The Consumer Is In Charge. Really?

In my family's history, there were a pair of people who I find fascinating.

They were an aunt and uncle who were born in the 1920s. They grew up in deep poverty during the great depression. According to legend, their families were often to be found out on the streets of NYC with their meager belongings, having been thrown out of their tenement apartments. Then they would rent other apartments and be out on the street again in 60 days, having, once again, not been able to pay the rent.

One set of parents tried to scrape out some kind of living with petty crime, like bookmaking and running card games.

Despite their hardships, the two people in question were brilliant and went on to impressive accomplishments. She became the head of the mathematics department at an East Coast college. He went on to become an author respected enough to have his work featured in The New York Times Book Review.

They were gentle, kind, compassionate people. During their college days, in the 1940s, they became communists. Their experience of poverty lead them to believe that communism offered the world the first truly realistic shot at equality.

When the horrors of Stalin's Soviet system started to become common knowledge during the 50s and 60s, they were devastated. For years they lived in a kind of denial state, refusing to change their political beliefs in the face of reality.

Although they were brilliant, they were the kind of people who Lenin is reported to have referred to as "useful idiots." There were thousands of well-meaning people in the West who completely misunderstood the nature of communism. They were "useful" to the Soviets in that they created an idealistic, sympathetic lobby for a brutal, murderous regime. They were "idiots" in that their ideology blinded them to reality. They couldn't see that communism was built on bullets and repression, not bake sales and sing-alongs.

Today, the marketing industry is espousing a conviction that may turn out to be very misguided. It is the belief that "the consumer is in charge." This assertion is inescapable in marketing circles.

The hypothesis behind this meme is that traditionally, in the relationship between marketers and consumers, the power has been in the hands of marketers. But today, because of the Internet, the consumer has the power.

Underlying this thinking is the viewpoint that the Internet has had a democratizing effect that is good for consumers and good for society. The thinking is that it has given the individual more power and more control. I am not so sure. In fact, I am highly skeptical.

If the Internet has produced any change in the power relationship between consumers and marketers, it may very well be in favor of the marketers. The amount of information they are collecting, warehousing, and selling about us is outrageous and alarming.

From an article last week in The Wall Street Journal...

"Some of the most widely used apps on Facebook—the games, quizzes and sharing services that define the social-networking site and give it such appeal—are gathering volumes of personal information.

A Wall Street Journal examination of 100 of the most popular Facebook apps found that some seek the email addresses, current location and sexual preference, among other details, not only of app users but also of their Facebook friends. One Yahoo service powered by Facebook requests access to a person's religious and political leanings as a condition for using it. The popular Skype service for making online phone calls seeks the Facebook photos and birthdays of its users and their friends...

...a user's friends aren't notified if information about them is used by a friend's app. An examination of the apps' activities also suggests that Facebook occasionally isn't enforcing its own rules on data privacy. "

In an article I wrote for Adweek over a year ago entitled Big Brother Has Arrived And He's Us, I said...

It (the Internet) pretends the information is secure, but only a blind fool believes this. It tells us that privacy is an old-fashioned, out-of-date concept. It is reassuring in its pervasiveness.

Then it sells the information to the highest bidder. And sometimes to any bidder at all...

There’s no reasonable way that this is a good development for a free society. There is no realistic vision of the future in which this will not lead to appalling mischief.

Like my aunt and uncle, the people who trust in the democratizing effect of the Internet are not evil or stupid. They sincerely believe that the web has given us more control. They sincerely believe the consumer is in charge.

Also like my aunt and uncle, they may be letting ideology get in the way of reality. They may be blind to the hidden, subtle structure.

Today, the Internet is essentially three things: Google, Facebook, and a zillion little rats and mice. An unprecedented amount of information and power is being concentrated in the hands of a few entities and their allies. I can't help but notice that in the world of marketing the big keep getting bigger and small keep getting vaporized. Does this sound to you like the consumer is in charge?

We are used to thinking about tyranny as a function of governmental excess. Never before in history has this kind of information monopoly been in the hands of non-governmental institutions. This is completely new and we have no idea where it leads.

It's getting harder and harder for me to believe that they have all the information, but we are in charge.

Addenda:
Right on cue, Facebook announced that they were buying Instagram today. This set off a firestorm among the social media crowd who apparently just discovered that Facebook knows where they live.

Also, someone sent me a pdf of the intro to Doc Searl's new book called "The Intention Economy" which has yet to be published. Doc is one of the authors of "The Cluetrain Manifesto." He is a very cool guy and from what I can tell from the intro to the book, he is in 100% disagreement with today's post. He thinks consumer power is about to explode. I would post his intro but I don't need a lawsuit for copyright infringement. If you can find it, it's worth reading to get another viewpoint.

Nobody Learns Anything

The very first post I wrote for this blog almost 5 years ago was called Aiming Low and was about marketers' unrelenting stupidity at targeting young people in advertising.

A few months later I wrote a piece about Pontiac mindlessly doing exactly that:

According to Ad Age, Pontiac is shifting its advertising efforts toward media that appeal to younger audiences such as video game tie-ins, Web ads and spots on sports channels and late-night shows.

The logic of this is perfectly idiotic and, as such, perfectly in line with the brainless reflexes of so many marketers... A few facts:

1. The average Pontiac buyer is over 50.

2. Baby Boomers and older comprise as much as 80% of the market for new cars.

3. Of the 13 cars the average American will buy in a lifetime, 8 will be bought after they're 50 years old.

4. Even if they want a Pontiac (which they don't and never will) young people can't afford new cars, and no lender in his right mind will finance them.

Now that Pontiac is dead and buried (huge surprise!), General Motors, having learned nothing, is in a big push to apply the same brilliant strategy to Chevrolet.

According to The New York Times, General Motors has hired MTV (Ohmygod, how cool is that?) to teach them how to sell Chevys to young people.

But unlike Pontiac, which only pissed away media dollars, Chevy is flirting with frittering away its whole culture on people who don't buy cars, don't want cars, and can't afford cars.

According to The Times...

"The partnership (with MTV) is intended to transform things as diverse as the milieu at the company’s steel-and-glass headquarters, the look of its Chevrolet cars, the dealership structure and the dashboard technology. Even the test drive is being reimagined, since young consumers find riding in a car with a stranger creepy..."

You wanna talk creepy?  Listen to this...

"Mr. Martin (the MTV guru-in-charge) has recruited what he calls “insurgents,” young Chevrolet employees who are willing to change things from the inside and report to him on skeptical executives."

What a great idea! An internal Gestapo ratting out non-compliant employees. The Cultural Revolution comes to Detroit.

"Last summer, (the MTV) team temporarily transformed part of the G.M. lobby into a loftlike space reminiscent of a coffee shop in Austin or Seattle, with graffiti on the walls and skateboards and throw pillows scattered around."

They can keep their damn coffee, where's the weed? By the way, it just doesn't get any cooler than Seattle or Awestin.

“We tried to teach dealers how to calibrate conversations”

Yeah, that oughtta work. I can just hear the training session now:

MTV: You really need to learn how to calibrate conversations...

DEALER: Calibrate this, asshole.

A lot has changed since I started this blog 5 years ago. But one thing will never change: Marketers' brainless, pathetic pursuit of young people.

Stimulation Nation

We are addicted to stimulation.

Every bar has nine TVs going at all times. Every commuter is wrapped in an iPhone-induced cocoon of digital music, chat, or games. Every couch potato is checking his Facebook page while watching American Idol. Every retail store has music playing and screens fluttering. Every sporting event is a non-stop parade of videos, promotions, and giveaways. Every movie is a hysterical spectacle of explosions, fire-breathing monsters, gunplay, and sex.

The stimulation is unrelenting.

We are so immersed in stimulation that when it ends we feel uncomfortable. It is no longer possible to vacation in quiet. Every resort swimming pool has pop music pumped in. Every hotel room has a huge flat screen.

A great deal of this stimulation is supported and amplified by advertising. Everywhere we turn, there is advertising. You can't swing a dead account planner without hitting some. In addition to flooding all our traditional channels of communication, advertising has now saturated all our new media.

Against this background of constant stimulation and advertising overload we have the persistent chirping of new age marketing wizards and web hustlers.

First they told us that advertising was dead. When that observation proved to be astonishingly stupid they came up with another dubious premise to justify their unremitting defense of the Divine Church Of The Internet. It goes something like this...

"The demise of in-your-face marketing and advertising is close at hand, to be replaced by...a form of advertising that depends on 'many lightweight interactions over time.' "

This nonsense (which I have quoted before) comes from a big shot at Facebook.

It is a tidy bit of verbal sleight-of-hand that accomplishes two objectives at once. First, it subtly acknowledges the dirty little secret that anyone with eyes can see, but no one wants to say out loud -- that the Internet has thus far been a weak advertising medium. But it cleverly tries to make the preposterous case that this weakness is actually a strength -- that web advertising (specifically, content marketing and social media) are more effective because of their low impact.

There's only one problem with this lovely little fantasy -- it is entirely without basis in fact. Where are the dominant brands that have been built with "many lightweight interactions over time?"

Where's the beer, or the airline, or the fast food joint, or the pick-up truck, or the cell phone, or the hotel chain, or the yogurt, or the sneakers, or the soda, or the car insurance, or the bank, or the...am I boring you?... that have been built with web-centric "lightweight interactions?"

I, too, would love to believe that there is a quieter, less frantic, more serene world in which subtlety and delicacy will carry the day. But where the hell is the evidence?

The evidence is all in the other direction. We are a culture that is hooked on stimulation. We like our stimulation loud and we like it in hi def.

The idea that the Internet has somehow cured consumers of this addiction is a juvenile amalgam of fairy tales and baloney.