Did We F It All Up?

"In the olden days, the relentless pounding of advertising turned the craft of marketing into something consumers learned, at best, to tolerate. Social media may well be the pain reliever?we have all needed -- the medicine that makes advertising relevant and welcome in our lives."

- Randall Rothenberg , then President and CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), in 360i's "Social Marketing Playbook," 2009

"The most common question parents ask me is, ‘Is social media safe for my kids?' The answer is that we don't have enough evidence to say it's safe, and in fact, there is growing evidence that social media use is associated with harm to young people’s mental health."

-US Surgeon General?Dr. Vivek Murthy, 2023

What does social media have in common with gun violence, drunk driving, and cigarettes? Welcome to the pantheon of?surgeon general advisories.?

I'm still getting through?the new report, "Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The US Surgeon General's Advisory," but it's a bitter?day for many of us who, like Randall and my old agency, envisioned?so much promise for the channel.

Social media doesn't fit as neatly into the other categories of advisories. Drunk driving is always bad. One can argue whether it's safe to drive after a single drink, but inebriation always has the potential to cause harm to the driver, passengers, and all other people who come in the driver's path. Social media need not be harmful as a rule.

But it has fallen so far short of its promise. That's as true for advertisers as consumers. Starting about a decade ago, social media marketing became dominated by media buys that had nothing to do with the potential of the medium. Ads running on Facebook that happen to allow comments and likes are a far cry from the truly interactive forms of marketing many of us espoused starting around 2005?that involved listening to and responding to customers.?

At least, many of us hoped, social media would do no harm. That standard is no longer tenable. It's impossible to ignore some of the harm being done.?

The report offers practical guidance,?and it doesn't assume one will read this and delete all their social accounts. Here's one recommendation, which hardly just applies to parents:

"Parents can set a good example of what responsible and healthy social media use looks like by limiting their own use, being mindful of social media habits (including when and how parents share information or content about their child), and modeling positive behavior on your social media accounts."

As humans and marketers, we can attempt to steer things in the right direction.

Then there's?Casey Newton's conclusion in Platformer: "When I first started writing a newsletter about social networks, the consequences of children using it were largely a mystery. But little by little, we’re beginning to understand both the risks and the benefits. And on the question of whether using social networks poses risks to children, the surgeon general’s warning today suggests that the answer is almost certainly yes."

It's not just social media that has strayed from its potential.

Can we talk about web3?

Ad Age just reported from the Web3 Marketing Summit, which is a self-selecting group. You're not going to have panels full of people who abandoned web3 marketing or want nothing to do with it. But even this more positive piece hinted at some of web3's biggest challenges for marketers.

The article, while full of examples of how brands are using web3, kept?describing how all the nomenclature around it needs to go.

Here's an emblematic quote from Bianca Posterli , head of brand marketing at?Doodles, a prominent NFT brand (one that dominated SXSW 2022): "The second that anyone sees 'NFTs' or 'blockchain,' they're immediately turned off." web3 has a marketing problem.

web3 also tends to run into problems?showing how such tech differs from what came before it.?There's an?example in the article of how Reddit went from rebranding its NFT collection as "collectible avatars." Do we need blockchain for that? Is?my Netflix profile pic a "collectible avatar"? What about my icon on the Nintendo Switch? Or how about the AOL Instant Messenger "Buddies"?from 1996?or Yahoo Messenger avatars from 2004? Most of the web3 demos I've checked out the past few months share some version of this problem. They either solve a problem that doesn't exist, or they solve a problem that has already been solved by more reliable approaches.

The biggest issue with web3 isn't the lack of consumer confusion. It's that as soon as most people are exposed to it, they discover there's someone on the other side trying to pull one over on them. It's hardly surprising that almost every scam message over DM on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and WhatsApp these days ultimately leads to crypto schemes.

Rick Wilson?constantly evokes the hashtag on Twitter #ETTD: "Everything Trump Touches Dies." I keep thinking?about that with web3. #EW3TD. I recently left a web3 group I was associated with because a founder was indirectly but clearly lashing out against people I knew who were jumping on the AI bandwagon. Can't we explore the potential of one sector without tearing down another??I also further empathize with the web3 abandoners as I launch the?AI Marketers Guild. I've long believed that "opportunist" is a compliment.?

It's also common to see people leading web3 companies and groups to be constantly shilling something as they beg you to buy their NFTs and whatever else is in their decentralized trenchcoats.?

Another one-time friend who I haven't seen in about two decades was IMing me over the weekend sharing their idea for launching a new crypto coin that will pool donations to select non-profits that support religious causes. After telling her how those non-profits will lose out on all the donations when the coin price invariably goes to zero and advising her to support non-profits ANY way but with cryptocurrency, I had to end the interminable conversation. I?did so with this advice: "Avoid crypto like the ten plagues."

It all makes me wonder... why do web3 things happen to good people?

Finally, for our purposes today, there's AI.

I think we're going to go through these cycles of hype and disillusionment much faster with AI.?

I felt it the other day when I was asking ChatGPT to riff on some creative ideas that I formerly would have done entirely myself. I missed the creative process. Not a word of this column was written by AI (really), but I've had moments of wondering whether anyone would care if it was.

Regardless of the quality of my writing, it's fair to say that I've amassed quite a large quantity of it. It's easy enough to train a language learning model (LLM) so that I could have a bot spit out a ton of 'original' writing on a new subject that sounds exactly like me. If I do that, how will I find the motivation to keep on writing??

There are so many societal threats from job loss to self-esteem issues. Ever look at a generative AI pic of yourself and feel uneasy about your own appearance?

The new generation of AI has the potential to rapidly find cures for every kind of cancer, but will that outpace the new social cancers that are unleashed?

I still love tech, overall. I've been playing around with so many AI tools lately, from better-known entities like Midjourney to my friend Brad Mehl 's impressive job interview coach?Winning Interviews. The best of them feel like magic and instill that sense of wonder

And yet, part of me can't help but wonder if we -- the marketers, the tech companies, the investors, even the consumers -- are just f'ing it all up before we even get to really understand what good it can do.