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.
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. Their spiderbots constantly seek “hotspots” of activity—particularly “evergreen” or purely organic activities, 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” content should be. Conventional wisdom would tell you that it is stuff that is more useful, relevant and actionable.
But this is simply the old approach of sucking up to all these guys (where are the women?) precisely when they’ve suggested you do otherwise. Our antennae in Silicon Valley point to “other content” that will deliver precisely what their algorithmic machines simply won’t do. They want you, the brand, to surprise people.
The Silicon Valley sage George Gilder elaborates on this, citing the latest insights in information theory. “Information is surprise. If it wasn’t surprising, we wouldn’t need it. However useful they may be, machines are not minds. Human minds can generate counterfactuals, imaginative flights, dreams. By contrast, a surprise in a machine is a breakdown. You don’t want surprising outcomes from your machines!”
The FAANGs are aware of their machines’ limitations and are aggressively working to neutralize things through Artificial Intelligence (AI). While they may never become “creative minds,” we know FAANG machines are being trained to become more inquisitive. Which makes it theoretically possible to grow awareness with conversations that that engage their artificially enhanced curiosity.
From my new book "Awareness Without Advetising. The New Art & Science of Brand Advocacy." Publication date 11-15-2018.