Tag

Algorithms

Browsing

By

If you opened Facebook, Twitter or Instagram about a decade ago, you’d likely see posts from friends and family, in chronological order.

Nowadays, users are hit with a barrage of content curated by an algorithm. Passionate about plants? Sports? Cats? Politics? That’s what you’re going to see.

“[There] are equations that measure what you’re doing, surveil the data of all the users on these platforms and then try to predict what each person is most likely to engage with,” New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka explains. “So rather than having this neat, ordered feed, you have this feed that’s constantly trying to guess what you’re going to click on, what you’re going to read, what you’re going to watch or listen to.”

In his new book, Filterworld, Chayka examines the algorithmic recommendations that dictate everything from the music, news and movies we consume, to the foods we eat and the places we go. He argues that all this machine-guided curation has made us docile consumers and flattened our likes and tastes.

“For us consumers, they are making us more passive just by feeding us so much stuff, by constantly recommending things that we are unlikely to click away from, that we’re going to tolerate [but] not find too surprising or challenging,” Chayka says.

What’s more, Chayka says, the algorithms pressure artists and other content creators to shape their work in ways that fit the feeds. For musicians working through Spotify or TikTok, this might mean recording catchy hooks that occur right at the beginning of a song — when a user is most likely to hear it.

Though the algorithms can feel inescapable, Chayka says increased regulation of social media companies can mitigate their impact. “I think if Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was forced to spin off some of its properties, like Instagram or WhatsApp, and those properties were made to compete against each other, then maybe users would have more agency and more choices for what they’re consuming,” he says.

Interview highlights

On how the internet takes power away from gatekeepers

There’s this huge power of the internet to let anyone publish the art that they make or the songs that they write. And I think that’s really powerful and unique. … [In] the cultural ecosystem that we had before, there were these gatekeepers, like magazine editors or record executives or even radio station DJs, who you did have to work through to get your art heard or seen or bought. And so these were human beings who had their own biases and preferences and social networks, and they tended to block people who didn’t fit with their own vision.

Cover of Filterworld

Doubleday

Now, in the algorithmic era, let’s say rather than seeking to please those human gatekeepers or figure out their tastes, the metric is just how much engagement you can get on these digital platforms. So the measure of your success is how many likes did you get? How many saves did you get on TikTok or bookmarks? How many streams did you get on Spotify?

So I think there are advantages and disadvantages to both of these kinds of regimes. Like, on the internet, anyone can put out their work and anyone can get heard. But that means to succeed, you also have to placate or adapt to these algorithmic ecosystems that, I think, don’t always let the most interesting work get heard or seen.

On the difficulty of knowing what’s going outside your specific algorithm

These digital platforms and feeds, they kind of promise a great communal experience, like we’re connecting with all the other TikTok users or all of the other Instagram users, but I think they’re actually kind of atomizing our experiences, because we can never tell what other people are seeing in their own feeds. We don’t have a sense of how many other people are fans of the same thing that we are fans of or even if they’re seeing the same piece of culture that we’re seeing, or experiencing an album or a TV show, in the same way. So I think there’s this lack of connection … this sense that we’re alone in our consumption habits and we can’t come together over art in the same way, which I think is kind of deadening the experience of art and making it harder to have that kind of collective enthusiasm for specific things.

On how success on social media determines who gets book deals, TV shows and record deals

Every publisher will ask a new author, “What is your platform like? How big of a platform do you have?” Which is almost a euphemism for, “How many followers do you have online?” — whether that’s [on] Twitter or Instagram or an email newsletter. They want to know that you already have an audience going into this process, that you have a built-in fan base for what you’re doing. And culture doesn’t always work that way. I don’t think every idea should have to be so iterative that you need fans already for something to succeed, that you have to kind of engage audiences at every point in the process of something to have it be successful. So for a musician, maybe you’ll get a big record deal only if you go viral on TikTok. Or if you have a hit YouTube series, maybe you’ll get more gigs as an actor. There’s this kind of gatekeeping effect here too, I think, where in order to get more success on algorithmic platforms, you have to start with seeding some kind of success on there already.

On how some film and TV shows lean into becoming internet memes

You can see how TV shows and movies have adapted to algorithmic feeds by the kind of one-liner, GIF-ready scenes that you see in so many TV shows and movies now. You can kind of see how a moment in a film is made to be shared on Twitter or how a certain reaction in a reality TV show, for example, is made to become a meme. And I think a lot of production choices have been influenced by that need for your piece of content to drive more pieces of content and to inspire its own reactions and riffs and more memes.

On how algorithms impact journalism

Algorithmic feeds, I think, took on the responsibility that a lot of news publications once had. … In decades past, we would see the news stories that we consumed on a daily basis from The New York Times front page on the print paper or as on The New York Times homepage on the internet. Now, instead of the publication choosing which stories are most important, which things you should see right away, the Twitter, or X, algorithmic feed is sorting out what kinds of stories you’re consuming and what narratives are being built up. We now have TikTok talking heads and explainers rather than news anchors on cable TV. So the responsibility for choosing what’s important, I think, has been ported over to algorithmic recommendations rather than human editors or producers.

On how passive consumption affects how deeply we think about culture

I think passive consumption certainly has its role. We are not always actively consuming culture and thinking deeply about the genius of a painting or a symphony. … It’s not something we can do all the time. But what I worry about is the passivity of consumption that we’ve been pushed into, the ways that we’re encouraged not to think about the culture we’re consuming, to not go deeper and not follow our own inclinations. … And I suppose that when I really think about it … the kind of horror that’s at the end of all this, at least for me, is that … we’ll never have the Fellini film that’s so challenging you think about it for the rest of your life or see the painting that’s so strange and discomforting that it really sticks with you. Like I don’t want to leave those masterpieces of art behind just because they don’t immediately engage people.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

Sam Briger and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

By

Sourced from npr

Once a year, spend some time taking back your algorithms

For the last few years, I’ve chosen one weekend day a year to undertake what I’ve come to call a Feeds Reboot. I try to systematically go through every subscription, every follow, every algorithmically or chronologically generated thing I see on social platforms, streaming services, and news apps, and reset or at least review the way it works. I can’t recommend this enough.

Every time I do a Feeds Reboot, I notice a huge uptick in how interesting and relevant I suddenly find the internet. Does it then spend the next 364 days slowly degrading back into a morass from which I will try and extricate myself next year? Yep! But I’m still making progress.

The point of a Feeds Reboot is to be more intentional about the internet. It’s not the same as a privacy audit, which is also a good thing to do every year; rather, it’s a way to change what you see online. Odds are, some of what’s in your feeds — the creators on YouTube, the out-there old friends on Facebook, the inescapable dance crazes on your TikTok For You page — is the result of something you commented on, liked, or just happened to watch many months or years ago. The reboot gives you a chance to start fresh, to declare to the internet that you are no longer the person you once were, and to take more control over the algorithms that run so much of your life.

My process has gotten more complicated over time and now includes three steps: the Following Audit, the Mass Archive, and a more complicated step I’ve come to call the Feeds Reboot Pro Max.

The Following Audit is tedious but really simple: just assess everything you follow everywhere. Go through your following list on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, look at all the sources you follow on RSS, check all your Discord memberships, look at all the newsletters you get, scroll through your podcast subscriptions, and check all the bands you follow on Spotify to make sure you still care. Don’t worry about adding better stuff since that tends to happen naturally over time. Just delete everything you don’t want, and make sure you’re only signed up for stuff you actually care about.

The next step is the Mass Archive, which is exactly what it sounds like. Do you have a million emails in your inbox? Do you have a read-it-later app chock-full of stuff you haven’t gotten to yet? How many unviewed Snaps do you have in your list? There’s only one way forward: get rid of all of it. You can delete it all if you’re feeling chaotic or just make a folder called “Archive” and dump everything in. That way it’ll all still be there if you need it… but you won’t. That’s the point.

If you just do those two things, you’ll notice almost immediately that your online life feels more relevant and less overloaded. It always takes the longest the first time since you have a lifetime of feed choices to look at; every year after that is much quicker.

The Feeds Reboot Pro Max is the next step in taking control of your algorithms. It involves looking into how various social algorithms already understand what you like and care about and tweaking them whenever possible.

Not every app lets you do this — TikTok, for instance, won’t give you any control at all over what you see. But some apps do offer more fine-grained control over the algorithm. I’ve included the steps for their mobile apps, though you can sometimes get to the same information in a browser. (And, with YouTube and Facebook in particular, it’s much easier to do some bulk actions on a laptop.) Here they are, in no particular order:

YouTube

  • Go to your Library tab, then select View All above your watch history. Scroll back through everything you’ve watched, hit the three-dot button on the right side, and select Remove from watch history to also take it out of your recommendation pool.
  • Or go nuclear: go to Settings, then History & privacy, and just click Clear watch history to wipe the whole thing and start over.
  • You can also click on Manage all activity and tell YouTube (and other Google services) to purge all your activity after a certain period of time. I have mine set to 18 months, but you can also choose three months or three years of data for Google to keep around.
You can control the data YouTube stores about you or delete it after the fact.
Image: YouTube/David Pierce

Instagram

  • Go to Settings, then Ads, and then Ad Topics to see a list of all the categories advertisers can use to reach you. If you see one you don’t want, tap on it and select See Less.
  • Go to your profile, tap on Following in the top right, and tap on the Least Interacted With category. Unfollow everything in there you don’t want anymore.

Facebook

  • Go to Settings & privacy > Settings and select Your Time on Facebook. Hit See Settings under Get More From Your Time, then tap News Feed Preferences, and either add or remove people from your Favourites and Unfollow lists to control how often they appear in your feed. (Unfollowing people without unfriending them remains an underrated tactic on Facebook.)
  • Go to Settings & privacy > Settings, look for Permissions, and select Ad preferences. Select Ad Topics at the top of the page, and you can see and edit all the topics Facebook tells advertisers you’re into. (This list mirrors the one on Instagram, by the way, so you should only need to tweak it in one place.)
Facebook offers more content control than most — and some of it applies to Instagram, too.
Image: Facebook/David Pierce

Twitter

  • Go to Settings > Privacy and safety, select Content you see, and review both the Topics and the Interests Twitter has for you. Unfollow the ones you no longer want, and opt in to the suggested topics that sound most interesting.

LinkedIn

  • Go to Settings & Privacy > Advertising data, then select Interest categories. You’ll be presented with everything LinkedIn thinks you care about and can turn off any you don’t.

Streaming services

  • Most streaming services have a feature — usually under some phrase like “Watch history” or in the menu where you manage your Continue Watching section — that lets you control what the service uses to inform your recommendations. I would do this on all your services more often than once a year.
  • In Netflix, for instance, it only works on the web: under your profile picture, go to your Account, look for your profile picture in Profile & Parental Controls, then select Viewing activity. Click on the Hide icon next to anything you’d rather not show up in your viewing history or inform your recommendations going forward.

Some folks I’ve talked to over the years recommend a more scorched-earth version of a Feeds Reboot. They say you should just periodically unfollow everyone everywhere and rebuild all your feeds naturally going forward. That feels like overkill to me, but the purpose is the same. Modern life is run by feeds and algorithms, and if you don’t tend to your inputs, you’ll eventually grow to hate the outputs.

The real onus here should be on the platforms themselves to make this process simpler and more transparent — to tell you more about what they know and let you change it. Facebook is probably the model here: a lot of its information is buried deep in settings menus, but you can see and edit everything from your search history to a detailed list of everything the platform thinks you care about.

Until then, there’s the Feeds Reboot. It’s an excellent weekend project for a long weekend like this one.

Feature Image Credit: Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

Sourced from The Verge

By Kim Komando.

It can be unsettling when you consider what makes a smart TV in your home “smart.” Because a smart TV connects to the internet, collecting data about you and your viewing habits is possible. Add apps into the picture and the data tracking accelerates.

What are TV manufacturers getting? Your viewing history, the ads you watch or skip, as well as other details. This data is shared with advertisers and marketing companies. You can turn the tracking off, so long as you know precisely where to look in the TV’s settings menu.

Tap or click here for steps to turn off the data tracking and spying on a Vizio, Samsung, LG, Amazon Fire TV, Roku TV and more.

But it’s not just the TV makers. Streaming companies are also tracking. Let’s take a look at the top streaming services and tell you how to take back your privacy:

Netflix lets you erase and get a copy of all the data collected about you.

Netflix collects data primarily to provide recommendations on other things you might want to watch. Simply stated, its algorithms want you to see value in continuing your monthly subscription.

Whether the recommendations are off or you want a private Netflix experience, you need to delete your viewing history.

1. Sign-in to your account at Netflix.com.

2. Choose your profile and click on the profile icon in the upper-right corner.

3. Click Account, then scroll down to Profile and Parental Controls.

4. Click your account icon. Then, click Viewing Activity.

5. On the menu, click the circle icon on the right of each entry to remove it from your watch history. To remove your entire watch history, scroll down and click hide all.

Netflix will provide a copy of data it collects about you. This dossier includes more than just your watch history and ratings for content. Netflix hangs on to your device information, account email preferences, IP address, billing information and data from other profiles on your account.

To request a copy, go to netflix.com/account/getmyinfo and follow the instructions. It can take up to 30 days for Netflix to process the request. Your data file will be sent to the email address attached to your account.

While you’re waiting for a copy of your data to arrive, why not dive into some hidden features in Netflix? You can find something new to watch using secret codes, stop that annoying “Are you still watching” prompt and much more. Tap or click here for 7 Netflix tricks you can use all the time.

Amazon Prime membership extends into personalized ads.

Amazon tracks your Prime account activities, including what you watch on Prime Video. This data includes your searches, items you recently viewed, shows and movies you recently watched and product categories you looked through.

PRIME SECRETS: Amazon Prime membership includes way more than free shipping and video streaming. Tap or click here to see my favorite perks, including at-home clothing try-on, free magazine subscriptions and 5 GB of photo storage.

This data helps Amazon create targeted ads. That’s why you’ll see products and suggestions similar to what you’ve watched or looked up. Here’s how to stop Amazon from tracking your browsing activity:

1. Log in to your account at Amazon.com.

2. Click on Browsing History from the menu under the Amazon search bar.

3. On the page that opens, click on the Manage history drop-down arrow.

4. Toggle Turn Browsing History on/off to the Off position.

You can also stop your data from being used for advertising.

1. Hover over Accounts & Lists and click Your Account.

2. Under Communication and content, click on Advertising preferences.

3. Choose Do not show me interest-based ads provided by Amazon. Click Submit.

HOT GIFTS: Top tech gifts under $100 you can buy on Amazon.

Amazon Fire TV users need to take one more step.

If you watch Prime Video on a Fire TV Stick or Cube, there’s one more step you need to take to stop Amazon from tracking you. The Fire TV’s privacy menu gives you the option to limit device data collection, app data collection and interest-based ads.

1. From the Fire TV main menu, select Settings.

2. Click Preferences, followed by Privacy Settings.

3. In the menu that opens, turn off Device Usage Data, Collect App Data Usage, and Interest-based Ads.

You can also disable Data Monitoring, which sends Amazon additional usage stats about your device.

1. From the Fire TV main menu, select Settings.

2. Click Preferences, followed by Data Monitoring.

3. In the menu that opens, turn Data Monitoring off.

Want more Fire TV know-how? Here are 10 tricks only the pros know.

How to stop your smart TV from spying on your viewing habits
Smart TVs have settings for adjusting your preferences. You can take control and tell the TV manufacturers not to sell your data.
USA TODAY

Hulu has three different steps for you to opt-out.

Hulu collects your watch history, personal details, and activity on the service. The service sells some of this data.

To clear and reset the Watch History for the profiles associated with your account, do the following:

1.     Log in to Hulu and open your Account page on a web browser.

2.     Select California Privacy Rights under Privacy and Settings. (Note: Hulu is based in California and follows the state’s regulations.)

3.     Under Manage Activity, click Watch History and Clear Selected. This will clear the entire watch history that Hulu stores for you.

Next, let’s take care of Hulu’s Nielsen Measurement. This collects viewership data that determines ratings for TV and streaming.

1. Log in to Hulu and open your Account page on a web browser.

2. Select Manage Nielsen Measurement under Privacy and Settings.

3. Click Opt-out.

Finally, let’s stop Hulu from selling your data to advertisers. Due to the state of California privacy regulations, you can opt-out of having your personal information and activity data sold.

1. Log in to Hulu and open your Account page on a web browser.

2. Select California Privacy Rights under Privacy and Settings.

3. Under Right to Opt Out, click Change Status.

4. Click Opt out.

Like what you’re reading? Get tips like this delivered to your inbox for free. Sign-up now while you’re thinking of it.

YouTube tracking can be stopped.

Google-owned YouTube uses your search history to build a detailed advertising profile about you. To remove what YouTube knows about you, start with your Google profile.

To get started, let’s tackle our search and activity history.

1. Visit myaccount.google.com and log in. Then, click on Manage your Google Account.

2. Click Manage your data & personalization, found under Privacy & Personalization.

3. Under the Activity controls menu, you will see checkmarks next to Web & App activity tracking, Location History and YouTube History. Click each one to change settings. Toggle each off to stop Google from tracking you.

4. Under Activity controls, click My Activity under Activity and timeline.

5. On the menu that appears in the left sidebar, click on Delete activity by. Choose how far back you would like to delete your history in the pop-up menu. Click Delete to confirm your changes.

Once you’ve followed these steps, you’ll have removed your search history and disabled tracking through apps, location history and YouTube activity.

Next, let’s turn off personalized ads. This is how Google serves you ads based on your activity and history.

1. Visit your Google Account settings once again and click on Data & personalization from the left-hand panel.

2. From the Ad personalization panel, click on Go to ad settings.

3. Toggle the switch next to Ad personalization is ON. You should now see Ad personalization is OFF.

If you use the Chrome browser, you can turn off ad personalization by installing Google’s Interest-Based Ads Opt-Out extension.

Roku makes it simple to opt-out.

Roku is less of a service and more of a hub for many other streaming platforms. But Roku keeps tabs on your data and sells it to advertisers, unless you personally opt-out of ad tracking. Here’s how to do it:

1. From the Roku main menu, open Settings.

2. Open Privacy, followed by Advertising.

3. Check Limit ad tracking to stop Roku from sharing your viewing data.

From Guest Mode to parental controls to custom screensavers, there’s a lot to learn about your Roku. Tap or click here for 8 smart tips (With examples).

By Kim Komando.

Learn about all the latest technology on the Kim Komando Show, the nation’s largest weekend radio talk show. Kim takes calls and dispenses advice on today’s digital lifestyle, from smartphones and tablets to online privacy and data hacks. For her daily tips, free newsletters and more, visit her website at Komando.com.

Sourced from USA Today TECH

By Rande Price

The Facebook’s News Feed, introduced in 2006, was once a strong source of traffic for many publishers. News organization utilized the intermediary platform to grow their audiences. The social sharing of news also altered the direct-to-consumer paradigm.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced that their News Feed would prioritize posts from friends and family over news content. While some news publishers faced modest declines, others reported significant ones. Chartbeat, a content analytics platform, provided data showing Facebook traffic to publishers declined 6% since the beginning of January. However, LittleThings, a publication focused on feel good stories and other content for women, claimed they lost 75% of their referral traffic due to changes in Facebook’s New Feed and subsequently shut down.

In its latest research, The Shorenstein Center on Media Studies explores the impact on non-profit news brands. Non-profit news organizations rely heavily on social interaction to help encourage donations. A traffic decline could negatively impact donation revenue. Shorenstein’s new report, Facebook Friends? The Impact of Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm, offers a custom analysis of eight non-profit news publishers.

The research divides the publishers into two categories: investigative and single-subject. The investigative group focuses on producing investigative journalism on a wide range of topics. The single-subject group produces investigative journalism in the context of a single subject. The three investigative organizations include The Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. The five single-subject organizations include Chalkbeat, The Hechinger Report, The Marshall Project, The Trace, and The War Horse. The analysis focuses on two key metrics – total users and total sessions – looking at the three months prior to and after the News Feed change.

In the three months after the News Feed changes, in terms of overall traffic, the investigative organizations saw small changes in both the number of users and the number of sessions. In contrast, the entire single-subject cohort registered growth for these two metrics.

The analysis also looks at the composition of traffic, where the traffic is coming from, by using the Google Analytics channels Direct, Email, Organic Search, Other, Referral, and/or Social. Referral traffic was most consistent; increasing both in users visits and sessions. Only two of the eight non-profit publishers show social referral increases. Not surprisingly, Facebook referrals closely follow in line to social.

Given some of the non-profit news publishers registered small to moderate traffic increases, the Shorenstein research hints to Facebook’s potential growth path for non-profit news publishers, even with the algorithm changes. The difference between larger commercial news publishers and non-profit may be due to how non-profit new organizations’ stories are shared on Facebook. More research on this is needed to understand the consumer experience sharing content from commercial news publishers compared to non-profit news publishers.

By Rande Price, Research Director—DCN@Randeloo

Sourced from WHAT’S NEW IN PUBLISHING

Sourced from ad exchanger.

Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.

Today’s column is written by Martin Kihn, research vice president at Gartner.

Inspired by results from retargeting, marketers are scrambling to stitch together customer data, unleash machine learning and deliver personalized experiences in display and video ads, websites, apps, watches and – soon – refrigerators.

But in our rush to hypertarget, marketers ignore the perils of personalization. Algorithms – or “algos,” as we say – can be intrusive and are prone to overuse. They build a commercial echo chamber and hone us down to our obvious features. Every time an optimization is made, some data is discarded. Usually, it’s data that doesn’t fit the model, which are exactly the features that make us unique.

Our algo addiction is a hidden threat to advertising’s function as a catalyst of discovery.

Algos are scripts that use rules to make decisions and improve their own performance over time. Marketers have employed them for years. Recommender systems use them to suggest which items we’re more likely to watch or buy. Personalization engines assemble website pages with articles, videos and images with which we’re more likely to engage. There are algorithms that write emails and uppity bots that want to fix it all.

They are already turning against us. For example, retargeting tech is not good at knowing when you buy an item or lose interest. Obnoxious ads contribute to an ad rejection culture that inspires ad blocking. GroupM calls this “repetitive irrelevance” and notes the irony that the “tracking and targeting intended to make advertising welcome makes it a nuisance.”

Robots On The Rampage

In February, the Pew Research Center issued a report that canvassed dozens of algo experts in many fields, including marketing. While praising the potential for machines to automate tasks and improve decisions, these experts also raised disturbing specters, such as corporate power creep and robot-driven bread lines.

Even rejecting dark fantasies, we have two reasons for caution. First, the techniques used to build algorithms, such as those used for ad targeting or product recommender systems, have their limits. Second, the human brain is biased in ways that can conspire with these algos to make marketing worse.

Algo perils: Optimization algos do the best they can with the data they’ve got – but that’s all they’ve got. Limited info is fed into what data scientists call a sparse array. For example, a product recommender may know a few things about you, such as the items you’ve bought, some demographics and location. While trying to predict what you’ll buy next, it looks for correlations between you and other customers, your items and other items, or both.

Common techniques applied here are principle component analysis, singular value decomposition and matrix factorizations. These are forms of dimensionality reduction which – as the name implies – are used to find the strongest signals in a lot of noise. To oversimplify, these methods reduce all customers and items (or ads) down to their most common features and ignore data that don’t fit.

This method of matchmaking is like trying to find a spouse by locating a bunch of guys your age who live in your city, averaging their girlfriends into one woman and marrying her. It might make for an OK date, but it’s no way to find true love.

Brains Out Of Balance

People have won Nobel Prizes showing us how biased our brains are. For programmatic marketers, the primary perils are self-seeking and herd behavior.

Self-seeking: It turns out that we humans also use algos to make decisions. We perform a kind of singular value decomposition on life. Technology makes this worse by giving us more ways to co-curate reality. Eli Pariser, the founder of MoveOn.org, argued in a popular book and TED talk called “The Filter Bubble” that personalization hurts us:

“[T]he filter bubble has dramatically changed the informational physics that determines which ideas we come in contact with.”

We have a tendency to like things we agree with and ignore things we don’t. This is confirmation bias. We show it in our social networks by “unfriending” people during elections and in our online news reading by ignoring sources we don’t like. In doing so, we train content targeting algos to reinforce our first prejudice.

In programmatic terms, we give digital signals from our comfort zone that label us as the Brooks Brothers man or luxury two-seater millennial. For a minute, these labels improve ad response. But over time, putting people into audiences flattens them and they lose their impact. The result is a narrowing of our digital marketing experience over time that makes it boring.

It’s already happened. If you don’t believe me, borrow someone else’s non-ad-blocked browser. Look at the ads. You will see some you’ve never seen before and won’t miss the usual suspects you’ve already tuned out. You will notice someone else’s ads more because they’re fresh.

Herd behavior: When we’re not sure what to buy, we look for popularity. There is nothing wrong with herd behavior, but once again, algos are exploiting it to death. They turn a herd into a stampede. Studies show that item and content voting tools quickly converge on a few top items, silencing the rest. Other studies show that the digital experience itself makes people lazy, focusing attention on fewer things over time.

The Serendipity Maker

What’s also lost in algorithms is serendipity. It’s a term first used by Horace Walpole in 1754 in a story in which the three princes of Serendip stumble on things they weren’t seeking. Using models that learn from what we’ve done before – and only what we’ve done before – recommender systems, personalization engines and ad targeting tools are the coded opposite of serendipity.

Yet good marketing is the art of discovery. It is supposed to capture our attention. Repeating messages we’ve already seen and recommending things because they’re popular might be logical, but it hardly fulfills David Ogilvy’s definition of a good ad: “I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.”

What can we do? Amid the original surge of panic around filter bubbles in 2010, a programmer at The Guardian created a simple “serendipity maker” for news. It pulled stories at random from a number of sources and presented them in a feed. Adding some randomness back into our marketing models would be a good place to start.

Humans are not machines, and the customer is always right. Too often, the algorithm gets that wrong.

Follow Martin Kihn (@martykihn), Gartner (@Gartner_inc) and AdExchanger (@adexchanger) on Twitter.

Sourced from ad exchanger.