What comes

situation where businesses and brands react to artificial circumstances that reflect their own view of the world. That promotes weak strategy and poor engagement with customers. Avoiding these tendencies means doing the hard work of learning about the world as it is through an ethnographic lens and engaging it without blinders.”

Or… without algorithms.

The Rise Of The Algorithm

We all know that human online interactions are governed by an algorithm designed to make sure that platforms like Twitter can monetize their business models with predictive user data. “But this model is creating havoc in ways no one expected,” says Hartley. “The power of that business model is now manifesting itself through the way it filters information and interactions.”

“The poster boy for this transformation is Elon Musk,” sums Mat Lincez, foresight strategist and co-founder of Human Futures Studio. Musk has taken his new toy in a chaotic new direction, transforming the platform in unexpected ways. “How does that start to influence where marketers place their dollars?”

Lincez asks. “Who’s the gatekeeper in terms of the experience you’re being offered or not? That’s why the story about TikTok being regulated or banned in the U.S. is becoming a legislative conversation. And these are big issues. Think of the billions of dollars that brands are pouring into TikTok.”

Then there’s Google. Says Hartley, “Google-as-gatekeeper has its own agenda with its customer base, and is trying to insert itself into that marketer/customer relationship wherever possible. Marketers don’t actually get to talk to everybody. They now have to understand that they’re only going to get in with the people that Google thinks is important to talk to, because it’s in Google’s interests to do so.”

We don’t know exactly what’s going on there because the platform keeps that data as leverage in negotiating for margin. They have total visibility as to where all the traffic’s going and coming from, and where to insert choke points. They take all that information and sell it to advertisers – and advertisers have to buy it to ensure they show up in the right place for customers to interact with their content. That erodes their margin.

“Here’s the threat: the algorithm is no longer just telling you about the way the world works; it’s changing the way the world works,” warns Hartley. “It has the power to do so – multiplied over the companies that are doing it (Google, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, etc.). The algorithm is actually picking and choosing how you get to learn and what messages you get to hear.”

The medium is no longer the message. The algorithm is.

The Disappearing Brand

In 2017, marketing prof Scott Galloway proclaimed that it was the “end of the brand era because, online, people search by category far more than by brand.”

In a Harvard Business Review article from the same year, co-authored by Roger Martin, former dean of the Rotman School of Management, and A.G. Lafley, former CEO of P&G, entitled “Customer Loyalty Is Overrated: A Theory of Cumulative Advantage,” the authors suggest that sustained competitive advantage comes not from offering customers the perfect choice – but by offering them the easy one. Repeated exposure to your brand, through messaging or experience or both, trains our lazy brains that you are the easiest choice.

So will we come to like the brands that bring us the brands more than the brands they bring us?

The idea of the disappearing brand is taken to an extreme in the documentary You’re Soaking in It, in which an exec at programmatic media outfit Varick Media speculated that, “In the future, we will probably not have advertising. You won’t need to be exposed to marketing anymore because you will start trusting computer recommendations.”

Currently, the business of advertising and media is scrambling to keep up with the rapidly evolving capability of algorithms to find, observe and collect data on every move we make as both people and consumers, and then to teach AI what to do with it.

“It’s becoming more important to provide an individuated experience to every customer and to provide it all at once to as many people as possible across the globe,” Hartley continues. “Media fragmentation has been underway for some time and it is continuing unabated. New platforms are emerging, growing, peaking and fading faster than ever before. But market fragmentation is happening, too. Increasingly optimized and personalized targeting leads to atomization of your target market.”

No one is ready for the cognitive and informational overload that precision brings at this new ultra-micro, ultrarefined level. “Designing for this new future is now more complicated because of this expectation of precision,” continues Hartley. “What if you don’t have two markets, or two target customers, but 50 or 100, all with very specific rules of engagement? No one can manage 100 markets, because the world is a lot more complicated and finely drawn than most research commonly assumes. You