“Algorithms can’t do the job alone,” Jimmy Iovine, ex-CEO of Beats and newly minted Apple executive, said when talking about how the alchemical arithmetic that determine Google’s search results, Facebook’s newsfeed, and the ads served along with them, works to a point but getting any better needs the consumer’s active involvement.
Marketers of all ilks – but especially those in the mobile and online space – would be wise to heed Iovine’s words. Treating online branding as an art form that requires a human touch to drive response rates isn’t a passing fad or going the way of the 8-track tape. Infact, it’s absolutely critical.
Unlike music, however, which Iovine and now all of Apple believe is best curated by objective experts, the best ad curator for consumers are consumers.
The likes of Google, Facebook and Bing spend a huge amount of their R&D investments each year with the hope of making their algorithms more human. The goal is taking the data generated by billions of users each day and trying to distill it down to the personal level.
The music industry has taken a similar approach with the transformation spanning the last decade, from downloads and fast-growing streaming services like Pandora, Spotify and YouTube to Internet radio.
But the science of prediction can go only so far, especially when the content being presented crosses the line from information to art. Unlike Google and Bing, which envision organizing the world’s information (one could include the NSA in this group), Apple wants to give you the things you love in the most efficient manner possible while controlling –or at least guiding—the user experience.
As Tim Cook, Apple CEO, said in response to a question about the Beats acquisition, “We’ve always loved music and believed…that it could transcend language, culture…and produce emotions and deep feelings that other things can’t.
“Beats had the insight early on to know how important human curation is. That technology by itself wasn’t enough—that it was the marriage of the two that would really be great and produce a feeling in people that we want to produce.”
So the growth engine in this acquisition is the streaming service, Beats Music.
Streaming is like owning your own radio station, as the confluence of ever more powerful smartphones, increasing network bandwidth, and cheap cloud storage drive the creation of an efficient access economy replacing the more cumbersome ownership economy. The difference between Beats/Apple and the Spotifies of the world is the curation of the music by industry experts with the scalability of algorithmic customization at the user level. It’s like having your algorithm trained by DJs.
Advertising is on a similar precipice of change. Big Data has not delivered on its promise of higher ad relevance. Edward Snowden’s revelations have introduced data privacy into mainstream conversation. And the vast majority of advertisers still have no idea how best to leverage that ubiquitous and most private modern device, smartphones.
It’s time to let consumers power marketing by giving them the means to guide the algorithms that serve them, allowing online advertising to produce that feeling in consumers that makes them respond.
