Blockchain, martech, and the flaw of excluded middles
The center will hold. Intermediaries will flourish.
If blockchain technology can directly connect advertisers and publishers (or consumers), what becomes of those companies whose entire raison d’etre is to capitalize on the valuespace that traditionally has lain between them? This was one of the issues panel moderator Alvin Foo invited us to discuss, at the Global Marketing Technology International Conference (GMTIC) last Friday (16 November 2018, Shanghai).
GMTIC was a great event, and it was a super panel. Our different roles in the industry notwithstanding, I believe we all agreed on the answer to Mr Foo’s question: Companies and institutions wishing to connect with consumers via promotional content will still need strategists, writers, artistic directors, and many others in order to present effectively a brand, a product, or a value-proposition. The wise use of blockchain technology will not drive to extinction all or even most of the value-rich activities marketers (and human beings) provide. The much maligned middle may shrink. It will surely change. But distributed-ledger technology doesn’t eliminate the need for ancillary and allied service-providers. Marketing agencies aren’t going anywhere.
Characterising “middlemen” tout court as value vampires or as free-riding parasites isn’t accurate, and it isn’t fair.
This, though, is the point I’d like to make. Characterising “middlemen” tout court as value vampires or as free-riding parasites isn’t accurate, and it isn’t fair — observe the unpleasant caricature of the middleman in the AdBank video.
Having mentioned AdBank, disclosure: There’s some similarity between AdBank and Adrealm. The effort on the part of The Adrealm Foundation to bring greater efficiency and equity to digital advertising does specifically contemplate the displacement of the data Goliaths who dominate the space between advertisers and publishers. But we do not take pot-shots at straw-man styled “middlemen.” Rather, we welcome those independent players who heretofore have been denied opportunities to get into the game. In our ecosystem, entities exerting hegemonic like control over data will (we hope) be displaced by small and medium-sized Davids who make money honestly and honourably by providing valued services where they are needed.
You have perhaps noticed that promoters of blockchain and cryptocurrency seem fixated with “middles” and “centers.” In the reigning rhetoric, both “intermediaries” and “centers” of governance are associated with inefficiency, the inflation of costs, needless complification, and corruption. Little wonder if the government of China is very careful about how blockchain and crypto are promoted here. In case you’ve forgotten, ‘China’ is English for zhong guo (中国), The Middle Kingdom (or “Central State”). When pro-decentralization presents itself as anti-center, it strikes a unique and powerful chord in these latitudes. Remember, too, that one element of the Confucian corpus that has trickled into the common aquifer of Chinese culture is the concept of 中庸 (zhong yong), the idea of “the middle way” (中庸之道). Damn at your peril the sacrosanct center.
The trust-problem is largely chimerical, or at least exaggerated to disturbing proportions. I know when a dog on a slippery slope is barking a red herring up the wrong tree, and “the trust problem” is that hound.
I am not eliding between middlemen and nuclei of power, or conflating intermediaries and actual (or de facto) oligarchies. These are functionally and conceptually distinct. It is nonetheless interesting to note that — whether we’re talking about Bitcoin or blockchains — we sooner or later find ourselves discussing some sort of liberation from one or another kind of middle/center. And I wonder: Perhaps all this positional language in the narrative is inhibiting a clearer view of the actual problem-space.
When the conversation is confined to potentially unnecessary intermediaries, we’re talking chiefly about how costs may be cut and waste avoided. So far so good — and who isn’t in favour of that? (Answer: Those who profit from inefficiencies.) It’s when the conversation is about either nuclei of power or acknowledged authorities that things get polemical quickly, because it is here that people raise the “problem of trust.”
The “problem of trust” is a topic for another time. Axing middlemen and creating trustless-trust with public key encryption technology are two distinct projects — both of which, by the way, have been oversimplified, spun by crypchain evangelists, leveraged by those with overarching sociopolitcal agendas. Suffice it to say that the trust-problem (as it is typically laid before us) is largely chimerical, or at least exaggerated to disturbing proportions. I know when a dog on a slippery slope is barking a red herring up the wrong tree, and this is that hound.
As for the death knell of middlemen and marketing agencies, this too is an unfortunate exaggeration. If you are an honest creator of genuine value, then you’ve nothing to fear from the distribution and adoption of blockchain technology. If, however, you’re selling magic beans — or selling tokenized magic beans — your day of reckoning awaits. And that day will come, with or without blockchain, whether you’re in the center, the middle, or somewhere in the aether.
Executive Director, Adrealm AEIOU
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