Chapter One
Backlash
Chapter Contents
The Early Social Networks
The Pushback Begins
The Backlash: Measured and Formalized
The Main Points
In 2004 I read an article written jointly by Jim Nail, at the time a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and Pete Blackshaw, then Chief Marketing Officer for Intelliseek. They quantified and defined the extent to which a sample set of trend-indicating online consumers were "pushing back" against traditional media. This was a turning point for me - I was working at GSD&M IdeaCity, an ad agency in Austin, TX, where I was helping develop the online and integrated marketing strategy team. This was also around the time when the first contemporary social networks began to gain critical mass, something that caught my attention and became the focus of my work.
In this opening chapter, I''ll cover the origin of the Social Web and the events that ushered in the capabilities that consumers now enjoy as they make daily use of the information available to them.
The Early Social Networks
My first involvement with online services was in 1986. I had just purchased a leading Edge Model "D" (so that I could learn about the kinds of things one might do with a personal computer). I signed up as a member of Prodigy, launched a couple of years earlier by CBS, IBM, and sears. The underlying premise of Prodigy was that advertisers - attracted by members - would play a key role in the business success of what was called the first "consumer online service." On the typical Prodigy page, the lower one-third of the screen was devoted to ads. These ads - more or less untargeted by today''s standards - were nonetheless a significant advancement in the potential for a marketer to directly reach an individual. Although it hadn''t been put to use yet, that computer screen - unlike a TV - had a unique physical address. The opportunity for truly personal adverting took a step forward. Prodigy, and in particular its contemporaries CompuServe and America Online, were in many ways the forerunners of present social networks and targeted online advertising. The thinking was that reaching a large number of individuals was not only potentially more valuable than reaching a homogenous mass audience, but that through technology, marketers just might be able to actually do it.
Individual, person-to-person connections have always been highly valued. The "real-world" community status of highly localized professionals - think of doctors, preachers, and insurance agents - comes from the fact that they are personally acquainted with each of the individuals that make up their overall customer base. This gives them the advantage of a highly personalized level of service. Assuming the service itself is acceptable (and if it''s not, they are quickly out of business), this personal bond translates directly into loyalty, the ultimate goal of brand marketers. Rather than failing to recognize the value of one-to-one efforts - no rocket science there - it was a logistical challenge that thwarted market-wide adoption of highly localized, personal advertising. Simply put, a mechanism to efficiently reach individuals on a large scale didn''t exist. In the early nineties, that changed.
Although it had been in development for a number of years, the Internet as we know it today began its climb when the National science Foundation (NsF) and its forward-thinking National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) program laid the ground rules for it. It was the NSF that championed the cause of an "open" Internet - a network that any entity, including a business, could use for any purpose, including commerce. Combined with the proliferation of low-cost personal computers, the opening up of the Internet set in place the path we are now on. Today, we are realizing the "Global Village," a term coined by Wyndham Lewis in 1948 and popularized by Marshall McLuhan in 1964 in his seminal work "Understanding Media." The Global Village is understood in both an historical and contemporary context through this partial excerpt from Wikipedia: The social and personal interactive norms preceeding the 1960s are "being replaced ... by what McLuhan calls ''electronic interdependence,'' an era when electronic media replace[s] visual culture, producing cognitive shifts and new social organizations." That certainly sounds familiar now.
The release of Prodigy and the significance of the potential of its integrated ad platform in targeting individuals is best understood in the context of the prevailing advertising mediums of the time and in particular television. Under the leadership and vision of NBC executive Pat Weaver, TV had shifted in the 1950s from a locally controlled, single-advertiser-per-show model to a network controlled, multi-advertiser (aka "magazine") model. While this was great for the networks, marketers, and ad agencies - reaching national-scale audiences was good for business as it provided operational and marketing efficiency - it also meant that viewers were treated more and more like a "mass" audience. With only four networks in place - CBS, NBC, ABC, and for a bonus point (see sidebar), name the fourth - mass advertising was clearly the wave of the future. To be fair, media planning and placement meant that Geritol was directed primarily toward an audience with an older skew or component. As a young kid, however, I saw plenty of Geritol ads while I watched Ed Sullivan and wondered how a person could ever need "more energy." Fifty years later, I know the answer: I now get my daily wings from Red Bull. Beyond big buckets such as "older" or "female," the targeting capability we now take for granted wasn''t really possible. While some degree of targeting was achievable on early radio or locally controlled TV prior to the rise of the national networks, the ability to target a message to an individual was severely limited.
The Pushback Begins
During the early years of television, ads made up less than ten minutes of each one-hour show. The time devoted to commercials has more than doubled since then, with many half-hour shows now showing about equal amounts of program content and advertising. With this much time being devoted to what has become "content" in its own right - look no further than the super Bowl ads for proof of the notion that ads are a distinct form of entertainment - it''s not surprising that a "pushback" began. The pushback was driven in a large part by the confluence of two major factors: the rise of the Baby Boomers and the arrival of the Internet-connected personal computer.
Spurred on by Boomer spending on electronics and the proliferation of the personal computer, by the mid-nineties the number of Internet websites had climbed from the 6,000 or so of 1992 to more than 1 million - and that was just the beginning. Email - still considered to be one of the earliest "killer apps" - had taken off as well. A developing world it was, too: while it seems incredible, into the mid-nineties email servers around the world sat open and unprotected, an "oversight" that would prove pivotal in the advent of the social Web. Back then, if you knew the IP address or name of the server, you could use it to send mail, no questions asked. We''re talking about mail that recipients would actually get and read. Commercial mail hadn''t really happened yet; however, the combination of the NSFNET lifting the ban on using the Internet for commercial purposes and the relatively unprotected nature of mail servers made what happened next inevitable. The big question of when - and not if - this new medium would be used for advertising and whether or not this would be accepted on a large scale was on more than a few people''s minds. It was a question just waiting to be answered.
A Big Boost from an Unlikely Source
On April 12, 1994, husband and wife Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel unknowingly gave social media - still more than 10 years in the future - a big boost when they provided an answer to the question of whether or not email could be used for advertising: It could. The "Green card" spam that they launched is generally considered the first unsolicited email advertisement sent over the Internet. The result was explosive, on both sides. Enterprising minds quickly realized there was money to be made - lots of money - and relatively little actual regulation that could be applied to constrain them. The term "spammer" - loosely based, unfairly, on Hormel''s canned meat - was coined to describe people sending email filled with questionable content. But if you could stand the heat coming from those who made it their business to thwart this newfound advertising channel, you could get rich. Real rich. Real fast.
Just as quickly, recipients and their Internet service Providers (ISPs) realized that this practice - novel as it was - was fundamentally objectionable, so they went to work on countermeasures. Cancelbot-the first antispam tool developed to automatically cancel the online accounts of suspected spammers - launched an entire movement of antispam tools. In 1997, author and Austin Resident Tracy LaQuey Parker filed and won one of the first successful antispam lawsuits. (If you''d like to read the judicial opinion, I''ve included a reference to it in the Appendix of this book.) A domain she owned - Flowers.com - was used by Craig Nowak (aka C.N. Enterprises) to launch a spam campaign falsely identified as originating from Flowers.com and Austin ISP Zilker Internet Park. Oops.
Why Does This Matter?
The arrival of spam - on a communications channel that recipients had control over - shattered a peaceful coexistence that had been in place for the past 30 years. Viewers had accepted interruptions more or less without complaint as the quid pro quo for free TV (and amazingly, albeit to a lesser extent on for-pay cable as well). Even if they objected, short of changing channels there was little they could do. Ads were part of the deal. The Internet - and in particular an email inbox - was different. First, it was "my" inbox, and "I" presumed the "right" to decide what landed in it, not least because I was paying for it! second, spam - unlike TV ads - could actually clog my inbox, slow down the Net, and generally degrade "my" experience. People took offense to that, on a collective scale. Spam had awakened a giant, and that giant has been pushing back on intrusive ads ever since. On the Social Web, interruptions do not result in a sustainable conversation. In their purest form, all conversations are participative and engaged in by choice. This simple premise goes a long way in explaining why interruption and deception on the Social Web are so violently rejected.
The relevance of these particular events and those that have followed in driving the evolution of social media cannot be overstated. In one sense, the issues raised by spam - the practice of sending a highly interruptive, often untargeted message to a recipient - triggered a discussion about how advertising in an electronic age could, and more importantly should, work. At the same time, in the early days the messages weren''t as bad, the emails not as junky, and the content not so disgusting. In the early days, it was about an annoyance for techies and a perceived (and misunderstood) opportunity for marketers. The questions were as much about how to make money as they were anything else, and not enough forethought was given to the recipient experience. Regardless, these discussions gave rise to the idea that recipients should have control over what was sent their way. The fact that their personal attention was worth money - something that ad execs had long known - was suddenly central in the discussions of the thought leaders who pushed all the harder against those who abused the emerging channels.
The offensive nature of spam, in particular, inflicted collateral damage on the ad industry as a whole. Ironically, and much to its own loss, the ad industry did little to stop it. Unsolicited email rallied people against advertising intrusion, and a lot of otherwise good work got caught in the crossfire. In contrast to TV ads, for example, spam fails to pay its own way, fails to entertain, and often contains deceptive messages. These are not the standards on which advertising was built. At GSD&M IdeaCity, the agency where I spent many years, agency co-founder Tim Mcclure coined the "Uninvited Guest" credo. The "Uninvited Guest" basically holds that a commercial is an interruption. As such, it is the duty of the marketer and advertiser collectively to "repay" the viewer, for example, by creating a moment of laughter or compassion that genuinely entertains. It is this quid pro quo that transforms the interruption into an invitation. This symbiotic relationship sat at the base of an ad system that had worked well, and with relatively few complaints, for 50-plus years. Beginning with Tide''s creation of soap operas and the Texas star Theater in the ''40s up to the Mobil-sponsored Masterpiece Theater in the ''70s, viewers readily accepted that advertisers were paying the freight in exchange for attention to their products and services. Measurable good will accrued to sponsors simply by virtue of having underwritten these programs.
No more. By violating the premise of the "Uninvited Guest," spammers brought to the fore a second and much more powerful notion among consumers: spammers raised awareness of the value of control over advertising at the recipient level. Spammers galvanized an entire audience (against them) and created a demand for control over advertising at a personal level. With TV, radio, magazines, and even direct mail - the United States Postal Service (USPS) has long enforced the rights of marketers to use its services so long as they paid for it - there was no viable means through which a recipient could select or moderate - much less block - commercial messages short of turning off the device. With digital communications, control elements are now built in; they are an expected part of the fabric that links us. If advertisers and network executives are experiencing angst over contemporary consumer-led "ad avoidance," they have, among others, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel to thank. By introducing unsolicited messages into a medium over which recipients can and readily do take ownership and control, the actions of the earliest for-personal-gain commercial spammers created in consumers both the awareness of the need for action and the exercise of personal control over incoming advertising. Antispam tools ranging from blacklists to spam filters are now the norm.
As spammers continued to proliferate, spam became not only a nuisance but a significant expense for systems owners and recipients alike. It was only a matter of time before legislation followed. In 2003 the CAN-SPAM act was signed into law. This was significant in the sense that legislation had been enacted that in part had its roots in the issues of recipient control over incoming advertising. This further validated - and pushed mainstream - the idea that "I own my inbox." From this point forward, it would be more difficult as a marketer to reach consumers using email without some form of permission or having passed through at least a rudimentary inbox spam filter. It wasn''t just email that felt the impact of growing consumer awareness of the control that now existed over interruptive advertising.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Social Media Marketingby Dave Evans Susan Bratton Copyright © 2008 by Dave Evans. Excerpted by permission.
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