Sorrell, Lanier Warn Against Tech Pitfalls

Martin-SorrellIn a dual interview with Group M’s North American CEO Rob Norman at the 4A’s “Transformation” conference in Los Angeles Tuesday morning, WPP’s Sir Martin Sorrell and Microsoft partner architect Jaron Lanier both paid tribute to the sweeping transformative power of new media technology -- but also warned against a number of potential drawbacks, ranging across society, culture and business.

Both noted that social media and new media technology have brought huge benefits in important areas, including politics and social change, alluding to their role in the Arab Spring last year. Sorrell praised “the change in the balance of power to the consumers, to the people,” including its “catalytic” function in politics.

However, both bemoaned what they portrayed as an increasingly superficial public discourse, resulting from the immediacy and ubiquity of new media technology. 

Sorrell asserted: “I do think we’re in danger of [losing] any depth at all in what we’re doing. There’s a tendency to analyze things almost before they’re analyzable.” Sorrell also lamented the demise of investigative journalism as another casualty of new media. For his part, Lanier has, on previous occasions, asked audience members not to tweet or post about what he’s saying until he’s finished. 

On the economic front, Lanier took a far more pessimistic view than Sorrell, claiming the Internet and related technologies have destroyed more value than they’ve created. Here Lanier recalled: “What we discovered in Silicon Valley about 12 years ago is that if we apply information systems to an industry, you can shrink the industry but grow yourself.”

One unfortunate side effect is unemployment, Lanier noted, adding “it’s a trend that just can’t continue.” 

At the business level, Lanier criticized what he characterized as an obsessive, myopic focus on data at the expense of creativity. “We’ve entered into a weird phase in the last decade or so where everyone is looking for data that will give them a leg up competitively,” including increasingly detailed information about consumers gleaned from social media and other sources. “But that’s a dangerous game,” Lanier, warned, as ultimately “whoever games can also get gamed.”

As soon as advertisers and other industries begin valuing data, “the scammers start ruining the data. The links start to be questionable, the reviews start to be questionable, the friends start to be phony, the ‘likes’ start to be phony," he added.

Nor are advertisers necessarily equipped to navigate this treacherous field: “When you’re entering this world of analytics you’re becoming a scientist -- and being a scientist is hard. Being a bad scientist is easy. There’s an ocean of scamminess… an incredible epidemic of pitches that you’ll get easy magic out of data. And that’s not how the game works, that’s not real," he says.

Lanier was far from hopeless. Having begun his career writing jingles, he implored the audience to return to the creative art that has always underlain great advertising: “You guys have to rediscover the romance of advertising [because] it’s only a game of analytics, we’re giving up that role. There’s this enormous, unexplored creative area that’s easily as big a deal as the dawn of television.”

1 comment about "Sorrell, Lanier Warn Against Tech Pitfalls".
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  1. Paul Benjou from The Center for Media Management Strategies, March 28, 2012 at 8:54 a.m.

    The position both these men take is perhaps the most responsible as we consider where the new media technologies are taking us. As an industry we are focusing 80% of our intellectual talent on 20% of what might become profitable, useful ventures.

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