Instead of Traditional Ads, Why Not a Video Game?

Tintri came up with the brilliant idea to revolutionize its marketing with a video game.

It’s a medium-sized company based in the Bay Area, and they’ve done most of their marketing on their website and at annual trade shows. It worked well enough, but making a big splash at trade shows is extraordinarily difficult. The competition is staggering, and the routine is always the same. A few people at a time will hang out in the booth for a while and have a couple of snacks, then move on to the next booth and forget all about Tintri.

They wanted to convince potential customers to stay longer, so they hired us here at reddbug to build a video game that’s so compelling that people would not want to leave.

We did it inside six months, but it wasn’t easy. Building a video game from scratch—including the concept and story—is a daunting experience, especially if you want to make sure the game is not only entertaining but addicting. We also had to ensure players wouldn’t feel like they’re being manipulated with an interactive ad.

And the game had to be relevant. It couldn’t just be about anything. Tintri builds sophisticated storage devices. Their enterprise cloud platform combines a web service architecture like Amazon’s with virtual machines and containers. It sounds complicated, but Tintri makes everything easy.

So we built all that in. The game consists of multiple levels and rooms. Each room represents another step in provisioning a server in such a way that’s directly related to Tintri’s product. Not only is the game entertaining, it educates players about Tintri while they’re playing it.

We also had to make sure the game didn’t infringe upon any other game maker’s intellectual property or trademark. It had to be original.

And we were under a time crunch. It’s easy enough to get a mobile app or game approved for distribution in the Android store, but it’s a different story with Apple. Apple has standards. Apple is picky. Apple likes to say no.

But they didn’t say no to reddbug and Tintri. It’s a good thing, too, because if the game wasn’t finished on time, if it was too buggy, or if the Apple store didn’t think it was good enough, all that time and money and effort would have been wasted.

It wasn’t wasted. The game was a smashing success. It really is fun and addictive, and it really does educate players about Tintri. The company even put up big TVs in their trade show booth displaying the leaderboards. It drew massive crowds. Thousands of people downloaded it onto their mobile devices and played it. They competed against each other. They talked about it. They brought more and more people into the booth who lingered and immersed themselves in Tintri’s world for a long time.

It was a risky move, but Tintri more than made its money back on the investment.

The game is still available in the app store. You can download and play it yourself for free. It’s called Storage Tintris.

And if you’d like to hire us to create an app or game for your company, contact us.

Who are Generation Z?

The next generation is already rising.

It’s hard to believe, but Generation X, those of us who now range in age from our mid-30s to mid-50s and once derisively known as “slackers,” are almost firmly ensconced in middle age. Generation Y, or Millenials, are today’s young adults, and they’ve been studied and written about almost as much as our aging Baby Boomers, most famously by William Strauss and Neil Howe, who coined their name in the book, Millennials Rising.

Generation Z, though, has been a mystery to almost everyone except their parents and teachers—until now.

In September and October of this year, Adobe surveyed more than 1,000 Generation Z students between the ages of 11-17, and more than 400 teachers with Generation Z kids as their students. The results are fascinating.

You can read the entire study yourself—the team here at reddbug helped develop the infographic and microsite—but here are the key insights.

Insight 1: This first one isn’t surprising—both students and teachers believe that Generation Z’s defining characteristic is that they’ve all grown up in the age of technology. These kids have never known a world without high-speed Internet, smartphones, social media and on-demand streaming video.

They think of regular old email the way Xers used to look at black-and-white television. It gets the job done, they suppose, but it’s not particularly interesting.

The upside is they think they’re more creative than older generations and have more passion “for making things better and smarter.” The downside may be that technology is so integral to their experience that, as one teacher said, “it can become a hindrance for them to think without it.”

Insight 2: They also say they’re excited and nervous about the future, and that they aren’t yet prepared for the “real world.” One student put it this way: “I feel unprepared due to a lack of jobs, the high cost of education, not learning important life skills after high school.”

Of course, none of us are truly ready for the real world until we’ve spent some time there. None of us are ready to be married, either, until we are, and we’re especially not ready to have our own children before they’re born. We figure it out, though—at least most of us do—and today’s kids will too.

Almost half of the students surveyed think that what they learn outside of school will be more important to their careers than what they learn at school. That will turn out to be true, too, for almost all of them, with the possible exceptions of rocket scientists and brain surgeons.

Insight 3: The overwhelming majority of both students and teachers think kids learn more by doing things and creating things than reading about them or hearing about them, and again, they’re right.

Think about it this way: you could read every book ever written about flying helicopters, but you’ll still probably crash the first time you fly one if there isn’t an instructor there helping you out.

Insight 4: Both students and teachers think creativity will be a crucial workforce skill in the future, and again, they are correct.

These kids have never known anything but the cutting edge, sure, but technology is still changing the world at a breathtaking pace, and unless a giant asteroid slams into the planet, that’s not going to change. The Generation Z cohort just isn’t old enough yet to experience the shock of the new. The tools they’ll have when they’re in the 40s, and the skills they’ll need to use them, haven’t even been imagined yet, let alone invented.

Much of what gets invented in the future—and they seem to know this instinctively—won’t just be used by them, it will be invented by them. We probably won’t have hover cars or jet packs when we older folks reach retirement age, but we’ll be able to thank Generation Z for most of the things that we will have.

Are You Burned Out?

Full-blown occupational burnout is one of the most devastating things that can happen to a person professionally.

It can strike anyone, but it’s most crushing when it happens after a long climb to a dream job. There’s nothing like the feeling of work bliss turning to ashes except for divorce.

Dr. Dina Glouberman wrote the book on the subject, called The Joy of Burnout: How Burning Out Unlocks the Way to a Better, Brighter Future. The title may seem ridiculous, but it’s not, as anyone who has burned out and fully recovered knows.

“Burnout feels like the end of the world,” she writes in Chapter One. “It’s not. It’s the beginning of a new one.”

Most professionals work for roughly 40 years, from their mid-20s to their mid-60s. Some work even longer, well into their 80s. Virtually none stay in one place, in one job, or on a single track for that entire duration. Otherwise, the mid-life crisis wouldn’t be so distressingly common.

What does slamming into the wall feel like? “Your heart has gone out of something,” Glouberman writes, “but fear, often of the loss of your sense of identity, drives you to work even harder or give even more.”

If you’re on the road to burning out but aren’t there yet, you can slow down and take more time for yourself. Stop working overtime on weekends if you don’t have to. Do what you can to reduce the amount of stress in your life. Get out more and remember that there is more to life than your job.

If you’ve reached the end of the road, though, if you’re truly finished with a long chapter in your life, no extra down time—not even a long sabbatical—is going to work, and you’ll find yourself having to choose from one of three options.

Start a whole new career. This one is the hardest and by far the most intimidating. There are no shortcuts, either. The key here is to leverage the skills you learned from your last career into your next one.

This is relatively straightforward if, say, you’re making the leap from journalism to marketing or from the military to law enforcement. It’s tougher if you want to hop from dentistry to real estate development. Still, the skills and experience you develop in one career will almost certainly apply in another one.

You can always start over from scratch. Lots of corporate managers pull the pin and move to the countryside to open a bed-and-breakfast. There are plenty law and medical students in their 40s and even 50s. The vast majority of these people are happier after they make the transition, though many go through hell first to get there.

Make changes to your career. Sometimes, you just need a new job that’s only a little bit different from your previous job. Maybe you need more responsibility, or perhaps you’re willing to take a pay cut to reduce your responsibilities and therefore your stress level. Jumping from writing to editing might do the trick, or from graphic design to management.

Nurture a new attitude toward your career. One of the characteristics of burnout is disengagement and a complete loss of interest in whatever attracted you to the job in the first place. It might help to remind yourself why you chose your career, but perhaps you’re no longer the same person you used to be. Either way, there is almost certainly some value in what you do or you wouldn’t have chosen to do it, and you may simply need to find something new to appreciate.

Some of us just need to overhaul our work-life balance. There is more to life than work, after all. None of us are here solely to produce. We are also children, siblings, parents and friends. If work is the only thing that matters, why would anyone ever want to retire or go on vacation?

Whether you just need a break or a whole new direction, remember that burnout isn’t a disease. It’s a symptom caused by something that’s wrong in your life, your mind’s way of saying it’s time to make some small or large changes.

Once you’ve implemented those changes, whether it takes a couple of weeks or a couple of years, you’ll feel refreshed and invigorated, like yourself again, only better.

Are You Suffering From Imposter Syndrome?

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” Bertrand Russell

Do you feel in over your head? Is fear of failure making you weak in the knees? Are you afraid of being “found out,” that the recent success you’ve enjoyed is based purely on happenstance and that there’s no chance you’ll win the luck lottery twice? Do you dread that any day now a man will show up at your front door and, staring at a clipboard, inform you that there’s been a mistake, that your professional credentials you never deserved in the first place are finally being revoked?

If that’s you, you probably have Imposter Syndrome, a condition identified by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978. High achieving individuals are especially prone to it. “The more people think you’re really great,” prize-winning author David Foster Wallace said in the outstanding film The End of the Tour, “the bigger the fear of being a fraud is.”

It’s not quote a mental disorder (it isn’t serious and it requires no therapy), but it affects as many as 70 percent of us at one point or another, and it can lead to anxiety and depression if we don’t come to grips with it.

The good news is that, contrary to how it makes you feel, imposter syndrome means you’re on the way up. You’re either embarking on an exciting new career path or you’ve recently been promoted. You’re outside your comfort zone, but you’re on your way to creating a new one.

Think about lobsters. As these creatures grow, they burst their shells and are temporarily vulnerable and exposed. Over time, though, they create new shells and feel safe and protected again. Their growth is always inwardly driven, rendering their former shells too small to contain them.

That’s you. If you have imposter syndrome, you’re probably growing. (No, you are not getting fatter.) You’re either growing taller or more expansive. Your resume, no doubt, looks better than it did even a short time ago. And the longer you stay where you are, the more comfortable you’ll feel in your new skin until you grow and expand again and begin the process anew.

Bear in mind that the feeling is most likely temporary, though it isn’t likely to switch off all at once. Rather, it will gradually diminish in stages.

It also helps to remember that the problem is almost universal.

“I have written eleven books,” Maya Angelou once said, “but each time I think, ‘uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’” “I still think people will find out that I’m really not very talented,” actress Michelle Pfeifer said. “I’m really not very good.  It’s all been a big sham.” “The first problem of any kind of even limited success,” author Neil Gaiman wrote, “is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. It’…something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor has said she feels the same way sometimes.

If those four people—and those are just four famous examples—are susceptible to repeated bouts of Imposter Syndrome despite being so spectacularly accomplished, the feeling clearly has no bearing on reality whatsoever. It’s just a feeling. An illusion. It can be safely dismissed. You can tell yourself that the feeling of being a fraud is itself fraudulent.

You know who never suffers from imposter syndrome? Those who don’t care. People who aren’t ambitious, who refuse to grow, who are content to coast through life without stretching themselves or trying anything new.

We all feel like we don’t know what we’re doing sometimes, but there will always be someone who feels this more intensely than we do. (Imagine what it must feel like to be inaugurated as President of the United States. It’s not like the White House begins with a job training program.)

Unless you’re truly a fraud, though—unless you’re prepping for surgery without any medical training, or working as an undercover agent inside a terrorist organization—just give this feeling the middle finger and get on with your day. Each day you finish your work, even when you do it imperfectly, counts as one more piece of evidence that you are, in fact, precisely where you’re supposed to be.

With Twitter and Facebook, Timing is Everything

The half-life of a Facebook post is 90 minutes. The half-life of a tweet is just 24.

This means that after less than half an hour, your tweet has already been seen and re-tweeted by half the people who will ever see or re-tweet it.

By the five-hour mark, a Facebook post will be 75 percent of the way to expired. A tweet passes that threshold in less than three hours.

This data comes from Benjamin Rey who drills down into the data and explains the methodology over at Wiselytics.

If you’re a social media marketer, then, timing is critical. The last thing you want to do is publish anything on your social media channels at midnight.

If you’re posting content on your own web site, it doesn’t really matter when it goes live unless you publish new content constantly. If you’re only publishing one to three times a week, you can drop a fresh blog post or article onto your page in the dead of night in the middle of a weekend. It’s fine.

Your tweets, though, and your Facebook posts need to debut at just the right time.

If you’re marketing locally or regionally, the best time is shortly after 9:00 am. The vast majority of your customers will be awake. Your post will be live and near enough the top of their social media feeds that it will be waiting for them and still visible whenever they decide to take a break from work and check out the Internet.

If you’re marketing nationwide, though, you might want to hold off on pressing the publish button until a bit later. You could wait until noon eastern time to ensure that customers on the west coast will be awake and caffeinated, but some of your customers on the east coast will head home and unwind offline before they see what you’ve published.

Best to aim for 10:30 am eastern. Your audience reach will be a little more balanced. You’ll only miss a small number of people on each coast—a few in the morning out west and a few in the evening back east.

If you post material to Facebook and Twitter all day, aiming for 10:30 am isn’t going to work. It’s never a good idea to dump a bunch of posts on your web site or social media channels all at once. So make a decision. If your customers will only see one posts all day, which would you like them to see? Post that one at 10:30 am eastern. Post half the others earlier if possible and the other half later.

Whatever you do, don’t tweet the same material more than once. Twitter expressly forbids posting “duplicate content over multiple accounts or multiple duplicate updates on one account.” If you do this, the service may flag your account as spam and will consider removing it.

The Most Diverse Generation in History

Marketing to Millenials is tricky. They are, as AJ Agrawal writes at Forbes, “the most diverse generation to have ever existed.”

Born between 1982 and 2002, the youngest are only 13 years old, but the oldest are already 34. Those on the tail end of the cohort are still basically children, but half are old enough to be college grads. Many have founded their own companies.

“You’ll find millennials consisting of everyone from single mothers to middle class professionals,” Agrawal writes. “You’ll find them in every single social class and industry from apps to fashion trends and marketing.”

That was true of previous generations too, of course, but it’s much more true of Millenials.

They’re even more unique in other ways. GenXers and Boomers remember the days before iTunes and Spotify when nearly everyone listened to the same music on the same handful of radio stations. They remember when everyone watched the same programs on television because nobody had more than a couple of channels.

They remember when everybody got their news from the same local newspaper and the same two or three local television networks. Back then, Americans of all ages and ethnic groups and political orientations shared the same cultural reference points. Tastes diverged, but not nearly as much as they do now.

The days of mass production, mass media, mass communication, and mass marketing are over forever. Never before has market segmentation and even individualization been more crucial, but some businesses are still stuck in the past.

“Many brands,” Patrick Spenner writes, “continue to push traditional life markers such as getting married, buying a home and starting a family, because that’s what drove older generations’ purchasing habits.”

Katie Elfering, a consumer strategist at CEB Iconoculture, digs deeper.

Millennials grew up in an expanding world of choice and options for just about everything they ever needed or wanted. Because of this, they view life very differently. They don’t see just see one path available to them—they see limitless possibilities to make their life their own. And as a result, they are misjudged and misunderstood—called narcissists or assumed to be in a state of perpetual stunted adulthood. In reality, it’s because a lot of these aspects of adulthood aren’t as available as they were in the past and, more importantly, because they know they have a lot of alternative options for what adulthood looks like… Brands need to stop waiting for Millennials to “grow up” and fall in line with what past generations have done.

Indeed. Millenials aren’t going to start behaving—or shopping—like Baby Boomers for the same reason America can’t go back to the 1950s—or even the early 2000s. History has no rewind button.

Boomers lived their young adult lives the way they did because they were the products of a stable post-war America with mass production, mass communication and mass everything else. We all live in a hyperindividualized world now, but Millenials have never known anything else. They’re going to be around longer than the rest of us, too. Advertisers and marketers, like all other professionals, had better get used to it.

Virtual Reality Will Transform Marketing

Virtual Reality is here. And it’s going to dramatically transform marketing as much as it will change entertainment.

The Oculus Rift headset was released this week, and the content reel on the company’s website makes it look like a blast. The content itself isn’t anything new, though. Mostly, it consists of video games, and video games have been around in one form or another since the 1970s.

We should expect the first generation of virtual reality applications and content to mimic the old forms, the way the first films resembled stage plays on screen, and the way early websites resembled print flyers.

What’s new here is the immersive experience. And with an immersive experience, we have an entirely new set of possibilities that we haven’t even begun to explore yet. Imagine, for instance, using a more advanced version of Google Earth with a virtual reality headset. Imagine, while you’re at it, using a more advanced version of Google Moon with a virtual reality headset.

Now imagine immersive marketing using a virtual reality headset. No, not immersive junk mail. Not immersive spam. And not 3-D banner ads. Imagine transporting your would-be customers to another place and time altogether.

SocialTimes recently interviewed Joshua Keller, CEO of Union Square Media, about the possibilities. “The most exciting aspect of VR,” he said, “is that the possibilities of it are limitless. Unlike traditional marketing forms like print, radio, and TV where you’re confined to a certain box of how you can spin campaigns, with VR marketers are much less restrained in the creativity of their campaigns. An auto-maker can offer virtual test drives or can walk users virtually through the manufacturing process. It is much more personal than a commercial spot where they’re seeing a model drive a car along the coast.”

You’d miss a couple of things on a virtual test drive. You wouldn’t really know how it feels. You wouldn’t know how well the seat fits your body, how much you can and can’t feel the road, or if the ride is quiet or loud on the freeway. But still. How much fun would that be?

And imagine if you’re looking for a new home. You could virtually tour a house before requesting a real-life showing by the real estate agent. You could “walk” up the steps, onto the porch, into the living room, down the hallway, through the kitchen, and out the back into the yard. You could place mockups of your own furniture into the house and see what it would look like.

Maybe you’re trying to decide where to stay on vacation. You could virtually tour resorts, hotels and vacation rentals. You could “stroll” the beaches on Maui or the back country trails in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

The possibilities really are endless.

Some forms of marketing—junk mail, spam, online ads that bog down websites—are annoying. But virtual reality marketing won’t be the least bit annoying when it’s done right. Customers will love it. At its best, it could be indistinguishable from entertainment.

Who wouldn’t want to virtually attend a live concert by their favorite new band while they’re on the road promoting their new album? Who wouldn’t want to virtually tour the Florida Keys if they’re in the market for a vacation to the Florida Keys? Who wouldn’t want to virtually test-drive the new Audi on a winding coast road even if they can’t feel the seat?

Sharpen Your Writing Chops in One Hour

Whether you’re copywriter, a content marketer, a novelist, or a journalist, there’s a little-known teaching tool available to everyone that can dramatically improve your writing in just an hour.

Find a writer who’s better than you and type their best work verbatim into your own word processor.

This is only plagiarism if you publish it, and you’re not going to publish it. (We certainly hope not, anyway.) This is just an exercise, a teaching tool, and it’s a powerful one.

Typing someone else’s words onto your own screen is the most intimate of all possible writing acts. It’s as if you’re opening up your mind and letting someone else take over for a while, almost as if you’re channeling them.

If you’re a novelist and spend an hour or so typing James Lee Burke’s lush descriptions, Raymond Carver’s spare prose, or Lee Child’s gripping action scenes, you’ll get a far better feel for how and why their words and sentences work so well than you ever could from just reading them.

Likewise, if you’re a copywriter who admires, say, the picture-window quality of the words on Adobe’s website, spend an hour or two typing that copy word-for-word onto your own screen. After a while, you’ll get so used to it that writing it yourself will seem easy.

It won’t be easy, but rest assured that it’s not easy for the writers you want to emulate either. They take great care in crafting and editing their copy to near perfection.

By typing the words, sentences, and paragraphs of great writers, your brain will process the way they use language at the deepest possible level. When their words flow from your eyes, through your brain, out your fingertips, and onto your own screen, you’ll be training yourself—subconsciously as well as consciously—to write more like them than you already do.

You’ll get a feel for word selection, pacing, sentence rhythm, information flow, and subtle touches that are hard to explain and even notice when you’re passively reading. It’s like having a great teacher sitting next to you and saying, “watch me and do exactly what I do.” If you spend enough time doing this, next time you get stuck you’ll be able to ask yourself what the great writers you’ve copied would do, and you’ll know the answer.

You can’t turn yourself into the next Hemingway even if you retype every word the man ever wrote, but if you re-type a lot of it, your own work will be far more Hemingway-esque than it used to be. Guaranteed.

Go ahead. Pick a writer who’s better than you are. Pick one of the masters and become that writer for an hour or two. You may be astonished at the results when you get back to work.

Lowering Prices Can Make You a Lot More Money

It’s a hard thing for some businesses to comprehend, but lower prices can bring in a lot more money. Just look at Walmart. Whether you love the company or hate it, there’s no denying that its “always low prices” strategy works. It’s the largest company by revenue in the world.

You have to be careful, though. The lower the price, the lower the perceived value. You wouldn’t buy a smartphone for 99 cents. The thing wouldn’t even work. It would have to be some kind of a scam. Perhaps it’s a dead phone that somebody dropped in the shower and is being sold used as a repurposed paperweight.

The higher the price, the higher the perceived value. What would you think of a smartphone that cost 5,000 dollars? That phone must really be something. The new iPhone probably looks like a 1980s Atari console by comparison. Leonardo DiCaprio probably has one. But we don’t have Leonardo DiCaprio’s budget, so we’re not dropping five grand on a phone, not even if the battery lasts all year on a single charge.

It may be hard to admit this, but you’re generally better off erring by pricing a little too low than a little too high. You’ll move a lot more units while doing little or no damage to the perceived value.

The Marketing MO blog precisely sums up how an elastic demand curve works.
When you raise prices slightly, volume goes down substantially.
When you lower prices slightly, volume goes up substantially.
Of course, you’ll want to make sure a lower price doesn’t obliterate your profit margin. You want to find the sweet spot that yields the most revenue. If you sell more units at a lower price but hardly make any money because the profit margin is miniscule, it’s not worth it. Likewise, if you’re only selling a small number of units because your price is too high, it doesn’t matter if you can drive a tank fleet through your profit margin—you’re not making much money.

Generally, you’ll have to price your products within the normal range of the market unless your product is stratospherically better than the competition’s, but even then you have to be careful. Your would-be customers will compare your prices to everyone else’s if it’s remotely feasible for them to do so. If they’re making a purchasing decision while standing in the aisle at Best Buy or browsing online at Amazon.com, price shopping is no more difficult than moving their eyeballs.

Sean D’Souza at Copyblogger makes a good point. “You want to create a situation where clients have stopped considering the competition and are now choosing from your range of products, services, or courses.”

You can do this easily if you sell directly from your own website. Potential customers will have to take at least a few extra steps before they can price shop. Instead of comparing your product’s prices to those of your competition, they’ll be comparing prices of your products. If you’re selling six different smartphones, or six different whatevers, they’ll ask themselves which of your six products looks like the best deal.

And that’s where the fun begins. You’ll have all kinds of leverage that you can’t have when selling at Best Buy or on Amazon. You might not need to lower your prices at all. By raising the price of one or two products, you’ll make the less expensive ones look like even better deals by comparison. You can’t do that at Best Buy because you can’t control your competition’s prices.

If your demand curve is elastic, however, you still might be better off lowering prices. It can produce shocking results.

When developer Gunnar Bartels dropped the price of his Sharemouse app from 25 dollars to 10 dollars, his sales and profits went through the roof. Techdirt has the details in a case study, but here’s the money quote:

“Holy cow!” Bartels wrote. Translation: He sold more licenses than the elastic pricing model predicted.

He was understandably skeptical and thought the experiment would almost certainly fail, but he gritted his teeth and dropped his price anyway because you never know until you try.

Be brave. Experiment. Keep trying until you find your own sweet spot.

Artificial Intelligence Can Transform Marketing

Over at the Huffington Post, Emma Rush, CEO of the British marketing agency Chemistry, makes a solid case that the marketing industry can learn a lot from Netflix. “Its algorithms,” she writes, “are used to gauge the success of shows, target relevant creative, package programming for specific people, and even to acquire new programming.”

Netflix knows what you want to watch because it knows what you have already watched. The more movies and shows you watch on Netflix, the more the company “knows” you and the more data its algorithms can churn. If you tend to gravitate toward award-winning romantic comedies, Netflix will suggest, or push, award-winning romantic comedies you haven’t watched yet.

If you want to see an even better model, look at Amazon. It started out as a bookstore, but it now sells just about everything except real estate and cars. You can get the electronic edition of the latest Lee Child thriller, but you can also order bath towels, steak seasoning, a high-tech non-stick frying pan, incense from India, and nutritional supplements. You can also stream Amazon Studios’ original content, such as the terrific police procedural, Bosch, based on Michael Connelly’s novels about LAPD homicide detective, Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch, named after the famous Dutch painter.

Because you can buy, read and watch just about anything from Amazon, the website’s algorithms can collect even more data points about you than Netflix can. Some people find this creepy, to be sure, and don’t want to be tracked by faceless corporations on the Internet, but the truth is that most people like it when retailers know what they want in advance and therefore know how to market to them.

One of the big reasons why Barnes and Noble struggles so much to compete online with Amazon is because when you go to BarnesandNoble.com, the company doesn’t care all that much about what you want to read. It pushes the latest best-sellers instead. Shopping for books at Amazon is the online equivalent of stepping into a brick and mortar bookstore where the owner has known you personally for years and can confidently say, “hey, we’ve got this new book by a fantastic new unknown author, and I know you’re going to love it.”

Compare that to how most websites work. “Three quarters of people are frustrated with websites when ad content has nothing to do with their own interests,” Rush writes, “and as more of our online activity moves to mobile, advertising eating into users’ mobile data plans is likely to become an even more emotive issue.”

Amazon and Netflix are able to provide a deeply personalized experience because their artificially intelligent algorithms have massive amounts of personal data to work with. Few companies—and no marketing agencies—have that kind of data at their disposal right now. And no company or organization will ever know everything about an individual’s tastes and preferences. Privacy concerns aren’t going away. Corporate and government omniscience is naturally resisted by huge numbers of people and probably always will be.

It’s nevertheless likely that the massive amounts of time marketing strategists currently spend pouring over mind-boggling amounts of data will eventually be outsourced to intelligent algorithms like those used at Netflix and Amazon. Advertisers may never have as much data to work with, and human intelligence backed up by years of professional experience and judgment can probably never be replaced by a marketing robot, but artificial intelligence is still in its infancy. We’re at the very beginning of a trend here, not the end.

“Netflix data didn’t create Breaking Bad,” Rush concludes, “and there was no data that could have predicted such a storyline would work. That was down to the show’s creator Vince Gilligan and his desire to rewrite the traditional ‘rules’ of a TV series. What Netflix is very good at, and what brands can learn from, is how to set up systems overlaid with human creativity. Systems that identify, in real-time, the various ways people engage with programmes, allowing brands to make faster and more confident decisions about what to show, to whom, and when.”