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How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men (newyorker.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt of a New Yorker piece: Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They've now been eclipsed by Math Men -- the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. Yet Math Men are beleaguered, as Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated when he humbled himself before Congress, in April. Math Men's adoration of data -- coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless -- has aroused government anger, much as Microsoft did two decades ago.
The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America's newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook.
The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America's newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook.
> Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies.
Yeah, but Google and Facebook aren't in the business of making ads for clients, like those advertising and marketing companies almost assuredly are.
Google and Facebook should be compared to newspapers, TVs and roadside billboards.
Companies will still be using those marketing companies to create the content, and then Facebook/Google is where they place the content for eyeballs to see it.
Zuck did no such thing - he pretty much robotically kept denying specific knowledge of pretty much everything he got asked.
#DeleteChrome
The numbers say this thing will make money, so we will make it. Whoops, the numbers were wrong.
Focus groups said they wanted this thing, so we sold it. Whoops, our questions were wrong.
Consumers aren't buying this kind of vehicle in large numbers, so we'll stop making it. Whoops, that kind of vehicle brought people into the door for the first time and introduced them to our brand.
Surveys say that more movies like this will sell, so we will bat them into the ground until we murder a franchise. Whoops, movies written and produced by people with vision become the greats, that define new genres and cement careers permanently.
You can know you're right, and still be wrong... at least some of the time
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Math Men's adoration of data -- coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless -- has aroused government anger
The reason for people's anger is not because of their "arrogant conviction that their 'science' is nearly flawless" it is because they are collecting huge amounts of private data and then are either inadequately protecting it from criminals (Equifax) or those seeking to manipulate elections (Facebook).
The NYT reliably misunderstands (ironically their own business): The growth of the Advertising industry over ~100 years has occurred primarily because there is good feedback [justification] for ad campaigns from sales volumes. With the Internet, much more information can be routinely tracked to give much finer feedback (click-thru). Side-stream (private?) data can be used to target ads for 2+ orders of magnitude in effectiveness.
"Math" [AI, neural nets, etc] is nothing more than a tool used by Mad Men who no longer need to use as much judgement [guessing]. Never become so amazed by flashy tools that you neglect the judgement required to use increased power. MBA hubris.
Advertising is the bane of society.
By itself it distorts the free market against the consumer's interest, and today the mechanism of catching the customer's attention in order to administer commercial propaganda has the effect of promoting the exchange of false or emotional information at a massive level, which can go as far as undermining the democratic process and the pacific coexistence of people.