Facebook, Google and Co aren't media companies. They don't tell stories. They just take the piss out of those that do...
"You're seeing more data, more math, and more science around consumer behavior, but I don't think what we have, and what we'll never have unless we tap completely into the brain, is the "Why", right? The emotional why. The heart and soul and influence of why..."
Gary Vaynerchuk on EQ, Storytelling, and the Value of Introverts, Verilliance, 13.04.13
Hang around here long enough and you'll know that I think the whole adtech-publishing ecosystem is teetering on the brink of a 'societal' collapse.
And that the arrival of GDPR this May could yet prove the 'and then some...' moment that finally pushes a whole industry over the edge.
Put simply, it's both too costly and too complex to be sustainable.
And for those that continue to doubt either claim, this piece on AdExchanger is worth a read - Forrester's principal analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo citing publishers who are now seeing 12% revenue returns off their programmatic advertising partners.
So 88 cents of every ad dollar is now going who knows where...
"When publishers tell me they only see something like 12 cents of every dollar spent on advertising on their site – where’s it going?" Khatibloo asks.
"It’s going to the vendors, whether that’s the agency, the DMP, the DSP, the SSP or the layer cake of companies all ostensibly trying to do better targeting and behavioral advertising.
"If we agree that they don’t bring enough value to this ecosystem, it changes the balance of advertising..."
So we need to address that balance. Publishers can't live on 12 cents of every ad dollar. Ask Buzzfeed. Or Vice. Or The Guardian.
Rip out all the cost of complexity that comes with running a Wall Street auction across a publishers website and offer instead an 85% revenue return for their content labours - via Evslin's Law of Ad Networks - and they might, however.
So if Addiply is to take full advantage of the chaos that GDPR might bring to said 'complex society' in five months time, we need to nail a funding round. This spring.
And as CEO, I'm going to have to tell someone a good story. As to why potential investors should believe any of the above.
And all in a two-minute video if we opt to go the crowd-fund route via, say, the likes of a Seedrs.
Two minutes in which I have to tell the story of my entrepreneurial life.
Nearly two years ago I wrote this - how it is within the power of the story tellers to define this latest digital age. The Third Wave, for those that know their Steve Case.
And I quoted Gary Veynerchuk at length - in particular around this whole idea of dry, mathematical data versus the emotional, human-led 'Why?'
What's the story? Something the likes of a Dave Trott would understand advertising-wise. Or, indeed, such an ad contrarian as Bob Hoffman.
And this, I think, gets to the heart of the current travails of 'Big Tech' - in particular, Facebook, Google and Amazon. Those three, great behemoths of data-driven analytics and auctions - none of whom could tell a good story to save their lives.
As they are increasingly being asked to do - be it via EU regulators this side of the Atlantic or a Senate Judiciary Committee in the case of Al Franken, Facebook and Russian roubles on the other.
“People are buying ads on your platform with roubles. They’re political ads. You put billions of data points together all the time," hammers Franken, speaking in a language that 99% of humans can understand.
It's simple, emotional - and comes from the heart. And he's asking a pretty simple 'Why?' - of some of the smartest people on the planet.
"That’s what I hear that these platforms do: they’re the most sophisticated things invented by man, ever. Google has all knowledge that man has ever developed. You can’t put together roubles with a political ad and go hmm, those two data points spell out something bad?”
And the Facebook reply?
“Senator, it’s a signal we should have been alert to..."
A signal. Should have been alert to...
There's no story there. No compelling tale to tell in response - no engagement, no emotion, no warmth, no trust, no humanity.
And that's their big Achilles Heel. When forced out into the open to defend themselves and the way that they have come to industrially harvest the world's data with or without our consent, they can't find the words...
It's a failing that comes down from the top.
Mark Zuckerberg can't tell a story.
"This will be a serious year of self-improvement and I'm looking forward to learning from working to fix our issues together," he wrote, setting out his goals for 2018 via his own Facebook blog post.
It's dry, distant and defensive. And doesn't make for compelling reading.
Which brings me on to a final point.
It is very rarely that I agree with anything that Facebook or Google say - or do.
But increasingly, I think they are right.
They are not media companies.
'Media' - in whatever guise you like, be it editorial or advertising, video, words, music or tweets - is the preserve of story tellers.
Those that relish the warmth and sense of belonging that comes from sitting around a fire and swapping stories. Something that is wholly in-built into our DNA. As humans.
Why tweet? Why post? Why write? Why film? To gain a sense of belonging. To win an invite. To join that tribe or that fireside.
It's what we are programmed to do.
And by that simple yardstick, Facebook, Google and Co aren't media companies.
Because they don't tell stories.
They just take the piss out of those that do.