We’re big fans of the @AdContrarian aka Bob Hoffman. His rudely provocative insights about the naked emperor of marketing industry flim-flammery are legendary. They usually come with a startling implication, and a directional insight for changing how we think and what we do. His newsletter this week was one long sustained take-down of the platforms e.g. Google, Facebook and Twitter. His angle of attack is surgically specific and aligns with a theme we’re all painfully familiar with – the increasingly illegal and immoral theft of our identity signals in the service of enriching their shareholders.
This fall (their spring) Free Radicals was asked by an Australian organization to help do something about this unfolding global catastrophe. Our short but intense consultative engagement sought to leverage our 1-2-3 punch of deep listening research, fresh insights articulation and crucible workshoppping to inform their proposed solution.
As background, in December 2017 the ACCC (Australian Competition and Consumer Commission) issued a report with recommendations for creating an ombudsmen to oversee the platforms, focusing in particular on the two titans in their market, Facebook and Google. The recommendations suggest establishing standards for internal dispute resolution when platform customers (individuals and small businesses) have issues, as well as mediating external resolutions when those don’t work.
After our Free Radicals consultative engagement was complete, I (Thom Kennon) was asked to make a submission to the report’s findings and recommendations during the open comment period. The thought was that, as global marketing industry veteran and academic, my viewpoint regarding the dominant and problematic role these platforms play in our shared lives might offer some insight into what to do about it, starting with Australia. They are canny down in Oz, and obviously see the opportunity for them to be the regulatory tail that one day might wag the global dog of the rapidly degrading surveillance economy. Perhaps fast enough to actually salvage some human autonomy and re-imagine an emerged role for businesses and brands in a post-platform not so dystopic 2020s.
Here’s the submission and I would love to start a conversation around it in our comments beneath. Have at it people. There are few debates as crucial to our future of value in the world than this one. Let’s argue like it’s worth it — cuz it is.
12 September 2019
Australian Government
The Treasury
Digital Platforms Inquiry
Submission from Thom Kennon
Academic at New York University, Yeshiva University, Miami Ad School
Consultant / Founder at Free Radicals LLC
Why Me
For the past thirty plus years I have enjoyed the unique opportunity to work as global marketing strategist for some of the world’s largest brands and businesses. My role as a senior strategic planner within the Omnicom and WPP networks as well as my own strategic consultancy (Free Radicals) has afforded me a thrilling seat at the frontier of change. Change in the way brands acquire and retain customers. Change in how consumers discover, share and create value in their worlds. Change in how technology – business and personal – changes the very nature of value itself.
For the past ten years I have taught graduate level marketing at four leading-edge universities and industry training institutions – University of Canberra, New York University, Yeshiva University and the Miami Ad School. In each instance, I have felt myself extraordinarily lucky to be able to apply my learnings and insights from real-world practice into an academic environment. Countless times over the past ten years I have shown up at night with a lecture deck based upon a brand or business case taken directly from that week’s real-world, real-time pitch or go-to-market plan.
Early in my career I developed a curiosity and eventual affinity for the emerging channels and touchpoints of each era. In the late 80s it was database marketing and direct response personalization. In the mid-90s I launched one of the earliest digital marketing agencies. Throughout the aughts and into the teens of this new century, working both with global holding companies as well as smaller independent specialty agencies, I became the mobile, search and social channel specialist within my agencies, as each of these emergent channels rose in perceived importance to business, brand and marketing strategic planning.
Critiquing like its 2099
Here on the eve of 2020 the defining emergent channel for our generation is not a channel at all. It is the platform and its ascendancy and resulting hegemony is a global fait accompli. My professional and academic career have led me to a position of deep critique regarding this ascendancy.
In response to the platforms’ pervasive control over all primary consumer touchpoints (now including voice printing, facial recognition, IoT sensors and DNA samplers) I have been developing a toolkit, process and methodology which can be applied to remediate brands and businesses with the consumers who have been essentially disintermediated by the persistent layer of these platforms in their connected lives. My strategy is one of utter pragmatism – we believe in a future where humans no longer surrender their personal, behavioral, historical, social or commercial traces in return for access to the chosen digital services and utilities. This future can only be achieved by a fundamental altering of the current asymmetrical power balance between humans, brands and the platforms. It will ultimately be in the best interests of all to reach this new paradigm of mutual value exchange. In this difficult interregnum, marketing specialists like me owe their clients efficient and effective means for sometimes “going around the platforms” in order to reconnect and remediate relationships between businesses and their customers.
After learning of and digesting the ACCC’s Digital Platforms Inquiry report, specifically its chapter 8 recommendations concerning consumers, businesses, platforms and the call for a resolution standards and mediating body, I was inspired to develop this submission.
I hope my years of experience in business, marketing and academia working intimately across the frontiers where three of these domains mingle and merge, qualifies me to make the observations and recommendations included below. Given my place as brand and business marketeer in the ecosystem it is impossible for me to either critique as a disinterested observer or advocate as a partisan insider. I am already complicit in advantaging my clients’ brands and businesses as best I can, within the context of this platform hegemony. I come neither to praise nor bury, but hopefully to save Caesar from himself in the service of navigating towards a better future for all actors within the global digital ecosystem.
Money changes everything
Between my professional strategic consulting work with clients and my pedagogic engagement with students I have spent the past ten years immersed in an evolving response to the presence of platforms in our world. In the late aughts and early teens, I was as enamored as any marketeer of the unique attraction and allure of their networks for building branded presences online and engineering consumer engagement. But like many marketing executives and academics, I have become increasingly uneasy with the unfolding ramifications for these brands and consumers vis a vis the usage contracts agreed with the platforms for these services – free in exchange for personal data surrender.
Never before had a media ecosystem been created and expanded leveraging such a powerful formula. The seeming asymmetrical value exchange of such rich services – search, social networks, navigation utilities, documents storage, email and messaging, content players, games and more – for no out-of-pocket payment was compelling. The end user agreement permissioning the platforms the use of their data in exchange for such a wealth of utility seemed too good to be true. As we’ve learned, that appears to be the case.
The business model of free digital services in exchange for accepting data-personalize advertising exposure is a brilliant evolution of its antecedent model of “free” content via broadcast TV and radio in exchange for advertising exposure. The platforms and their business model could not have benefited more by the timing. Just as many consumers were replacing their couch-based appointment viewing hours with traditional broadcast content with digital attention hours online, this offer of free-of-fee was and is a powerful incentive to participate in this new economy, as the now infamous adage says, as the product, not the primary customer.
The platforms’ business customers are the brand advertisers. And the new role of platform as both connection and disintermediation point between businesses who advertise and their customers and prospects is the defining event for early 21st century business.
The Ambition of Chapter 8
The entirety of the ACCC’s investigation, analysis, report and recommendations is highly laudable. As above, its focus and recommendations align with my professional and academic interests in understanding the platforms’ effect on value creation, exchange and extraction in the emergent global ecosystem of humans and brands. From this perspective, I recognize the scope, breadth and depth of its eight chapters as representing the tip of an emerging spear of government and NGO initiatives across the globe to reset and rebalance the dynamics of the digital playing field for people, businesses and communities of the world in this accelerating era of the platforms.
My submission concerns the specific analysis, observation and recommendations found in its final chapter eight, specifically regarding its two recommendations:
Recommendation 22, the “Development of minimum internal dispute resolution standards by the ACMA to apply to digital platforms.”
Recommendation 23, the “Establishment of an ombudsman scheme to resolve complaints and disputes with digital platform providers.”
The full report concerning this aspect of your inquiry specifically identifies the deleterious effect of scams on human and business communities in this new digital ecosystem owned and operated by the platforms. Importantly, your findings in chapter 8 recognize there are issues and problems extending beyond scams, and what they share is a common need for dispute resolution when problems arise. As our experience and deep listening research both suggest, the problems requiring resolution encountered by users within the platforms’ ecosystem include a range of issues above and beyond the harms wrought from scams.
Asymmetries of Power
There’s no secret regarding the genesis of these accelerating problems arising from the platforms productization of human attention in the service of advertising monetization. The sheer volume, scale, diversity of format, type, length, language and the persistent daily avalanche of content and data produced is beyond the limits of our 20th century imaginations. Clearly more 21st century-like regimens for regulation, oversight and issue resolution are required.
The business problem at the heart of the platforms’ business model is existential: how to avoid liable responsibility for all this content while mitigating against its potential deleterious effect on the platform’s users, customers and partners.
Tristan Harris is a US technology industry leader, critic and commentator. In his recent testimony offered to the United States Senate Commerce Committee hearings in June 2019 (investigating the platforms’ influence on our worlds in similar fashion to the ACCC’s), Harris is eloquent in his diagnostic of this imminently existential problem faced by platforms. They’ve made the not unreasonable calculus that it is impossible to assume or presume liability for this content from an editorial, curatorial or publishing standpoint.
Section 230 of the United States Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) declares internet services providers (interpreted since to include platforms) immune from liability associated with content published, uploaded or shared by third-party users of their services.
To quote from the wiki entry, the CDA, “Passed at a time where Internet use was just starting to take off, Section 230 has frequently been referred as a key law that has allowed the Internet to flourish, often referred to as ‘The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet’.”
There are several key moments relevant to my submission in support of chapter 8’s recommendations for both internal dispute resolution procedures and an ombudsman function to support escalation to external dispute resolute. At timestamp mark 16:07, Harris mentions that the US Section 230 of the CDA, by absolving the platforms of liability for the content carried by their networks, has “freed them up to do what they’ve created today”. The what they’ve created today is an unprecedented asymmetry of power regarding information and individuals, at the heart of their business model.
Earlier in Harris’s testimony, at timestamp 11:05, he describes the immensity of Google’s problem (via their YouTube service) to somehow manually review and filter bad content from its network, using the recent Indian elections as an example. He says, “You can hire content moderators in English, but the problem is you have 2 billion users, speaking hundreds of languages using these products … and how many engineers at Google speak the 22 languages in India where there’s an election coming up”.
Harris’ first soundbite describes the liberation of responsibility which the platforms have accelerated to an unsustainable degree of data appropriation and inevitable misuse. The evidence of the ACCC’s own research and report clearly identifies the harms these practices can, do and will continue to have on its users, compounded by the lack of clear and viable pathways to remediate them. One needn’t be cynical to suggest this asymmetry of power is critical to the business model – or at least the topline profit margins the platforms have allowed themselves and their shareholders to expect.
Harris’ second quote more chillingly describes the seeming impossibility of any network service provider to successfully monitor, police – be responsible for – the content of its networks and its effects on its users. It also explains or at least rationalizes the platforms’ decision to outsource a nominal level of network hygiene to the automated judgement and jurying of the algorithm.
Let the bots do it
In his rich and insightful testimony under the Senate Committee hearing lights, Harris cooly name-checks one of the World Wide Web’s preeminent technologists, Marc Andreesen, Mosaic developer and Netscape co-founder, quoting his famous “software will eat the world” comment. He suggests the rule of bots proves Andreesen’s prescience.
Programmable bots, first imagined by Alan Turing in the earliest days of computer science, make up over half the traffic of the global Internet. When Andreesen first mentioned software eating the world in an interview with CRN in1990 (see topic mention timeline here) he likely couldn’t have imagined how programmable automated internet bots would come to play such a critical role in how, when and where humans connect with each other online. Or not.
Bots solve the problematically gaping hole at the heart of the platforms’ business model. Automated “bots” are the self-teaching, ever-optimizing programmable business rules which roam the web in search of potentially bad content and actors, flagging both for possible takedown, banning, deletion or demonetization.
One of the most famous and arguably valuable bots ever created is the search engine “spider” as most famously and valuably perfected by Google engineers. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest that this automated bot crawling for and feeding the seemingly limitless stores of answers to the world’s questions, has served as the key to unlocking the $850 billion dollar valuation of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Our recent deep listening analysis (see below) of the global ecosystem of platforms, people and businesses, combined with our ongoing professional work developing marketing programs across these platforms, suggests the strategy pursued by platforms like Google and Facebook when it comes to insulating themselves from liability claims while minimizing the carrying costs of policing that content. Each have come to rely on these bots as frontline filters and identifiers of potential bad actors and their content, while each have built secondary bulwarks of human curators, editors and analysts to manage the damage and problem effluence accruing from the brute force business logic of the bots.
This, from the platform view, makes sense. These are technology companies, first and foremost. As such, Google and Facebook (along with their competitors Amazon, Alibaba, Twitter, Tencent et al), have made extraordinary investments in engineers and computing power to develop the products and services of their platforms. Increasingly, these services are powered by machine learning and artificial intelligence, and this arms race of intelligent machining is one of the preeminent business stories of our era. The platforms are doing what technologists call “eating their own dogfood”, that is applying their own tools of production in the service of inhouse work.
You can’t botify fair
The logic behind the platforms’ strategy is clear — continue to invest in the AI/ML-fueled bots instead of building the massive human force that would be required to perform the gargantuan yet nuanced work of separating out the wheat from the chaff of our digital lives, content and data traces. Like Tristan Harris told the US Senators – they’ve done the math and, using Facebook as an example, monitoring and analyzing the behaviors of 2 billion people and businesses along with the trillions of discrete data and content objects they produce each hour of every day 365 days a year isn’t just hard to do with humans alone. It would represent a cost of doing business that would, most likely within a quarter or two, essentially turn these currency printing platforms into bankrupt shells.
But they, their users and, now authorities like ACCC, are realizing the inherent problem with this approach. It doesn’t work well for anyone. In fact, based upon both the ACCC’s and our analysis, it is fast reaching an unsustainable point of no return. The platforms see what we see, that they can’t continue to protect their business model of monetizing attention, while reducing the threat of potential regulation or breakups, all while mustering some level of customer satisfaction and care, which is currently missing.
Leveraging bots as automated gatekeepers, minus a frontline human element is not sustainable for a simple reason. It isn’t fair. The platforms’ users, despite the pithy trope of being “products”, are still their customers. And all the free services in the world can’t justify a lack of at least a modicum of customer care. A customer care grounded in some demonstrable level of basic human fairness.
Here’s the killer punchline: Despite all the increasingly sophisticated advances in state-of-the-art machine learning and artificial intelligence, the platform-policing bots they power are incapable of fair.
Deep listening changes you
As part of my professional and academic work I have been an early advocate and practitioner of an emergent primary research methodology called deep listening. Unlike traditional qualitative and quantitative research methodologies, deep listening doesn’t rely on designed stimulus to trigger respondent data. There are no surveys, discussion guides, focus group provocations or questionnaires. Its method shares more in common with some types of purely ethnographic research methodologies in its characteristically observational approach and its low impact intrusion on possible response contamination. Its design ensures that analyst are incapable of affecting response, since the only stimulus are key words which are populated into a crawling tool (yes, the bots persist…) which scrape the social web for conversations including those keywords.
The resulting dataset of conversational media is, as you might imagine, a deeply unstructured unruly and anarchic mix of tweets, and forum posts, subreddit threads and blog comments. We apply modeling tools to these stews of conversations to see trends and propensities for word use, sentiment, and content tone. But, though we call it listening, the deepest analysis and resulting insight comes from reading. As I tell my clients, partners and students – once you spend 30, 40 or more hours ‘reading’, (essentially eavesdropping on) thousands of potentially relevant conversations, you will inevitably arise from your desk and say to anyone nearby, “let me at ‘em”. Like we say in class and in pitches – listening changes you.
This sort of research almost guarantees surprises. Instead of designing in the limits of potential findings as traditional research methods do, deep listening’s open-ended process of analysis is inherently serendipitous. We almost always find things we never would have thought to look for. The language people use when they are confused, angry, lost, hurt or puzzled, and the language others use when they respond, cajole, correct, assist, soothe or yes, abuse, reveals a depth of human nature and desire that is, in my thirty plus years of experience, impossible to plumb with traditional forms of research.
Ahead of developing this submission to the ACCC, I turned our deep listening machine upon the Australian market. I must admit, humbly given the above, it was one of those rare cases where the evidence surfaced and insights gleaned did not radically surprise us. They indeed validated that the problems being voiced in Australia about the negative effects of platform-living on people and businesses, are those very same problems that have caused courts and governments in the EU and United States to launch their probes.
It was, however, as deeply moving as it was troubling, in its powerful affirmation of the specific pains, harms and losses caused to people every day. Harms and losses inflicted by the platforms continuing policy of choice to turn a blind eye and mute voice towards the everyday problems people and businesses experience. A purposeful business choice, by design, to instead enable systems of unequivocal and unilateral judgment and unappealable penalties, all painfully bereft of fairness.
A bridge to fair
There is a well-known pattern of humor behavior called ‘desire paths’ which designers sometimes refer to when building or optimizing systems which best meet the more natural desires or behavioral inclinations of humans when they interact with their environment. If we were to suggest designing a system to support a more prominent, accessible and fair process for people to resolve disputes with the platforms, we need look no further than much of the evidence we’ve collected and analyzed in our global assessment of the ‘trouble with platforms’. Humans have created loose networks of care, advice, support and problem resolution amongst themselves. Often using one platform’s tools, e.g. Twitter or Reddit to help each other solve problems encountered or mitigate harms from another platform, e.g. Google or Facebook. With no little irony, we note that many more innovative brands have actually adopted and adapted the very tools of Facebook and Google as extensions of or primary channels for their own customer care support.
With consumer workarounds and brand customer care case studies as inspiration, it is a small leap to suggest that the platforms agree to a very simple step and invite an ACCC-authorized ombudsman into the mix. Much like the TIO ombudsman who currently serves as mediation point between consumers and their telecommunications service providers, TIO could establish a similar service layer of external dispute resolution process and support for the platforms and Australian users.
There’s a method to our madness in spending so much time above interrogating the platforms’ business models and incentives. A clear and honest recognition of the very real business dynamics at work in this still-emerging and evolving ecosystem of humans and platforms is not just required. It grounds the business logic and rationale for the solution itself. That is, the decision to invite a TIO ombudsman into the mix makes extremely good business sense for the platforms. At its very minimum, such a move resets the balance between users and platforms towards an objective fairness. A balance of fairness painfully missing from the current systemic customer care opacity, more noted for its lack of escalation or appeal processes.
The platforms, like many governments, courts and regulators around the world all share a single sense that the current model is, by any calculation, not sustainable. The platforms recognize that trillions of dollars, yuan, euros and sterling are at risk if they continue to stall a meaningfully equitable solution process for mediating customer disputes.
By investing in an unbiased, non-governmental organizational force like the TIO to design, create and oversee a process for transparent resolution of disputes committed to fair outcomes, the platforms business models are protected for now, while importantly, such a step could be understood as a bridge towards a new day of platforms and people. A mediating bridge built with a very simple but universally valued ingredient that is good for any business, in any market, at any time – fairness.
From my position as global marketing strategist and academic, I can honestly assert that Australia is poised to lead the globe in these efforts to bridge our shared digital worlds towards a better, connected, value-rich and fairer future. I extend deep gratitude to the ACCC staff who have read thus far in my perhaps too lengthy case supporting a recommendation for the establishment of three critical conditions missing from the current state of platform and human affairs. The standardization of rigorous internal dispute resolution processes, a similarly visible and rigorous process for external dispute resolution and the granting of oversight and management of that external dispute resolution to the ombudsman currently serving and performing a similar role for Australia’s telecommunications industry, TIO.
Thank you for your time in considering my submission and please let me know if there is any need or opportunity for follow-up in support of this important initiative.
Thom Kennon
New York City
12.9.2019
Thom Kennon is a leading global marketing strategist and founder of alternative strategic consultancy Free Radicals. He is an adjunct professor at New York University and Yeshiva University teaching in their masters programs in digital and integrated marketing. He is a visiting academic and lecturer at the Miami Ad School. His LinkedIn profile is here, and he can be reached via his emails – trk5@nyu.edu, thomas.kennon@yu.edu or thom@freeradicals.marketing.