Disrupting Disruption

How Adobe Is Makng Me Feel

You hear a lot of idioms when you work in adech. Fail fast. Long tail thinking. And perhaps the most powerful, disrupt everything.

This call to innovate has led to the engine that is driving the U.S. economy. A small number of tech companies are the biggest reason why the stock market as a whole has performed so well in the past six months, and there's no end of folks who want to be just like them. And for the most part, this is a great and good thing, especially if you are a fan of getting the U.S. off fossil fuel use.

I've made a living from innovation for decades, and at my current gig, continue in this vein. So what I'm about to discuss isn't an easy thing to denigrate. But here goes.

There are no panaceas in life, and nothing that comes without consequences. Sustainable energy infrastructure has an impact on the environment, albeit one that's remarkably lower than fossil fuel use. I may delight in my phone taking pictures or serving as a flashlight or guitar tuner, but there are untold numbers of people who, thanks to these apps, no longer have employment. Consequences.

Which leads me to news from Adobe, demoed on stage and covered recently in business publications, of Voco. Basically, Photoshop for audio, which gives the operator of the software the ability to create thoroughly realistic scripts that were never said by the speaker. All you need is 20 to 40 minutes of data to work from, and you can make anyone say anything, in a fake that's nearly undetectable to anyone who isn't looking at the actual code.

No, seriously.

And while the stated use case for the software is clear and useful for a limited number of professionals -- sound engineers on media that get to skip laborious recovery sessions -- the far greater negative impact on humanity seems clear, yes?

If fake news is the scourge by which elections and social media has been more or less permanently corrupted, how much worse does it get when you add these tools to the mix?

If governance is becoming an ever-growing toxic mix of tribalism, what happens when you give by any means warriors these weapons?

And if we've gotten into this mess due to a corrupting narrative of how you can't trust the media or your government...

Well, what amount of damage kicks in when sight and hearing are also suspect?

There are some tools that, at the risk of infuriating extreme libertarians, are widely regarded as not suitable to be in the hands of private actors, due to the risk of misuse. Tanks. Lethal gases. Nuclear weapons. And so on.

If Adobe about to make the coding equivalent... well, let me put it this way.

We're going to have bigger problems then, say, consumers no longer thinking that a celebrity is really endorsing your goods or services...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Can, Could, Won't: Managing Risk

Additional risk: eye pokery

At one of the earlier stops in my career, I was fortunate enough to work with a top-notch legal compliance officer. Not only was this person quick and skilled, they were also exceptionally patient and understanding. That was all very necessary, since it was their poor task to proof all of my copy for not just the usual editing maladies, but also for anything that could put our employer in legal jeopardy.

What probably made the work (slightly) more tolerable for them was that I had some background in law in the first place. A political science degree, some secertarial work for law professors and lawyers at various temp jobs, and other roles prior to that gig made me think that I knew some stuff. And, well, I did; just enough to be dangerous. Because my skill set was nothing compared to what this employer wanted to instill, and even less than what many of our clients wanted to enforce. That's why the compliance role was there in the first place.

After a few years of high throughput copywriting and creative direction, I just didn't go down paths that led to issues. Can was just automatically changed to could, claims were softened with puffery or avoided, dates were omitted because the nature of our delivery channel (email) led to way too big of a chance of a bait and switch accusal. Sweepstakes were swapped out for less problematic premiums, and sensitive discussions were taken out of email, putting us light years ahead of, sadly, people who get major political party nominations to be the leader of the Free World. I've pretty much worked in a legally compliant way ever since, and have even served as the de facto legal expert for several employers afterward that just didn't have the budget or interest to have true counsel.

It wasn't as if anything I wanted to try before I got all of that training was irresponsible. None of my clients ever ran into legal issues due to creative before or since, and while some of my stops have run into fireworks for poor practices, none of that was related to practices in my part of the business. But once you get trained to go in a certain direction, that's where you go creatively. Especially since the other directions don't seem to gain you much more than added risk.

Which leads me to the risk that's on the other side of the ledger. While there are plenty of consumer categories that play in arenas where true and correct fear lives in the heart's of your clients, the real shame of it all is that those are the categories that are most ready for innovation. (That's the reason why so many job listings in restrictive fields come with a heavy requirement for relevant experience; it's a safeguard for things that can never, ever happen.) Class action suits are just the end for many a buisness, if not for the obvious legal damages, but also from the turnover they inspire. Doing anything new or novel in these categories takes unusual courage from your client, and presentation skill from the agency.

The trouble with being too aware of risk is that it breeds a degree of sameness and safety to all of your finished work, and in that sameness, you can't innovate, learn from outliers, push the envelope... or feel truly alive in the gig.

Because at the end of the day, there's legal risk in getting out of bed. It's just a little more pronounced and obvious than the risk you get from weak creative.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

3D Dragon Haircut Research

Sorry, Not 3D Enough

I'm going to confess to a prejudice here. When it comes to getting a haircut, I like the barber to have a few years on me. (Yes, I know, doesn't seem to go with the picture or the column's focus, which is marketing and advertising. We'll get there. Trust me.)

I'm sure that there are plenty of people who cut hair for a living who are masterful at the work at an early age. My needs aren't particularly esoteric, either. But once you've gotten used to the fine points of the job (a quality straight razor, a sense of how short I like it without needing to interrogate or break out measuring tape)... well, going with someone new to the field just seems like too much risk for not enough reward.

Besides, you also miss out on a chance to do market research. Which is kind of a big deal, given my profession, and how, if you really want to sell something in the U.S., you better be able to convince the people with money. That'd be (shh!) older people. Moving on.

This last week, I caught a skeptical column in my media feed that downplayed the coming impact of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. The columnist pointed out how 3D in television, cable, and even movie theaters has been limited, with cable providers in the UK giving it away for free, rather than going for an upcharge. So with that as a precedent, why get excited about something new that's likely to run into the same resistant consumer inertia?

It's a reasonable point, honestly. Betting on failure is rarely sexy, but breakthroughs are relatively rare, which is why they are so memorable. Gartner calls this stage in the Hype Cycle the "Trough of Disillusionment", and for every tech that powers through to the "Slope of Enlightenment" and eventual "Plateau of Productivity", there are an untold number that fall by the wayside. I also work for a cutting-edge tech company, so I'm biased by nature.

Which led me to the barber's chair this last weekend, and small talk as Ray (good name for a barber, right? One syllable, can't mispronounce it) got to work on my desire to retain less sweat during the summer. He asked me what I do. I gave him my company's quick pitch, and my role in it. Given that I now work in the Bay Area and everyone dreams of knowing about the next great tech IPO, he asked about that aspect of the business. I pivoted, because honestly, it's just not that interesting to me; if the company does great over the next few years, I'm sure a rising tide will raise all boats, but that kind of long-term dreaming can just get really distracting.

Instead, I pivoted back to what could be done with the tech, and what problems it solves. Which didn't interest him as much, because honestly, why should it? He's a barber. But then I drew it out further, and talked about the last mile aspects. How his phone could give him an AR path to the products he wants the next time he's in a warehouse store, rather than have to track down staff. How he could get offers and coupons without having to hunt for them. How the products and services that he wants to buy could be made cheaper, simply because the marketing and advertising expense would go down with increased efficiency. (Also, more darkly, the probable headcount at that location, because tech is frequently shorthand for Employment Winter Is Coming.) How some companies might choose to pass those savings on to the consumer, all while keeping their margins in check, in an attempt to grow their market share.

He got it then. He also got how, once anything like that was on his phone, how quick he'd be to use it all the time, and how soon it would just become table stakes for anyone that sells stuff.

Because that's the difference between 3D, VR and AR. There's no clear problem that 3D tech serves. Take a look at my screen shot image at the start of this column, and you'll see a character from "Game of Thrones" getting so up close and personal to an angry dragon that her hair is blown back.

No one who ever watched that show turned it off because the effects weren't 3D enough.

But plenty of people didn't buy something in a store because they couldn't find it, forgot their coupon, or thought it was too much money in the first place...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Persistence, Biology and Business

Sing It, Fellow Monkey

This week at my gig, I found myself going over presentation decks for a couple of absolutely critical pitch meetings, and obsessing over... how to make the fonts and spacing more consistent, and delving into the extremely fidgety points over exactly how large the bullets should be.

Widow and orphan copy protection, column widths, trying to avoid to start a line with symbols over text, checking back and forth to see what was the more consistent usage, and so on. It's the kind of work that always takes longer than you think it should because any interruption that you get in your life will take precedence over this. At its core, this level of document control is stuff that your brain is just *trying* to be distracted from, no matter how many times you've done it.

There are tricks around editing and QA, of course, which you learn from painful trial and error and experience. First, to remind yourself of just how important the meetings are; that has a way to sharpen the attention. A second is to edit backward, so your mind doesn't fill in blanks that aren't there. A third is read all of the copy out loud, which is an old broadcast journalism tactic that's great for self-editors. I also like to do my rounds at different speeds, so that my double and triple check doesn't feel like I'm just going through the motions.

Sometimes when I'm doing this, my mind wanders as to why the edit is necessary in the first place. Persistence and attention to detail seems like something anyone can do, after all. But keeping a sharp point during what others might consider drudgery is a talent, and I work at a start-up; people are incredibly busy and need to move to other projects with speed. Having the eye to find these points seems like it's in shorter and shorter supply, especially as we get more and more used to machine learning that lulls us into thinking everything is OK..

Which leads the skeptical reader to wonder just how much value is being added through this level of due diligence, and the answer is, well, no one knows. When a prospect doesn't convert to a client, they'll never tell you that they aren't going to sign because of tiny errors that made them lose confidence in your brand. But just because they don't recognize these things at a conscious level doesn't mean that it didn't happen. What we're trying to do at my current gig is hard; it requires our clients to disrupt their current way of doing things, and to challenge assumptions that they've been living with for, in some cases, many years. Having everything just so is almost like, well, insurance.

Believe it or not, such things even have a basis in biology.

I've been fortunate enough to run into a few interviews recently from a Stanford professor, Richard Sapolsky, who will gladly give you way too much to think about. After a lifetime of study, the professor believes that free will is simply the biology that we haven't learned yet, and so much of the stuff that we think is a conscious choice is, well, anything but. Sapolsky cites the mathematical woes faced by prisoners trying to gain parole with hearings just before lunch (dramatically lower than any other time, but never, of course, in front of judges that would admit that they were too cranky before feeding to feel much in the way of mercy). He also talks about the historical culture of blame that society would give to epileptics, people with scurvy, dyslexia, and so on. All of these classes were blamed for their afflictions until the world knew more about what caused them, and then they weren't.

Sapolsky also notes, with the evidence of people answering questions while hooked up to various scanning technology, that we make decisions almost instantaneously, and then spend much of our time and gray matter justifying those decisions. How people of different political persuasions, or those with better backgrounds with parents who had lower amounts of stress, react and manage complex conditions, or more darkly, racial relations and class differences. It's all simultaneously depressing and empowering, as it points to how little we should feel good about ourselves and our accomplishments, and how seemingly intractable problems might have solutions, if only we can get past the conditions that are causing near hard-wired dismissal.

Which is all very far away from a presentation deck, until we get back to decisions made by individuals in micro-seconds, on near unconscious levels. On criteria that will never be stated out loud.

Persistence is in my biology. It might also be in our audiences.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

M&AD Holiday Special: July 4 Memories

Do Not Try This At (My) Home

Since the industry is officially in Hangover Time between Cannes and the holiday weekend, I thought I'd take a break from the usual profession-centric column and share a memory of a past holiday. If you aren't down for the flight of fancy, feel free to take a pass and check back next week.

First, I need to set the scene for you. I'm in my early '20s, trying to make it as a musician, working temp jobs after college. I'm broke from dealing with college loans, and I'm living in a terrible part of Philadelphia, known locally as Fishtown. (It's kind of like Brooklyn, all the way down to the recent revival and spike of real estate values with hipster gentrification.)

So I'm sitting out of my corner gun turret window, about a quarter of a mile away from an elevated train stop, because it's hot and I don't have air conditioning. I'm noodling on an acoustic guitar and trying to write a song. It's pretty much how I spent most of my evenings. I'm looking out at an empty lot with broken glass and drug paraphernalia, and that's when I see these two guys. (Don't worry, we're getting to the good/holiday part.)

They are, well, *painfully* drunk, in the way that's just hard to look at, because they are standing at angles that look wrong. They've got well-lit torches, which is kind of worrisome in any situation that isn't a movie set, and they also have a steel trash can.

Oh, one last thing. They've got fireworks.

Professional, end of the day at an amusement park level, fireworks. Stuff that goes up into the air and makes all sorts of pretty colors, and I have to think they stole some of it, because it's just not the stuff that you see sold to the general public.

Which they proceed to light, at random intervals and random angles, for the next hour and a half.

Which I watch, because how could you not? And I was struck by the following realizations.

1) They could easily end their own lives, or at the very least, seriously impact their future enjoyment of same, at any moment, really. Even if they weren't drunk, but especially more because they are.

2) They could easily end *my* life, in that I'm not very far away from them, and the right/wrong angle means I'm going to get incoming.

3) My choice of address means that there isn't going any real chance of police coming to my location.

Because luck and/or aphorisms about the kind feelings of God toward drunkards, the fireworks show ended without mayhem. The guys set off what they had, laughed like schoolchildren at everything they lit, then staggered off when they were done. I didn't get any songs written that night, but I did get a memory that will last a lifetime, even though it may have ruined me for every Fourth of July since.

After all, professional fireworks shows are great... but they do tend to lack a certain element of drama, right?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

GLOWing with quality

Wrestling is the new awesome

This weekend, I binge-watched the new Netflix comedy/drama "GLOW", which stars Alison Brie and Marc Maron. It's a fictionalized version of the creation of an '80s television show for a women's wrestling promotion, and, well, it's great. The writer and director who worked on it honed their craft on the acclaimed "Orange Is The New Black", it hits all of the period notes just right, it does a wonderful job of stretching out and telling the stories over over a dozen people in its ensemble cast, and I hope they make many more seasons of it. Full stars.

But as delighted as I was by watching this, and as much as I'd recommend it to friends, that's not the most striking thing about watching this. What "GLOW" does is prove, not exactly for the first time but in a way that just deepens the conversation while adding more precedent, is provide the viewer with something they hadn't seen before. By doing that, it's just one more moment of long-form/small-audience entertainment that is just so much better than anything you might see in a movie theater. "GLOW" doesn't have to follow the set rules of big-budget stuff, which means it can be, well, so much better than what it might otherwise have been.

This way, you don't need to check the demographic boxes of people who will pay and leave their homes to see a project, and shoehorn in elements that don't really fit. Nor do you have to put the needs of multi-lingual audiences first with big special effects and less than full verbal acceptance. You can avoid having to sand off the very rough edges of your main characters in the goal of making them conventionally likable or attractive. You can also go to deeper and darker places with your plot twists, and not have to worry about de facto censoring from corporate interests and co-promotional tie-ins.

You can, in short, just make art for art's sake, and do so over a far more optimal amount of time. (In GLOW's case, 10 episodes, or the much better part of one day / evening's viewing.)

This is, of course, a dramatic and disruptive change in our world, where movies go from not just cultural hegemony and economic dominance to a much more blunt and narrow place. It also creates the conditions for economic upheaval, since I suspect shows like "GLOW" are going to be part of a retail apocalypse-like meltdown of movie screens, the same way that North America will eventually lose a third of its retail stores from the shift to online and economic leveling.

For everyone who thinks the U.S. is just going to keep growing, I've got a heaping helping of skepticism from the sheer passing of the Baby Boomers from areas of impact. There will be exceptions at the individual company level, of course, but it's not going to be a rising tide for all boats. Which all translates to rough time for the most treasured placement in brand advertising, the 30-second broadcast spot. Now that I'm cord-cut and the NBA Finals are over, I haven't seen one of those in over a week, and probably won't again until the NFL season starts. I can't imagine I'm alone in that group, really.

But all of that, of course, is Not Your Problem as the individual consumer. For us, there are simply great and memorable viewing experiences that stick in your brain for a long time to come, an unprecedented array of choice and convenience, and the desire to share that better way of living with friends and family. Hopefully for many more seasons to come.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Pen and Paper

Literacy, Literally

This week, I was privileged enough to go on-site with a new client, in a conference room with nearly a dozen people. I had my laptop in a bag, as did everyone, and wasn't presenting; this was more of a support role, for, well, everyone in the room. It's kind of where my role lives.

Anyway, I pulled out my bound notebook and pen, and the laptop never left my bag. Everyone else in the room either had a screen open, or computer plus notepad, and I'll be honest with you... it made me self-conscious. For a while. And then I got to the task of filling my notebook, and fully engaging with everyone in the room, because I had pulled the old-school trick of basically putting blinders on myself.

Was I completely focused? No; the meeting went for over three hours, and I still had my phone on me, and not checking your phone for over three hours when its buzzing is something akin to torture, especially when you are, like myself, three thousand miles away from your family. But by the time the meeting was over, the client was satisfied, we had action points to work on, and my notebook had four pages of notes. And I write small.

Which I then took back to my desk, transcribed and edited, and used for two follow-up meetings and an email to the client. It's probably overkill, but when it comes to servicing a client, overkill is the side you should error on. Also, kind of, my brand? But back to the paper.

There's nothing magic about taking notes on paper. I can type faster than I write, the file translates easier with a cut and paste, and there's nothing wrong with people who do all of their stuff on screen. You can get distracted with a pen in your hand, especially if you have doodling skills. (I have none.)

But what a page does is prevent you from seeing all of the other things that you can do with your screen. It makes you more present to your audience, and less likely to be distracted. It adds a certain bit of gravitas to the proceedings, and triggers my memory of the event better later.

It also, likely, shows my age, and my training, because the start of my working life was as a journalist with a clipboard, with no mobile computers. Hence the self-consciousness, especially in marketing and advertising, where the people who are my age are not, shall we say, common. Or growing.

Which seems to be a bit of a shame... because my notes? Pretty good, honestly.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Explaining Magic

Step Back, I'm Going To Try Magic

I'm pressed for time this week -- more traveling, this time for family rather than business -- so you'll have to forgive me for the lack of a fanciful set-up to the column. Bluntly, there were three article in my feed this week that prompted this take, and they are:

1) As part of a snarky listicle, the sentiment "data is the residue of possibility" (not an exact quote, but you get the gist), as part of a putdown of adtech and/or analytics. The idea being that great brand marketers just, well, know, and don't let the data drive when it comes to Having Big Ideas.

2) A rundown of how the FAANG Five (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google) have driven a disproportionate amount of the growth in the U.S. in the past decade, and how traders are starting to get worried about valuations, but are compromised from acting on that fear, because that's where the money is.

3) A story of how services that let people rent out their cars during unused portions of the day has mostly run aground, even while similarly disruptive plays for lodging and ride sharing have worked like gangbusters.

For many of the past 15 years, I've been at workplaces where we weren't just the pipe that provided service to clients, but also got to analyze what flowed through it. That vantage point, along with a middling ability to write, present and gin up concepts and theories, has kept a roof over my family's head, but it's also given me some clues about what works and what doesn't.

Spoiler alert: it's focus and effort.

In general, people get Big Ideas from a massive collection of little ones, measuring differences, sacrificing any sacred cows and moving on. That all takes work, especially if you don't have the best tools to use, but even if you don't, you still have to do it. The FAANG companies may have Big Ideas at their core, but for the most part, those ideas weren't unique; each one has competitors that they ruthlessly stomped with better execution and iteration.

That's why they are so highly valued. The market isn't in love with social media, cool consumer entertainment tech, e-commerce, streaming content and search. They are in love with companies that are constantly improving on the things that make money today, and using what they learn to make money tomorrow. Cutting values on companies that do these things is just superstition, and while there's money to be made from understanding when the public is going to move in that direction, it's a much harder buck. There's no reason to sell FAANG right now, other than the reason to sell, well, everything.

Which is why the folks who are trying to me-too on the AirBNB and Uber/Lyft paradigm of crowdsourcing of underused resources something of a non-starter, beyond the sheer logistics of trusting your car to not just a stranger, but that stranger's driving ability and care for other people's possessions... they don't have the same magic. Maybe they'll demonstrate it later, but until they do, look elsewhere.

That's because showing up for work and not just doing the job, but also figuring out how you are going to be better than you were the day before?

Doesn't just happen with a snap of the fingers...

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The Treacherous Servant In Your Hand

Job Killer

Our family's current dog is a collie mix who is best behaved when he has a job to do. Which has the not inconsiderable problem that he invents jobs when he doesn't get them. So to take some of his energy out of that search, and to also vary up my running routine, I'd take him for walks that would generally go for a couple of miles. Which meant a lot of walking at night, and a lot of collecting his leavings when there wasn't a lot of ambient light.

Since I have a smartphone, and said phone has access to apps, I did the simple move of downloading a flashlight app that controlled the phone's onboard camera flash. Presto, a flashlight just when I need it, on the same device I was already holding, and as simple as can be in terms of use. For free, even. The app is still on my phone. I don't use it very often, especially now that I'm living apart from the pooch, but it's there.

Oh, and there's also this: I'm likely never buying another flashlight again in my life. The phone does that now.

In addition to dog walking, I noodle around on guitar. I play an acoustic, an electric, and am trying to get into some small measure of shape on a mandolin. That last one is an absolute bear when it comes to callouses, but the instrument that I own was a lovely gift from my wife, and the nice thing about mandolin is that there is a whole lot less people in the world who can make you feel inadequate about your skills on it. This is all a holdover from my musician days of decades past, and I keep mulling over trying to do something musical again, because it makes me happy.

There is, of course, a remarkably handy app for my phone that lets me tune my guitars, and even the mandolin. For free, even. I've downloaded that. Presto, a tuner just when I need it, on the same device I was already holding, and so on, and so on.

I've probably bought a half dozen tuners in my life, as I've never quite gotten the knack of tuning by ear, and tuners tend to disappear from kit bags and/or have unfortunate things happen to them, since they are, well, gear. I'm also likely to never buy another one again in my life, because while I'm sure the app isn't as good as the real thing, I'm also sure that my ears can't tell the difference.

Lots of people are employed in the good and honorable work of making flashlights, and guitar tuners, and cameras, and so many other things that have been disrupted by the servant in your pocket. Cab drivers, hotel chains, gas station owners, any number of retail stores that are closing en masse. More every day, it seems.

That phone is going to come for bigger targets on the food chain. Brand awareness advertising that can't prove out a benefit on a spreadsheet. The 9 to 5 workday, with its inefficent traffic patterns and it's 24/7/365 tether to the office. Premium seating at live events, starting with ticket selling, then moving to AR/VR that lets you "be" on the field or stage. The cable TV bundle, the non-intelligent home that wastes heating and cooling, the notion that someone at your local store might be able to walk you over to the item you need, rather than just seeing a line on the floor that doesn't exist for anyone but you.

All of which will be wonderful, all of which you will use without a second thought, all of which you will soon not be able to live without.

And all of which is going to force great numbers of your fellow citizens to find another means of employment.

Because the biggest enemy of employment isn't another country, or work ethic, or regulation, or any of the other bogeymen that people like to trot out whenever conversations turn from earners to takers, from "entitlements" to taxes, and so on.

It's technology. Technology that can certainly create some jobs, wonderful ones even, where the workers are fulfilled and well compensated and using tools that make them incredibly productive.

But for every single good to great job? An untold number of meh to good ones, crushed under the steel wheels of history.

Those wheels seem to be gaining speed, too.

Sure your own gig is safe from them?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Privacy, Schmivacy

Spambot with actual spam

The column this week starts with replacing a dishwasher. But you are going to have to take a big long walk to get there with me.

In some of the news that I monitor this week, there was talk of white hat hackers taking advantage of security holes in the background browsers of Internet-connected televisions, with Nefarious Potential to follow. (Your appliance may already be a spambot!)

The TVs now come with cameras and microphones as part of their rigging, so the set can (a) save energy by dimming or turning off when you leave or fall asleep, or (b) monitor your attention for marketing and advertising purposes, because offline and online is eventually all going to be one.

But let's not get sidetracked. Remember, we're going to the dishwasher.

As most Internet of Things (IoT) devices tend towards economically friendly browsers like open source and Linux, hacks are easy and updates are intermittent. The entire situation has the potential to scuttle the industry before it really gets off the ground, especially if media and/or litigation decides to make a lunch of it, and, well, that's certainly possible. If for no other reason than there is a lot of venture capital / deep pockets in the IoT space.

Which all sounds a lot more dire than I'd like to make it, if only for the following factors.

1) Privacy skews at a demographic level. People who have grown up with connected everything have also grown up with cynicism, incessant trolling and social media that has always acted as a race to the most shared. These are also the folks who are going to buy the new stuff. Privacy enhancement isn't going to move gear, at least not in comparison to price and features, and as long as the IoT gear does things that the consumer finds to be of value, they'll trade off privacy in a heartbeat. They have for, well, decades.

2) Legislation isn't likely to happen. We live in an era where consumer-unfriendly measures like an end to net neutrality are going to provide all kinds of air cover to the IoT, as if much will get done in the polarized and charged environment that seems to be the new normal in the U.S. For something as esoteric as the privacy settings on niche gadgets, this will be a golden era of being able to hide in plain sight.

3) When there's big money on the table, *always* bet against crime. A few years ago, I was extremely concerned about fraud in the display ad business, since the work could be done anywhere in the world, and all of the solutions to the problem seemed to require an unrealistic amount of human bandwidth. (My livelihood was also tied up entirely in display.)

What has happened since is that the problem, while still a major concern, has likely crested and started to recede, because Facebook and Google threw a lot of resources at it, and the rest of the industry followed the leaders. Most estimates have the majority of fraud done by a few high volume actors, which means, in all likelihood, that the net is closing in on those folks.

There's still an unacceptable number of bad actors out there, and the situation needs to get better, but it's already on the way. IoT hackers are going to have a lot of talented people trying to take them out of the game, and more will come every day. Oh, and the very best hackers will also switch over from black to white hat coding, since you can do the same work but turn it into a stable career, rather than worry about, well, prison.

At the start of a new industry, the value proposition will always seem small, and maybe even a little ridiculous. Why would anyone want their refrigerator to be connected to the Internet, especially if it adds to the cost of the unit and contributes to a security issue? But when the connectivity creates a device that self-repairs based on remote monitoring, informs (or auto-replenishes) a shopping list in ways that makes life easier, alerts the user to when produce is about to spoil, or self-corrects energy expenditure when the unit isn't being used as much, all of which saves the user money?

Well, all of that is going to be something you won't want to do without, once you have it. There will be bumps in the road, and those who choose to do without. Kind of like every tech advancement ever, or (hey! we got here after all!) kind of like when dishwashers started turning up in kitchens.

The new ones do all kinds of stuff the old ones don't do. They are dramatically better than the one we got rid of, for less money than the old one cost. The tech that's inside the unit has all kinds of sensors and gadgetry, and we have become (damn near instantly) used to the new level of service.

Oh, and in the store where we got this, they put the dishwashers next to the fridges. Which had models with digital whiteboards and browsers, next to the models that didn't.

Guess which ones got all of the foot traffic?

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

The AdTech Two Step

Step One: Honey, Not Those Shoes

This week in Adtech saw two sequential stories that followed a pattern that goes back, well, decades. Let's do the dance.

Step 1 -- An adtech company finds an issue that affects customers (in this case, billing). Said company reports the issue, offers a correction, and tries to get ahead of any possible PR blowback by being, well, proactive about the whole thing.

Step 2 -- Media begrudgingly admits that adtech company did the right thing in reporting the error and fixing the problem, but that Steps Must Be Taken to prevent this kind of thing from ever happening again, because without some third party being around to protect clients, they are At Risk.

This time, it was Facebook with an ad impression correction. Clients were overcharged by a fraction of a percent, because the error was only on a limited series of platform and browsers. Since the whole thing was (a) not really a big deal on the numbers, (b) happening during an era where you can't go a single hour, let alone day, without some new attraction in the So Many Rings U.S. Political Circus distracting everyone, and (c) not really enough of a reason to step away from a dominant provider, it slipped by without much notice. (And yes, last month something similar happened with Google and YouTube. You get the point.)

But for me, it sticks in the craw... because it's part of what seems to be an eternal double standard when it comes to online advertising. To wit: has anyone ever called television ads that are skipped, muted by remote control, in close proximity to controversial content, or just ignored by the viewer... unviewable or worthless?

Because that what online ads that aren't seen by the viewer, no matter the reason why, are called.

Outdoor ads are placed in venue where a known number of cars will pass by, and priced accordingly. No one knows how many of those ads are seen now, especially with an ever-increasing amount of in-car options, but as an advertiser, you'll pay for those cars just the same. Radio, print, podcasts.. all of those ads, paid for on an impression count that's optimal and theoretical.

Only digital, with its relentless ability to quantify so many things that the non-quantifiable benefit is usually disregarded, tells you how much isn't optimal. For this, it's punished, in a process that promises to go away as the world matures and the market gradually takes over for other mediums, but in the interim, we're still doing this dance.

What isn't accepted, either then or now, is that you *can* add to your branding online, because those ads aren't worthless. (Which we can tell, naturally, with metrics, because nerds, we never stop trying). It's slow and arduous, and no one wants to do it without offline air cover, but brand awareness does rise for folks who see your work online. Especially if it's well-targeted, clever, with strong offers and good execution.

You know, the same way it works offline. Because the customer and prospect base is increasingly the same in both places.

So since we know how this dance ends -- more and more marketers using data to make more and more decisions, from an ever-rising level of accountability because digital doesn't really take steps backward...

Well, can't we just skip some steps? Maybe admit that digital has impact that isn't measured, that analog is subject to all kinds of issues that has always been more or less baked into the price, and that the world is more complex than an either/or answer?

Because, well, this dance is getting old. And it's pretty clear that the music's not stopping, and that, for the most part? We're calling the tune.

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.

Cord, Cut

You'll Rarely Miss It

I've been traveling on business for the past few weeks, as part of a long-term relocation project. For the next 2 to 14 months, I'll be living by myself, away from family, while situations shake out and we figure out the next place for all of us to be.

This also means that for the first time in my life, I'm completely without a television... and, also, access to all of the entertainment options that cable television brings.

What I wasn't prepared for was just how little I'd miss it. (By the way, this is a huge part of why AirBNB can be viable now. All you need to host now is fast and reliable Wifi; the one place that I've stayed in the past two weeks that had cable, it was unwatchable due to pixilation. But I digress.)

With the exception of NBA playoff games -- which I've picked up at various sports bars and gyms, aided by the West Coast time shift -- I haven't looked at anything outside of my Netflix queue for weeks now, and probably won't for the next few months. I've picked up topical stuff from online sources, but for the most part, I've just been watching less and less, and getting more done. (There's also a new gig that's pretty all-consuming right now, and promises to continue to be that way.)

I am long past the event horizon of people who should be cord-cutting, and if the NBA playoffs had been more compelling up to this point, maybe I'd be more annoyed by the loss of access. But the fact of the matter is that you can find most of the content that you are looking for via the Web now, and there isn't so much that demands a full screen, immersing experience to be enjoyable.

Eventually, my living conditions will change, and I'll have more than my own entertainment needs to consider. Perhaps I'll break down and go back to a bundled package or satellite system, especially if I'm entertaining others, or my football laundry has a particularly compelling year. Maybe once my Netflix queue stops being quite so compelling (new "Master of None"! new "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt!"), this will also feel more like deprivation.

But, still? Something I've had for decades and decades just went away, and I'm not missing it -- at all. If you run a cable company, or a broadcast network, and that doesn't put a little fear into you, I'm not sure what will. (Also, um, if your livelihood depends on 30 second spots that feed such things.)

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Feel free to comment, as well as like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the RFP boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.