Gordon Mattey

People can make marketing meaningful

Every time I touch the advertising industry, it makes me furious.  

Every time I think of it, I see an opportunity for change.  Not only is there a lack of innovation (i.e, see yet another gimmicky ad format that serves to interrupt my experience), but the industry is built on surreptitiousness and deception (e.g., cross-site profile tracking and behavioural targetting) for the sake of efficiency.  

And ultimately acting in secret and deception is evil.  (please argue with me if you disagree).

There are so many participants in the value system who work to extract attention and monetize eyeballs.  Listen to those words.  Language forms our key sense of the world, so does it make sense to talk about the eyeballs of people in that way?

The stance is all wrong - people are put on a defensive from the start.  

Legislation and self-regulation have been needed to stop those with the power from going too far and being more transparent.   There are many in the industry who don’t want change to happen.  

But the internet can efficiently disrupts intermediaries.  The internet shifts power.

Display (i.e., non search) advertising on the internet is still sold the same way advertising has been sold for 50 years —> the old newspaper model where audiences are large amorphous blobs.  Large groups of people who don’t have a voice and who don’t interact.  The blobs are being made relatively smaller but the people are not engaged.

With advertising today, people are only used for impressions and clicks.  It’s a one way exchange of attention - an advertising on-night-stand.  Nobody cares about me beyond a relatively very short interaction.

The one neglected participant in the whole marketing system is the PEOPLE

We aren’t inert and invisible anymore.  We aren’t silent and we aren’t happy about deception and secrecy.  Why are we treated this way?

It is my belief that armed with the right mechanisms and tools, people can change the shape of the whole marketing industry.  

People are the ones with the eyeballs, they can make advertising more meaningful to themselves and to others; culturally, socially, personally, and humanly.

(I just randomly found this great video that has another take on this dramatic shift in reality) 

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