My mother texted me at ten o'clock on a Sunday night. She had just finished a documentary on Netflix and she wanted to know, gently, whether the thing in the documentary was my job.
It is not, exactly. I do brand strategy. But I have sat in the room next door to the room in that documentary, and I have watched a media planner walk a client through lookalike audiences while the client nodded along, warmly, without understanding a single word of what had been described to him.
That client now has a spouse who has watched The Social Dilemma.
The documentary did not teach anybody how targeting works. It gave a lot of people permission to say out loud that targeting makes them uneasy, and that permission is now sitting in your kickoff meetings.
I fielded the question twice last week, both times from marketers who have approved the same media plan four years running without blinking, and both times phrased as a joke. Neither time was it a joke.
Here is the part that gets lost. The discomfort is not about precision. Nobody is upset that an ad found them. They are upset that they cannot see the machine that found them, and they have quietly decided that the person presenting in the meeting is the machine's representative. If you are the strategist on that call, congratulations, you are the representative.
So, three things.
One. Learn the difference between what you do and what the platform does, and be able to say it in one sentence. You build the argument. The platform decides who hears it. Those are two different jobs with two different sets of ethics, and clients cannot tell them apart unless you tell them.
Two. Have a position before anyone asks for one. In July, Patagonia and The North Face and Ben & Jerry's pulled their Facebook spend, and whatever you make of the outcome, the useful part was that they already knew what they believed. The brands that spent a week drafting an answer looked exactly like brands that had never thought about it.
Three. Stop using the word data as a shrug. Data is not weather. Somebody chose the signals, somebody built the segment, somebody wrote the exclusion, and somebody signed off. When you say the data told us, you are laundering a decision a person made, and everyone on the call can now hear you doing it.
Stop using the word data as a shrug.
I wrote my mother a long answer, deleted most of it, and sent the short one. Truffles was asleep across the keyboard by then and Barnaby was watching the cursor blink like it owed him money. Neither of them had a follow-up question, which was the best part of my week.