NewsLine Column: Non-Human Marketing

With consumers beginning to trust technology to help them make all kinds of purchasing decisions, Jean-Paul Edwards, head of media futures at Manning Gottlieb OMD, discusses the rise of non-human marketing…

We live in an ever more technical world. Our relationship with technology is changing, we are trusting our machines to do more and more things for us. Driverless trains, fly by wire and heart pace makers are examples of where we literally put our lives in the hands of decision making technology.

Consumers in the digital era are now trusting technology to help them with purchasing decisions. When consumers want to look for something on the internet over 80% of them go to a search engine. They trust the search engine. The search engines need to be made aware of a specific website and be persuaded to list that site when a user types in a relevant term. Whole new ranges of communication techniques have been developed for this purpose. As a genre we call this Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The tools and techniques of this communication are very different from consumer orientated marketing.

A technological arms race has begun. The optimisers seek to gain as much exposure for their clients as possible. The search engines want to limit the results of their searches to only the most relevant. Link popularity, spoofing, meta tagging and trusted feed are just some of the names of the techniques that the optimisers and engines use in pursuit of their respective aims.

It’s not just search engines though, spam blockers and firewalls can similarly be considered gatekeepers of content. Getting around them is a form of non-human marketing with its own methods and techniques.

Consumers are trusting the internet for more purchases as time goes on. As they get busier and time becomes even more pressured there is a need to automate certain regular tasks such as managing finances or doing the weekly shop. Tools to help them do this exist now and will be developed. Intelligent agents are small computer programs that can hunt for goods and services in the same way as search engines but also have added knowledge about an individual consumers’ specific needs and desires. Another nascent non-human marketing format will be to ‘sell’ to these agents.

Personal Video Recorders (tiVo/Sky+) have the ability to record or filter out programmes and advertising based on user preferences. The targeting of these devices initially by broadcasters but then also by advertisers could end up taking a significant proportion of TV marketing budgets within the next 5 years.

Some will try to circumvent these devices and get directly to the consumer, the future equivalent of spamming. This will likely be the initial strategy of brands who see such devices as a threat to current business models and are unwilling to change their model. Consumers will soon tire of such brands. They, like the search engines before them, will engage in an arms race. Those brands that do respect the consumer’s permission and privacy are likely to be more trusted and welcomed into a more secure area with access to the consumers themselves.

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