Martech: A Bad Romance
Mark Grether, CEO of the ad server Sizmek was on stage giving a keynote about our new “why” as a company, a la Simon Sinek. He had been trying to figure out our purpose and mission for years. “We are here” he said, “to keep the internet free”. We were at a 2019 sales conference. It was a brisk February day, perfect weather for Las Vegas just two months before Sizmek would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The year before was a whirlwind. I had spent 2018 on stage doing keynote speeches, moderating panels, and being an AI luminary. Grether had promoted me to being the company’s Chief Visionary - an evangelist role that I was grateful for, although I still cringe at the title’s pretentiousness today. This likely ended up being one of the main reasons why I was let go along with a few hundred other employees during the bankruptcy, quickly classified as an expendable luxury item.
I was already checked out. Sizmek had acquired Rocket Fuel in 2017- the adtech unicorn that had a $3.2b valuation in 2013 when it went public then turned into an Icarus cautionary tale after it acquired the data management platform company, X+1 in 2014. When Sizmek bought Rocket Fuel I was running the AI innovation lab, The Rocket Fuel Institute as managing director as the time.
I had direct experience in the famous Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2015-16, at the peak of the firm’s campaign initiatives with Trump—which has been well-documented and is the subject of the popular Netflix film, The Great Hack. This experience shaped my current media theories on AI data ethics, surveillance capitalism, and the future of humanity. This is what drives my conviction in media arts and digital communication.
With over two decades of experience in cultivating the most powerful AI technologies, building teams, and leading AI research projects, I have a unique interdisciplinary perspective in digital media arts and communication, and its impact on society and geopolitics. I realize now that I’m only able to achieve this perspective having worked with the best and the brightest in the trenches of Silicon Valley culture. Even though these technologies brought convenience and a flurry of opportunities for growth, some significant underlying factors amplified consumerism’s dark side and fed its appetite—which is the premise of my research.
The Rocket Fuel years were joyful and invigorating, despite the company’s bad press due to the lack of transparency. Agency clients and the press criticized Rocket Fuel founders for hubris. I joined Rocket Fuel in 2012—at the peak of its successful run right before the IPO. Several years of fast spending and a decline in the managed service business would lead the company to a distressed sale. Some excesses included a private suite at Madison Square Garden, excessive sales conferences at the Ritz Carlton in Mexico and Puerto Rico. Despite having the best AI in the space, the company was in trouble. By the time I was at Sizmek, I not only stopped drinking the Kool Aid. I was completely put off by my entire industry category—advertising and marketing platforms that automated the optimization of digital business outcomes for brands and enterprises.
I landed an amazing job at the AI tech unicorn company, Rocket Fuel, in which I also rose up the ranks quickly, from being a Director of Emerging Media Strategy to being the Managing Director of Rocket Fuel’s Innovation and Media Lab, where I led a team of data engineers, researchers, and solution architects to extract insights from over a hundred petabytes of online observations—including a consumer behavior study on red and blue states. I also led research initiatives on artificial intelligence’s impact on the future of experiences, work, ethics, capitalism, and the symbiosis of humanity and technology in the cognitive era. I published over a dozen whitepapers on AI’s impact across a variety of industries, created curriculum for thought leadership, enterprise enablement strategies, and a vast amount of business consulting frameworks to help leaders navigate an increasingly complex future at the intersection of planetary-scale computation, consumption, and economics.
My job at Sizmek was to get people excited about the future of marketing with AI. My thought leadership’s aim for clients to infer that Sizmek was a leader in AI-powered marketing. Only there were two big problems—I was no longer excited about marketing, and I was definitely not excited about Sizmek. But something more interesting started to happen. I was still very much entrenched in building AI products. I was tasked with turning about 300b daily marketing observations into research insights—one of which was a study on the consumer purchases of republicans and democrats across geographic regions. In addition, I began to research AI’s impact on various industry categories Rocket Fuel was pursuing—financial services and banking, retail and CPG, healthcare, automative, and more. I wrote over a dozen whitepapers on AI. I was getting invited to speak at conferences and private events. I began to build my career as a public intellectual.
bottom-feeding behavior: the PROGRAMMATIC ADTECh ecosystem
The reason why I developed a distaste for my industry was because of this idea of ‘keeping the internet free’. Sizmek in my opinion was doing its part to keep the internet free through ads and perpetual user engagement. I had an epiphany. Digital advertising kept the web free by keeping it shitty. The value exchange between users, brands, and tech platforms was no longer equal.
The problem with adtech cannot ultimately be blamed on companies like Sizmek or the people that work there. The problem is systemic unfortunately. And unless you see things from a design-thinking perspective, it’s hard to unravel the interdependencies of a much more significant trend—the accelerating pace of digital transformation and machine-driven automation. The problem is that the web has evolved into an accidental megastructure that Benjamin Bratton calls, The Stack—a system that has created a fragmented tapestry of interweaving attributes, changing the way sovereignty is administered, how identity is managed, and how data is governed.
The adtech industry has fed into the platform explosion but has maintained some of the worst aspect of the American advertising complex—a world that offers some contributions to culture, but really exists to maintain consumerism. Adtech players—ad servers, data providers, demand side platforms, supply-side solutions—all provide a service or solution, often to help marketers alleviate complexity to drive better performance, but often cause the very complexity they seek to weed out.
Advertising has become a thorn in the butts of user experience. In another post, I explore the problem with personalization. Personalization has been an over-used buzzword like digital transformation, but doesn’t actually care about the needs of individual users. From Google and Facebook’s perspective, they only care about their users in the context of the data they provide to inform predictive models for marketers. The brands that advertise on Google and Facebook only care about personalization within the framework of their journey to buy their respective products. People are only as important to them as their propensity to buy those products, how often, and how much incremental revenue will help grow their business.
Digital advertising has evolved into a $500b dollar industry—with Google and Facebook capturing almost 90% of market share to display ads to customers, reach their in contexts in which they would be most receptive to purchase signals, and modify their behavior to serve the stakeholders that control the mass medium. What does that make companies that then help to add dozens of digital solutions to bolster performance? The thousands of companies that compete for 10% of market share? Bottom feeders.
I respect company’s that have figured out ways to capitalize on the needs of marketers. I know how difficult it is to create, run, and grow companies that actually turn a profit and keep employees paid and happy. I just wish that these business leaders would focus on more ambitious business plans. But digging deeper into this issue reveals again a system problem that goes deeper than adtech and martech. And I refuse to vilify the individuals. I have dear friends at these companies, I don't think this is a matter of bad people who've done a bad thing. I think this is a matter of a globally tragic, astoundingly ridiculous mistake, rather than a wave of evil. But this mistake has created systemic repercussions.
from big data to media theory
My new long-term research goals and my unique interdisciplinary experience as an AI researcher has extensive expertise in media arts, technology transformation, business, and cognitive cultural change as a result of digital disruption and the emergence of artificial intelligence.
My career in media and communication has been robust. I received my B.A. Communication from the University of the Pacific in 2000. My first job out of college was working as an account executive for one of the largest media companies in Asia, ABS-CBN International. I also worked as a producer and journalist for soft and hard news programs, as well as producing commercials for ABS-CBN clients. I also produced a short film noir that screened in competition at the Sundance film festival. I ended up leading ABS-CBN’s interactive division just as things were heating up in the dot.com era. This experience gave me a strong foundation in media business and production, while piquing my interest in innovation and the cosmological effects of technology transformation.
This led me to a series of startup endeavors—all of which were at the intersection of media, data, technology, and customer experiences. I grew fascinated at how the best and the brightest in Silicon Valley were being recruited to optimize attention, engagement, and business outcomes. I learned how to build businesses both poorly and successfully. Working in the media technology space made me more cognizant of how social media impacted our behavior, and how it evolved to become the dominant form of mass communication. I began to develop theories on cognition, creativity, and innovation. While working for a media agency I was able to get an MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco. My thesis explored the intrinsic properties of innovation from a design thinking perspective that integrated cognition with principles in physics and marketing. Several versions later, my book, Mindshare, was published in 2012, by MotionPub—which received the USA Best Book Award that year.
In my new work-in-progress book, Aion: On Human Potential, I explore progress through a kaleidoscopic portrayal of the self, her role in the future of humanity, and what it means to live in an increasingly more simulated and cognitive world. The book is a comprehensive design brief in the spirit of Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack, and brings together a culmination of perspectives on technology transformation, social psychology, philosophy, quantum mechanics, and macroeconomics. My hope is that it will help readers navigate the world with more confidence by understanding the hidden forces and interdependencies of various physical, digital, and socio-economic systems. These underlying principles should guide us toward abundance or lead to our ultimate demise.
Today I am involved with numerous technology ventures. I am the co-founder of DialIN — which represents the culmination of my career successes, as well as its failures. DialIN represents an entirely new approach to user data sovereignty, and a completely multi-dimensional media experience. All this purging on the martech space and my experience has led me here. I’ve never been more fulfilled and confident about my journey to transform the world, while enjoying the pains and pleasures to the bone.