AI, Paper Clips and Criteo Boxes

All Hail The Criteo Overlords

This is going to get pretty esoteric pretty quickly, but I think it will get to a place that's helpful to marketing and advertising folks. Let's dig in.

In a recent interview on NPR's Fresh Air, Bill McKibben spoke about his latest book, where he outlined threats to humanity. (Mostly, spoiler alert, climate change.) At the tail end of the talk, McKibben also noted the threat posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), loosely defined as computers making decisions based on a virtuous learning loop built on data accumulation and analysis.

McKibben did so with a fairly famous thought exercise known as the Paperclip Problem, or to get more high faluting, instrumental convergence. In this, an AI robot with a seemingly good but unbounded mission (say, the most efficient manufacture of paperclips) would quickly move to terminate its human masters, since they would likely shut off the robot at some future point, and thereby prevent paperclips from being made.

Now, at this point, you might be wondering how we're getting to digital advertising challenges. And with that, I give you the Criteo Box, which is a term that some in our field use to describe template retargeting ads made (in)famous by the dominant player in the space, Criteo. (Example above.)

Criteo boxes are loathed by many design and brand marketing professionals, because they are machine and data driven utilitarian shopping bots that seem to eliminate the need for design. The challenge becomes all about the dynamic product recommendations shown in the ads, because by whatever analytic standard is being used to determine good ads from bad, the data has driven you to this, the final plateau of performance.

An inelegant bare bones box with as many recs as you can fit, Because Data.

Which might lead you to think that design doesn't matter, because it's been solved by AI. Like betting that you will win in chess against IBM's Watson, it's a losing proposition. Just accept the box and move on, with the small possible caveat that it's only solved for remarketing and not acquisition. (But will also likely be solved at some point for acqusition, again, Because Data.)

But here's where I'd like to hold out hope for humanity's continued presence in my life's work, while still being OK with analytics. My belief is that the Criteo Box is only dominant due to an over-reliance on short term goal events.

If you are judging only by clicks, an ad with multiple entry points and good dynamic SKUs might always win over something more brand related. (Side note: please don't use clicks as your goal event, as it's really a bad idea due to bad actors and fat fingering on mobile, and it's not 2001. Tangent over.)

But what if you were looking at, say, purchases? Or the lifetime value of the consumer? Or the margins driven from that value? Or...

Well, you get the point.

The reason why we don't judge ads by these longer funnel approaches is because no advertiser is going to run just display ads. They are also going to follow up with email, have a social and native presence, perform work in search engine optimization for paid and native, and upsell the user on site. All of which will have impact on the performance of the ads, and possibly not an equal one.

In addition, advertisers are going to rise or fall based on customer service, their offline presence, print and broadcast and podcast and heaven knows what else. (Oh, and a side note? Advertisers don't exist in a vacuum without competition, and if everyone in your space is making nothing but Criteo Boxes, your non-Criteo Box ad is likely going to stand out. And, perhaps, perform better.)

Because life is about a lot more than paperclips. Strong performance practices are rarely so cut and dried as to be about a single factor or a single metric. Things that you think you know probably need to be re-tested, and re-thought, rather than assumed to be settled law.

People who design ads without consulting the data are, I believe, acting in an irresponsible manner to their clients.

But so are the ones that act only from data, rather than be inspired by it.

(Also, beating Criteo Box controls? Not a new trick for me. Reach out and let's talk.)

Shovels Not Grails

Let's Get Digging

This week, a good friend and better business associate may complete a quest.

It's taken years of his life and tens of thousands of hours of work, but he's attracted great partners, and the business is nearly complete on a life changing round of funding. Soon after that, we may witness the spread of this tech for marketing and advertising professionals.

Exciting times! (And yes, I'm hoping to work with him on it, mostly because he inspires me to do good work, and you really want to spend your time with people like that.)

Why is his tech life changing? Because he's made something that other people will use to solve a problem and chase their dreams. More importantly, he's done it with a solution that is completely self serve, easy to use, and (this is critical) limited in scope. Instead of threatening the current way of doing things for people in the space, it's just a supremely cool thing that they will use to be more effective. Without a ramp-up period, a forced breaking of silos, or a lockout of current partners.

You can explain his solution in a sentence. Without leaving out stuff that some clients will value, while others ignore.

In other words, he's not selling the Holy Grail.

He's selling the shovel that you need to find it.

(Much better business than Grails, honestly. Also, he's not going to use the shovel for you.)

Part of this echoes what many of the start ups that I've worked for in the past two decades have looked to do. But while it's easy to state your vision, the details of what's involved (primarily account management and customer success) usually destroys those intentions. Clients want to know what you know, have you do things for them that they would rather not, or expand the use of your tool into areas that it might not support to the same level of expertise.

Your customers aren't wrong to want these things, of course. Their concern about your business model probably doesn't go beyond polite interest, and at the end of the day, everyone just wants to solve their own problems, not yours.

With your solution or someone else's, with the usual mix of great, cheap and fast (pick two!) impacting their business decision.

More about this soon, I hope. (And yeah, I'm under NDA, which explains all of the vagueness.)

The Peril of Perfection

The Gong Is Necessary

Back in my pre-marketing and advertising past, I was a musician.

Well, to be completely honest about it, I was a singer/songwriter, who also bankrolled a band. Musicians, generally, have more skill in their instruments than I do, and I was never completely secure in the title. I worked hard at it, took voice lessons, thought about it all the time, and hustled up hundreds of gigs. We completed four recording projects and I don't regret the experience.

Anyway, back to the story. (I promise this will have something to do with marketing and advertising. Honest.)

We had a drummer that wanted to be John Bonham (that's the guy who played for Led Zeppelin, and is also pictured above). Which is a fine thing for a drummer to want to be, honestly. But his ambitions, at least at the point in time when we recorded, weren't quite up to his chops.

On a specific track in question, he was trying to execute a particular difficult part, and he didn't quite get it right. It was close, but it wasn't in the exact point. He could have just done something simpler, but that wasn't where his art demanded him to be.

Enter technology.

At the time, we were recording on analog tape, which is prized by many recording musicians and studio engineers for its warmth. The story goes is that since digital music is all just 1s and 0s, you don't get the full nuance. (It's a similar story with people who prefer vinyl.)

Which means that you can only edit, or "punch", the tape so much before the tape degrades. And if you are editing the music in question, you have to be extremely exact, and maybe even break out a razor and do splice work, to get a "correct" track.

Which is how we spent way too much time into the wee hours of a Saturday night / Sunday morning, at billable hours, to get a single drum hit in a complicated fill to move a fraction of a percentage of a second... all so the drummer was happy. (Well, more relieved than happy.)

To him, that fix meant everything. It meant that he could hear the song in the future without dwelling on his mistake, that he could take pride in ownership, and that his dreams of sounding like his hero weren't beyond his grasp.

Needless to say, no other person in the world noticed it.

Also, everyone else in the room wanted to murder him.

Which leads me back to digital advertising, and our nearly limitless ability to get things just, exactly, perfect. Often, to the pixel.

And which leaves me thinking, far too often, about my old drummer.

And how often people need to be just like him...