Advertising: the bitter sweet bubble
Online Advertising revenue increased by 15% in 2010 and if it continues growing at the same pace, Online Ads spend will overtake TV by 2016. In this context, predicting the burst of the “advertising bubble” seems audacious, to say the least. Having worked in the #3 communications/advertising company, Doc Searl’s theory gave me a lot to reflect upon.
Searl believes that online advertising and advertising in general are completely going against the flood of modern and independent customers empowered by digital technologies. In other terms, forcing on Internet users untrustworthy ads they have never requested might seem a non-sense in time of “Groundswell” and “Long Tail”. Then how to pay for media content? Doc Searl came up with a solution called “Paychoice”, a new business model for media where the customer is free to pay or not to pay a content they enjoyed at a price the decide. More than a business model, it’s a new VRM (vendor relationship management), a micro-accounting system that keeps track of the customer’s preferences without any privacy violation. In the abstract, that model would fund online media, from news broadcasts to artists.
What would be the advantages? First of all, a voluntary payment would reinforce the value of a customer’s recommendation “X decided to pay for Y article” would certainly be stronger than clicking on a costless like button. Second of all, it would provide a stronger incentive to better the content of many free medias. Traffic is less of a proof of comprehensive reading than an actual payment. Nonetheless, “Paychoice” has a flaw that Searl barely addresses: how do you stigmatize non-payments that could be a prove of a content bad quality as much as users’ intellectual dishonesty? Does he envision a social stigmatization through keeping count of who paid what and display those counting on social networks? Searl is being very elusive about that issue.
Dan Conover imagines other alternative solutions to fund the media ecosystem. Like Searl, he doesn’t believe in the future of “we-control-everything” status quo. He mentions crowd-funding, non-profit news models, sponsorships and micro-sponsorships but doesn’t completely eliminate advertising as a source of revenue.
Is advertising doomed? Is Advertising Evil? Advertising is part of a communication strategy. Its downsides are easy to nail down: invasive, questionable appearance, sometimes misleading etc. Nevertheless, advertising is also a communication medium necessary to convey messages and actions, especially in politics and in the public sector. Banning advertising in politics, like in France for instance, leads to a greater pressure put on the media by politicians deprived of one major medium of communication to reach out the population. Advertising can also be extremely creative and part of popular cultures (The Super Bowl is one example). Finally, the advertising industry has improved throughout the years: by targeting customers and their preferences, sellers have built a product that can truly interest viewers. I don’t see how the advertising bubble might ever burst. Especially if ads content keep on getting better and better and become a useful tool to users. The future of advertising as a reciprocal and mutual benefit between sellers and customers might be a more plausible hypothesis. Why couldn’t we refuse to watch ads we believe are irrelevant? Forcing ads on customers might be doomed. Asking them to decide what they are willing to watch seems a promising alternative that could benefit both parties and provide a more reliable source of funding for media than user’s whim to pay or not to pay for a content they appreciated.
Wikipedia : the favorite playground of political activists
The Front National is the main French extreme-right wing party. Understanding its very complex history and the political changes it has gone through since it was founded in 1972 is absolutely critical to really grasp French politics and French society and to some extent Europe political history.
I specialized in the French right-wing history and wrote my master thesis on its political communication strategies and how democratic parties could combat them. When I took a look at the English Wikipedia page of the “Front National”, I was appalled by how blatantly biased it was: False information, huge lack of relevant sources, outdated references, highly noticeable praise of one of his main leader etc. In my opinion it was too biased to blame the cultural and language barrier. I checked the profile page and related discussions of the most active contributor and found out that this person, who is displaying religious pictures on his personal page, has been vitiating most of the articles related to the European extreme-right wing parties. I read on his discussion board that he submitted an article about “resurgence of racism in Europe” that was rejected for “blatant violation of Wikipedia policies”, however he is still authorized to edit highly sensitive and controversial articles.
The European extreme right wing has historically been very active online. As a minority pressure group without easy access to the traditional media, they learnt how to use Internet and rushed into it before the democratic parties. In France, extreme right wing activists represent one of the most active blogosphere far ahead from the Socialist or the majority parties. The “Front National” was the first French political party to go online and launch a website. The environmentalists (an other minority party with a narrow access to the traditional press) followed their example a few days later. Internet has always been an important part of those voters’ political activism. Political science professors and Front National’s specialists carefully watch the “Front National” French Wikipedia page in which including such misleading information would cause a national stir. For obvious reasons and an understandable lack of interest, the English page doesn’t have sharp-eyed watchdogs. Being comprehensive on the article’s bias and uncountable intended errors, would literally equal to rewrite the entire paper. Here is the actual version of it presenting a few examples only of its bias and what should be objected :
At first, the structure of the article appears coherent, pretty classic for a political party : History/ Political profile/ Leadership/ Elections. If you dig into it, you will find severe bias such as the following section :
3 Political profile
- 3.1 Law and order
- 3.2 Immigration
- 3.3 Economy
- 3.4 Foreign policy
- 3.5 Issues of revisionism
“Law and Order” cannot possibly be a title in the party’s political profile, it is not a recognized name, has never been used in a translated version within the Party or among political science researchers. It is purely the user’s understanding and opinion of the FN’s ideas through a culturally biased perspective. It aims at giving a positive impression on a questionable ideology.
“Issues of Revisionism” has no objective reasons to be the last title of the political profile like it was a dismissible detail. The following sentence should be removed: “some FN party officials, notably Jean-Marie Le Pen and Bruno Gollnisch, have occasionally espoused what has been seen as latent anti-Semitism in the party”. “Occasionally” is not an accurate description of the facts: Jean Marie Le Pen has been sentenced 18 times in accordance to the French Law for “heinous statements”. “What has been seen as latent anti-Semitism” implies that there was a subjective debate whereas the article should refer to the legal context in which those facts took place and therefore should include: “In accordance to the French Law that prohibits racist and heinous statements…”. By contrast, The French Wikipedia page dedicates an entire section to “Lawsuits and sentences”.
The footnotes are placed according to the author’s whims without consideration for the facts. For instance, the following sentence is not sourced and as a matter of fact it couldn’t be as it is simply untrue: “The FN has established itself as the third largest political force in France, after the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) and the Socialist Party (PS)”. According to what? Which election is being considered to establish such a ranking? If you consider the last presidential election, the FN is the fourth political force in the country, the fifth if you consider the last Congress election. And I could go on and on. This statement is erroneous.
Those are just examples.
Aside from those bias and false facts, the comprehensiveness of the article follows the same pattern: the author only relates what he wants. For instance, in the section describing Marine Le Pen, the party new leader, he doesn’t even mention the numerous defections that she is facing: the party split… I also wonder why there is no reference made to the heinous murder of a Algerian boy by two FN activists during one of their “peaceful” march. They threw him in the Seine River but apparently it was not worth mentioning despite all the national media coverage that followed the tragic event.
The sourcing mentions only three authors which books were published in 1997, 1999 and 2007. Other American authors have published on this topic such as Gabriel Goodliffe in 2011. Some very famous and well-recognized French specialists of the topic are translated in English. Considering the data available, I would say this sourcing is a comfortable selection and not a bibliography. I would also question the author’s reading skills since we both have a very different understanding of the New York Times paper sourced in the article. And I’m pretty sure on this one that I’m not the one with English disabilities.
What is to say about the pictures chosen by the author? I really enjoyed those nice and smiley pictures of happy FN key figures. Genuine question though, where are the pictures of their violent protests? The photos of their neo Nazis activists and their Hitler tattoos? I have a bunch of them that I took during my research and I will be happy to put them online.
To conclude, I would be extremely delighted to spend hours online to edit and to object on every single bias contained in the article. I would be more than happy to properly source it in order to balance this complex and fascinating chapter of France Politics that deserves better than political activism disguised behind a false and misleading representation of History.
“Google is watching you” – About 179,000,000 results
Two kids in a Stanford dorm room decided they would change the world by gathering and organizing all the world’s information. They created Google without any business model in mind, a company solely based on the reign of data and users satisfaction over short-term gains. “In the Plex” by Steven Levy draws the story of the 25 billion dollars company, from the garage where it started in 1998 to recent Senate Antitrust Committees. With a lively and capturing style, Steven Levy depicts Google strategy and its two bedrocks, its search engine and its advertising mode. The author has spent years following the company and offers a unique perspective on its successes and failures, its values, its dilemmas, its cult for secret and its management methods.
The story of Google is the best possible advertisement for the challenged American Dream: how to make the most unrealistic dream happen and how to turn that dream in one of the most powerful and wealthy company in the world which motto is “Don’t be evil”? All the ingredients for a Hollywood movie lay in this success story including emerging enemies: yes, the unbelievable is happening, Google is being seriously challenged. Not on its technology that remains utterly superior, but on its very philosophy : its entitlement to stock and use unlimited data, and its vision of Internet based on algorithm predominance.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to change the world and they unquestionably did. They built “the barometer of the world” on the billion of data provided by users. They intended to make Google “The third part of your brain (…) augmented with the knowledge of the world”. Data is the key of the company permanent improvement and evolution. Google has been designed to be “a practical large-scale machine learning system” made to realize its founders “dream of artificial intelligence in augmenting humanity”. Steven Levy describes how Gmail was game changing in Google’s image : “Google had gone from cuddly Internet icon to Big Brother in one day”. Intellectual property challenges, defamation, invasion of privacy and content regulation are now the legal problems Google encounters everyday. Does Google know too much about us? And above all, should we trust Google’s integrity? What should scare users the most is maybe not Google’s power but Google’s vulnerability to its economic interests and therefore to governmental intrusions. As Dan Gillmor explains it in a recent paper, users control over the web-based products and services they subscribe for is extremely low: those services providers can change the product as they want and “the more our products contain software the more likely it will be that these products are not really ours anymore. The companies that sell them (or, in the case of web services, allow us to use them) will increasingly make decisions that they can change at a whim, or a court order.” Google’s experience in China proved that the company in spite of its so-called moral purity can comply with governmental requests when its economic interests are at stake. Google has been through constant struggles to balance its ethics and its obligations to respect the national legislations. For instance, in France and Germany, Google chose to censor pages related to Neo-nazi parties and Holocaust revisionism according to those countries laws. Nonetheless the company decided to fight the French State in court on a decree obliging them to keep web users’ personal data for a year. What if they lose? What kind of compromises are being made between the company and foreign governments under the table? Citizens can only count on Google’s good will to maintain their privacy and to prevent governments from digging into it. This is a very insufficient and unsatisfactory guarantee. “Don’t be evil”: well, promises are only binding on those people who believe in them… Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s good intentions cannot be enough. “Evil is what Sergey says is evil” said Page. Western democracies have designed their institutions to the purpose of avoiding granting one single individual that much power. Furthermore Google’s information retention power raises the issue of Le droit a l’oubli which is probably one of the most important social, judicial, legislative and ethical challenge of the next decade. Eric Schmidt’s statement on this issue gives cause for concern… He supports the idea of users’ responsibility : “As long as the answer is that I chose to make a mess of myself with this picture, then it’s fine. That’s their choice, and they have to live with it. The issue is when somebody else does it.” In other terms, you will have to live with the consequences of your unwise posts.
Users might become less tolerant of all the personal information Google keeps. By not addressing the privacy issue more clearly and by frequently making mistakes such as the Google Street incident among many others, Google is going to create new opportunities for its competitors which might use a less elusive privacy policy to promote their services.
Here comes everybody : time to make room for them
I have no doubt that every new media expert has read Shirky’s book in and out. Government officials on the other hand have probably not and should as this book describes the social and political revolution our society is going through : the ubiquitousness of the Internet has made us more connected than ever to one another and has made it easier than ever to form new kinds of groups which now allow us to share, collaborate and, above all, take collective action with almost inexistent management costs. And while there is so much to say about this book, the latter point is the one I will be especially focusing on. Indeed, what was impossible in terms of collective action before, due to high organization costs, is now not only possible, but easy. We individually use these social tools everyday: to organize a party or an event, and then collect money to buy a present for the host of that event. Yet, do we realize to what extent these social tools politically affect society as a whole when new behaviors in communication are supported by new technological tools? “The hallmark of revolution is that the goals of revolutionaries cannot be contained by the institutional structure of the existing society. As a result, either the revolutionaries are put down, or some of those institutions are altered, replaced or destroyed”. Altered, replaced or destroyed. Those are our options as government officials. We are not there yet but governments are not the only players in taking social actions. Those new groups are existing, acting, and communicating outside our scope and outside our control.
A pertinent question to ask is: Is it beneficial for society that anyone can start a ‘pressure group’ even without knowledge of the issue nor even without a mandate? Is institutions lesser influence a good or a bad thing? The answer of course is more than complex. Democratic governments are designed to reflect the general interest defining by the majority’s vote. Do we want a world in which any canny individual with just a few computer-skills can use the powerful leverage that Internet is to defend their own personal cause? Institutions like governments cannot afford to pursue most of the activities developed by these emerging ‘pressure groups.’… and this is not necessarily a bad thing as those limited resources are a solid guarantee that they will be invested in the general interest over individual interests. The Internet has become the new street in which people can start a protest or take action against official and traditional institutions. More than a street, it’s a highway upon which pressure groups act fast and are highly motivated. As Shirky states, such groups gather a handful of determined and active leaders backed by a consenting but not as motivated crowd. Many of those groups fail to reach their goals because of a lack of clear leadership and… bad PR. Because that is the secret of Internet: a parallel society that still crossed path with the traditional communications tools. Indeed, television remains the most widely used source for national and international news in the US – 66% of Americans say it is their main source of news – and even if the internet is slowly closing in on television and even surpassed it among new generations, TV remains at the moment throughout the world the most powerful media. Many of those web-created pressure groups organize flash mobs and spectacular demonstration in order to get the press attention especially in Europe where the web tends to be more elitist than in the US.
Yet, who is the best recipient of crowd wisdom? Institutions? Those new political structures? It doesn’t really matter, says the author “it’s already out there, deal with it”. We try…
First of all, we cannot stop them, we cannot control them and obviously we cannot initiate them. It sounds like a common place but some governments actually tried. The French government spent 1 million euros on a platform called “creators of possible” which offered a tool to have people gathered around a cause of their choice and act on it. To employ Shirky’s analytical framework, there was no Promise, just a useless Tool that already existed and a ridiculously unfair Bargain : ‘please, communicate under our control and authority and we’ll use your taxes to develop a fancy governmental meetup.fr’. Not surprisingly, it failed and the press still makes jokes about it. So why did the majority party venture in this “social tool”? French internet users are historically from the left wings parties, well-educated (way more than average), politically aware and active which is quite a challenge for the current right wing government’s online communications. So far, all the majority party online direct initiatives have failed, from negligible to truly laughable. The majority party spokesperson opens a twitter account? He gets kicked out of Twitter by users within a few hours. Majority party activists try to copy-paste what they believe to be the american methods (a major French fantasy) by launching a collaborative website that criticizes the opposition’s program? They forgot to buy all the domain names affiliated to the name they registered… The left wing party bought those domains that redirect the user to a page containing one sentence :”guys, if you want to go online at least you should hire professionals that know how to buy a domain name”. When I said “laughable”, I meant it. No to mention the Google bombing of the French President (a few months ago if you had googled “asshole of the web” you would have been redirected to the President official website). The majority party suffers from a lack of motivated and active users online and therefore has a hard time to compete with the opposition party which voters are younger and more “web-aware”. So we should help them to find each other, thought the majority party key figures. That is what “les createurs de possible” were designed to be: a platform aiming at gathering and helping the right wing voters to organize. The instructions were pretty simple : pick a cause such as “opening a new english class in my daughter’s primary school” or a broader proposition such as “introduce first aids workshops in highschool” and gather as many supports as you can and finally create a community that will help you to act on it. Officially, the idea was to go beyond political differences and to encourage political participation. The party official in charge of the project said “we went further than Barack Obama in 2008 by helping all French people to be actors of a real change”. Please, no comment needed, it still hurts. On a governmental level, data.gouv.fr is in process. More than technological tools, the French web needs time to democratize and to open to a larger audience. Going direct is still extremely risky and most of government communications directors are legitimately reluctant to take that risk.
Second of all, governments have to acknowledge for good this new reality and spend money to hire real experts in their communications staff, especially in Europe where new media experts are often left out and traditional PR methods are preferred. We have to implement efficient tools to monitor new pressure groups and analyze them. Most of the time government communications staffs are struggling with damage control issues because they’ve maintained traditional communications teams and methods.
Finally, government communications officials should take the inevitable next step in their PR mapping : talk to those new leaders who run these groups. Talk to them when they start organizing, if possible before, by mapping the activists (experience shows that they are likely to be the same people over and over again), talk to them while they’re in action, and talk to them after. They are now as important as labor union heads or chief editors. We can no longer ignore them. Some key government figures still refuse to invite bloggers and other representatives of online media to the tables along with the traditional press. “They don’t respect the phrase ‘off the record’” some officials argue. But the record is everywhere now, in our pocket, on our mobile phones, on our table on our laptops and tablet PCs. And there is hardly any more ‘off’ now. The way citizens communicate has drastically changed. We should start with adjusting our teams and methods and get ready for that next step that no one can really predict. One thing is certain though, as Shirky puts it : “the future belongs to those who take the present for granted.”
From talking to typing
It is a tradition to start a blog with a “who am I” syrupy post. I have two problems with that : first, I never talk about a work in progress. Two, starting a blog for the first time at 27 years old is ironic enough for a political com professional not to make a fuzz about it. Especially when you are pretty sure to eventually click on “publish” instead of “delete”.
Let’s say this blog will be dedicated to political communication and new media observations within Harvard Kennedy School. And a lot more to come.
