digital Era

Marketing with Wonder

Being ‘In the Zone’

Dreams of the Heart

O Captain, My Captain

Abandoning Fear

Taking Flight with Black Swans

Fear is the Mind-killer

Media and Marketing Beyond The Algorithm

55 About the Author

Endorsements

What Are They Saying About Chasing String in the Digital Era?

"Jaffer Ali’s prose is about all things large and small while forever lighting the way. Chasing String in the Digital Era is part a working-man’s Nassim Nicholas Taleb, part Henry David Thoreau, part John Boyd, part Marshall McLuhan, part soaring heart, part unfettered mind and - thankfully - all vintage Jaffer Ali."

- Jeff Einstein, Media critic and founder of Brothers Einstein Digital Agency

Everyone in online marketing has opinions, but like all industries there’s a great deal of groupthink. Jaffer has a refreshing voice for two important reasons. First, he has invested his own money to test the approaches he has opinions about. And second, he is more concerned with what works than with what is popular. I highly value what Jaffer has to say. So should you.

- Tom Cunniff, Founder of Cunniff Consulting

Jaffer Ali writes from the intersections of Heart, Common Sense, Street Smarts and Experience. I’ve helped countless brands in the digital marketing sector since 1994 and learn something new every time he makes time to share his wisdom. Whether this is your first foray into ecommerce and digital marketing or you’re an experienced veteran, this collection of Life and Business lessons will open your eyes.

- Adam Boettiger, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist

Whether you’re talking politics, privacy or technology, Jaffer’s insight and knowledge will help you sift through the illusion of everyday life and cut right to the heart of matters!

- Shelly Palmer, Fox Television’s Shelly Palmer Digital Living & author, Digital Wisdom: Thought Leadership For a Connected World

Dedication

Everything I am or will likely become rests on the foundations that my father, Khalil B. Ali, taught me. At an early age, he inculcated in me the notion of what it meant to be a free man. So much of what I write is a loving tribute to this amazing man and Father. He was my first teacher about entrepreneurship and through his lovingly patient and guiding hand lit the way for the path forward.

No dedication would be complete without mentioning my wife, Carol. She has been my faithful companion for over 26 years. She defines what it means to nurture all that know her and gratitude is unbound for the joy she has brought every day to our lives. As a serial entrepreneur, there is no way I could have managed the highs and lows without her undying support. This is not a cliché. Everyone needs at least one person in the world to believe in them. Her faith carried me through many tough days as she created an oasis of calm at home.

Lastly, I would like to thank my cousin Tom and sister Anisa for their patience in being my business partners for over seventeen years. It has been quite a ride and they have always been generous with their spirit in both good times and bad.

Preface

The online digital marketing and media ecosystem is a troubled mess. But few of the trade publications acknowledge or are aware of the mess. Since our own media companies and marketing division has touched every part of the online ecosystem, we have a front row seat into the problems and challenges of our industry.

I started writing about the problems of the industry way back in 1998 and continued more or less to this day. It is not always comfortable to be the one yelling that the emperor has no clothes, but that is what I set out to do. Chasing String in the Digital Era is a collection of the essays and articles written over the years.

But what is chasing string? If you ever had a pet cat, you would understand how it chased string endlessly, seemingly without purpose. While we can never be sure what purpose is in the cat’s mind, modern day marketers are doing their best feline imitation. Only the digital string being chased is behavioral targeting, Big Data and a love of all things new (neomania). Our industry is chasing this string all the while purring like a kitten.

I have noticed that few of the pundits that do most of the writing really have skin in the game. What I mean by this is that few are really spending their own money while making a living in the online ecosystem. They may be flush with VC money and publishing content. Others are at agencies who must peddle the latest technologies and services to their clients. Other experts come from large brands making media buying decisions with budgets supplied from high above them.

This environment does not lend itself to truth. It lends itself to a great deal of cheerleading. While we have made a good living within this dysfunctional ecosystem, we never could get ourselves to don the pom poms and cheerlead. I am congenitally unable to cheerlead.

Because we always spent our own money exploring this new thing or that new idea, we had to look at reality squarely in the eye. If banners sucked as a medium, we would only say it after spending our own money. If pre-roll advertising could be sold, but REALLY did not work very well, how could we continue to buy it? We could not. How could we continue to sell pre-roll? We could not and still look ourselves in the mirror.

Nothing stops you from chasing string more than if that twine can wrap around your neck and strangle you. We discovered the dangers of chasing string pretty quickly. There are others that really make a lot of money dangling that string in front of others. Another metaphor of snake oil also comes to mind.

Chasing string has another terrible side effect. We get shockingly distracted from what is important. And that goes way beyond making or losing money. Our digital lives have engendered the age of distraction where data trumps knowledge and wisdom is in very short supply.

Chasing String in the Digital Era is meant to give readers a chance to pause…to think. To add a bit more deliberation to what they do. We cannot continue to short change privacy…to exaggerate differences between political parties…to surrender our thoughts and inclinations to entities too big to fail.

This collection of essays is a journey of sorts. Politics, economics, marketing and media are covered. Each essay can stand on its own and collectively, a business and worldview emerges that hopefully the reader will appreciate.

Jaffer Ali, March, 2013

Introduction

This collection of essays represents my fourth contribution to the publishing industry. Some may find it a curious blend. The articles or essays are divided into seven themes. But what unites them all is a sense that something is not quite right.

In Chapter One, Politics and Media, the curious relationship between our media, economics and political discourse is examined. Traditional media is having a difficulty competing with the Internet on many fronts. It is worthwhile asking just how much our MSM is secretly subsidized to maintain prevailing societal myths.

But as audiences for MSM news erodes, independent, online media are replacing traditional media outlets that frame discourse with only two frames of reference. The online environment allows for many different types of flowers to bloom.

In Chapter Two, the overriding theme deals with why we should not place unbridled faith in technology. There is a pervasive love of all things new… neomania if you will and this is not healthy. Technology and its relationship to regime change has been drastically overstated. Examining the relationship to social change and technology is a subject worthy of a book by itself.

In Chapter Three we take a look at the online ecosystem from several perspectives. Asking questions of sustainability to drilling down and examining the advertising model, there is a lot of fodder for the fire if one wishes to explore in depth after reading.

Chapter Four deals with privacy challenges a connected world presents. In a drive for improving advertising returns, there is a real cost to our privacy. The irony of ironies is that all the data collected on us is not leading to improved economic performance.

If one is honest and experiences poor performance of the new ad models, it behooves us to understand why so much data has not improved ROI. Chapter Five deals with how uncertainty is cooked into the meals we are served… in our online ad models and beyond.

There is not always a hard delineation between one chapter and another. In Chapter Six, we cover the extremes between what makes sense and nonsense. We hope you have a little fun with The Rodney Principle which liberally uses simple, yet elegant one-liners from Rodney Dangerfield. Tying jokes to business models was not as difficult as it might sound. Working for fifteen years in the online space, I have seen more than my share of business models that were no better than jokes.

The final chapter The Wonder of It All offers hope and a possible way out. It is not just a way out for online marketers, it is a way out for us personally who admit to the challenges of being tethered to the Internet 24/7. Our online lives have merged with our offline lives. The space between the two has narrowed. They promise to narrow even further. One need not look further than Google Glasses in beta at the time of this e-book coming out.

Chasing string is a useful metaphor for our lives. I hope these collected essays offer a perspective that can help you in your personal and professional lives.

Chapter 1: Politics and Media

Behold, Here Comes Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee

Published 10/9/12

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

- Helen Keller, in a letter written in 1911

Did you happen to catch the debate last week? The monumentally wooden Jim Lehrer spent most of his