Apple just triggered the marketing apocalypse
And I for one say, let it burn.
Last month Apple allowed iPhone and iPad users to decide whether or not they want to be tracked by advertisers. A staggering 96% said NO to tracking. Mind you, this is in the United States where families at dinnertime are polarized with disagreement over almost everything including what kind of food to eat for dinner. The one thing everyone seems to agree on is that targeted ads have no value to those being targeted.
Then at WWDC Apple doubled down on privacy and said they’re introducing into all their mail clients the ability to block email spy pixels. Apple wasn’t the first to do this. Technologists like me have been blocking spy pixels in email for years because we know what they are. But almost all non-technical consumers have no idea how much they are being abused by advertisers without their permission, and Apple has the power to raise the issue, completely consistent with Steve’s original vision, and change the world.
So what does a world look like when FaceBook and Youtube lose their ability to use targeted ads?
The bottom falls out of the business model.
Let’s take anyone’s email newsletter. If you have no idea what the open rate really is because 90% of the Apple market has disabled spy pixels, you have no idea whether or not people are opening your newsletter. The only metric you’re left with is what your customers tell you through their own words and actions, and the latter is the only metric that counts.
Did they buy your product?
Did they come back and buy it again?
Did the customer get referred by another existing customer who told them about your product?
These are the only things that matter. Repeat customers. New customers. Customers referring other customers. These things tell you if your product is great or not. Advertising dollars just turns up the volume, but it will never make the music better. Unfortunately, the volume on advertising is so high that it drowns out the ruckus being created by the really talented person who’s making a product worth buying. And that’s what has happened over the past 20, maybe 30 years.
I don’t trust anything I hear on TV or radio anymore. In fact, I don’t trust nearly everything read on the Internet. Take this TV ad for the BMW X2 in Japan. It’s unbelievably bad. Why do I know about it? I came across it by accident when researching the X2, and it was so bad I wanted to move on to another car out of self-conscious embarrassment. I did end up buying an X2, despite that awful ad. The single greatest influence on my decision making? Two Canadian guys who reviewed the car on Youtube. Watch the BMW ad, with the psychotic stringed puppets biting fingers with a throng of Japanese schoolgirls doing something, then watch the Straight Pipes review. How does each make you feel? Which one is talking to your adult brain? Which is grunting at your lizard brain?
We have become so numb to the noise that advertisers need to double down to find new ways to make noise. It’s already happening with youtubers. In 2020 I found myself unfollowing several of my favorite youtubers because their sponsorships changed from something related to their videos, like photography or cameras of whatnot, to something only demographically related, like a Mercedes Benz, which I don’t want, don’t need, don’t relate to and don’t care about. Their videos were very high in terms of production value, but they weren’t art enough for me to stay as a subscriber once they decided to start pitching the car. The glut of noisy, obnoxious advertising has pushed the envelope of human selective auditory attention to now include hitting the “unfollow” button even subconsciously.
I didn’t follow them for cars, I followed them for cameras. That’s the difference. Given the choice, I will always choose to support an artist or a professional over a videographer or cinematographer. There is a difference. And it’s a very fine line. I think it’s time for people to reread, with great attention, Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 true fans.
Because 1,000 true fans may soon become more valuable than a 1,000,000 Youtube subscribers.
Does this mean my Youtube Red subscription will go up in price? I have no idea. Probably. Will it be worth it? We’ll see. Does it matter? Not really.
I am looking forward to a major adjustment in our society where content no longer means cheap commodity. Where one’s art can be discovered by the people who value it more easily, because the noise has been turned off.
In business school I was told by the judges that my business would fail unless I borrowed 10 million dollars for advertising. I had the only business out of all the contestants that had actually started serving customers, and had cash in the bank. I pitched my business’ value with two bullets points: 18% of all new customers were referred by existing customers within 30 days, and we could grow self-funded from our own profits. And that is why I lost the business plan. That same business went on to grow into millions of dollars of profitable revenue, self-funded, for over a decade.
I don’t have any tears for the mass marketers who are finally having the carpet pulled out from beneath their feet. They don’t provide value. They have numbed us for decades. They destroy our concentration with noise. They make it difficult for us to find the real artisans who deserve our patronage.
So I’ll say it again: Let it burn.
