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Facebook have developed and employ and now sell
vatious technological solutions
to advertisers.
At the heart of this,
at the heart of all of these computer driven algorithms,
is the notion that we will target individuals.,
the users of Facebook with certain messages.
Targeted advertising is the future of advertising, the days of,
kind of, broad brush
television advertising, whilst it's still
an effective tool, it has been rendered less affective by the proliferation
of digital channels.
Advertisers now seek to buy
and to ensure that their
branded messages appear in line with
with user behaviour.
So that's the principle.
Technically, how Facebook does that, technically how all computer algorithms
do that,
is via a series of quantifiable metrics, so what they're doing really is
they are counting things
and they are putting those things into buckets. For example, the pages that you
like,
the friends that you are friends with,
the things that you are talking about etcetera. Things that you can
quantify.
In a recent case with a Unilever brand that seeks to target women,
Facebook technology was employed
which counted quantifiable metrics,
one of which being the pages that were being viewed,
and when the
when the individual viewed that page,
the
algorithm decided to display
this brand's message.
The problem with this
is that quantifiable metrics are very good and they're very useful,
but what they don't do is understand context.
So in this case, what the machine could not do, and in fact, what machines can never do,
is understand the context
in which language is being employed, in this case, use of the word women.
So you get the
situation whereby targeted adverts are appearing on a page
which, for humorous reasons,
appears to promote violence towards women.
This for a brand who have spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last five years
supporting, in their words, real women.
And that's the risk to advertisers.
In our opinion, sadly, this was always inevitable.
And the reasons for that are two-fold.
Firstly, another pause for thought issue.
Senior executives
need to understand that it's never been easier to do
stuff. It's never been easier to execute on tactical initiatives. But that's not
the issue.
The issue is that these tactical initiatives need to hang together under a
well-thought out,
well-planned strategic direction.
The second factor is we must be alive to the capability gaps in technological
solutions.
Yes, technology is very good, but the difference between quantifiable metrics,
i.e. counting things, which machines are very good at, and qualitative metrics, i.e. the
understanding of context,
how human beings employ language, why they employ it, what's behind particular
decisions that they make, computers are
traditionally very bad at.
Let's recognise what technology is good at, let's recognise where the
capability gaps are, and let's plug those capability gaps.
The biggest opportunity afforded to senior executives,
by which I mean board-level executives,
chief executives,
by social media, is the ability to understand consumers,
to research markets,
to underpin your product life cycle management, new product development
and customer experience development
with unstructured, unsolicited, real behaviour.
That leads us to the first principle when dealing with social media at a
senior level.
To senior stakeholders, social media is not a broadcast channel, or number of
broadcast channels.
It is a medium via which they can understand their consumers and potential
consumers better.
So for chief executives who are running companies in highly
customer-centric businesses, retail,
financial services, insurance,
tech telco, etcetera,
this is
the richest source of customer insight
leading to, and business intelligence, leading to
strategy
that is available.
The skill sets needed to understand
this data, at a tactical and strategic level, are different to the ones that are
currently available in the mainstream. There are a number of
boutique organisations and academic research organisations who are pioneering in this
in this field. We are one.
So, viewing social media
as a way to understand consumers
is the first principle.
It is not a broadcast channel, it is a way to understand consumers
and markets.
And the second principle is
the pause for thought principal.
Again, it has never been easier to
issue tactical directives and to execute
on a suite of tactical initiatives. Why are we doing things?
What's the objective?
What does success look like?