We are all familiar in some form with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In it, a mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, seeks to bring life to a reconstructed dead man. He succeeds, but ultimately unleashes a horror and a monster he could have never imagined. A dream of dubious origins that creates not only a miserable creature but a creature that reaps misery and revenge on mankind. Science gone horribly wrong.
Some may know the impressive origins of the story, written by a 16-year-old woman as part of a “horror story contest” between four writers (she clearly won.) Fewer probably know that a pretext for her story was a fascination of her 18th-century age. In a time of a great many premature deaths from a myriad of diseases and plagues, many people and scientists were fascinated by the question, “Could life be restored once lost?”
It was a viewpoint abhorred by the Church who thought only God should give and take life but a curious fascination of those who had lost loved ones or feared for their own mortality. Could science reverse the greatest fear of all? Could something too good to be true be made true?
Shelley’s novel has many critical reviews and discussions but the one I find most intriguing is it was a warning against The State. Give the State, or a megalomaniac, too much power and we would see all the beauty of the real world destroyed because no man or woman is God. The by evils of too much power in the hands of too few who truly Did Not Know.
This naturally brings me to the Advertising Business and its fascination with MarTech and all things data, AI, and too-good-to-be-true hyperbole. Advertising has been doing the Frankenstein Metamorphosis since at least the mid-1980s.
At that time, we began to see the evolution of The Holding Companies. Huge profit centers that bought up brand names and portfolios and crudely sewed them together into “Integrated Marketing Cross-Functional Under-One-Roof answers to a Post Cold War Global Economy.”
Right. As ludicrous as this sounds to anyone with their feet planted firmly on the ground, this megalomaniacal strategy appealed to Megalomaniacal Businesspeople who envisioned their brands of toilet paper, fast food burgers, and electronic devices being The Brand for The Whole World. “We’ve done this for you in the free world.
Now imagine what we can do if we can get to all those ex-communists!” As dumb as this premise was and is, it made a whole lot of Dr. Frankensteins very, very, very rich. The creatives who made the ideas that sold the products? Not so much. Bonuses went away, stock options largely disappeared, jobs followed. To the Holding Companies this didn’t matter. The creators weren’t the brand, The Agency Under the Holding Company was. The copywriters and art directors (who were always a pain anyways) could be replaced by newer, cheaper, more naïve new hires. Few of the Villagers were much the wiser.
Could it get worse? Yes, much, and it did. The internet and social media and user-data entered the picture. So did the New Dr. Frankensteins, who promised they could harness this data, make sense out of it, have the data drive the messaging for the platforms and indeed…soon have no use for the pain-in-the-ass, critical-thinking creative problem solvers at all.
The messages could be made by bots, sent out by bots, more info collected by bots, bots selling to Unique Customer Numbers (the new name for the villagers), it was a Bot’s World. More like botulism. An unholy mess of poison and rot.
REELated:
Look at almost any agency website and they’ll bellow about their “data-driven creativity” and “capabilities to capture data and create insights” that “harness the power of technology to immerse the consumer in your brand.” Jargon for “bullshit.” This just can’t be done. Unless you consider a half-percentage point click-open rate on your CRM email amazing.
Insights are by definition “the capacity to gain a deep intuitive understanding of a person.” A mysterious talent that is human and as mysterious as the creation of life itself. It will never, it CAN never, be generated by The State or a mad doctor no matter what anyone or any hogwash-infused website proclaims.
A rich data entrepreneur once told me “Data is the oil of the Information Age.” I replied, “Then I hope the Information Age lasts about as long as disco.” Data sucks. The capturing of it willy-nilly should be illegal, as should be the selling of it (think of your Unique ID as a slave, sold to the highest bidder to do work and build their fortune. Sound good?)
Data was collected on suspected terrorists in similar ways after 9/11 and caused an uproar. “How could citizens’ lives and privacy be taken this way by The State?” Use it to catch terrorists and people get mad. Use it to sell orange juice or ultra-mega light beer and the same crowd is down with it. At least until they are all unemployed, I guess.
Frankenstein is alive and well, he just goes by Don or Donna Draper now. He or she is The State, and they want to sell you, crush you, and eliminate your job. Unless the true critical thinkers stand up and say, “We’ve had more than enough.” Then Frankenstein becomes as dead as disco.
John Immesoete is an award-winning copywriter, CD and CCO. He is also an avowed “Datheist,” having unfortunately been born with a mind of his own. He is currently freelancing, writing a book, selling cars, and hoping to join a shop that knows real advertising from data-driven drivel.
