The Bullmore Paradox: A Tale of Fame and Fragments

Jeremy Bullmore is my favorite futurist He started at JWT in 1954 and still works at WPP todayIn 2001 Jeremy wrote in a celebrated address titled quotPosh Spice and Persilquotamp160that quotIf you want to be as famous as BMW it39s no use being known only by the tiny percentage of the population who can afford to buy your car todayquot As a result and if you believe both fame and knowledge contribute to your success fame is what you need to create and preserveIt may seem paradoxical then to recognize as Jeremy did that quotpeople build brands as birds build nests from scraps and straws we chance uponquotamp160amp160Scraps and straws don39t appear to be the ingredients of fame However quotto chance uponquotamp160does not imply lack of purpose or knowledge as birds know exactly what they are looking for and to what endIn the business of marketing the same is often true In some cases the consumer does not know what he does not know in others the consumer knows what he or she wants and it39s up to the marketer to lay a trail of clues for the consumer to collect so that a personal emotional and functional image of the brand can be formed over time and acted upon at the point of desire or needIn today39s parlance this can be summed up in one word quotrelevancequotRelevance has taken on a new and specific meaning in the digital world Unlike the editors and schedulers that programed media in the prebroadband predisruption age today39s megaplatforms train algorithms to be the arbiter of the content served to their billions of usersSome of this training is basic On Facebook the people with whom you interact most frequently and deeply are the ones whose posts will populate your news feed The more distant or tenuous the relationship the less likely it is that your very own echo chamber will reverberate with anything new Put simply when an algorithm makes trillions of decisions every hour if you want to be seen you have to be relevantWhen you search on Google the precision of your own query and the vast learning machine will determine those links which it infers have the greatest likelihood of answering the question posed Google is simply in the business of relevance from both the perspective of user utility and for its own commercial wellbeingFor brands in these two environments the same rules apply If your content can not be found or seems unlikely to generate some form of interaction or transaction you simply won39t be seen If you are prepared to pay for the privilege then relevance carries the tangible reward of winning an auction bid at a lower price than your less relevant competitor Critically for the brand owner being searched by name rather than by category advantages you further and is of course a function to a degree at least of the accumulation of fame over timeFame and relevance are complementary concepts and always have been Now due to the algorithmic mediation of experience this codependency is more important than everIf you are famous but not relevant you achieve little if you are relevant but not famous you might achieve something but that something may be a fraction of your potentialFor the world39s largest brands and their agencies that presents a challenge that can be summarized as a continued need for fame and a growing imperative for relevance Perhaps it39s fair to say that a big idea is no longer a big idea unless it enables a content platform and a data story connected to assets that answer the demand for relevance in the metaphorical eyes of the algorithmIf it sounds like a balancing act is required I have achieved my purposeIt39s possible that in a world where the first and third largest sellers of advertising in the world are algorithmically driven that some brand owners and their agencies have overcompensated We desire the approbation of the algorithm but have paid twice for its affections We paid once as organic reach was throttled We paid again at the expense of fame and with the diminishment of the ambient presence of brands in societyWe have done this in part because we have inadvertently separated fame and relevance and tilted the validation of our strategies to short term and apparently binary measures of success at the expense of deep rooted saliency for our brands and businessesIt may appear optimal to only deliver messages to those in market at the moment they are ready and able to buy but we should remain aware of the longer term threat of optimizing ourselves into invisibilityIn a quotfactquotamp160driven world it is counterintuitive to some that for a brand to be known and admired by people who will never ever be in a position to buy that brand or who may never want to buy that brand amp160still has a valueamp160 As Jeremy has said quotThrow out all the bathwater and eventually the baby disappears altogetherquotThe case work on the value of fame is compelling The achievement of that fame however has never been harder to achieve as the gift of simultaneous mass reach bestowed by the broadcast age gives less generously today The only certainty is that microtargeting alone is not the answer and it would be valuable for us all to look at a digital laggard like Apple and their beautifully executed use of television out of home and print as an example of how to create persistent fame by staying the course despite the lack of immediacy in the linebyline metrics of their campaignsTo misquote the almost equally great Errol Brown of Hot Chocolate quotIt started with a click I never knew it would come to thisquotClick the social buttons above to share this story with your colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this commentary are exclusively the views of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated bloggers

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The Bullmore Paradox: A Tale of Fame and Fragments

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