The Four

it—they didn’t aspire to the same products and services. Social
targeting was a failure.
The new marketing is behavioral targeting. And it works: nothing
can predict your future purchases like your current activities. If I’m on
the Tiffany website, and I have searched for engagement rings, and I
have set up an appointment to purchase such a ring at a certain
boutique, that likely means I am about to get married. If I’m spending
a ton of time on the Audi site configuring an A4, then I am in the
market for a $30,000 to $40,000 four-door luxury sedan.
Thanks to artificial intelligence we now can track behavior at a
level and scale previously unimaginable. It’s no accident when I start
getting served Audi ads all over the web. Behavioral targeting is now
the white meat of marketing. The ability to attach behavior to specific
identities is the quiet war taking place in media.
There is still a long way to go. I am (as I write this) on a plane from
Munich (to Bangkok), where I spoke at the immensely enjoyable DLD
conference. DLD is essentially a hip Davos, where followers of the
religion of innovation pilgrimage to Munich to worship at the feet of
our modern-day apostles—Kalanick, Hastings, Zuckerberg, Schmidt,
etc. I can’t, obviously, compete with those guys. So, my strategy for
getting more attendance and more YouTube views of my talk at DLD?
I don a wig and (no joke) dance. I don’t play fair—the basis of all good
strategy.
In sum, my business strategy message boils down to “What can
you do really well that is also really hard?”
First, I say something in my talks. I highlight that Apple is the
largest tax avoider in the world because lawmakers treat it like the hot
girl on campus—if she pays a little attention to them, they swoon and
are willing to enter into an abusive relationship. I say that Uber is
fomenting an ethos in business that’s terrible for society. Four
thousand Uber employees and their investors will split $80 billion (or
more) as the 1,600,000 drivers working for Uber will see their wages
crash to a level that makes them the working poor. We used to admire
firms that created hundreds of thousands of middle- and upper-class
jobs; now our heroes are firms that produce a dozen lords and
hundreds of thousands of serfs.