On being a vegetarian butcher

This was a talk for the Feed breakfast. Their essay question was “How do you see one to one marketing and relationships, and how does that impact your daily life?”

Someone at the office recently described me as a vegetarian butcher.

They, er, no longer work at the company, but I probably ought to explain that they were referring to my electronic habits, rather than any after-hours ritual slaughter.

And the reason is that over the past couple of years I have been trying systematically to purge my electronic life of as much advertising, tracking and monitoring as I possibly can with a modest amount of effort.

All my devices and networks have a comprehensive scheme of adblocking and tracker blocking that works on a number of different levels to stop everything from simple Google search ads to the gobs of javascript tracking that we sling around.

Every account I create has a unique login to reduce the number of datasets that can cross-match me.

And I’m even one of those freaks who periodically resets their mobile ad ID.

And there’s more. We’ve just got rid of our landline, which is of course a useful identity key, and I avoid buying stuff directly if I can possibly get it from someone with whom I already have a billing relationship.

People talk about the coming of ‘personal data lockers’ but I already have three - Apple, Amazon and O2, and the deal seems to be that if I keep paying them money they will keep other people at arm’s length.

Though I have to admit this does occasionally pose a dilemma. For example, if I buy Disney Life via iTunes then Disney don’t get my billing details which is good, but then I can’t sign in on the Roku which is bad, though the Apple TV is fine of course.

And speaking of the TV streamers in the house, they all skip ads on YouTube, ITV and the Channel 4 app, so none of us on Planet Modha have seen a TV or display ad for months, and even then only accidentally or when something breaks, and that’s easily dealt with.

Now I’m not a complete bastard, so I do make sure I give money to the few things whose disappearance I would care about, and also to all the open source projects that have helped me achieve these minor conjuring tricks.

But you can see why my sadly departed colleague described me as a ‘vegetarian butcher’.

Although of course that’s not quite right, because what I do for work is really a continuation of what I do in the home Modha Media Lab, not a contradiction to it. I’m lucky enough to be asked to analyse and document the delicate politics of data. And even more fortunate to be fascinated by this intimate, technical dance that helps the few companies who have direct consumer relationships, build deeper, richer data properties which they will in some cases rent out to the many who don’t.

Sometimes it’s the smallest things that are worth noting. The way that Facebook have just switched to Safari View Controller for their app login, but not, of course, for the Instant Articles webview.

Or the way that Google, for a while at least, were expanding their own search box on mobile Safari results when you scrolled back up a bit, to try and stop those all-important second searches from going to Apple first.

And then sometimes its the really big things hiding in plain sight.

Like the periodic re-permissionings that happen when the ad product people at Google or Facebook hit an internal compliance wall. (You will of course all have seen that the big G did a really in-your-face one recently to ensure you ‘agree’ to let Google use your logged out search and YouTube histories. After a while you couldn’t even dismiss the warning - you had to engage with the legal question at hand.)

Or other big things like the questionable examples of persistent tracking and identity sharing that come to light from time to time such as the Verizon header enrichment scheme.

All of these behaviours are of course indicators of who is missing what data and therefore where the value might be; of who’s got it and who ain’t. Indicators of a deeper struggle.

So what can we learn from all these electronic turf wars? I mean, apart from the fact that I am a well-to-do, spoiled, geeky marketer living in a personal and professional bubble of my own devising?

The main lesson for me has been that I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything at all. It hasn’t harmed my life in the slightest. In fact, generally it has made things better. I’ve never had a richer or more stimulating media diet and never been better entertained than I am today. In the abstract, I don’t really miss ‘brands’ and brand communication at all.

Which is weird for something I’ve given so many years of my life to. And also something of a problem.

In the distant past we used to talk about being a ‘welcome guest’ in the living room. I came into this industry because I loved the way it entertained me. I was reading something about British TV wrestling in the 70s and early 80s - you know, characters like Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks - and the writer was trying to explain why, although it was a bit rubbish in some ways, it was a little gem of entertainment in a sea of gloom and economic misery.

So it’s no coincidence that my generation of ad people grew up on a mission to entertain. For years I was a planner, trying to find ways of communicating something both simply and engagingly. I used to rationalise the ‘brand tax’ we made people pay, for often indistinguishable products by telling ourselves we were adding ‘intangible values’ and creating a brand ‘placebo effect’. And of course it helped that the brand tax paid our salaries as well.

But looking back on it now, I wonder if that was the historical anomaly. A rare window in time where the nature of the medium given to advertisers encouraged them towards charming behaviour rather corporate malfeasance.

And if that’s the case, the window is closing fast. We’re being made redundant on that score. Ousted by millions of other content suppliers. People don’t need funny ads now they’ve got Charlie Bit My Finger and the Slow Mo Guys. Perversely, YouTube is as much a validation of the old TV ad formats as it is a threat to them. Even Sir Martin agrees to some extent, given his recent John Hegarty slapdown.

So one window is closing. And what are we to do?

Some things stay the same. There are still lots of product categories where there is money to be fought for, and margin to be won. There are still markets where it is worth bombing each other to a competitive standstill, in our freshly digitised battle of the Marketing Somme. There are still companies trying to make good products and services that need to be brought to peoples’ attention. Good wine still needs a bush.

And it is probably also true that untargeted reach, wherever we can get it, will at least hold its own against more targeted channels, because much of the value created by more efficient one-to-one matching of buyers and sellers will be skimmed by the data haves, rather than the have-nots. The intermediaries will take margin from both sides of the equation as companies pay for listings and virtual shelf-space and trials and any other form of enhanced presence, while people will pay subscriptions for algorithmic services rendered, explicitly or otherwise.

So why am I optimistic about the future? Or at least the future for brands which legitimately have a direct engagement with a consumer in the natural course of doing business? Well the main reason is that when I’m in vegetarian mode, my observation is that the experiences provided by them are still utterly rubbish.

In fact I’m sure part of the reason that, outside of utilities, housing and travel, that Amazon and Apple have the lions share of my discretionary spend (and yes I did do a spreadsheet to check) is that the relationships I have with them are constantly reinforced by the irritation of going anywhere else.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’re trying to book cinema tickets on your phone on a spotty connection, and end up weeping with frustration at the amount of typing in the whole process.

You’re putting an email address into a website, which firstly asks you to repeat it, and then throws an error because, although they have the same text, the phone has capitalised the first letter of one of them and the site thinks they don’t match even though email addresses are case insensitive.

Or you’re filling in a form and the autofill feature doesn’t work because the browser can’t understand the page, or your phone shows you the full keyboard rather than the numeric one even though the field only needs a number.

Or you’re trying to pay for something and the site tells you off for choosing the wrong type of card even though it has actually just worked out the correct one.

Or you get an email asking you a question when the database that sent it already knows the answer.

Every day we all encounter hundreds of examples of online friction like this, and if we’re going to compete with the big players, the data death stars, the only way forward to my mind is to apply OCD levels of obsession to the small things.

And the way to do that is absolutely a case of both/and, not either/or. We tend to be drawn into glib dichotomies of data vs creativity, mad men vs math men, but actually salvation lies in finding ways to organise ourselves to combine the two. To be more obsessive about consumer behaviour to find hypotheses and to be better at beating up the data to confirm or deny them.

Which isn’t about blind a/b testing of ‘expert’ derived options - if any of you have read some of the literature you’ll know that sometimes the combination of ‘expert’ and machine is actually worse than a machine on its own.

It’s more likely about combining a close-reading of individual behaviour and movement within the electronic rat runs that we all build with some kind of ‘fuzzing’ the experience for users, in the same way that hacking suites now automate the location of buffer overflows.

It’s about maintaining good check lists of the ways that things can go wrong, so that we can keep testing against them. And about finding ways a single moment of irritation for a single customer can be acted upon and given as much priority in being fixed as something big and functional.

I signed up for Hive books recently - for those of you who don’t know, it’s an Amazon substitute that works via local independent bookshops. And when nothing went wrong, and they didn’t ask me any stupid questions or get in my way it just felt so good. So easy. So inevitable.

And there’s money to be won in creating that kind of feeling.