Striking the Balance Between Digital and Analogue - with Thomas Koch

Anyway, back to why I'm here at all, still in the past in season one of the show, and that is because shortly after releasing our final full episode for this season, my absolute favorite by the way, I heard from the inimitable man himself, the delightful Thomas Koch who agreed to meet me online. And let me pick his brains on some of the juicy topics from his fantastic talk in Vienna. And after just a small amount of gushing... "but I just wanted to say as well, I really enjoyed your talk, I thought it was so refreshing"... we started to talk about how he turned the, up until then, entirely digitally-focused conference on its head.

Which is necessary, because all of the digital natives, most of them are doing a pretty good job. And I very well know what they're doing. Because I'm still part of the advertising industry, and in charge of beautiful campaigns. What they don't have is experience, experience with the old media. And the challenge is to build a mix out of analog and digital media, traditional and digital media. It's completely impossible for them because they don't know what a newspaper is. They don't know how television works. But these media still are responsible for two-thirds of our media consumption. So they're not gone. And that's what makes it a challenge. And that's what makes it a very, very interesting field of work. And so I try to help where I can.

And you may remember from Mr. Koch's talk that 2050 is the year touted as being the point at which we can fully begin to rely on computers for our digital media needs.

Or can we? And what about after that? Will analog media persist? Or will it simply be replaced?

In some ways, things do not change. If you take a look at everybody saying television is dead – so people are streaming? What is the fucking difference between switching on a TV set? Or switching on your computer and streaming Netflix? There is no difference. It's the same kind of consumption.

And if you say okay, the big difference is the television is funded by advertising and Netflix is not, No. I mean, take a look at product placement on Netflix. It's amazing. It's full of advertising. So there isn't that much of a difference.

So what will change?

One thing will change, print will change, naturally. Because we're not gonna we're not going to consume what we read in print. Even in 2050, we will have books, we will have a few magazines. But there will be only a few left, the rest is then digital, naturally.

Actually, this isn't a surprise to me. In the last decade, we've seen a rise in vinyl, for example, or in the audio world, there's still huge demand for analog equipment.

Take a look at books, consumption of books has hardly changed in the past 20 years. It's because of the way we read books, reading a book online is so completely different. It's not what people want to get used to. I mean, if you usually take eight books with you on a one-week vacation, yeah, that's a bit too heavy. You might like to download them. That's where it comes down to practical use. But reading a book, a paper book is a wonderful way of deep diving into content, as we call it.

It is not changing, I mean, take a look at – go to the beach and see who's reading a paper book, 99% are. Young and old. What I call it is the best of both worlds. There are things we use digitally, where the function is a lot better than it ever was before. So use it. If something traditional or in the analog media was better than it is at the present, then do what you want. I mean, isn't it wonderful to have a world like this where you can use everything as you wish?

As Thomas alluded to earlier in the conversation, TV is an oft-raised example of how digital is killing analog. But we need to decide what we're actually talking about here.

Are we talking about the way the users interact with the technology, or how they think differently about it? Are we really just talking about the backend, so to speak? And if so, why? Why does it matter what's behind the curtain if the show out the front is the same?

TV is evolving, but not changing the way we consume movies and films and content – that is not really changing. It's the same with audio radio consumption, it hasn't changed a bit.

What we're doing is, I mean, we're doing a podcast at the moment. Podcasts are adding to the way we used radio in the past. But they're not changing the way we use radio. That's what I love about the digital world. It gives us more than we had in the past. But people don't change that fast. I mean, scientists are telling us that our brain has not evolved during the past 300,000 years.

This appears to be true. A study I read recently suggested that if a baby were to be taken from, say, 20,000 years ago, through time somehow, casually ignoring the time dilation and spaghettification, that this act may induce then left bundled, coo-ing at the doorstep of a modern family, they could grow up to be indistinguishable from those around them both in their mental capacity and their behavior. I thought it was interesting.

That's why things are not changing that much. And that's why the traditional media world isn't doing that badly at the moment. Print is slowing down. Radio hasn't changed. Outdoor advertising is booming. With paper and with digital functions. TV isn't changing that much.

But the use of digital media is evolving on top of that, and that's what's beautiful about the world we're in. I'm a media planner. I have never had so much media at my disposal for any kind of work I have to do with them. It's wonderful.

Okay, good. That settles it then. Digital, if used thoughtfully for what it's best at without unnecessarily shirking the old analog ways is all sunbeams and puppies.

But what about all the bad stuff? If you recall, in the main episode with Mr. Koch he talked about a campaign that he and a colleague had launched called Stop Funding Hate, which sounds pretty serious, and to be fair, it kind of is, so I asked Mr. Koch about what prompted the need for such an initiative.

The problem is rather easy to describe. In the past, we selected target groups like young men, or professionals or whatever, and then searched for media with which we could approach them.

Okay, so you would identify a particular target group first, and then determine the media that suits that group and your needs as an advertiser.

In the digital world, this has changed. We don't search for media anymore. We tell the gadgets, we want to reach young men or young professionals, the programmatic array delivers us this target group, wherever these people are, whatever kind of media they use, which means that a German campaign approaching young men, if you adjust your computer incorrectly, all of a sudden you reach young terrorists, because they use media and yes, maybe they might even be interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, whatever the target group is searched for, by programmatic devices.

And that makes the media approach of target groups completely different. We don't care what kind of media they use. Now we have to learn that we do care. Marketing has to learn that it is responsible for what it is doing. This wasn't necessary in the past.

American advertisers would never advertise on TV when sex is involved, they always told us no sex, no breasts, nothing of that kind. No matter what, they felt that kind of responsibility. So we avoided sex on television. We did that. We have to learn to do the same thing in digital media. We are responsible for the websites we are advertising on, we have to decide if we want to advertise on the right or wrong websites, like there are dozens of them in the United States – take a look at a website like Bearing Arms. Bearing Arms is the website of the National Rifle Association.

Headlines on beararms.com at the time of recording in this episode include "Mass shootings Prevention Act won't stop killers but will crush civil rights", "Florida shooting shoots holes in gun control case", and "Nigerian immigrant wants gun control. Here is why she's wrong." As well as a helpful and friendly reminder that while it's great to shoot guns to celebrate New Year's Eve, one should refrain from firing too many shots straight up into the air.

You have to decide if you want to place your advertising on a website like that. No matter who uses a website, it might be your target group. That's fine. But you have as a marketer, you have to decide where you wish to advertise. And if you feel responsible.

Right. So what was it that changed the game?

It's the fault of programmatic, if I was searching for somebody whose fault it is. What the advertisers naturally do is they use blacklists nowadays,

This is something we talked more about in our Ad Fraud and Brand Safety episode, by the way.

The advertisers and their media agencies, so, they would use a list of websites they do not wish to advertise on and give the programmatic system the information that ads are not supposed to be delivered to these websites. This doesn't work. These people are clever. They depend on our advertising money. Some of these websites have been built just to attract advertising money. So they're clever enough to find ways.

There's one example I love. Everybody knows the Washington Post. The Washington Post is one of the most asked-for newspapers in the world. It's wonderful, no problem advertising there. There is a website called Washington Times, which is very Right-ish, no advertiser in the world would ever want to advertise there. But the agencies are fooled by the name. Washington Times delivers a lot of advertising they shouldn't be. And that means money for them. They earn millions of dollars on stuff like that.

Ok, so that's the problem. But what actually is Stop Funding Hate and how is it attempting to address it?

It started when I met with Michael Maurantonio, in Switzerland. He is a data forensics guy, a real expert on digital stuff, a lot more than I am. And he has a lot of experience with media agencies. He worked on the client side as a media manager. And what he does now, is he does media controlling for digital campaigns. I met him and he showed me an ad for Volkswagen that was placed on Breitbart.

Breitbart News Network is an American far-right syndicated news opinion and commentary website founded in mid-2007 by American Conservative commentator Andrew Breitbart. Breitbart's content has been described as misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by academics and journalists. Thank you, Wikipedia.

And I said to him, Listen, I'm gonna inform Volkswagen that they are advertising on Breitbart, I'm quite sure they do not wish to do that. And what I did is, I made a Twitter post out of it. I wrote, dear Volkswagen, I was very kind, Dear marketing people at Volkswagen, you are advertising on Breitbart with German advertising, please check if you really want to do that.

That hit the fan. Just this one post because a whole lot of media in Germany took the news, like Spiegel. And all of a sudden, Volkswagen was in real trouble. They got in touch with me, they told me that naturally, they do not wish to advertise on Breitbart, and they do not wish to funnel their money, their advertising money into a website like that. So they tried to stop it.

So Michael had been had been searching the web for Swiss advertisers on specific websites that belong to let's say, the political Right. And I started to do the same in Germany. And after a year, then we did the same in Austria, because we were asked to do so. And after a year, we had 1500 advertisers with their campaigns coming from Germany, 700 from Switzerland, and 300 from Austria, advertising on websites like Breitbart. And that, let's say, made something conscious that hadn't been conscious in the past, because nobody was really controlling where the advertising money is being delivered to.

So after this result with Volkswagen, Thomas Koch and Michael Maurantonio went one step further.

What we did is we addressed the companies and asked them not to stop their advertising, we're not the Internet police. We just showed them what they are doing and ask them to check if they wish to do so, 

Like I said, we had we had two and a half thousand different advertisers in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria that we identified on these websites. What happened is that naturally, some of the advertisers reached out to us, got in touch with us, and asked for screenshots and stuff like that, and tried to stop. In Germany 16% of the identified advertisers got in touch with us. Is this good news or is this bad news? 16% is not very much. Of the 16% who got in touch with us and expressed no, they do not wish to advertise on websites like this, and they did not want to finance hate or fake news in this way, 40% were not capable of stopping their campaigns on these websites.

Bloody hell... right...

So what we have here is we have not enough control, there is no controlling to show the advertisers where they are advertising. And if they find out that something is going wrong, that the technics of digital advertising are not capable of stopping the campaign there. This is a disaster. Because it means that advertisers do not hold the consequences of their doing in the digital world. They're not capable of doing that.

So if blacklisting isn't as effective as we thought, what can advertisers actually do?

Well, it's a return to media planning. If I tell a computer I want to reach young professionals, and the computer does my job of media planning and delivering the ads, where the target group is supposed to be, that's giving the machine the responsibility over media planning. So this doesn't seem to work very well.

What we need is, I just mentioned blacklists, what we need as whitelists. We need to tell the computer on which websites we wish to advertise and that's a return to media planning. Deciding, what kind of media does my target group use, and placing my advertising there. It might be a mixture of both blacklists and whitelists, of media planning by people and media planning by machine. What we need is we need a consciousness of what we're doing.

Everybody's talking about responsible media, nowadays, it's a huge thing. But we haven't delivered the tools to the market. How to be responsible for media spending, we have to learn that. And I think we, Michael and I, did help the industry to become conscious of what is happening and others will have to be held responsible for the tools that are implemented. I can't do everything, I mean. 

We're always very fast in changing things. It doesn't always work. If we give a machine 100% responsibility over what we are doing, in this case, how we are delivering advertising – no, it doesn't work. So change it again, make people responsible again.