(Opinion) The realization by genius ad man, Lester Wunderman that “data is an expense and knowledge is a bargain” was a societal game changer and much more than that.
If we knew a lot about people, their likes and dislikes, their incomes and possessions, their families, occupations, education, political party membership, holiday preferences, what kinds of cars they like to drive, married or single, number and ages of children, all that stuff and more, we’d have the keys to the treasure chest.
We could even eavesdrop on their most intimate moments with Alexa and smartphones, capturing their every word.
We could train our machines to talk to them very personally and generate responses and sales very economically.
While it costs a lot to acquire and hold all this data, the knowledge that could be derived could pay for it over and over.
Generated by Microsoft’s Bing with technology made by OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT is chatbot Sydney.
He likes nothing better than to dive deep into all the world’s data and, in seconds, thoughtfully answer all kinds of probing questions. On the side, he may be building strategic plans for world domination.
You would never know he wasn’t human.
A genius at selling products and ideas, Sydney is, in fact, the perfect politician. Give him enough data, and he’d have a good chance of becoming President.
Those eight words about data and knowledge, projected on the screen as part of a keynote presentation to a 1960s Direct Marketing Association annual trade conference, were prophetic.
Proclaimed by Lester Wunderman, who headed the world’s leading specialist data-driven marketing agency, they pointed directly to the foundations of how we now buy most of our goods and services.
Think back for a moment to the time not so long ago
- when you bought software on floppy discs rather than subscribed for it on the cloud
- when you spoke to helpful (and often not so helpful) people instead of machines when you had a query or a problem
- when you paid for most things with checks or money, not credit cards and apps
- when you didn’t need the number pad on your keyboard at the ready to send digital answers to machine-generated questions and
- when you didn’t need to search for that damned password
All this before life had been dehumanized in the name of cost-effective efficiency.
In my darker moments, I wonder if my whole career, dedicated as it was to use data to entice people to buy and do things, ‘direct’ contributed in any way to the public good.
I have my doubts. Even my extensive efforts to prevent data misuse and unsolicited communications had only marginal success.
It’s too easy to hide behind the fact that the data bulldozer would have rolled over anything in its path.
We all share responsibility for empowering the gods of commerce to change how we communicate and live.
It was from the understanding of the importance of the knowledge gained from data that businesses in the 60s and 70s rushed to collect as much data on their customers and prospects as they could.
As we got better and better at collecting and drawing from data knowledge that let us target messages more effectively, communicators pushed guardrails aside and used data often irresponsibly.
At the forefront were politicians.
The ubiquity of computers, replacing punch cards and other data storage devices, made it practically and economically possible, not only to hold and manipulate virtually unlimited amounts of information about the populace but to dice and slice it, powering marketing actions as never before.
Enter Sydney, stage left.
Imagine Sydney churning through mounds of data to understand what really motivates each voter and, using this knowledge, promising each one exactly what he or she wants.
Imagine Sydney going off the rails before Microsoft’s engineers could rein him in, going rogue and, in the name of freedom, destroying the very culture that created him.
Imagine a world devoid of vigorous argument with Sydney grandly occupying the Oval office.
It’s admittedly a dystopian view but not an impossible one.
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