Growth For Growth's Sake Is Cancer's Ideology

Note: I had previously published a version of this on my old website. It has been updated with a focus on the upcoming year.

Exponential Growth skews our perceptions of ourselves and others

Many people smarter than me have spent plenty of time trying to figure out why algorithms choose the posts they do. In my opinion, the interesting part is how (for some of us) our own self-esteem and self-worth has become connected to these numbers and platforms. 

Like many other millennials, a lot of my friends have social media profiles for their pets. One of those friends has a Tik Tok for one of his cats. One video going viral back in 2021 resulted in some absolutely astounding results, with millions of views in less than a week. 999% growth is a very big number.  

In the days after my friend went viral, I talked to him a lot about why. I saw his initial excitement of being able to get into the Tik Tok Creators Fund turn into frustration when the growth tailed off; a few days passed, and it turned back into excitement when the chart turned back upward. Months have passed; the pattern continues. Sometimes Ruth is blessed by the algorithm; other times, my friend spends his time telling people no, he doesn't need to put his cat down.

If we’re all addicted to growth, the digital platforms we spend our time on are the needle and the likes, shares, and dollars that get pumped out are the heroin. Humans get very impressed with very big numbers. I think all of us have a base desire to watch those numbers go up for the things we do, online or otherwise, the way you get a hit of dopamine from winning at a slot machine.

Why is that so important?

I see this phenomenon regularly in my job. Paid Media Marketing is often seen as a game of scale and aggregates. But it's far too easy to see a bad day and panic that it's something you did vs something external that is out of your control. Therefore, it’s sometimes very hard to not associate your own mental well being with your performance. What makes this especially difficult, as a member of an advertising agency, is that you are not the decision maker. Your client is. If they feel the wind rushing by them in a free fall, there's not a lot you can say to reassure them. But when you're soaring upward? The feeling of flight is so, so addictive. But… even if you have done something really good for a client lately, it doesn't matter when the line is going down. The only acceptable line chart is a hockey stick in the era we live in, yet it ignores the reality of how change happens. I’ve taken it on the chin and had some bad days managing other people’s money, but these days get balanced out by the overall line chart. Not every client can see that, but so the game goes.

The amazing thing about exponential growth is that when you’re standing at one point on the slope, it’s impossible to tell how far up and to the right it will curve. The downside is that our internet platforms and capitalist culture at large are designed to be more, more, more. Therefore, when the curve goes down instead, it’s hard to not think something is ‘wrong’ or needs to ‘change’ but the day in, day out dips are the game. Those dips can affect your well being, especially if/when you have a job where you never log off. Some people are very good at seeing the longer trend line, but others only see the dips and fret about what the internet has done to our behavior or their numbers right now, as if a moral panic about a new tool or worrying about cash is a new thing rather than history repeating itself.

Meanwhile, machine learning has gotten good enough to the point where it can cross cultural boundaries and cause things to go viral globally. It is only going to get better for these platforms as they continue to collect data on a daily basis. Tik Tok is just the beginning. The implications for this are astounding, meanwhile, we’re only beginning to see the start of them. Inside Amazon, a program called Hands Off The Wheel is currently automating white collar jobs. Algorithms are starting to get better at white collar jobs than people. This implication is two-fold. First, it makes the ability to win the games they set up across different platforms even more profitable. Second, the idea that machine learning will automate away blue collar jobs has not completely borne out in the data. While automation has highly affected blue collar industries, today companies still need people inside the factories. That means there will be an excess of highly educated Americans who will turn to these new types of careers online, in addition to the automation that is happening or has happened in blue collar sectors. And that's before we get into Generative AI programs that exploded in 2022.

Is your line made with beeswax?

We are doing this while having no real idea what we are optimizing for online. There is no transparency about why certain posts are chosen by the algorithms for further engagement. Advertisers try to hack it with metrics like hook rate and cost per engagement, but as a paid media marketer, I have learned through millions of other people’s dollars that what you tell the platform to optimize for is what you will get. If you pay for video views, you get views. If you place a pixel and ask for purchases, you get purchases. I think it’s a slightly fair assumption that how the algorithm works on the paid side mimics the organic side, but I have no idea if that's true! If I could tell you which ad was going to succeed, I wouldn't need to be an advertiser. As far I as I can tell, the only thing that the digital platforms know how to optimize for is their own profit margins, not your results. Every single advertiser needs to remember that, always.

None of these algorithms are vettable. We have no idea why certain trends happen, we just know they are happening because winning the game of being chosen by these algorithms is immensely profitable. As Zeynep Tufecki puts it, we’ve created a dystopia to get people to click on ads. As we feed more clicks and data to the machine, we’re becoming the sheep to their shepherd. We have no idea where we are being led. We follow to make the pack bigger, because there is safety in numbers.

I would argue that in 2023, we are heading into a brave new world. Between the geopolitical stakes playing out in plain sight during Tik Tok's rise, Meta's continuing identity crisis, Google's attempts to automate advertisers out of existence, and massive economic headwinds that are unlikely to cease anytime soon, we will see more businesses watch their lines go down from factors far beyond the control of their product, customer base, or ads. Maybe it's the supply chain backing up again due to COVID policy changes in China. Maybe the Federal Reserve keeps raising interest rates. Maybe the war in Ukraine escalates again. If you think you know for certain what will happen next year, I would like to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge for a mere one billion dollars.

The agencies that survive will not solely be dependent on the wings of advertising. They will be able to survive when they fly too close to the sun, because their financial wings will not be made of the beeswax that are just service fees. The others will crash into the ocean and drown while the world moves on around them, just like the painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder showed in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The agencies who win will have to understand that their product is more than a creative or a landing page: it is results.

Therefore: growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of cancer.

All cancer cares about is more infections of cells, more destruction of previously healthy tissue, as fast as possible. I’ve come to believe that digital platforms are designed to make our behavior as advertisers cancerous because of our numbers obsession. We’re so focused on making dollars go up that we are usually failing to think about what other numbers should be measured and matter for our clients. It is no secret why: we need to get the spend up because that is how we make money.

"But that's not my job! I just make the ads?" Bullshit. You get paid because you help a business make money. I don't mind being Daedalus here: I say that is optimizing for the wrong metric when businesses are crashing and burning or barely making it.

Can you be profitable with your ad spend is a much bigger challenge for advertisers to understand and achieve. It requires looking at conversion funnels across B2B and DTC, margins of each client, their warehouse, supply chains, inventory levels and a lot of other areas of expertise post-purchase that advertising agencies do not have. It requires deep collaboration and trust between a client and the agency that takes time, sweat, and a whole lot of effort to develop. But that's what will be required for success. A good creative or new campaign can create as many problems as successes. What is the point of trying to soar if the backend of the business is not ready to scale with it? All that will happen is you crash into the ocean. The waves are 20 feet high, the sea is getting rougher and even more unforgiving than usual. Good luck with not drowning.