Gabe Samuels and Project D-Map

Gabe is an Israeli expat who became an American and joined the ad industry as head of media research at J Walter Thompson in the mid1970s and ultimately became the agency39s de facto head of new media at a time when the expansion of the media universe started accelerating thanks to satellites and cable TV and as early forms of digital teletext videotext CDROMs quotinteractive kiosksquot and the first commercial online services began transforming the world as we knew itGabe left JWT to help launch one of the companies that transformed it Prodigy an ambitious venture of ATampampT CBS IBM and Sears that became one of the toeholds for the modern day commercial Internetamp160 When Prodigy folded Gabe joined the Advertising Research Foundation where he invited me to cover important industry research projects as a flyonthewall journalistOne of them was a collaboration of the ARF and MIT39s fabled Media Lab called quotDMapquot because its mission was to develop a roadmap for how digital media especially the Internet would transform advertising marketing and mediaamp160 The project lasted for months in 1999 including regular meetings with the heads of research of its sponsors tech giants like Microsoft and HP media giants like CBS and a couple of big ad agencies including Grey Advertising and McCannEricksonLed by MIT39s Russ Neuman the team took more than a quarter century worth of media trends things like technology and consumer adoption curves and their impact on ad spending and came up with a model to project how various economic technological regulatory and consumer scenarios would impact how when where and why people consumed mediaamp160 The project culminated in a symposium at MIT where some of the biggest marketers agencies technologists and visionaries in media discussed how digital technology ultimately would lead to those changesWhile no one in the room actually used these words what I heard them say over those two days was that in the future there would be digital media quotfiltersquot representing both consumers and brandsamp160 In this future scenario a brand would use its filter to make its best offer to the consumer39s filter and if and when the filters struck a deal the offer would pass through to the consumeramp160 It was an idyllic marketbased view of how marketing would evolve in a digital worldRemarkably it proved to be half rightamp160 Marketers and the media technology and agency partners they use ultimately figured out how to leverage advances in search programmatic audience exchanges and technology to understand who what when where and why someone was in front of their digital ad impressionsIt was half wrong too because nobody created the corresponding technology enabling consumers to determine those Five Ws for themselves Instead two unintended consequences occurredOne is that consumers unwittingly ended up giving the rights to their data to other third parties big data companies like Acxiom Oracle and Nielsen and giant walledgardens like Facebook and Google to target themThe other is that a new class of technologies emerged enabling consumers to avoid advertising altogether especially ad blockersThe industry is already beginning to apply AI to develop the next generation of consumer interfaces socalled conversational marketing or even quotfrictionlessquot marketing bots that will anticipate what consumers want from brands before or without the consumer even knowing they want itBidr39s ambition is to change that by giving consumers a corresponding way to filter offers they receive from brandsamp160 I39m writing this column to chronicle people like Gabe Joe Marchese Jack Myers and others who helped inspire itamp160 Hopefully that will inspire you to participate in the Bidr trial to help build a marketplace based on the value of youGabe has long since retired from the business but he still has plenty of opinions to share with anyone who wants to discuss it with himamp160 He now spends his days with his daughters and his grandchildren and traveling the world with his second wife KathyClick the social buttons above or below to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Gabe Samuels and Project D-Map

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