AI will not be our god. If it brings our demise, it will be because of human greed and stupidity.

I wrote somewhat extensively about how generative AI’s are trained a few months ago. But here’s a three bullet point recap.

Not all AI training involves fundamental intellectual property infringement. At least one large company in this space is reportedly only using licensed stock images, and compensating artists; thanks Adobe. Also, the public domain exists, but that’s not how most generative AI is being trained.

Training a generative AI takes huge archives of images and text. Adobe aside, most AI training data is “ripped from the net,” as the kids say.

At least two large class action lawsuits are pending each against multiple companies in this new AI space 1, 2 over the use of copyrighted works. Separately Getty Images is suing Stability AI. That’s hardly an exhaustive list of pending AI, IP, litigation.

Even without the conclusion of those lawsuits, artifacts of the human data stolen to build machines keep appearing.

Wired traced an AI writing assistant’s use of a fanfiction sex trope to the original source. I highlighted a time when ChatGPT gave incorrect information from a single source. Futurism found examples of plagiarism in CNET’s AI “journalism” experiment.

Many of the use cases for generative AI are clearly replacing human creators. Besides CNET, Buzzfeed, and Men’s Journal have been running AI generated articles already. It’s hard to argue these uses of AI aren’t poised to replace human writers, if not already replacing them.

Writing, like nearly all creative work, does not in and of itself generate money. Something, books, subscriptions, tickets, advertising, and so forth must be sold to turn writing into cash. So publishers, media executives, and the like exist, making money from writing (and other creative works).

In an ideal world writers and business people would have a symbiotic relationship. We are not in an ideal world. To paraphrase The Beatles we all live in an ad supported pyramid scheme.

The model of running ads against eyeballs creates a disparity between how business people, and writers feel about content. Writers value writing. The business perspective views writing as simply content units. Preventing AI from replacing writers is one of the core reasons for the current writers strike.

It is common for business folks to assume more content units must equate to more money. The business goal becomes creating content units that are good enough, for as low a cost as possible. Shortly before Buzzfeed News shuttered, staff of Buzzfeed’s News division were told to focus on increasing the volume of stories published each day.

The content units mindset makes AI replacing human writers inevitable. This AI future won’t just replace writers, when the goal is churning out more content units, ever cheaper, every creative is on the chopping block. The sword that will cut their jobs is being forged with their work.

The writers on strike have made themselves known. They have a collective voice, and we hear it. AI has voiceless victims as well.

Big Technology published an article about Richard Mathenge and others who worked on ChatGPT as part of the team who labeled explicit content. From the article,

Mathenge and a Kenya-based data labeling team, managed by U.S. firm Sama, were paid about $1 per hour. OpenAI told Big Technology it believed it was paying its Sama contractors $12.50 per hour.

The situation these human workers dealt with isn’t without coverage. Time published an investigation into the Kenyan data labelers earlier this year that received a lot of attention. Earlier this month NBC News covered these and U.S. workers in a similar situation.

Still, articles hyping up generative AI, and even the “we spoke to a chatbot” genre of reports, far outnumber those talking about the human cost of building artificial intelligence.

Grief Tech is a category of AI, billing itself as helping people cope with the loss of a loved one. For KnowTechie I wrote about how predatory I find this use case. It’s exploiting emotionally vulnerable people the way séances always have.

Grief Tech is a science fiction twist on fraud as old as history. Other classical grifts are also getting a modern spin thanks to AI. Impersonation scams, where scammers pretend to be a trusted entity have been super powered by AI.

The Federal Trade Commission issued a consumer alert that scammers could target people with the voice of a loved one. That’s not a hypothetical problem. AI-generated voices or voice changers have been used in serious frauds and scams.

Back in 2019 criminals used these voice changing tools to scam $243,000 out of a U.K-based energy firm. In 2020, a manager of a Japanize frim in Hong Kong was tricked into making several large transfers by someone using this technology.

A man in Texas said his father was scammed out of $1,000 by someone using an AI voice. Collectively eight senior citizens in Canada have been taken in by scammers impersonating loved ones in crisis to the tune of a combined $200,000. And most disturbingly, a woman in Arizona was reportedly asked to pay a $1 million ransom for her daughter’s safe return, by scammers who faked her daughter’s voice.

The Washington Post reported that in 2022 the FTC received over 36,000 reports of people swindled by someone presenting themselves as a friend or family member. Over 5,100 of those incidents happened over the phone.

Loved ones and known service providers are not the only people scammers impersonate. It is disturbingly easy to impersonate a celebrity using AI. A song called “Heart on My Sleeve” featuring the AI generated voices of Drake and the artist formally known as The Weekend recently went viral.

Scammers are using digital ads featuring celebrities. I wrote about scam ads impersonating MrBeast. Verifythis reported on ads impersonating Joe Biden promoting a fake stimulus program. 

The Wall Street Journal covered several uses of deepfake public figures in advertising. When a deepfake is used without authorization, celebrities’ have had success in court. But digital ads aren’t a Superbowl commercial, and they can fly below the radar.

This technology is wild, and already out of the Pandora’s box. No amount of self-serving calls for AI regulation or actual regulation can reset things to zero.

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on May 26, 2023. Photo: “Wall Street writers strike.” by kona99 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

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The advertising economy is starting to resemble a collection of interconnected multi-level marketing schemes. Some kind of intermediary firm sits atop each pyramid brokering the serving of ads to eyeballs. Under that are ad agencies, and tech firms that work on sales and bid management. The bottom are ad buyers, perhaps too few to sustain all these pyramids.

Advertising subsidizes many things people want or at least use. Free over-the-air TV, radio, and most social media; in fact, most news media is free or available at a lower cost to consumers due to ads.

Advertisers buy ads almost entirely because they want to sell stuff. To paraphrase Peter Drucker, innovation and marketing are the only two things that create value in a business; everything else is a cost. Drucker didn’t seem to consider a world where companies can buy political power to force a monopolistic product onto people, but I digress.

When done correctly, ads drive sales, paying for themselves while subsidizing much of modern life. Most people hate ads, but in practice, they hate paying for things more. Look at video streaming, where nearly 20% of new signups for Netflix in early 2023 opted for the ad-supported tier, which came at a cost savings of $3 compared to the basic ad-free plan.

Streaming companies can earn more from an ad supported account than most consumers are willing to pay for the service. Creating a bazar world were everyone wants in on the ads. Offering ad inventory, big data targeting, or AI for an ad tech stack is incredibly profitable. A startup called Telly plans on giving away millions of premium TVs with an attached smaller second TV used to serve ads.

Telly’s founder Ilya Pozin previously cofounded Pluto TV, an ad-supported streaming service now owned by Paramount. The press release for Telly feels as odd to me as a company announcing they give away free beer, if users hold a second smaller beer that tries to sell them things while they drink it.

Telly’s business model may work. The one time cost of a TV capable of inserting ads adjacent content people already watch is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of creating that content. Couple that with the willingness to disregard existing privacy law that Shoshana Wodinsky pointed out, and you have a viable, if scummy business.

Selling media inventory and ad tech can certainly be profitable. But that model requires advertisers to exist, and reminder, advertisers buy ads almost entirely because they want to sell stuff. I cannot help but think as more companies try to win in the ad market, we are running out of product sellers.

Some industries are so mature, saturated, and legally entrenched that most growth is poaching customers from existing service providers. Jake from State Farm is in a tug a war with the Geico Gecko and Flow from Progressive. Auto insurers spent over $10 billion on advertising in 2021, as each company pushed to grow.

For auto insurance the market cannot exponentially increase in size. Advertising is in effect a cost of doing business. Those costs are passed onto consumers.

For consumers the modern advertising economy involves trading privacy for a model that shifts costs onto them elsewhere. The costs include valid marketing efforts, click fraud, and a large chuck of money that disappears. According to a study by the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), about 15% of programmatic ad spend vanishes within the ads supply chain. Those costs too are passed onto consumers.

Advertising has always carried with it the challenge of attribution. John Wanamaker, who died in 1922 said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” In 2023, attribution of wasted spend is somewhat more clear than in Wanamaker’s lifetime. But in 2023 about 49% of advertising goes to intermediaries, and easily between 7-23% of all ad spend goes to bots and fraud.

The longer I spend in the advertising swamp the less comfortable I am with advertising as an American economic pillar. Advertising is eroding consumer privacy, without much benefit to publishers or advertisers. In an article I published a few months ago I said,

In an empirical study on the impacts of behaviorally targeted advertising on online publishers’ revenue, researchers at the University of Minnesota, University of California, Irvine, and Carnegie Mellon University found that publishers only earn about 4% more revenue for ad impressions that had cookies enabled than for ones that don’t. The study is from 2019, so cookies are mentioned a lot. But I have seen no evidence that the conclusions were false in 2019, or that anything has changed as of 2023.

In an ideal world advertising would give consumers access to free content, created by fairly compensated workers, in exchange for learning about products they’d want to buy. In that world everybody wins. But that world hasn’t existed since the dawn of DoubleClick, if it ever existed.

In our world advertising represents the worst of rent seeking behavior. You may get a free TV, but at what cost?

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on May 17, 2023. Photo: “I. M. Pei’s Pyramid, The Louvre” by Mustang Joe is marked with CC0 1.0.

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The Business Of Helping Build Businesses by Mason Pelt was first published in HackerNoon on January 12, 2020. While This article was published first on HackerNoon, the website’s editorial team deleted it following a copyright dispute. This article is updated with more context and published in MasonPelt.com on May 3, 2023.

This goes out to freelancers and those who run professional service companies. Are you building a business or helping others build theirs? It can be both. But that requires awareness, caution, and focus. 

Every company I’ve founded has been a B2B service firm, meaning we make money providing services to other companies. Sometimes those services are tightly connected to the business with whom we work — for example, working as a fractional marketing team member for a startup yet to hire anyone to fill the role.

Working as a service provider (for example, offering PPC management), especially when tied tightly to a fledgling company, makes it easy to think you function like a founder. In some cases, I’ve even been told my role was that of a temporary founder. To serve as a generalist hand on deck, with the goal of growing the company.

At issue is that a contracted firm is not a founder or even an employee. If the startup goes big, there is no future liquidity event that makes the contracted agency money. If the startup fails, well, the contractor loses a client, and probably never possessed the clout to prevent the failure. 

I love it when the founders of companies my agency works with are successful. But I learned the hard way that shorting my own company to help them is a bad idea. Just like any funded startup, if my agency has an investor, I owe them my best effort to create a return on their investment. It should be the same when I am the only investor. 

I used to office in a startup accelerator. While there, I’d listen to pitches and watch teams work on developing ideas that were statistically doomed to fail. I thought it was cool. For a long time, I sought out working with startups, it was fun, and I am predisposed towards buying into “the vision”. I’d probably have worked for Fyre Festival at a deep discount if I’d met Billy McFarland.

I used to bend over backward, offering startups discounts because the idea that I could have even a small part in shaping the next unicorn was kind of exciting. Later I got jaded and stopped working with all pre-revenue startups for some time. 

My disillusion with early-stage startups happened because I’ve worked with maybe 40 failed startups. In most cases, I’d start with a discounted offer and then listen as founders tried to negotiate the rates further. Typical reasons a startup would ask for a discount included not having closed an A-round and merely being a startup.

Of the startups that had little funding, most spent money foolishly, and as a service provider I had no control. Even when I was on the cap table or paid a percentage of the value I was creating, I was not a founder or investor; I never had a vote.

If I felt buying 10 Aeron Chairs from Herman Miller was a waste of money, that opinion did not matter. As a service provider or a minority shareholder, I had no real control over anything. But I had mistakenly tied the revenue of my business to the success of a startup that spends $12,000 on chairs, despite having only four employees and an insignificant $200k seed round.

Anyone who hires my agency will expect us to produce good work and follow what is laid out in our contracts. What I expect are my rates, paid according to our agreement. Clearly, if I fail to deliver, no one will work with me, so for my firm to succeed, I must be successful in helping other businesses. That lesson took me a long time to learn, and honestly, I’m still learning.

For those of you in the business of helping other businesses, don’t forget about your firm. It’s important to provide results for clients, and it’s paramount to live up to your contracts. That is all for nothing if your firm isn’t economically stable. This isn’t profound, but put on your oxygen mask first.

This article was written by Push ROI’s Mason Pelt, was first published in HackerNoon on January 12, 2020 and is now canonicalized here. Photo by USACE HQ is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

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To greatly paraphrase Tolstoy, you can explain anything to a complete ding dong if they know nothing about the topic, but you’ll fail to explain it to the greatest minds if they start with any preconceptions. Cognitive bias is powerful. People will pay more for a worse product if they think the brand is better.

BuzzFeed built a digital brand that can only be understood by living online during its heyday. The way reposted videos of TikTok fill Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, is only slightly more pervasive than the level to which BuzzFeed content once filled social feeds. Everyone knew BuzzFeed, but few loved it.

The media company built traffic without an audience. BuzzFeed appeared to show you a compilation of oddly satisfying power-washing videos or a quiz to learn what kind of potato you were. Like the big-name cola that isn’t Coca-Cola, people knew the brand, but it was a preference for very few.

BuzzFeed News launched in 2011, and was shuttered in 2023. The news outlet won the George Polk Award, The Sidney Award, National Magazine Award, the National Press Foundation award, and a Pulitzer Prize. BuzzFeed News built an audience concentrated with news hounds and other journalists. Although BuzzFeed News was editorially separate from BuzzFeed in the ways that matter, the company never really shook the BuzzFeed brand.

The first rule of celebrity roasts is, tell jokes to make the widest audience laugh. In practice, this means a lot of jokes about Martha Stewart going to prison. Sadly for BuzzFeed News, the BuzzFeed brand meant, the jokes were about investigations into what K-pop star you’d be if a member of BTS bit you. Jokes no one could make about any other Pulitzer Prize winning outlet.

It hurt BuzzFeed News more because many of the highest-traffic articles are entertainment reporting of the gossip column variety. Here are three examples;

I haven’t seen BuzzFeed News’ analytics, so I’m not claiming these are the highest-traffic articles ever published on the site. However, These articles cascaded more widely than the average article on the site. More people saw the headlines, and those brand impressions enforced preconceptions.

Almost every news outlet finds that sports and entertainment content are the major traffic drivers. But no other news outlets are cursed with BuzzFeed branding. Look, Gatorade is not called Pepsi Sports Drink for a reason.

The world doesn’t need more articles about Twitter, I will publish this anyway because Twitter was an online home for some time for me and many others. Twitter is dead to me, at least for now, It could close or turn into 4chan tomorrow, and it would be no more dead to me. Still the Twitter blue check is a branding case study.

The blue check, once associated with identity verification came to be seen as a status symbol because of who had them. The first to get blue checks were those so famous that they were not only at risk for impersonation but were also likely to be harmed in a legally actionable way by impersonation. Beyoncé, Stephen King, and Barack Obama were not important because they had the blue checks, they had the blue check because they were important.

Twitter used this branding effectively for many years. A company could get the blue check as part of advertising deals. For a while it was a kind of open secret that spending a certain amount on Twitter ads would cause a blue badge to appear. The perceived eliteness of the badge most assuredly made Twitter money.

Verifying news outlets and journalist also helped build brand power. It made it easier for a subset of people with distribution outside of Twitter to gain visibility with the truly famous. Important people like to feel important, and knowing that reporters were following and engaging is a great way to keep someone too famous for Twitter active on the platform.

As I wrote about years ago for VentureBeat,

I got my verification back when the public could request it. I had to jump through a few hoops, filling out a form explaining why I deserve verification. I had to provide articles published in large, credibility-imparting media outlets that mention me by name to prove I was ‘noteworthy.’ I also had to submit photos of my ID and other documents to verify I was, indeed, myself.

I’ve also pointed out how random the verifications were,

No matter what as it stands now, Twitter’s verifications are strangely unbalanced. I’m a “blue check” because I’ve written words for famous places, but Nerd City, a YouTuber with a massive audience, and public reputation, is not?

If I’m a persecuted individual online, it’s not for this reason, but people hated small accounts with a blue checkmark by the name. People have parasocial relationships with social media creators who were not ordained by some sort of Twitter kingmaker. Lashing out at small verified accounts was a way of shaking a fist at a system that no one understood.

All of that fist shaking built up the brand. The fact that Rihanna, and Shannon Sharpe, and I the great and powerful Mason Pelt got blue checks, but Nerd City and Beth Bordan were not approved created mystique. The jokes about Thore’s hammer and the trolling all imbued a meaningless emoji with some form of significance.

Accounts like mine were proof that the system didn’t require fame. People started to believe that if they got a blue badge they would be taken seriously. This fed into the brand power of the blue check.

Elon Musk was able to do in months what BuzzFeed News couldn’t do in years; completely eradicate prior brand perceptions. Making the blue checks a clear transaction that everyone understands scrubbed away the patina. Doing away with the legacy checkmarks took away the last bits of aureole for the symbol.

To save the value of the shit coin Musk started handing out blue checks to celebrities. This was the nail in the coffin for the blue check’s brand. A diverse array of truly famous people who didn’t like the implication that they paid for a trophy denounced the blue check like a scarlet letter.

Musk managed to get public statements from some of the most influential folks on the platform and the planet that the blue check isn’t cool. Here’s a partial list: Paul Krugman, Chrissy Teigen, Lil Nas X, Stephen King, LeBron James, the Auschwitz Memorial, Dril (the king of trolls), Ian McKellen, Riyad Mahrez, Trixie Mattel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jon Favreau (not the director), and many more. No one is so cool that their use could recover the brand the blue check once had.

Brands are hard won, and as BuzzFeed News shows hard lost. But a business genius like Elon Musk probably could have ended BuzzFeed News faster, more violently, and with less dignity. Good bye to BuzzFeed News, and good riddance to Twitter.

Perhaps worth a disclosure that the @masonpelt Twitter account was put into limbo after I pretended to be Elon Musk’s mom on March 31, 2023. Twitter insists that the account is hacked, and that the email for the account is incorrect despite proof to the contrary. The account maintained it’s blue check as a warning that Musk has mommy issues until April 20, 2023.

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on April 24, 2023. Photo by verchmarco is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

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On a call for a long-dead startup building its empire on Google+, someone, a person, objected to being paid to appear in a commercial promoting a class they sold because of how it would impact their brand. They were a chef, not a famous one. But in July of 2011, they had quickly amassed a following of about 6,000 in under a month on the hot emerging social network that was Google+, and they believed fame was on the horizon.

Google+ launched with hype in 2011. Even a flurry of new players fighting to capture the mindshare of an uncertain Twitter doesn’t match the hype I saw around Google’s new social network. It was a big deal in June, July, and part of August in 2011.

The startup I worked with used Google+ to connect experts with people who wanted one-on-one online instruction. Solid as a concept, and outsourcing almost the entirety of product development to the rapidly growing social network arm of a major tech company left startup costs at nearly zero.

In November of 2011, The BBC ran an article titled ‘Google denies Google+ death reports‘. The BBC joined the chatter after most of the tech press had already called the time of death. A critical mass of normal users abandoned Google+ by September.

In January 2012, Google made signing up for a Google+ account mandatory to create a Google account. But just because you make a horse create an account doesn’t mean they will log in. I expect Google+ is the fastest-growing social network of all time by number of inactive, resentful signups.

In April 2014, Tech Crunch pronounced the social network the ‘Walking Dead’. As of September 2014, joining Google+ was no longer required to create a Google account. It was a ghost town of a social network, just a few survivors posting, and responding to one another.

Google+ was laid to rest in April 2019. A wild ride, where the only real activity came during a three-month window at the start.

Celebrities say no to things out of concern for their public-facing brand. But many people who are a far cry from celebrity status lose perspective. Someone with 10,000 social media followers will often come across like a bad first-time novelist’s interpretation of how they think a famous person behaves.

I’ve had calls with representatives for actual celebrities of the performance at the Grammy Awards variety. I’ve also had calls with people (and their management) who think they are on track to perform at the Grammy Awards. The constant from those conversations is far more concern about a brand image from those with thousands of followers than those with millions of fans.

Back to the chef. Due to their brand concerns, they objected to nearly every marketing decision for the marketplace they used as a seller. Late-night calls opposing words used in marketing copy on pages unrelated to them type of objections.

So far as I can tell, our chef never built a social following outside of Google+. If memory serves, even on Google+ they peeked at just over 18,000 followers. Our chef had a Google+ page, not a brand, but they acted like they thought they were Gordon Ramsay.

I wouldn’t expect that level of nonsense from Gordon Ramsay. I know for a fact that Gordon Ramsay didn’t refuse to allow any advertising of his brand image to promote his video course from Master Class. Here’s the trailer for that Master Class if you don’t believe me.

Don’t get me wrong, 18,000 real, organically amassed followers are impressive on almost any social network, but it’s not a brand. Few were searching for this chef outside of Google+. Even on the platform, the chef was hardly sought out.

I hold with most of the ideas in the essay 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kell. That a creator only needs 1,000 true fans to make a living is a fact. Here’s what Kell calls a fan. 

Rarely will 18,000 followers translate to 1,000 or even 100 true fans. On social media, followers are largely transient and unattached. What’s more, social media followers are non-transferable. They don’t move with a creator from network to network.

MrBeast, a creator with a strong brand, has 146 million YouTube Subscribers but only 25.4 million Instagram followers and 19.5 million Twitter followers. That’s a huge following on multiple platforms but far from a 1:1 ratio. No large creator is so loved that their entire audience will modify online behavior to keep up with them everywhere.

When a creator has a dispassionate following on only one social network, they are completely at the mercy of that networks whims. The company could suspend them or suppress them. A government could ban or attempt to ban the network. The platform could simply dwindle in popularity.

Sans Steak-umm and Wendy’s virtually no brand pulls off being hip and relatable online. But most seem to try for it. We all know the memes.

Brand: Hello fellow users I am a hip relatable brand.

Fellow users: Silence brand!

Brands decided to be organic, but with rules and guidelines that create the least organic feel possible. The style guides of large brands often note tone of voice. Meaningless phrases such as, “Always confident, never cocky,” fill pages of documents adjacent useful information like the brands official colors. These long brand bibles are always expensive, and rarely useful.

Brand guides should exist. But for almost every brand on earth they should be under 13 pages. Information about the colors and fonts, taglines, notes of phrases that must always be said, and notes about what words are never allowed, and what topics will never be addressed.

Always say “Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth” for branding reasons is understandable. Never say “guarantee”, “animal testing” or “Harry Potter” will also be understandable. A custard brand, could sensibly have a don’t say ice-cream rule, but it won’t feel organic.

People do not see brands as socially organic. Disney, Coca-Cola, and adidas (seemingly styled as all lowercase) are large faceless companies. People think they are cool; They like the products, but Disney has no friends, because Disney is not a person.

Brands however get hung up on this organic branding, despite all logic and evidence that it’s less effective than just embracing brandness. Nearly 10 years ago, I had an argument with a brand manager who vetoed all social ads from a media plan. They wanted to be seen as organic. But they were not organic.

Driving home I heard a radio ad and saw a billboard for the same brand. In the name of being an organic brand, the company posted to Facebook to reach about 4% of their audience with the exact same creative that would have gone in the advertisements. It was a choice to miss a goldrush of incredibly underpriced advertising, in exchange for valueless branding.

Online almost everyone, including myself has a brand face. For a while my online persona was a combination of Dril and some sort of angry professor working two jobs while waiting for tenure. For me, this was turning my personality up to 11, and my inhibitions to the rain on my skin. Not who I really am, but a caricature thereof.

I know many who strive for a manicured lawn brand on the internet. The type who despite 900 Instagram post only have four photos; power stance in a suit, shirtless in the gym, skydiving / plane taking off, and disembodied hand holding a drink. The image is not who they are, who they wish they were or any part of them.

People strive to be brands creating a loss of self, and as seen with our chef a loss of any potential brand. Brands try to be people, in programmatic and contrived ways. Both are organic as a Twinkie asking how the fellow kids are doing.

Everyone can smell the fake plastic trees. It wears me out.

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on April 17, 2023. Photo by JFGryphon is marked with CC0 1.0.

The post Brands As People, People As Brands appeared first on Mason Pelt.

Get woke go broke, rhymes. It is, however, a stupid criticism nearly every time I’ve heard it applied to a company’s advertising. The exceptions are when the criticism of wokeness is a criticism of the messaging and placement. Or when a company is truly ideologically motivated, but the latter is rare.

In almost every example of ad people call “woke,” the business has no company-wide ideology. People at companies have ideologies and may push a firm toward their morality. But Disney or Procter & Gamble are too large and complex as organizations, having too many moving parts to be truly ideological.

When a publicly traded company, with a board of directors and many layers of executives, does something, it’s generally smoothed into whatever the decision-makers believe benefits them. Their incentives are aligned with the company making money to pay out shareholder dividends. Charitably this is an imperfect system, but it also means any perceived ideology, woke or otherwise, is a hollow commitment.

Pride Month is June. For the last few years that means each June, Target will greet everyone with a display for cardboard rainbows holding forth gay apparel, fa la la la, la la, la la.

Target has LGBTQ+ employees and allies up and down the org chart. But the pride displays are because the items sell at a profit. It’s a sign of cultural acceptance that the LGBTQ+ market segments are so far out of the closet they can be openly catered to by a company that wants money.

The hand full of people flipping out on social media over the rainbow vomit wokeness are, generally speaking, free advertising. Were Target a single location store in rural Texas it may not work. But Target is a top 10 retailer by size, and at scale, the lunatic’s freaking out help the bottom line.

Bud Light hired Dylan Mulvaney for a promotion. Mulvaney is trans, and while famous, not Beyoncé famous. Also, Mulvaney is not the kind of person normally associated with Bud Light, causing some uproar. The buzz has probably been incredible for Bud Light directly, but certainly for AB InBev.

Bud Light is a joke among many; It’s the water of beers. It’s cat piss in a glass. It’s also the top-selling beer in the US for 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and I stopped looking. Bud Light can handle people posting social media videos of them shooting the blue cans.

All the social media attention is giving a mid-tier influencer’s brand partnership, Beyoncé levels of awareness. The rants and media coverage will make some thirsty for beer. Some may even want to support bud light. Others won’t buy a Bud Light or a Budweiser; they know better get woke go broke after all!

But the people, now thirsty for beer, may pick up some similarly priced beer from Michelob Ultra, Stella Artois, Busch Beer, Natural Light, Landshark, Shock Top, Hoegaarden, or one of the other brands owned by AB InBev. AB InBev doesn’t hold all the beer, but they own a lot. Carlsberg Group, Molson Coors, and Heineken will benefit from the Bud Light outrage.

The biggest threat to beer right now, is perceived as hard seltzer. If Mulvaney has gotten people talking about beer, AB InBev will make money. And that’s the goal, profit.

Few to none of the woke companies people point to are ideologically motivated. They deserve neither praise nor rage for wokeness. Some companies are truly moving due to ideology.

Look at B&H Photo, they aren’t a woke example, but you’ll understand what I mean. The company is owned and operated by Hasidic or Orthodox Jews who keep Shabbos. So bhphotovideo.com does not process orders from sundown on Friday to sunset on Saturday.

What about Chick-fil-A? Despite an apparent 2019 PR push saying Chick-fil-A loses 14% in revenue from closing on Sunday, the math was stupid. The churchy chicken chain earns more per restaurant than any other fast food joint.

Closed on Sunday drives a volume of sales on Saturday and Monday. The spike (from limited data) for Chick-fil-A’s sales is well above the expected baseline set by comparing competing restaurants. Consider shoutouts from the evangelical pulpits Chick-fil-A gets, and closing on Sunday is a marketing strategy, not a moral stance.

So why do some woke ads fail if every large company, including privately owned Chick-fil-A, is just in it for money? Because some ads are ineffective.

The first time I heard “get woke, go broke,” it was over a Gillette ad. The ad’s messaging missed any reasonable mark. It spoke neither to the primary buyers of the products nor the primary consumers.

As I’ve written before, the “look at your man” Old Spice ads were brilliant because they addressed women with a male significant other. At that time, at least, that demographic was the primary buyer of men’s toiletries.

The Gillette toxic masculinity ad started by pivoting the established company slogan, asking, “Is this the best a man can get?” Saying “the best a man can get” is a statement about product quality. The other is asking, “can’t men be better?”

It reminded me of the Globo Gym ad from the film Dodgeball. “Tired of being overweight and under attractive?” Come out to the gym, you useless waste of human flesh. Generally speaking, shaming people doesn’t drive sales.

If the Gillette ad used the same opener about toxic masculinity, switching to a montage of clips of Fred Rogers, Jim Henson, Steve Irwin, and LeVar Burton, ending with “the best a man can get” tagline, the ad would have been more effective. The ad was just bad.

Disclosures: Via agencies and production companies, Mason Pelt worked with Bud Light (Graphics for Bud Light Bands) in 2012 and Gillette (YouTube Channel Management) in 2013-14. 

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on April 11, 2023. Photo by Dylan Mulvaney on TikTok

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The internet, once a hand full of websites, grew rapidly. In July 2008, Google announced it had an index of 1 trillion URLs. Nearly 15 years later, the internet is larger but, in some ways, still a handful of websites.

I frequently lament Meta and Alphabet swallowing the web. In a post about TikTok, an app with over 1 billion monthly active users, itself representing a large site that makes the internet feel small, I complained forums and directories are gone. A kind of gentrification for the web where the cool message board is now on Facebook and independent blogs are concentrated on a few platforms owned by companies that can act out in petty ways.

In most revenue share models, a large platform, Medium, Twitch, YouTube, and so forth, collect payments from ads or subscriptions and split profit with creators forming a not-technically-an-employee-but-still-kind-of-anemployee-with-extra-steps relationship. A relationship where someone may not work for [platform], but [platform] can suspend income or even remove that non-employee-etcetera’s work or access to the platform without warning or reason.

I don’t think social media is a utility that must be regulated and forced to act with neutrality. Except for actual utilities, housing, and certain banking and adjacent technologies, that sort of regulation would be undesirable.

I don’t want Daily Kos prohibited by law from removing Alex Jones from the comment section. I also don’t like the world where people work for platforms creating content units with no substantive legal protection. It’s bad when companies can be petty and retributive while controlling much of someone’s income and reputation.

Here are a few examples of large sites using an employee with extra steps model, acting outside of stated terms or norms. This is not an endorsement of any parties mentioned. It’s just that, in my opinion, these companies acted to be punitive, and these are high-profile examples. 

Fiverr ban VoiceoverPete for “attempt[ing] to defraud or scam others,” at least that’s implied as the reason based on a statement from Fiver to Mel Magazine. The crime of VoiceoverPete was recording a meme format, literally one listed by Know Your Meme. The format is a fictional character who “needs your help,” followed by a list of needs and a long, clearly satirical request for a credit card number.

When Patreon banned user Sargon of Akkad, the creator did not actually violate the platform’s terms of service. Patreon’s terms of service did not at the time they ban Sargon of Akkad, have a policy for hate speech made off the platform. And from Patreon’s own statements, it was an interview, unrelated to and never mentioned on Patreon, that caused the ban hammer.

When internet personality Ninja left Twitch, the company removed his verification badge and started promoting other streamers on his page. Ninja was, at the time, the largest streamer on Twitch, and the press about his leaving for a deal with Microsoft probably drove over-the-top traffic to his page. But at one point, Ninja’s Twitch page ended up having porn streamed onto it because Twitch was promoting other streamers indiscriminately.

Twitch was completely in its right to use Ninja’s abandoned feed to promote other Twitch streamers’ content. But at the time, their behavior was completely outside of the norm for how Twitch handled offline streamers or streamers who left the platform. It was petty and dumb.

I get something out of Twitter, but not money. Unlike most social networks, Twitter doesn’t share revenue with creators. Twitter needs creators, or it dies. If they designed the product to make Steven King happy, it would be better for everyone.

Instead, Twitter’s been trying to remove old verification badges and failing, pissing off Steven King, pissing off Mark Cuban, banning an account Tweeting about Musk’s jet, making the Twitter logo a Doge, cutting API access for most developers, creating a massive memory leak, labeling NPR as state-affiliated media and many more stupid choices.

Today is my seventh day of Twitter limbo. On March 31st, I became Elon Musk’s mother for several hours. But the account was put into a type of quarantine. My username replaced by a dot, my photo removed, I cannot log in. But my profile, with the years-old blue check still stands like a head on a pike warning others that Elon Musk has mommy issues.

From my Twitter purgatory I realized that for much of the last 14 years Twitter replaced bookmarking, and a swath of general notes. I’ve long searched my Tweets regularly seeking links I’ve shared or liked. The typos and voice to text errors don’t make me look contemplative, but being able to find a link to an interesting story about AI from a few years ago is nice.

Before Twitter people used to microblog. Clipping to the CMS is a sort of joke in online media circles now, but it’s something everyone once did. Find something you loved and wanting to bookmark and amplify, people would copy the title, and lede, add a paragraph of thoughts and click publish.

Some people would, maybe, see the post from an RSS reader. If no one saw it, well Google still used (and uses) links as a ranking factor, so value was added to the original publisher. It’s not so different from an account with only a few followers sharing a story.

Twitter took over the microblogging slot. A handful of news aggregators and social sites now poorly substitute RSS. Social media generally replaced comment sections. A few large platforms are the home of many independent bloggers. We gave up control of the web.

Twitter is not an open system but an open-facing system. The same is true for many social and blogging sites. For example, Substack, a platform I use, makes the user’s ownership of the content center to the marketing messaging.

On Substack, I cannot add URL redirects or canonicalize syndicated content. Users may own what they create. But Substack is very much trying to frame itself as the home of that content. And making it hard to leave in a way that doesn’t improve the product. I acknowledge these restrictions may help prevent spam, but they aren’t open.

I will add a microblog for resharing links to my site in the coming days. I could use Pocket or Flipboard, but I’m tired of giving control to platforms that give the illusion of openness.

The Verge, added a microblog feed last year. The Verge is a massive media company, it pays those who create for it, as employees, not some weird not-technically-an-employee deal. More websites should add microblogs. 

The moral warning of the blue check on a pike is stop giving up control of your data, your content, and your income without understanding the deal you’re making. We need an open web, not digital land grabbing.

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on April 7, 2023. Photo by Tristan Higbee is licensed under CC BY 2.0 [modified]

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As a writer, Stephen King is famous, prolific, and respected. He’s published over 70 novels, novellas, and non-fiction books. ‘Salem’s Lot is casually referenced in verse by Eminem. Neil Gaiman said he read King’s On Writing and began removing adverbs from a draft of American Gods.

Famously slow writer George R. R. Martin once jokingly asked King how he wrote books so fast. Fast or otherwise, King doesn’t need to write anymore. Conservatively King’s net worth means he could never work another moment of his life, and he’s already enshrined as a legend.

Harper Lee is universally considered a great American novelist. Most can name her entire two book bibliography in one breath. Certainly, few joke that they require reminders films they love are based on her work.

At this point, King writes because he wants to write. He has a book coming out in September of 2023. And for over nine years, he’s used Twitter frequently, if not daily.

In other words, Stephen King, a wealthy, household-name author, has written for free on Twitter for nearly a decade.

Twitter is not a traditional publisher. But bird website shares a business model similar to that of all ads supported publishers. A circle that requires creators, advertisers, and consumers.

If content isn’t attracting consumers reach drops. If reach drops advertisers leave. If advertisers go away, the publication dies. All for the want of a horseshoe nail. For better or likely for worse that’s the grim reality of ads supported publishing.

So much of Twitter’s value is real celebrities choosing to use the site mostly unfiltered by communications teams, and agents. On Twitter, King and the many other legit celebrities who actively use the platform represent the kings and queens of the creator class. And every single one of them is effectively working for Twitter for the love of the game.

Twitter is the only large social network that doesn’t offer any form of ads revenue sharing with creators. Ice-T, Gwyneth Paltrow or Ryan Reynolds may successfully use Twitter to drive measurable sales of concert tickets, mobile phone service or vagina scented candles. But most of the creator class give far more to Twitter than they receive.

Ice-T has been going hard musically since the ’80s. He’s pre-Twitter, in fact, pre-internet. He’s filled venues for a long time. Now he has mainstream fame and assuredly a well-funded team to promote shows. Save for the odd brand deal that asks him to Tweet, Ice-T is on Twitter for fun.

King has less reason to use Twitter than nearly any celebrity. If King wanted to hit billionaire status, hiring some sharky MD from Goldman Sachs to run a family office is more efficient than writing. If He wanted to promote his next book, few publications on earth wouldn’t let him publish a personal essay about, well, anything he wanted, with a fat editors note that he’s promoting a forthcoming novel.

If King wrote an article for The New York Times it would undoubtedly be promoted across the Time’s Twitter, Facebook, Email, home page, Google News and the print addition. A distribution greater than the distribution for King’s own Twitter. King could write for AARP The Magazine and the Costco Connection and reach over 30 million more people in print. What’s more, no editor would turn down his article.

Citing my ad agency demon pedigree here, Twitter is a poor traffic driver for most publications. Social traffic for a typical publication is under 14% of all traffic. Search is the largest traffic source for publications normally over 55% of all traffic. Direct traffic people visiting is typically over 23% of total traffic.

Most of the traffic from social in the world of publications comes from Facebook. Across verticals Facebook is almost always over 40% of the traffic from social for a publication (something like 5.6% of total traffic). Twitter is charitably responsible for something like 20% of social referrals (2.8% of total traffic).

Those numbers are based on data I’ve looked at across a selection of sites, and very by topic. Crypto for example gets far more traffic from Twitter, and cooking media gets a lot of traffic from Pinterest. But on the average, Twitter is a modest portion of traffic for established publications.

Yet journalists and media types spend a lot of time on Twitter. Media types are a lower form of creator class than legit famous people, but they are needed for the ecosystem. Prior to Musk they were catered to, because the knight and bishop class were good for business.

The content of journalists, bloggers, podcasters and YouTubers backfills the content pathways celebrities leave vacant. This lower tier creator class also create content off of Twitter where they on average have far more distribution. The time these folks spend on Twitter is reflected off the site.

Twitter is linked to from virtually every page of every publication on the internet. The social network is shouted out in nearly every news, and entertainment broadcast often by media types who themselves ascended to true fame. The value of the media coverage and links Twitter’s received is absurd.

Twitter in part by design, but largely by network effect became the quote builder. Everyone from truly famous people to utter randos has the chance to have Tweets end up mentioned or embedded on a popular site. I’m closer to rando than famous, and a cursory search for my Tweets embedded in media sites shows Mediaite, BuzzFeed News, HuffPost, something called Sportskeeda and a dozen more.

The network effect serves to drive celebrities, and those in the media class to use Twitter more. The circle continues as celebrities attract normal people, and normal people attract brand dollars. Twitter became a customer support hub largely due to the size of the existing network, and that made the network effect stronger.

Whatever brain chemicals Stephen King gets from using Twitter is all he receives from his free work adding value to the platform. Since King has perhaps the fewest reasons to use Twitter of any famous person on earth, his happiness should literally be a Twitter success metric.

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on April 3, 2023. Disclosure at the time of publication, Mason Pelt is locked out of Twitter for being Elon Musk’s mother for several hours on March 31st.

The post Stephen King’s Happiness Is A Twitter Success Metric appeared first on Mason Pelt.

So ketamine is a dangerous drug. Alright, but what about alcohol?

So TikTok is a national security threat. Alright, what about Meta?

The declaration that one thing is unreconcilably bad and the other good or at least substantially less bad is based on little to no data.

In the congressional hearings about TikTok, most complaints from the U.S. ruling class apply to all social media platforms. The main complaints also apply to all major internet companies monetized from collecting consumer data. The claims of TikTok being a national security threat are much the same arbitrary arguments as what drugs are made illegal.

Ketamine, is an order of magnitude less harmful than alcohol. If you want to argue that fact, first check with any emergency medicine doctor or read the analyses of the Drug harms in the U.K paper, but I digress. My claim for TikTok is that it’s pretty much the same U.S. national security risk as Facebook and Google.

That TikTok is a Chinese company may pose some security risks to U.S. interests not posed by other popular apps. Shoshana Wodinsky created a list of all the unique crimes the company was accused of committing during the, to use a line from Reason Magazine, masturbatory display of political theater.

Very few accusations are unique to TikTok. But, to the extent that members of congress know about data brokers, I assume they feel the U.S. data brokers’ selling lists of all the closeted gay people, with cancer, taking anti depressants in Kentucky are good and clean. But first party data collection by the Chinese Communist Party is bad, and dirty. The drug harm-comparison analogy here is alcohol you distilled yourself versus GHB you made in your bathtub; both being less than ideal.

TikTok has blocked videos about human rights in China. That’s evil. However, heartless as is caveat will sound that wasn’t the point of the hearing. When questions about the censoring of content showing China’s crimes against the Uyghurs came up, it was to highlight TikTok’s power to manipulate public discourse even in the US.

But. This but is so big a Sir Mix-a-Lot song should play in the background for a fun homophone; The web has always been shaped by a handful of megacompanies.

I could point to the satellites and cables. But without examining the physical infrastructure making up the global internet’s plumbing, look at the sites people visit. Google, Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp make up much of many people’s internet experience. Most of the remaining time statistically is spent on 20 other large sites owned by a hand full of companies.

Once navigated via directories and cross-links, the web is now gobbled up by Google. The Big G controls the flow of information to an extent that for many websites a Google penalty means they don’t exist. When Google names its preferred way to syndicate content or add links to press releases, that becomes the correct way. 

Facebook became an easy place for news outlets to get traffic, the result is that seemingly every news outlet on earth promoted Facebook on every page. Media companies asked users to follow them on Facebook at the expense of building their email lists or native apps. Facebook now controls the reach of many media companies, frequently forcing them to pay Facebook to reach an audience they built for Facebook.

I love Techmeme; it’s an example of a curated feed site that used to be more common online. Techmeme succeeded despite following little of the conventional wisdom for SEO and social growth. Most sites like it failed, largely because Google, and Facebook killed them off.

The web was once fragmented, relying on open protocols. Over time power has been concentrated to fewer parties, mostly in closed systems. In my time online I’ve seen forums all but vanish, and RSS/Atom fall out of use.

Google Reader dominated the market for RSS readers from 2005 until Google killed it in 2013. Google’s tendency is to offer a free product, corner the market, build a new closed system, and kill off the free product leaving no viable competitors. Anyway, feel free to follow my blog on Google News.

As for forums, if all the forums of 2012 were owned by one large company, that company would have lobbied congress to have Facebook shut down. Monopolists like to kill off competitors. Killing can mean launching a competing product, or asking legislators to act as a weapon in the name of national security.

The concentration of control over information flow is concerning. Alphabet and Meta have killed off most of the curators. When AI starts to flood the web with spam, we will desperately miss the curators we lost.

Make no mistake Alphabet and Meta are monopolies. TikTok competes with them for eyeballs, and perhaps even as a search engine. Alphabet with YouTube shorts and Meta with Instagram and Facebook reels have tried to compete with TikTok, but are hardly winning. It’s weird that Meta ended it’s Reels Play bonus program only after congress started foaming at the mouth over the idea of banning TikTok.

To the extent that TikTok poses a risk to U.S. interests, it’s the fear that a new Mr. Monopoly will dance into our hearts, and do to U.S. monopolies what they have done to everyone else since the dawn of the web. This doesn’t’ make TikTok good. But heed my message; every player is cheating.

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in MasonPelt.com on March 30, 2023. Photo: “Old Man Monopoly DJing on Elizabeth & Prince NYC” by dpstyles is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

The post TikTok, Drugs, Congress, and Monopoly appeared first on Mason Pelt.

Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes, and Charlie Javice share a few things in common. They all seem to have committed fraud; though a court of law convicted only Homes at the time of writing. The three are also Forbes ’30 Under 30′ Alumni.

Forbes is the best in the business at monetizing frauds on the way up and later on the way down. Javice was the CEO of a startup called Frank that JPMorgan Chase acquired in large part because of the over 4 million users the company boasted. The best coverage of JPMorgan Chase’s lawsuit claiming Frank only had 300,000 real users and created 4.265 million fake customer records to satisfy due diligence is in Forbes.

Holmes was found guilty on four of 11 fraud charges as the founder of the fake blood-testing startup Theranos. She received an 11-year prison sentence. Forbes has published many articles covering the trial, the sentencing, and the analysis of what went wrong. Just as they once happily propped Holmes up as some business and technical thought leader.

Bankman-Fried, once propped up by fawning media coverage in Forbes, now graces the pages with words about his probable fraud with FTX and Alameda Research. These paragraphs are becoming monotonous.

Forbes made money with articles, building up these fraudsters without critical analysis. The media juggernaut now makes money writing about the frauds, which were at least partly made possible by the endowment of trust from Forbes.

In an article I wrote in 2020 about fake gurus, I talked about Sam Ovens, a man who aggressively marketed a course teaching people to run businesses. The courses were advertised as teaching how to create a “wildly profitable” consulting business even if you don’t have any tech skills or previous business experience. It sounds like a scam on the surface, and with further analysis, it looks more like a scam.

In 2017, Sam Ovens made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia: Industry, Manufacturing & Energy list. Ovens was from New Zealand, selling the secrets to earning six figures. His company had offices in Dublin and New York City. Why was he on a list for manufacturing in Asia?

Forbes doesn’t just make money from Ads and subscriptions; they will sell you a chance to write for Forbes. As I showed in the older article, I paid nearly $2,000 to join one of the Forbes Councils.

The primary benefit of joining a Forbes Council is being able to write for Forbes. Forbes Councils are differentiated from the staff writers and contributors. But Forbes (along with other large publications) has already had problems with contributors selling placements.

My digi-pal Jon Christian wrote an expose about Forbes link selling years ago. He didn’t cover the full extent of how bad the link selling was and still is in premium publications. He’s a reporter and an ethical one.

I’m a demon at an ad agency. Until I started Tweeting about the links people offered to sell me, I was getting offers to buy articles in publications like Inc, Entrepreneur, and Forbes. Years back, a friend’s company traded video production work for an article from a Forbes contributor. The post was deleted, so I won’t out anyone, but backroom deals happen.

In my professional context as ad agency demon, reporters and editors largely view my submissions with skepticism. I’d have less of a microscope on me were I just a freelance writer. That’s probably why I often notice “freelance” reporters covering PR firms’ clients from contributor bylines at Forbes (and others).

I’ve written about Spring Free EV, because of the comical way the startup chose to breach a contract with Push ROI, my agency. But they are uninteresting as startups go. I’d be shocked if they’ve had even $1 million in total revenue, and the most popular Tweet about them is me mocking Ev Williams for investing.

Hey, @ev as you are an investor in a startup that breached a contract with my firm and refused to pay the fees they committed themselves to, I must ask; Do you just generally believe contracts do not matter? https://t.co/8e71ArHnWS

But (and my citations will be careful here) when apparently working with VSC, a PR firm Spring Free EV gained three articles written by two Forbes contributors, two by Brad Templeton, and one by Anne Field. I’m not accusing anyone of paying for placements. Still, three articles by Forbes contributors about a company I didn’t sue because they seemed to have no assets or revenue is odd.

This article may read as an attack on Forbes. But I’m not saying to disregard every article they’ve published. I happily cited a Forbes contributor in a recent article about media literacy. Because I don’t think Forbes is faking Elon Musk quotes.

I am critical of the business model and the often low-quality articles churned out by unpaid contributors, or worse, contributors paying for the privilege of publishing. Forbes is not the only offender, but they are, in my assessment, the biggest.

I have an article about how weak due diligence and lack of negative media coverage for early-stage startups create the people like Bankman-Fried, Holmes, and Javice. Forbes is an almost perfect place to publish the article, but it’s a place I will never submit to because, all things considered, I’m not credible enough to survive writing for Forbes.

Article by Mason Pelt of Push ROI. First published in PushROI.com on January 17, 2023.

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