Mobilizing people not as cogs but in communities is the future of a marketing free from the digital monsters we have enabled.

Regulation to halt the extraction (or theft) of personal data and creative content is essential to escape from the crisis in marketing and commerce.

It is jarring to read these two books at the same time.

Diane Coyle is an academic specializing in the application of economics to public policy. Her analysis of how economics must be re-thought is accessible to the layman, including marketers. She makes three points.

1. Once accepted economic realities like the law of diminishing returns no longer hold.

?“We need a modern approach to the public provision and regulation of information goods, applying the rich literature on asymmetric information and older network industries to the non-linearities and externalities of the digital world.”

2. Neoliberal economics in which “there is no such thing as society” (Margaret Thatcher) has failed.

“And we need to put the social, not the individual, at the heart of the study of economics, taking seriously the line often stated about the importance of institutions and trust to economic outcomes.”

3. Ignoring the interdependence of communities and society has enabled giant tech monopolies.

“We individual cogs do not operate separately, as so much economic analysis assumes, and the misleading assumption has given rise to the emergence of collective monsters. Taming them will require recognition of this interdependence, so we can understand, and perhaps manage, the economic challenges the world faces.”

Coyle summarizes how economics in the 21st century has been transformed above all by digital information goods. ?

The greatest, because the most powerful, “monster’ may be Amazon. Investigative reporter @ Dana Mattioli talked to hundreds of former employees, businesses large and small, innovators, competitors, and legislators. She lays bare the character of Amazon’s leadership and the impact of its ruthless and (according to one interviewee) “illegal” practices throughout society.

• On Amazon's early, idealistic employees “It was like the invasion of the MBAs after the IPO. It was disorienting and depressing and stressful,”
• On “a long trail of startups that would claim that Amazon unfairly used intelligence gained from proprietary deal and partnership talks to create its technology in-house.”
• On sellers on the marketplace “When sellers learn that Amazon is not only taking a giant cut of their profits but also spying on them, they are often stunned by the greed. “How much more do they want from me?” is a popular refrain.”
• On competitors like the one who “called Amazon’s pricing of certain devices “illegal.” “They just take money from their monopoly business, they just subsidize, subsidize, subsidize,”
• On Amazon escaping regulation, “It’s not a monopoly through market share, because they’re very good at saying ‘we’re 1 percent of total retail.’ It’s a monopoly through the fact that they’re in eight businesses, and the collective impact that that has on the ecosystem is monopolistic."
• On government, “One member of Congress compared Amazon to the mafia because of the power it has over small businesses."

Amazon's fortress seems impenetrable, protected less by the traditional idea of a moat, but by a linked array of steel cables connecting and supporting their multiple businesses. The steel is our data. Mattioli reveals for example "the supposed firewall between the private label and third-party teams, employees on the team described lax protocols that were easy to circumvent." Amazon's vast personal data resources mean it can optimize every product and proposition to vanquish every innovator or competitor.

I continue to invite consideration of the counterfactual. What if the marketing and advertising industries had lobbied for the regulation of personal data capture and analysis, and won the support of the legislators in the then Obama administration and Cameron governments to prevent data extraction?

Today, the same question arises for all the creative industries. What is the marketing and advertising industry lobbied for the regulation of creative content capture and modeling, to win the support of the American and British governments?

Head of the FTC Lina Kahn started her career as a protégé of the head of the Open Markets Institute: standing for liberty, democracy, and prosperity. Its head Barry Lynn recently published the essay, The Antitrust Revolution, by Barry C. Lynn (harpers.org) in which he concluded,

"Look at almost every crisis in America today and down the chain of causation we will find a monopolist."

Stewart Pearson

Stewart believes in Consilience, the unity of knowledge across disciplines. He has lived, worked, and traveled globally in Europe, Asia, and the U.S. He has settled in the Evergreen State and Seattle. After studying Statistics and Marxist Economics in the U.K. he had four decades of experience in marketing and advertising focused on building client brands directly and globally.?He was Global Chief Client Officer and Vice-Chairman of Wunderman, then the fastest-growing major agency in WPP. David Ogilvy once sent him a telex from India and Lester Wunderman told him stories of Picasso from the village in France where both of Stewart’s heroes had lived. Stewart is on?LinkedIn?and?Twitter, and at?[email protected].