It was a pretty good game, despite the fact that the Browns won. (I am, as you've probably guessed on the basis of my moral qualities and good teeth, a Steelers fan.)
And it was a pretty good broadcast experience, too, because Amazon got Al Michaels to do the play-by-play, and that guy could effectively narrate a dentist's waiting room. And plus they had like five billion cameras to show every single time Aaron Rodgers cussed out Mike McCarthy, and they had fancy on-screen graphics to show when someone was going to blitz, and they had decent on-field interviews with the coaches, and yada yada, et cetera, you know: the whole shebang of the NFL TV viewing bonanza.
I won't lie: the NFL is a good product. It's fun to watch. It sucks you in.
But by the time I was done watching it, I wanted out.
And not just because the Steelers proved once again that they are trapped in a cycle of endless competitive mediocrity (although that too), but more so because I felt trapped, personally, in the inescapable banal joviality of an endless commercial.
See, when you watch football on Amazon Prime, not only are there a ton of commercials, there are a ton of commercials for Amazon Prime. You've entered their ecosystem, scurried right into their trap like a rat following cheese. And they give you the cheese, all right: You can literally click a button on your internet-connected smart TV and buy whatever stupid thing they're showing you, spur of the moment, bam, then get it in a few hours with same-day shipping. It's wonderful. It's insane.
It's wild to think that Amazon started with books. Just some books. But now they own all the books, and warehouses, and trucks, and drones, and the rest of the supply chain, and also cloud servers, and Whole Foods, and The Silmarillion, and Thursday Night Football and oh yeah a streaming service with all of the world's recorded music.
The end goal is obvious: Amazon would like to own you.
And not just a couple minutes of your life, but all of it, or at least all the useful parts. They'd like to function like one of those old coal companies, omnipotent, where workers live in company houses and pay for groceries at the company store with company credit, only they'd like to do that for the whole world rather than just a measly town or two.
It's not that Amazon is evil, really. It's just that they are necessarily (and ruthlessly) efficient.
Just like every other big tech company.
Meta wants to own all of you, too.
I've had this realization force-fed to me the past month via the big Meta marketing headlines. Stuff like:
Meta One is a nonsensical paid subscription service that will let businesses post links on Facebook and Instagram. (Yes, businesses have always been able to post links for free, and yes, now they will have to pay for it.)
Meta is also getting rid of all placement targeting options, which basically means advertisers will no longer have any say over where their ads are shown. (Yes, advertisers have always been able to choose where to place their ads in Meta's ecosystem.)
Both of these updates are purposed toward the same end goal:
Meta would like to increase the time, attention, and money that you spend with Meta.
The Meta One stuff is pretty straightforward. Obviously, if a business posts a link off-platform, it takes users off of Meta, which is no good for Meta. So they might as well recoup the lost attention with a little extra revenue, and, in so doing, decrease the number of off-platform links that get posted in the first place. It sucks for most businesses, but from Meta's point of view, it's a win-win.
Getting rid of placement controls is less straightforward, but it's directionally similar. Meta is moving toward a world where the only advertising campaigns that work on their platform happen entirely on their platform.
Placement controls have long been a way to set up more effective click conversion campaigns. Clicks from certain placements (like Audience Network, etc.) can go wrong via accidental clicks or bot traffic. If we want to get people to Spotify, for example, it helps to run your ads exclusively in Instagram reels.
But Meta, it goes without saying, would rather not send its precious users to places like Spotify.
So, goodbye placement controls, and hello automatic everything. By reducing advertisers' abilities to manually guide results, Meta is pushing all of us to rely on their conversion tracking, which, admittedly, works quite well. In Meta's ideal world, the whole buying process, from discovery to lead capture to purchase, will happen on Meta, and Meta will be advertisers all-in-all, and all of you will be theirs.
It's a burgeoning utopia. Or at least brilliantly efficient.
So what should you do?
I'll close with a couple thoughts.
First, if you're running music ads, don't panic. Meta ads for music streams still work and probably will for a while. For now and the foreseeable future, you can use Value Rules to get around the loss of placement controls. I made a video about this here; it's more complicated and a little less effective than picking placements, but Meta ads are so good that it's still probably the best advertising option out there.
Second, while I think it's important to recognize what all of these tech platforms want – they want all of you – I'm not arguing that you should get off of them entirely. Amazon, Meta, Google, Spotify, etc. are wildly successful because they are wildly convenient, and, in many cases, wickedly helpful.
I can see three viable paths for music artists.
- The first is to boycott the big tech platforms as much as possible, and to instead build everything you can on independent options like Bandcamp and Subvert – while, of course, playing a ton of real live shows for real live people.
- The second is to build on big tech platforms in such a way so as to flow with the current of their incentives rather than against it. For instance: I think it'll only get easier to run ads for Instagram followers and to sell products on Facebook. You can run those sorts of campaigns, follow the rules, and help yourself to a growing slice of Mark Zuckerberg's people-based pie.
- And the third is, I think, probably the most realistic: Practice some mix of the two strategies above. Be wily with how you build on tech platforms, and be sure to build off of them, too.
Good luck, and whatever you do, just remember: They want to eat you.
– Jon
Jon Anderson
Founder @ Two Story Media
Surprisingly Good @ Sitting Quietly
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100% Human Guarantee
I wrote this, not AI.
Today's random photo: The ingredient list on a protein bar that my brother told me I shouldn't eat. (Not Tom, the other one, Tim, who is big into nutrition.) Too late though because I bought a box of 30.
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P.S. – Last week was Part 2 of me telling you what to do with your time and money. You can read it here.