Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to double-click down on both of those sectors individually. The first question that comes to my mind is the fragmentation of media attention question. While there is fragmentation, there are also a couple of channels that are hogging attention from a platform point of view.

Facebook continues to be a very big attention hogger globally. You have a much better organized list of who’s hogging whose attention than I do. How do you see this playing out? There is a lot of clamor right now about addictive behaviors.

John Deschner: First, I read a stat that Google and Facebook together pull 60% of all digital media dollars. I think it’s true. Facebook doesn’t really mean Facebook. Facebook means a lot of different types of ad units. It means Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. You’re talking about, at least, three or four fundamentally different behaviors and different places. Even Facebook Live is also a fundamentally different way of interacting.

The duopoly is more of a financial entity than it is a consumer behavior. Especially with Google, you can play with everything from Daydream all the way through to 50 different kinds of YouTube units. Then there’s paid search. If I’m a brand, I certainly have concerns about that because being in a duopoly situation tends to be uncompetitive from a financial perspective.

As an advertiser, I think it’s still a pretty broad spectrum of behaviors. I think it’s been a really interesting last couple of months. Before I came back to Los Angeles last year, I was in Southeast Asia for a couple of years. Myanmar, especially, switched on the Internet and then all of a sudden, 3G cards were $1.50 a month instead of $1,500 a month, and Facebook became synonymous with the Internet. Then it got turned into some really nefarious purposes.

It makes what happened in the US election exceptionally mild by comparison. You have people from these platforms saying, “We should have thought harder. We created the digital version of a cigarette, and we never thought about what it might do when we put it out into the world.” Seeing the announcement that YouTube is making around human curation and Facebook announcing that they’re going to change the newsfeed, you have an acknowledgment.

Underlying all of that, there’s a guy called Dan Hahn who basically said that these events around the election, Facebook Live in North Africa, and in Myanmar, are what happen right before you get regulated software development, which I think would fundamentally change Silicon Valley.

Sramana Mitra: All of those are very interesting developments. We are tracking all of them very closely. I agree with you there’s going to be regulation. There needs to be regulation.

John Deschner: The question there is, would it be government regulation or self regulation?

Sramana Mitra: If they don’t self regulate, government will regulate. If they self regulate, it may be done in a more intelligent way. Government regulation can be not very intelligent.

John Deschner: Look at what happened in the motion picture industry earlier on. The video game industry did the same thing. Both those industries reassured the public and government that they had a handle on it and they understood their responsibility. The onus is now on platforms including smartphone manufacturers to understand that there’s a balance between profits and impact to the world.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: John Deschner, Chief Innovation Officer of TBWA/Chiat/Day
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