Tonight I am on a plane to Stockholm to talk at SMX. One of my two talks is on “The Future of SEM/SEO”. I feel honored to have been asked to talk on this topic, albeit for just 10 minutes, because my co-presenter is Bill Hunt of Global Strategies, who is also the author of “Search Engine Marketing Inc.” which he co-authored with Mike Moran.
I’ve talked on the Future of Search before, but the world really does change quickly and to me, what has been really burning on my brain recently is just what happens when marketers are able to tap into aggregated personalized data. You may or may not have stopped to think about why Facebook is free… What happens when the Facebook data is overlaid with data from (say) ping.fm or another service that links all your logins together, and then this data is linked with data continually transmitted back to base from (say) your web browser and overlaid again with the profiles of people going to sites tracked using and analytics system that reports back to the mother ship?
What will happen is the complete opposite of the video makers end piece. We as marketers will be able to target right down to the individual, influencing them at regular intervals through the day. You could very realistically deliver adverts to ONLY leaders of specific organizations, planting doubts in their core belief systems. Darren Brown would have a field day. Don’t believe me? Then imagine this level of influence in Derren’s hands and see how marketers of the future (if not the present) will be able to using this. This should just about convince you:
[Edit: Unfortunately, Channel4 has made the video that was here inaccessible for most of the world. It was a very interesting Derren Brown “trick” that appears to use the power of suggestion through advertising to convince am unsuspecting person to act entirely irrationally]
So the non-scalable part of Derren’s trick here is the amount of effort he went to in the above video to be able to do that trick. But an aggregated media database able to target you right down to your choice of passwords gives a scalable way to completely change a person’s view on almost anything.
So I do not see an explosion of consumption as the first video suggests, I see the change for this system to change advertising from charging a few pennies per thousand ad impressions, to charging a few thousand just to be able to control the messaging seen by almost a single individual.
I do not know how you can possibly regulate such an industry. Who would be able to say what was advertising and what was coercion? One is a clever profession, whilst the other is illegal in many countries. Defining an ethical standard as an advertiser is really important here. This can be used for good – persuading Amy Winehouse to go to rehab of her own accord, or targeting would be criminals to help them change their ways. But it could also be a force for evil – getting people to gamble when they are most desperate for money – or turning an honest man into a religious fanatic or terrorist.
Or what if you used it to overthrow a government legitimately? Imagine if you could convince people that Obama was a Muslim? or that the Earth was only 6,000 years old. In the face of every fiber of your being knowing these things can’t be true, I wonder how many people you could get believing such fantasies?
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