8December 2020IN MY OPINIONTHE DIGITAL MARKETING EXPERIENCEDo you take your coffee black, or do you find black coffee to be bitter and disgusting? Whatever your answer, it's clear that the same cup gets experienced differently by different people. How can this be? Your sensors (taste, smell, sight, etc.) interact with the coffee, and your brain confirms its mental model of it. Societal and peer-group attitudes combined with the pleasurable effects of the hot bean water can, over multiple experiences, update your model to make black coffee something that's enjoyable. Everyone's model is different because models are based on experiences. To me it's one way, to you it's another, and to your great great grandmother it's yet another. Everything in the world is like that cup of black coffee. Everything depends on how you experience it. But not for long.Thanks to digital marketing and the technologies that fuel it, the way we experience things is changing dramatically. For centuries, companies have marketed their products by advertising a thing to an audience, e.g., coffee and people who might drink coffee. Advertising is good when it persuades an audience to take an action. David Ogilvy, arguably the most influential voice in modern advertising, puts it like this in On Advertising, "When Aeschines spoke, they said, `How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, `Let us march against Philip.'" (Ogilvy, 1985, p. 7). Advertising isn't just about communicating, it's about promising an experience. The slogan, More Doctors Smoke Camels Than Any Other Cigarette, does more than state a spurious fact. It persuades some people that smoking Camels (might) offer a healthier experience than the alternatives. Until recently, advertising has been burdened with having to persuade an entire audience despite the fact that each individual experiences things differently.Our newfound technology allows us to personalize a message to the individual. This evolution of marketing is getting so good that it's starting to do a better job than we do at finding good experiences. You could comb through albums in a record shop. Or you could let Spotify learn your tastes and queue up tracks you're going to like. You could take a gamble on a new restaurant. Or you could let Google give you a personalized scoring of how much you'll enjoy a place. How do they do that? A Google representative explains, "We use machine learning to generate this number, based on a few factors: what we By Jared Leshin, Director of Digital Acceleration, Holmes Murphy
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