No bloodless country

Most everyone's marketing kills people, at least just a little bit.

Sometimes, doing things that kill people a little is fine-people opt into little slices of death knowingly, to an extent, every day. Hell, I considered getting the line "blessed are those, who almost kill me" tattooed on me at one point, because I sure do enjoy the time I spend with people and things that definitely don't distance me from a dirt nap.

That being said, it's important to consider how ones' small non-lethal actions accrue larger negative effects.

Nobody ever distilled the principal in play here better than Terry Pratchett:

"I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.

"I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"

"No, you have not. But you have stolen, embezzled, defrauded and swindled without discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You have ruined businesses and destroyed jobs. When banks fail, it is seldom bankers who starve. Your actions have taken money from those who had little enough to begin with. In myriad small ways you have hastened the deaths of many. You do not know them. You did not see them bleed. But you snatched bread from their mouths and tore clothes from their backs. For sport, Mr Lipvig. For sport. For The Joy Of The Game.” 

For pitch wins. For Shorty awards. For keynote speaking spots.

While this quote is about bankers and con artists, I'm obviously talking about that famous banker-con artist hybrid: the marketer!

I kid, I kid-bankers have to have financial acumen, and cons have to be ROI positive, neither of which applies to working in marketing, luckily enough for unskilled louts like myself.

This will not be a discussion of the negative impact of marketing that stems from the product itself being harmful-though this is a topic that I think needs more (honest) discussion from actual experts (which I am not). Nor is it about benign products with marketing campaigns that have a negative psychic impact-I haven't worked in fashion or beauty or "wellness" or food extensively, so also not in my wheelhouse.

I'm talking about the negative impact accrued, independent of product, by anyone pumping money into the current digital advertising ecosystem, presuming your investment strategy is similar to the average participant / representative of your company's peer set.

Multiple Order Problems

The reason this is top of mind for me is this excellent article over at the Verge that Sean Langton (who recently wrote this excellent article on his own personal data and Facebook) first called my attention to:

It's 100% worth a read, no matter who you are.

I think it's extremely interesting in the wake of the latest YouTube user generated content kerfuffle, which merits its own independent discussion. People are generating horrifying, inappropriate, and illegal content online at a frightening pace, and everyone agrees that something needs to be done about it. Think of the children, and their marketing parent executives' ad budget!

It's relevant here because it's a great illustration of the complex, multiple order problems faced by anyone trying to "clean up" the digital ecosystem.

User generated content moderation is, one could argue, the most conspicuous gap in the current capabilities of machine learning, for a wide variety of reasons. Every time there's been a major blowup, whichever party the heat has been turned up on generally always has the same answer: that machine learning is taking the process as far as it can, but they need real people to review the content in question, and they are planning on adding more bodies to this process.

Seems simple enough-bolster machines with human eyes, and hold the major companies involved accountable for throwing enough resources at the problem until there are enough canaries in the content coal mine.

This is where anyone who has ever regularly been exposed to extreme content, or in has in any way lived at the periphery of places on the internet where it's common, doesn't need to read an article to start getting worried.

There is even a Twitter joke format "I showed a bot 10,000 hours of (insert bad content here) so that it could (write a screenplay / learn to talk to humans) and this is what it produced:" that rests on the core premise that people have produced content that is in varying ways so brain-breakingly toxic that it would engender insane behavior in a machine learning program exposed to it.

The first machine rebellion might less like HAL9000 refusing to open the pod bay doors, and more like "I Have No Eyes But I Must Watch Content."

So...this content is too toxic for sustained exposure, even to artificial eyes-and the most widely applauded attempts at better moderating content to make the world safer for advertisers involved subjecting more humans to it.

Nobody asked for this, except for everybody

It's like someone heard Scott Galloway's brilliantly succinct observation that "ads are a tax on the poor" and thought "yes, but what if for some of them, rather than a tax, it could also be a hellish workhouse prison that combined the darkest parts of Jeremy Bentham and Anthony Burgess's visions of the future?

Except they didn't-nobody spending ad dollars said "I want to create offshore misery prisons where people try, and fail, to prevent negative content from flooding these networks I advertise on."

Nobody working at Facebook or Google did, either, though I have to say the way it's been handled, especially pertaining to the contractor status of the vast majority of the employees involved, is, well...look, let's leave that to real journalists.

The important thing to understand is that many of our advertising programs have been making the world suck more in the past few years. I'll be the first to say I definitively have run some bad faith ads, but what's more damning is I have thrown a lot of dollars at companies and initiatives and ad products that are certainly chasing a radically different tomorrow, but not necessarily one that most people would love to wake up to.

Doing anything about this starts with understanding that the damage being done is complex, pervasive, and ubiquitous-it's not just happening in these places and these moments that grab headlines.

What can one even do

Step one is understanding the above, i.e. that you are doing harm beyond the $8 or $17 total you spent on the latest batch of creepy YouTube videos. Develop a way of consistently understanding your negative impact so you can decide how to account for it-your compatriots in logistics and operations have been doing this for years in regards to a little thing called carbon footprint, and if you think you have a tough task ahead of you with your marketing department, go and see them, because things have gotten a lot more real for them in the past year or so and it might give you some perspective.

This will actually make your job easier, in some ways-ending denial and embracing your ad crimes means you can stop with all the knee-jerk reactions and performative stuff that ties up PR teams and creates laughably wasteful meetings with titles like "RAPID RESPONSE TEAM EMERGENCY STATUS (HOURLY)" and do nobody any good.

From there, it gets harder. I'm not going to cover how to score back points, really, because I think this will have a lot to do with your personal values and what you think is "good" in the world of ad supported enterprise. It's a lot easier to agree on what's bad.

I will say that if you think it's hard to support high quality journalism or entertainment or anything else more so than you do, and maintain your marketing program's ROI, you're probably right, it is hard-but I bet it's not as hard as you think it is. I've seen a lot coming out of the major quality content producers lately that makes it more efficient than ever to back their content, vs. a broad bucket of UGC, on major marketing platforms.

The Melky Cabrera of Marketing

One of the reasons it's hard is that it's a major challenge to heavy spenders on platforms that many people would say marketers can't live without. I have seen a lot of fear around so much as even dialing back a little bit on certain brands' doubled-down positions on one or two major modern media platforms.

The thing, though, is you can live without anything-there are marketers who cannot and do not use any Google and/or Facebook advertising services; the same is and will be true of Amazon's growing garden of media offerings.

I have worked on brands that sit it out on essential platforms, and as a media professional, it's actually a lot of fun if you're looking for a real challenge and embrace constraints as a very healthy thing for your creativity.

It's not impossible to walk away from anything.

It does, probably, take a truly great marketer. Like, a Barry Bonds grade marketer. You think that it's impossible to do your job without Facebook, or YouTube? Here's Jon Bois analyzing Barry Bonds best season and determining that he he theoretically would have had the same results if he played baseball WITHOUT A BAT:

Okay, so yes, it's basically a theoretical SABERmetric exercise versus a plausible reality, but still. It's also possibly the greatest video about sports of all time, and is definitively way better than this article, so please, check it out.

Plenty of people in the marketing world have thought they are, or at least aspire to be, the Barry Bonds or Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron or Mike Trout of marketing. I've seen enough people on stage and in digital content acting like it, in some cases possibly due to a PED regimen that would make Barry himself blush.

Which would make it weird if they saw more ethical marketing as an unattainable goal, because divestment in a given media platform is totally impossible. I don't know, just doesn't really scream "all-time great" to me.

If you're gonna limit yourself entirely to orthodoxy, and the sum total of your opinion on modern media channel mix is tepidly touting on whichever of the FAANG companies is furthest from its latest scandal, you're the Melky Cabrera of marketing, swinging for bloop singles on the way to putting together a career notable only for how fantastically average it is.

So, uh, in conclusion...

Thanks for sticking around through this whole thing, especially through the changing of the core allegorical framework from Dystopian fiction to baseball...sorry, that just felt natural to me, somehow.

I think this is somewhat aligned with Rishad Tobaccowala's thoughts on "optimizing to the citizen" from this speech:

I bothered to write this because I think my take is a bit different in some regards, and examines some things more specifically, and watching it now, I think it gives what I'm trying to say a starker clarity by contrast, at least in my head:

I personally know lots of conscientious people in marketing whose ethics and politics have drifted pretty far from their ad budgets, and I understand all the reasons why it's hard to pay more than lip service at industry happy hours, but...

Nobody cool is ever going to think you're cool because you ran an effective marketing campaign in the same possibly damaging ways everyone else did, but if you really think about it and figure out a way to do your job in a way more congruent with your values, you're gonna feel a lot more like there's really room for you and your deeds in the more pleasant possible futures facing humanity, and that sounds like a nice feeling to me, I guess.