The Internet Has Gone Foul. [Part I of IV]

“Let me tell you some things I find productive. Positive reinforcement. Negative reinforcement. Honesty. I’ll tell you some things I find unproductive: constantly worrying about where you stand based on inscrutable social clues, and then inevitably re-framing it all in a reassuring way so that you can get to sleep at night. No, I do not believe in that, at all. If I invited you to lunch, I think you’re a winner; if I didn’t, I don’t. But I just met you all. Life is long, opinions change. Winners, prove me right. Losers, prove me wrong.”

— Bob Kazamakis

Founded as the “Winnipeg Sales and Ad Club” in 1944, the Advertising Association of Winnipeg (or ‘AAW’) has for many years – and rightfully so – laid claim to being “Manitoba’s largest advertising, marketing and graphic design community”. The organisation recently hosted its 2023 Signature Awards, an annual event that honours and celebrates the very best work put forth that year by its membership. That these winners represent the “best of the best” work being done, we can be certain, as the event’s homepage assures us that “the Signature Awards entries are judged by an unbiased international panel of senior-working industry professionals”.

The AAW’s 2023 call for entries… erm, called for entries, in the categories of “best individual online ad”, “best collection of online ads” (these first two to be judged on their overtly ‘creative’ aspects), “best website”, “best microsite”, and “best social media campaign” (those last two would be folded into the “Miscellaneous” category by the time that finalists were announced). You will note the absence from that list – as from every call for entries which has preceded it – of any category of honours, recognised by the largest professional society to which I might belong locally, under which any aspect of my own career might sensibly fit.

Be that as it may, for curiosity’s sake I recently found myself looking over the “Best Website” winners at the AAW’s 2023 Signature Awards. The winning agency’s client is (or was) a charming little bed-and-breakfast in rural southwestern Manitoba. I’ll refrain from naming either party here, to save them any undue embarrassment:

• A cursory Lighthouse audit gave the AAW’s “Best Website” of 2023 a performance score of 39 out of 100 on mobile devices– meaning it was firmly entrenched in the bottom half of all known websites (according to the HTTP Archive) when rendered in that context.
• An test run by whatdoesmysitecost.com found that loading the homepage of the AAW’s “Best Website” of 2023 costs a typical user more than $1 USD in that the data-transfer involved in loading the homepage of the AAW’s “Best Website” of 2023, via a Canadian mobile network, would incure more than $1 USD in data-costs for a typical Canadian user, if/when this is done via a mobile network.
• A “Carbon Control” report from WebPageTest.org estimated that each new visit to the AAW’s “Best Website” of 2023 emits roughly two grams of CO2 into the atmosphere. That is more than three times the average estimated emissions per visit to any of the top 1000 sites on the Web.
• The AAW’s “Best Website of 2023” does not contain a privacy policy, which is a de facto breach of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). The website and its owners are failing to satisfy the barest of bare minimums of consumer data protection as have been required under Canadian federal law for the past quarter-century.

I don’t want to give the impression that my intent in this post is to go on “punching down” at my chosen example here – that would be unfair. But it would be similarly unfair of me (or anyone else) to suggest that the sorts of criticisms one could level, based on the points I’ve just listed, would be in any way especial. That is simply not the case. I have since audited all of the 2023 Signature Award finalists, judged in either the “Best Website” or “Best Microsite” category, and I can tell you that they’re not even the only members of this “exemplary” list with some glaringly obvious legal violations. In that other case, the spot in the website’s footer where you might normally find a link to the required privacy policies, there is instead this brief note of thanks: “Funded by: Justice Department Canada”.

There’s Something on the Wing of the Plane!

Probably the main benefit of what headhunters would describe as my “diverse working experience” (obvious code for “routinely unemployed”) that I’ve managed to gain a number of “inside looks”, on both the buy-side and the sell-side of advertising, into the ways professional marketers operate, in a number of different environments. This would be a great spot to throw a few more appeals to authority, but let’s skip that and say that I’ve worked with all kinds.

Let me spare you the aggravation: it’s turtles, all the way down.

“Digital marketers”, as a rule, are not good at digital marketing. That much is obvious. What I mean is that the prevailing majority of people employed today as “digital marketers” – of varying stripes, and in varying capacities – could not tell you accurately and in terms you might understand what it is that they do, or what it is they are trying to do, or even what it is they’re meant to be doing (for in practice, the honest answers to these questions would most often be distinct). This too is obvious, or at least I contend that it should be. It is my carefully considered professional opinion as a digital marketer, and you may cite that for all it is worth.

Supposing that you and I can agree on this point, you might still feel that I’m describing a phenomena that is concentrated mainly at the lower ends of the pay scales; surely, the real money people have their heads screwed on tight! Earlier in my career, I harboured a similar suspicion – that my own experience of this yawning “competence chasm” in the profession could be chalked up to… let’s say “local factors”. Again, it just isn’t so. Geography is no longer the barrier it once was to my working with (and for) the bigger brands, with the bigger offices in the bigger cities. So I can assess, with moderate confidence, that the deep-rooted, pervasive and systemic ignorance that I am trying to describe is by this point endemic at virtually all levels of marketing campaign management. It is what it is. We are where we are.

This can all get to being – to put it mildly – a bit of a problem, especially once contemplated on the scale of a company, or even an industry, or the entire digital economy writ large. Indeed, as someone whose day-to-day revolves around handling the various problems which arise from this more fundamental one, I have often found myself at a loss to accurately convey its ‘bigness’ –though I will be making another attempt here in this series, a bit later on.

An example might help here. For a few years, I had come to rely on a particular metaphor to explain one such “big problem” that many of my clients have faced and are facing (namely “attribution”, which is marketer-speak for “who gets credit for what”). I first had the idea back in 2021, when Apple introduced “App Tracking Transparency” in iOS 14.5. Suddenly, just about every iPhone users was being asked for their express consent to the invasive tracking and data-harvesting practices of the online publishers they visited, and (gasp!) many users did not. I won’t relay the entire thing for you here, but it involved an airliner taking off from one airport, heading to another several hours away, when a sudden natural disaster causes catastrophic damage to the runways at their destination, mid-flight. Various marketing stakeholders stood for the roles of the flight crew, passengers, air traffic controllers, so on…

In hindsight, it is perhaps most telling that this was the simplest metaphor I had arrived at, even with non-technical audiences in mind. But the point of my imagined scenario was this: we can no longer follow our earlier plans, because real-world conditions are irrevocably altered. Nevertheless, the aircraft must and will still land: it has a finite supply of fuel, which constrains its remaining flight-time, and thus the places that can be reached to attempt a safe landing. Practically all of the theoretically possible landing sites are unsafe, and would risk catastrophic losses of aircraft and life. Of those scarce few landing sites that are safe to attempt a landing – other nearby airfields, perhaps – some will be preferable to others. So, what should everyone be doing now?

Beer Ain’t Drinkin’

More recently, I’ve encountered and tried to integrate several concepts from “systems thinking” in general (and “statistical process control” in particular) into my work. Among these most recent projects, I can say in full frankness, are some of the finest works of my career. My employer, and their clientele, seems pleased as well. But before any of that could happen – and indeed before it can keep happening – a new, yet by-now familiar conversation, must always be had.

At the outset of each new project, some new group of people (that is, the “stakeholders”) have to agree on what their problems are, and how they intend to go about fixing them, before they may commit, collectively, to having a(nother) go at solving them. One becomes acutely aware of this process when, for example, they are advocating for a specific approach (like statistical process control), within a novel context (like digital marketing management), wherein many of the stakeholders may be safely relied upon to view its precepts and conclusions as falling somewhere on a spectrum between “counterintuitive” and “career-ending” (at least at first blush).

Imagine my happy surprise, then, in having recently stumbled into the works of British cybernetician Stafford Beer – in particular, his 1973 work Designing Freedom. A brisk fifty pages, many of which are given over to the author’s own hand-drawn notes, this book was first presented as a six-part series of half-hour radio broadcasts. These would be the 1973 Massey Lectures, commissioned and published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Beer intended them to serve as a popular introduction to cybernetics (as he defines it: “the science of effective organisation”).

I shall call this “my happy surprise”, for that is the kind thing to say. There is also, I freely admit, a keen and searing sense of intellectual jealousy in having recognised so superior a distillation of so many concepts that I have struggled and meandered my way towards expressing, over many years and through various sources, presented in such clear and suasive terms.

Here, let me show you a little more of what I mean. It’ll be good for me, probably.

How It Started, How It’s Going

A year or two ago, I was invited to give a lecture to a class of students enrolled in the “Advertising” stream of the local Red River College Polytechnic’s “Creative Communications” diploma program, on the topic of (what else?) digital advertising.

This was, to me, a very exciting prospect, for all sorts of reasons. Indeed, how often are we “working people” presented with an opportunity to speak directly to those now seeking to enter our profession, and tell them (a bit of) what it is (we think) they’re really getting themselves into?

I doubt I’ll be invited to give another. Not that there was any trouble on the day, mind, for my talk seemed to be well-received – at least as far as you can tell these things through a video-call. I had a fine time, and very much enjoyed the experience. No, my doubt stems from having neglected to return the paperwork to receive a $50 honourarium (the forms asked for my Social Insurance Number, which I thought was too much for $50), causing no small annoyance to both the instructor who had so kindly invited me to speak, and to the Accounts Payable department. Anyways.

This being a rather expansive subject (and me being the sort of person I am), I eagerly set about slapping up the dozen-or-so presentation slides I felt I would need, and combing through some “prior art” to help tie the concepts I wanted to discuss back to real-world examples. And so, on the day of that lecture – following some perfunctory definitions of “AdOps” and other key bits of industry jargon, and a brief enumeration of the sorts of tasks that are common (in my experience) to this line of work – I arrived at the thesis of my talk. This time, I will relay it in its entirety:

• Digital advertisers work within, and are tasked with administering, systems of enormous complexity.
  • One need not go on at length recounting all of the terrible and wondrous things that online advertising can do (or purports to do) in order to appreciate that these rely upon numerous, complex, interconnected sub-systems.
• Operating within (and upon) these complex systems, digital marketers are most often tasked with doing good work on behalf of other stakeholders, and with communicating the results of their efforts to those stakeholders.
  • This is a key detail, since – with rare exception – the essential functions and goals of “marketing” are subordinate to those of the larger institution.
  • To put a finer point on it, very few organisations exist with an “animating purpose” of communicating their own existence to the world.
• It is therefore useful to consider how it is that people – and by extension, organisations – actually go about “knowing” things. Here, I submit that one will find that three strategies are prevalent in the discipline of professional marketing today:
  1. Inspection: Careful examination and analysis of the products of one’s work, subjecting these to (at times, destructive) testing. This method is analogous to, and to great extent modeled after, the ‘intuitive’ ways that children and other animals have been observed to go about learning about the world around them.
     • Pros of Inspection: Capable of identifying (perceived) errors, defects, or strengths in a given process and/or its outputs.
     • Cons of Inspection: Labourious; time- and resource-intensive, and typically takes place “after the fact” (AKA “post hoc analysis”).
  2. Fraud: Fabricating aspects of one’s work in order to satisfy (in the immediate, surface-level sense of that word) the desires of external stakeholders. This is, I must emphasise, the most prevalent strategy one will find adopted in practice.
     • Pros of Committing Fraud: It is often less difficult (in some contexts, trivially so) to produce a correct-sounding response to informational requests. “External stakeholders” will often lack the domain knowledge and/or resources necessary to challenge any answers which deviate from reality.
     • Cons of Committing Fraud: Moral hazard; reputational risk; it tends not to feel very good.
       • I tried not to belabour this point, since most folks don’t need to have “fraud bad” explained to them. People know that it’s bad. Nevertheless, fraud is inarguably a strategy, and so it is useful for us to contemplate the circumstances in which a person (or a group) might choose to adopt it.
  3. Statistical Process Control (SPC): This would be the subject of the remainder of my talk that day; in the words of W. Edwards Deming, one of the field’s pioneering minds, “the statistical control of quality is the broadest term possible for the problems of economic production“.
     • Pros of Statistical Process Control: Near-real-time monitoring of the “outputs” of a given process; an emphasis on early identification and prevention of faults in a process, rather than reliance on “post hoc” review and/or analysis to understand (and iterate upon) the end-results.
     • Cons of Statistical Process Control: Less intuitive than either of the two preceding strategies; some degree of re-training and education is often required of all project stakeholders in order for such methods to prove successful and effective.

From there, I set about introducing the concept of “variation”; of “normal distributions”, and Shewhart’s invention of the “control chart“; of the need to distinguish between the “stability” and the “capability” of a process, and so on *sniff*. Since then, I have added a section focused on “tampering” (AKA “overcontrol”, or “management-by-numbers”), and another focusing on the basic nature of “quality” and of “loss”. These most recent versions of my talk have come to form an hour-long “crash course” of sorts, which I’ve now made a habit of offering (some might say “threatening”) to present to most colleagues and/or clients, at some point or another. Trust me, if we work together for long enough, it will come up.

Now. Did you manage to follow along with all of that? If you did, then great, I’m so pleased! And if you didn’t, that’s fine too – you wouldn’t be the first, and the fault is likely mine. But here, just have a look at these four pages, from Stafford Beer’s lecture notes, in the published version of Designing Freedom. Know a little better my seething brain-envy:

If the ideas and doodles above have at all intrigued you, but there is some other part of you currently shouting that yes, this is all fascinating, no really, but that it’s just not feeling up to three-or-so hours of heady, far-ranging lectures on foundational cybernetics, then that is perfectly fair. We’ll stop here, for now. But if that does happen to be the case for you, then might I suggest saving this one for a summertime beach-read (or a beach-listen)? No, really – here are just the first three sentences from the first lecture:

The little house where I have come to live alone for a few weeks sits on the edge of a steep hill in a quiet village on the western coast of Chile. Huge majestic waves roll into the bay and crash magnificently over the rocks, sparkling white against the green sea under a winter sun. It is for me a time of peace, a time to clear the head, a time to treasure.

In Part II (coming soon!), I plan to return to those “big problems” we spoke of earlier, while relaying a few of the ideas Stafford Beer presents in the first three lectures of Designing Freedom. After that, I aim to focus on Beer’s fourth lecture in Part III, and maybe sort out why his notion of an “electronic mafia” feels to me in many ways far more apt than the more recent (and fashionable) framing of “surveillance capitalism“.

Happy New Year,

– R.