Prologue
I was born and raised in a place that’s famous for how cold it gets during the winter. It’s been said this location became a hotbed for creative people as they have nothing better to do than to sit inside and be creative while it freezes from October to May.
I moved away from Minneapolis a few times personally and professionally (Silicon Valley, Europe, Asia). While it may have dimmed my artistic sensibilities to get away from my peers, it also made me think more sensibly.
Before I left my creative cocoon, I was great at thinking things up, but not always thinking them through. I soon realized companies like the FAANGs (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Microsoft) were all about the latter. Today the FAANGs still exist to determine the intent of an online query so that it can be directed to an answer that makes them the most money. It’s usually the right answer for the consumer too.
As the technologist Shelly Palmer puts it “Google is not a search engine. It is an advertising engine rigged to put the right ad in front of the right person at the right time to optimize revenue for Google. Other considerations are secondary.:
This book is focused on how to avoid paying the new “Advertising Man” to generate awareness. This does not mean you can avoid paying for great work. Viral ideas concocted over beers are not sophisticated enough for Silicon Valley.
We are afraid you will have to generate campaign driven content that is likely (but not exclusively) created by advertising professionals. You’ll simply use it in a way that optimizes revenue for someone other than Google.
Which is not easily accomplished.
Particularly if you believe the world is rigged.
Sages and Surprises
In this environment, the first goal of a marketer should be to understand, by fiber and strand, how this new online net affects brand awareness. Because now it really doesn’t matter what you think, it matters what they think, so you must think things through.
But it doesn’t always work that way.
This is because we are the product for the FAANGs. When something is freely provided and then financed by an ingenious advertising scheme you are always their product. They need to have every detail of your life and business posted online to make them money.
Lately, however, people are beginning to unstock themselves from these Silicon Valley shelves. Better yet, more than one of these digital Paladins has looked deeply into their inventory and realized that a lot of it is fake.
Before you concoct a FAANG extortion scheme with your Facebook profile realize that they still police every path you must travel to build awareness. If you want to get anywhere with your brand, therefore, you need to understand the new rules of the road.
While the FAANGs are primarily advertising vehicles they still curate content organically. Their spyders are constantly crawling for “hotspots” of activity and “evergreen” or purely organic activities as well as “high value” conversations and interactions between real people (not robots).
Because of this, we believe the more rigged, inauthentic or just plain fake content grows online, the more FAANGs will reward the opposite kind of content—as they are already doing—to the chagrin of their advertisers.
Without being married to someone named Sergey, Mark, Tim, Jeff or Satya, it is impossible to know precisely what this “opposite: kind of content is.
Awareness Without Advertising, Vol 1 . Available on Amazon and optimized for Kindle.