Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

It was winter in New York City and Asaf Jacobi’s Harley-Davidson dealership was selling one or two motorcycles a week. It wasn’t enough.

Jacobi went for a long walk in Riverside Park and happened to bump into Or Shani, CEO of an AI firm, Adgorithms. After discussing Jacobi’s sales woes, Shani, suggested he try out Albert, Adgorithm’s AI-driven marketing platform. It works across digital channels, like Facebook and Google, to measure, and then autonomously optimize, the outcomes of marketing campaigns.

Jacobi decided he’d give Albert a one-weekend audition.That weekend Jacobi sold 15 motorcycles. It was almost twice his all-time summer weekend sales record of eight....

Ads used to just be ads. They were signs on the side of the road, or in our browsers. They were something that could be ignored. Visually loud, sure, but they weren’t a fundamental part of our conversations, relationships, or entertainment.

But on the internet today, ads aren’t just part of the content or interface, they are the content and the interface. From what photos you see on Facebook, to the music you listen to on Spotify, to the videos you watch on Snapchat–it’s all served by algorithms that have quantified your response well enough to exploit your tastes, showing you things that you will almost certainly click on.

By using these apps and services, we’re feeding the companies that control them immense amounts of data that, in turn, tailors the medium to fit our tastes. The difference between an ad and a piece of content, these days, is becoming technical. It’s an insight that echoes throughout Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends report, which she and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers published yesterday afternoon.

The report, which is heavily anticipated every year, contains hundreds of slides breaking down digital culture and business–everything from emerging markets in China to the rise of unboxing culture. But the trend that stuck out most to us this year? That the internet is now playing every user in one giant game we cannot escape. Here’s how....