Comments on: THE ERASURE OF MAN

By: Stu

Stu — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 22:37:40 +0000

I agree with Joe that this technology doesn’t really spill into the real world – yet. And Rob is right to point out the implications of this technology for the future. I’m more concerned with the NOW. Does data mining mean that eventually I’ll get mailings from “the napster of porn” or will it only remain in the virtual sphere? Guess we’ll find out.

edit- typos corrected. apparently i can’t type on my phone all that well.

By: joe

joe — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 15:28:54 +0000

Hmm… this isn’t the only way we’ll advertise in the future, or something. That’s not what I’m saying. Demographic work, for instance, which doesn’t necessarily involve the internet at all, remains and will continue to remain (as far into the future as I can reasonably see), quite important. Direct mailings will remain important. Door to door salesmen still and will continue to sell things. The point is subtler. This new (and I do argue that it’s new) way of looking at people, for the very reasons you’re describing, seems reasonable to us. This is key. And the point here is, really, we’re not talking about people. There’s novelty in this, and this is a symptom of something–not a cause. I don’t think I can belabor this point any more without over-emphasizing what I’m trying to say, though. It becomes something else when it’s hammered away at.

By: robert

robert — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 21:47:02 +0000

The difference is that you (or Media6) thinks that advertising is going to end with a surrender to the fact that any targeted appraoch will only be based on a subset or portion of the content. The Google approach is more along the lines of trying to constantly reduce the gap between the subset and the completeness of a person — without giving up the ability to produce useable metrics.

Right now Google has a ton of data about your search and your email, but think of Goog411 – it’s sole purpose is to give the Google voice recognition engine the data that it needs to learn how to recognize more speech. It’s computer code that is learning how people talk, training itself to be better. What will they use that for? GrandCental is more or less a deprecated product, but they were certainly making a push to route all of your phone calls through their IP technology. Google Maps is in your pocket and you want to know where you are — and now Google knows where you are, have been, and are going. So yes, it’s still about the content of a person — but it’s getting scarily close to being about the completeness. I’m sure with Googles social networking properties they have already conceptualized and tested similar network based components and may even already be giving it weight to their advertising metric algorithm. Then again… maybe I’m just a paranoid freak and things haven’t gotten to be that advanced yet. One thing is for sure…. they’re doing something with all of those PHDs out in silicon valley.

By: joe

joe — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:46:15 +0000

I see what you’re saying. For me, one thing is important here: the personal content doesn’t matter. That which is human doesn’t matter. For google, when they’re plucking words out of your email to advertise stuff to you, your content still matters. I mean, maybe you even canceled your iphone order after going to the checkout page. This thing doesn’t know. What you do matters to a degree, but your humanity is gone, so you’re no longer a human agent, and the agent executing the entire process is no longer human either. I’m not into epochal history, so I agree with you that it’s part of a continuous process, but naming what that process is matters to me. Is this the lone future of marketing? Certainly not. Are we beginning to understand the category “human” differently? Most definitely.

By: robert

robert — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 16:18:09 +0000

So I roll in at about 3am after a night of hard boozin’ and chasing the skirted, only to find that dude has written an ESSSSSAY on here. My eyeballs popped out of my skull and I broke the scroll bar trying to get to the bottom of it. Well researched, opined, and written, pal. I like it.

Media6 seems to be very open about exactly what they’re doing, but I’m not in total agreement with you (or them, obviously) that it’s the most effective way or the future of anything. They are using a business model and strategy that is funamentally in the middle of a shift. Sure, they have invented a product/method/formula that is a focused and concentrated device, but it is still just on a small piece of information. People at baseball games like baseball — so they are advertised to as such. Taking this one step further, it’s completely reasonable to forecast that it’s very likely that a friend of someone that likes baseball may also respond to similar appeals — and this is what Media6 does.

Google may provide the strongest argument against this method, however, by showing you their bank statements. They have been able to monetize their ability to algorithmically break down a persons interests from an enormous (!!!!!) set of data (and not just networks) and provide relative advertisements. Now that we’re in the the petabyte age, innovation on an old model of inferred connections is probably only going to result in more tired, (still largely) mass-targeted advertisements. The real innovation and leverage will come from companies that collect as much data as possible (about any and every aspect of a person,) figure out a way to drill into it, churn out usable back-end results, and focus those marketing appeals even more directly to people that they KNOW are interested in the subject matter. Kahhhhhh-CHING!