{"id":14403,"date":"2020-09-27T11:00:29","date_gmt":"2020-09-27T05:30:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/?p=14403"},"modified":"2021-01-02T11:17:51","modified_gmt":"2021-01-02T05:47:51","slug":"secondary-influences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/2020\/09\/27\/secondary-influences\/","title":{"rendered":"Occult of personality"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recently, Badshah took the rap for\u00a0allegedly paying for fake views<\/a> on a music video, in a bid to break a YouTube viewership record. I’m surprised that a lot of folks were surprised! Whether it’s social media (FB, Instagram, Snapchat etc) or media networks (YouTube, TikTok, and largely Twitter too), digital ecosystems have been built around reach. Just like traditional media was. Reach that is then sold to brands and advertisers. Reach that is usually also a poor surrogate for efficiency and effectiveness. That’s why all this reminds me of\u00a0Goodhart’s law – when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. The unintended but predictable consequences of optimising for the measure. So why do brands still do it? Hey, everyone has KRAs and no time for real outcomes. Output is good enough. Influencer marketing does just that. Besides, a case can even be made for credibility in the audience’s mind. But that’s a separate story.<\/p>\n

The wordplay in the first sentence was intentional – took the rap<\/em>. Because there are similar dramas being enacted. Not just at celebrity levels, but around us too. You thought that the CXOs and “Leaders” on your LinkedIn timeline simultaneously discovered their bodhi<\/em> tree and stand-up potential? To be fair, maybe some did because that’s one of the side-effects of a pandemic, but definitely not all. It’s also not a coincidence that there has been a surge in agencies that charge anywhere from 50k-2.5lakh\/month to create and maintain a “personal brand”. The broad trend of “weak ties” since the advent of social networks, and the recent sharp shift to online-only interaction has made it easier to deploy masks of the personality kind, and cultivate “authenticity”! Which sometimes results in fun.<\/p>\n

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Different countries approach the legal aspect of this “business” differently. Karthik has covered a lot of ground on this in his post<\/a>. To me, the word “misrepresentation” says it enough, and I have no doubts in my mind that it should be made illegal. Although it will only be of consequence when large numbers are involved, and will not affect the garden variety CXO\/thought leader.\u00a0Morality has anyway stopped being a deterrent a long time ago.<\/p>\n

An article<\/a> I read a while back sums it all up beautifully.<\/p>\n

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But more importantly, this blind obsession for reach has serious second order consequences too. As this Wired story<\/a> points out, we’re now in a world\u00a0 where “..algorithmically generated content receives algorithmically generated responses, which feeds into algorithmically mediated curation systems that surface information based on engagement.<\/em>” Who has the time for facts? Add to this the fact that AI is the potential future of influencers, and we have all the ingredients of an information dystopia. Even worse than the one we are in. And we really can’t blame AI when humans are absolutely fine with duplicity to raise their profile. The average celebrity might have a revenue model linked to his\/her reach. But for professionals to pretend to be an above-average “cerebrity”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The “fakeness” in influencer marketing is only a symptom of a malaise that is present at all levels of society. The CXOs\/thought leaders who use agencies to build a personal brand are exhibiting the same duplicity. The secondary consequences on society, thanks to AI driven media creation and consumption, are probably beyond our influence now! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6054,1479,98],"tags":[5968,5180,5969,3578,229],"class_list":["post-14403","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","category-thoughtstream","category-future","tag-goodharts-law","tag-influencer-marketing","tag-narcissism","tag-personal-brand","tag-social-media"],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14403","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14403"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14403\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14623,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14403\/revisions\/14623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14403"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14403"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/manuscrypts.com\/test\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14403"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}