Sauron's Eye and The Orc Era of Marketing
Sauron's Eye and The Orc Era of Marketing
An interview with In Growth We Trust
Recently, I was interviewed by the good people at In Growth We Trust.
It was a fun conversation with Jake and Yoann - as we traversed the creation of Passionfruit, the future of work and the need to think of marketers (or indeed any customer / consumer you’re selling to!) as human beings that have WhatsApp conversations with their mums!
That last point comes across tongue in cheek in the interview, but on reflection I do feel we continue to underestimate the effect of Sauron’s digital eye.
To explain the Lord of The Ring reference: in the Tolkien novels it is said that the eye operates “with great power to pierce all shadows of cloud, and earth, and flesh, and to see you”
That last clause, that feeling of being seen, increasingly dictates the interactions, behaviours and incentives around us. In the West, we almost all (nb smartphone penetration is estimated between 81-92% in the US and the UK) carry an extension of our bodies which has a camera inserted in it.
In the past, the visibility of our actions were largely confined to the time and space in which they took place — it would take a quite special moment to appear in a newspaper or on a TV broadcast. Now, with the ubiquity of smart phones, everything is seen to some extent - be it shared openly on TikTok, or on a closed community like a WhatsApp group.
As Paul Virilio puts it in The Vision Machine, “the imperative to re-present oneself” has obliterated our experience of distance. To take that out of French philosophical jargon, since everything we do these days can be visually recorded and reproduced, we act in a way which “prices in” that what we do will be seen by our mums, our peers, our love interests, our colleagues and so on.
As such, the new cost of living in the era of Sauron’s eye is that external perception drives more behaviour than ever before. For marketers, this means that it’s not private market share or sales numbers that get you the big promotion anymore, so much as it is the big glitzy vanity campaign that “everyone sees” on LinkedIn. Granted, sometimes the big glitzy campaign does drive market share and sales, but usually it’s more boring stuff like improved physical availability of your product and consistently memorable brand messaging/creative across the channels where your consumers spend time.
This new paradigm frustrates many. As an industry, Marketing, much like the world-at-large, is fuelled by third party perception of people who don’t “matter” (ie for Marketers, aren’t your consumer), not confidential outcomes celebrated by small teams, or hard numbers shared in investor updates. But it is the new paradigm, and will only accelerate as, per Digital Native’s recent post, generative AI brings a production revolution that means more can be made and more can be seen.
Cynically, I suppose that means we are the new Orcs?
“They were Elves once, taken by the dark powers, tortured and mutilated, a terrible, ruined form of life...”
Saruman, The Lord of The Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring
Anyway, listen to the podcast if you fancy it, and indeed the many other fabulous episodes that Yoann and Jake have created. They are living proof that there’s always more room for high quality content. As a side note, I am persuaded that the most downloaded podcast of 2030 has not yet been started.
