The Irrelevancing of the Ad Industry. (And Us.)

 

Last week, you couldn’t spit without hitting about 97,000 posts on LinkedIn and the bought-and-paid-for trade press about last week’s most important advertising topic. Or the most important topic according to all those easily shiny-objected out of noticing what’s really happening in the world.

Do you really care about instagram’s “runic” “r.”

Does it change the facts about the brand (no matter how many billions in legal fees are spent by non-tax-paying meta and zuckerberg to appeal the many rulings against their evil and corrupt company. A company that will do anything for the billions in ad dollars they suck up (or zuck up) regardless of how much data they steal and how many children are raped because of them.)

Some facts to consider before you get heated about the merits of their new masturbatory logo distraction.

• meta maintained a policy allowing accounts engaged in the "trafficking of humans for sex" to accumulate 16 violations before being suspended on the 17th. 

      In baseball we say “three strikes and you're out.” meta                   rewrote that to "17 strikes and you’re out.’

• A New Mexico jury ordered meta to pay $375,000,000 in civil penalties for “willfully violating the state’s unfair practices act.”
• meta misled users about the safety of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp and enabled child sexual exploitation on those platforms.
• internal company documents showed a “pattern of executives prioritizing growth over child safety.” BTW, safety here is not a kid getting a bee sting or scraping her knee. It’s selling kids for sex and profiting from it.
• Meta's head of content policy, Monika Bickert, wrote that the company was "about to do a bad thing" and called the plan to encrypt facebook messenger "so irresponsible.” She warned it would hinder the reporting of child exploitation cases to law enforcement. 
• Internal documents filed in the case revealed that meta's own staff had repeatedly flagged the risks its platforms posed to children, but that safety features were blocked or delayed because they were deemed unprofitable. 
• As of March 2020, instagram had no dedicated mechanism for users to report child sexual abuse material. When an employee raised the issue multiple times, she was told building such a tool would require too much work. (Probably not as much work as a logo-redesign, however.)
• Internal documents from a November 2020 technical failure further showed that meta's ability to track bad actors was disrupted at a time when thousands of minors were reporting the most severe category of inappropriate interactions, including sex trafficking, sextortion, and real-world meetings for sex.
•  A 2019 proposal to make all teen accounts private by default was rejected after meta's growth team found it would damage engagement metrics. 

As an industry, are we really so shallow, stupid and corrupt that we’ll over-look these easily available facts and instead focus on ligatures, precious design and the like.

That “r”?

That’s heinous.

The child-rape? That’s our business model.

As Sir John Hegarty said some years ago, the industry has retreated to the fringes. We don’t build brands. We stunt growth.

We lie. We’re not even the “toy department” anymore. That’s too dignified.

So we do fake.

So we do hate.

So we do rape.

Hairballs.