Ad Age just did a great print feature on marketers’ biggest fears: “WHAT SCARES ME RIGHT NOW … industry insiders on a world of rapid change, false moves, major hype, fake news and more … much more. Welcome to your nightmares.”
It recently hit the website. Here’s what I said:
What if we’re all idiots? What if everything the ad-tech industry has been doing for the past decade has been a cultural Manhattan Project? We’ve fallen in love with an intoxicating meme: that personalization is better than association. This belief has driven advertising from contextual relevance to personal relevance. And that evolution unleashed the biggest data-gathering free-for-all in history.
That’s led to uncounted privacy breaches, sure. But worse, the globe-spanning empires we’ve built on this idea have fueled reality bubbles that isolate us in small groups and provide fertile fields for thought-terrorism: the power of unknown and anonymous people, organizations and countries to change what we collectively hold as true, without accountability. Personalization is here to stay. But the cost has not yet been counted.
Super-pumped that they put a big visual together for a piece of the quote!
