It’s seems a perfect opportunity, by the way, for media agencies’ smartest minds to apply their intellectual grunt at the Media Federation of Australia’s (MFA) Effectiveness Expo and create a roadmap for the entire marketing industry. Thought leadership - there’s a crazy thought. 

Let’s get to the big three themes then.     

Privacy

The assumption that capturing user data will remain free and relatively unencumbered like it is today is wrong. 

GDPR has not only still to be tested for precedents beyond a few billion-dollar fines on Google and Facebook in France and Germany, marketers, as we’ll discuss in future Mi3 editions, will likely be liable as “data controllers” themselves and face massive fines. A case could land within 12 months, certainly two years, in which a brand owner will face a charge of broadcasting personal data via real time bidding in an advertising exchange. That will spook even the most unconvinced and nonchalant industry players. 

Far fetched? Only if you think the Asia-Pacific CEO of Publicis’ group, Jane Lin-Baden, is crazy (and she’s not). 

Lin-Baden was in Australia last month and told a group of Publicis clients that the idea of users having complete control over the flow of their data with the ability to trade their data, funded from marketing budgets and using blockchain, was inevitable. 

Users, she said have to be incentivised in the data system. Lin-Baden told me later she thought it would happen within five years. Think about it. It’s a radical shift for the advertising industry and anyone interested in personalisation in any form.

All of these outcomes are likely without even canvassing the rapidly rising threat of regulation. We’ll get to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission shortly but chairman Rod Sims is talking tough in the lead-up to his final recommendations from the Digital Platforms Inquiry.  

Public Health 

The social and personal health impact of technology, screens and the attention economy is the risk most underweighted of the three by the advertising and marketing supply chain. 

But as Scott Galloway, the frightfully smart and data-armed marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business told Vanity Fair last week, the statistics don’t lie. The number of teens presenting to emergency wards in the US from self-harm is skyrocketing. Teen depression is going the same way.  Much of it is to do with the effects of social media and dopamine hits, ultimately funded by the advertising and marketing industries. There’s more trouble for the industry if it doesn’t get on the front foot. Health professionals are and it will bite.    

Competition Law

Exciting stuff for all of us this one, but without question it’s a clear and present threat to reliance the industry has created on a few global platforms. Even in the US, which until maybe a year ago was seen as a low threat, is now engaged in real antitrust debate around how they might constrain or break up Facebook, Google and Amazon. On Friday the U.S. Justice Department was reported to be preparing an investigation into whether Google has broken antitrust law. 

It immediately prompted this response from TripAdvisor chief executive Stephen Kaufer: “TripAdvisor remains concerned about Google’s practices in the United States, the EU and throughout the world,” Kaufer said in a statement. "For the good of consumers and competition on the internet, we welcome any renewed interest by U.S. regulators into Google’s anticompetitive behaviour.”

Granted, Kaufer has something to lose from Google's encroachment into TripAdvisor's turf, but then, who doesn't? This sentiment is rising on so many fronts it is almost negligible of the media and marketing industries to ignore any of it. 

We’ll have more on these issues in coming editions but it’s time to get smart – and ready. No kidding.