In the digital strategy training sessions I run, I try to use simple language and lively analogies to describe the complex world of digital media and marketing.
One comparison I draw is between the digital macro-environment and the legendary TV series Game of Thrones (GoT). The aim is to help people see beyond the impenetrable wall of data centres, techno-jargon, capital risk and dystopian views of robotic horizons, and that the digital technology industry is just like any other; full of fallible humans, political battles, and egomaniacal plans. Hopefully, bringing the issues alive for those whom the discussion of bits and bytes is a non-starter.
In case you haven’t seen it, GoT was an epic fantasy TV series about nine Great Houses – as in aristocratic families - competing to be top dogs, and take their rightful control of the Iron Throne in the fictional continent of Westeros. The result is a convoluted, brutal non-stop war full of would-be kings, powerplay-plots, and bloodshed on a tectonic level.
The global digital marketing ecosystem is so vast, sprawling, dynamic and politically complex that a point-of-comparison...
...with a world driven by equally labyrinthine subterfuge and ruthless scheming can be helpful. Furthermore, just as the ‘smallfolk’ in Game of Thrones are the grist for the Great Houses’ mill, we all now live in a digital world, the parameters of which are drawn by the technology empires.
In fact, it’s not a great leap to compare GoT to the global digital landscape, driven by technological mega-corps battling each other for market share and economic hegemony.
In GoT, the players are the Great Houses, such as the Starks and the Lannisters, formed of familial alliances that seek to undermine each other at every opportunity, whilst advancing their own interests and agendas through political machinations and strategic warfare. All set against the background of the Seven Kingdoms, the geographical main states through which the battles surge. While the Great Houses have deep bonds with the Kingdoms, their ambitions are always set on global domination.
In today’s world of digital media and marketing, the players are the Great Platforms, such as Apple, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet. These digital fiefdoms also harbour global ambitions that they deploy through armies of technologists and data centres, alongside unlimited bounty from capital markets. This is all played out under the uneasy governance of nation states, akin to GoT's Kingdoms, that simultaneously woo the Great Platforms and their resources, whilst also struggling to wrestle away their power through evolving regulatory frameworks and brute force mega-fines - just to show who’s boss.
Finally, in the GoT universe there are hundreds of smaller Noble or Lesser Houses, such as Harrigon and Marmont, that are subservient to the Great Houses. These pretenders seek constantly to upset the hierarchy by switching alliances, building their own armies and resources through guile and courage, but, vitally, without incurring the Great Houses’ destructive wrath.
In the digital world, the role of the Lesser Houses is played by smaller but significant technology challengers, such as The Trade Desk or Open AI, that use innovation and agility to disrupt convergence and attract the patronage of the Great Platforms. Ideally, without being outflanked or smashed by the techno-aristocrats.
The analogy is also a helpful way to understand the day-to-day digital media operations and marketing strategies that, increasingly, are driven and defined by this global clash of silicon titans. As we see below, it only takes one of the Great Platforms to drop an AI shoulder or a framework feint and the rest of the ecosystem is off-balance and vulnerable.
In the same way that battles in GoT, such as Blackwater, are the perpetual peaks of dramatic powerplays, the Great Platforms of digital media are locked in eternal war. While not as gory, the virtual skirmishes and conflicts are every bit as ferocious.
Apple’s Privacy Crusade
An epic example of such crusading online manoeuvres is Apple’s repositioning in 2014 to become a paragon of privacy. This could have been mistaken at the time to be a wholesome act of consumer rights as Apple CEO, Tim Cook, explained his concerns about customers being tracked and targeted with personalised advertising. However, in fact, the swipe was a samurai-level of marketing kendo; one upon which Cook has skewered many opponents since. ‘Privacy is a fundamental right,’ he opined, and in doing so, made the digital weather for years to come. GoT’s arch-schemer Lord Petyr Baelish would be proud. ‘You should be in control of your data – not the highest bidder’, Cook continued, thereby skewering his arch enemies Meta (nee Facebook) and Alphabet (nee Google) with a silicon stiletto blade. Not only was he preparing the privacy battle ground, but he also put his own Great Platform at the top of a virtual vantage point.
Since that initial declaration, Cook has mercilessly doubled-down. Despite being happy to bank $20 billion from Google each year to remain the default Safari search engine, his privacy stance forced its parent company, Alphabet, to find an alternative to the third-party cookie gold that holds together its display advertising empire. A search that has failed (ironically) to date leaving Google to employ the Ostrich-strategy of putting its head into a sandbox.
More recently, in 2021, Cook launched the coup-de-grace in this 'privacy' campaign when he included the App Tracking Transparency (ATT) feature in iOS 14 that required Apple users to provide consent for apps seeking to collect valuable first-party data about them. Like the best strategists he caught the other Great Platforms unawares with this harmless sounding ‘update’, that was, apparently, delivered as part of Cook's crusade to protect the privacy rights of his wealthy customers. However, as most people, unsurprisingly, refused consent to be tracked, ATT also restricted the data feedback loop that proved the efficacy of his arch-rivals’ advertising empires. This meant Apple scored a direct hit on its competition of such force that the share prices of Meta, Alphabet and Snap were all shaken on the stock exchanges where The Digital Throne is won and lost. The fact that the other Great Platforms refuse to admit the effects of Cook’s master stroke and blame ‘economic headwinds’ - is telling. Never complain, never explain.
Furthermore, having thrown its opponents with the ATT privacy-first master stroke, Apple appears to be preparing another spellbinding market move by building its own advertising network. All whilst simultaneously claiming not to do advertising, employing Orwellian doublethink such as ‘refinement’ instead of ‘targeting’. GoT’s shapeshifting Faceless Men would be proud. This has led to excoriating responses from normally reserved organisations, such as the IAB, that told Apple (in GoT's Common Tongue) that ATT would, ‘kneecap’ the industry and to stop talking, ‘out of both sides of your mouth’.
Zuckerberg’s Dream
If Apple’s privacy play was a masterstroke that GoT’s Tyrion Lannister would’ve applauded, Mark Zuckerberg’s decision in 2021 to rebrand his entire empire as Meta, and spend a King’s ransom on building out his vision of the metaverse, looks more like Robert Bartheon’s decision to mix wine and boar-hunting. The Metaverse was an adventure Zuckerberg introduced as, ‘the ultimate dream of social technology’, but one that his shareholders now describe as, ‘terrifying’ due to its effect on the company's all-important market cap - and therefore status.
The neutral bystander may have seen Zuckerberg’s decision to launch his metaverse, a version of Web3, where people give up on the real world and joined a legless version of Second Life, as a logical next step of digitisation. In reality, it was a powerplay to address the strategic weakness that the Meta founder has always faced. Despite his Great Platform generating endless wealth, the treasure Zuckerberg always wanted was hardware. That’s because he knew that his arch-rivals' ownership of their own operating kit – Alphabet’s open-source Android and Apple’s super-closed iOS – left him hopelessly outflanked. All of us walk around with one of these in our pockets and Zuck has long since known that his two biggest foes could just turn him off at any point. Which is pretty much what Apple’s Cook tried with ATT.
The gazillions Zuckerberg has spent on kit such as Meta Quest VR headsets (which sound like they’re drawn straight from GoT) was intended to plug this gap and provide his Great Platform with its own kit and Kingdom. However, even his most loyal henchmen aren’t convinced by Horizon Worlds (further GoT vibes) and a bloody revolution looks possible as activist investors (aka Lesser Houses) want to melt down his golden share.
Nation States Fight Back
While Apple’s Cook and Alphabet’s Pichai may sit back and smirk at Zuckerberg’s misfortune, their own Great Platforms are under serious attack from powerful governmental forces. Just as GoT’s Kingdoms govern territory, and battle with the Great Houses for influence, powerful nation states have spent years trying to find legislation that will allow them to curtail the growing digital hegemony of the trillion-dollar Great Platforms.
The preferred battering ram that legislators use is privacy and the detrimental effect of consumers being exposed to, ‘surveillance capitalism’; a world view that the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) boss David Cohen calls, ‘dystopian nonsense’ and, ‘insane’. Nonetheless, the EU’s GDPR led the way in 2018 with, maybe intentionally, vague guidelines being drawn, facilitating the subsequent extraction of vast fines - 1.65 billion euros in 2022 alone.
However, the political forces now appear to be sharpening their legal rapiers.
In 2019, the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) released a report that, using classic British understatement, stated the UK adtech and real-time-bidding industry, ‘understood it needed to make improvements to comply with the law’. Covid halted those enquiries but in 2021 ICO announced the investigation had re-started and that it would be, ‘vast and complex’.
In France, CNIL, the French watchdog, has made it clear that Apple’s virtuous privacy positioning cuts no ice. The quasi-judicial body appeared to agree with the IAB’s doublethink verdict, slapping a fine on Cupertino this year, highlighting its collection of 'identifiers' of App store users for the, ‘personalisation of ads’. Which sounds a little like Apple thinks tracking of its customers is bad - unless it's doing the tracking. Then it's good because, you know, 'War is Peace'.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice kicked off 2023, by dropping the monopoly bomb on Mountain View. ‘Google is royally screwed’, said one smart commentator in Tyrion-esque fashion. Super-legislators now appear to regard, ‘Don’t Be Evil’, Google in a similar way to tobacco companies, spewing virtual fumes into the atmosphere and destroying their residents’ mental health. ‘They think, ‘Data is bad. Advertising is bad. Kill Bad Tech’’, says IAB’s boss Cohen. Thus, fines must follow even if Big Tech, just like Big Tobacco before, can shrug them off as the cost-of-doing-business.
However, despite this rapid improvement of legislative scrutiny from the days when Zuckerberg could escape the US Congress’ glare by explaining, ‘Senator, we run ads’, governments still grapple with digital technology like the shadow demons in Game of Thrones.
In 2021, a committee in the UK Parliament grappled with what an effective regulator for the digital world might look like. Such was their difficulty that they landed upon a concept that could’ve been drawn straight from the GoT’s Isle of Skagos. Professor Andrew Murray explained to the committee that the type of regulatory model that is required does not exist. ‘We are looking for a unicorn,’ he stated. This concept was, bizarrely, picked up by the committee's other members, leading to conversations about what, ‘the unicorns might look like’, ‘setting a unicorn trap’, ‘catching our unicorn’ and concluded that, ‘the unicorn becomes even more distant'. Mysterious words that could’ve come straight from the GoT’s Master of Whisperers, Lord Varys. (As opposed to Lord Vaizey of Didcot - who was on the Digital and Communications Committee at the time).
The rise of TikTok only increases the stakes as the Great Platform from China, whilst evidently providing fun, games and opportunity is viewed by the US’ Department of Justice with deep suspicion, due to its owner ByteDance being at the beck and call of President Xi. While the ‘smallfolk’ may see TikTok as an endless source of pranks, dances and challenges, the DoJ’s Deputy Attorney General, Lisa Monaco, announced the launch of the, ‘Disruptive Technology Strike Force’, to tackle those, ‘interests that are not consistent with our own’. Or, in GoT terms, real North-Of-The-Wall vibes.
And it’s no longer just the DoJ. The biggest nation state and Kingdom of them all is bringing other armoury to bear, including the US Supreme Court that is currently considering if Section 230 and its magical twenty-six words protecting the Great Platforms from legal challenge, is a spell that no longer can be cast.
The legislative task of taming the Great Platforms isn’t going to become easier as technology proliferates and further battles with nation states expand. As Silicon Valley aristocrat Paul Graham, recently noted, ‘If the government tries to regulate AI, how are they even going to define it?’. Maybe with dragons, instead of unicorns?
The AI Magic
Which brings us to the latest era of digital warfare – a battle royale that looks to be generational in more ways than one. In Game Of Thrones, the idea of magic – known as the ‘higher mysteries’ - is, maybe surprisingly, seen as a phenomenon from a previous era. However, the Westeros residents also know magic may rise again and when it does its power could alter everything. That’s why the birth of Daenerys Targaryen’s baby dragons, reptiles strongly associated with magic, and that Tyrion Lannister believes, ‘are more intelligent than men’, is seen as a historical change and, maybe, existential threat.
All of which is analogous to the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, specifically, machine-learning (ML). Its power can seem magical. Algorithms are no longer written but trained and let wild to draw their own conclusions. The resulting applications, such as the Deepmind (a Lesser House swallowed up by Alphabet’s Great Platform) AI platform AlphaFold, that predicts the molecular development of protein folding has changed the world of biology. Or, in other words, the world.
In fact, AI and machine-learning aren’t new to the Great Platforms. In 2016, Google announced something called RankBrain into its search algorithm. This left many cold at the time but was an early application of machine-learning being used to supercharge Google’s search results, the epicentre of its financial empire. The Great Platforms all followed suit, knowing that whoever controlled this sorcery could take the Silicon Throne. Apple launched Siri using natural-language processing, a type of AI. Amazon used machine-learning to build its recommendation engine, while Meta put neural networks to work building the newsfeed.
However, at the end of 2022, a Lesser House took a baby dragon and appeared to make it breathe fire. When Open AI launched Chat GPT, the application sent an existential shockwave through the world of digital technology. Microsoft threw gold at the new pretender, hoping it could undermine the existing world order, and specifically Google’s search Kingdom. Pichai, the Alphabet King, appeared to panic, sending an internal memo echoing Bill Gates’ in 1995 in which the Microsoft founder stated, ‘The Internet is a tidal wave. It changes the rules’.
Such was Chat GPT’s impact that Alphabet was forced to launch its own chat app, the GoT sounding ‘Bard’ - seemingly in a fit of pique. Maybe because of this lack of planning, a tiny error was included in the company’s promotional campaign and a direct hit on Alphabet's share price ensued – a self-inflicted wound that would’ve had Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, chortling as he integrated Open AI's model throughout his empire. However, cool heads returned quickly and realised the heat from the dragon’s breath wasn’t quite as fearsome as first thought. And yet, the fire it did breathe was enough to bring the magic back.
New Battle Lines
In Game of Thrones’ Westeros, new battle fronts and lines are constantly being drawn and re-written. In the digital technology empires the same is true. That’s because both worlds are driven by politics and the never-ending quest for power. We only need to review how, for many years, Meta, Alphabet and Amazon have been fighting to take control of the Open Internet, the virtual arena where publishers and brands trade advertising inventory through programmatically-driven auctions on a staggering scale.
Just one example of the skulduggery employed is highlighted by the aforementioned US’ Department of Justice’s case against Google. And, specifically, how the Great Platform reacted to the appearance of ‘header-bidding’, a techy hack introduced by publishers to display advertising markets in 2015. The tweak to the auctions’ ‘waterfall’ mechanics changed revenue flows in favour of the publishers – and away from Google. However, just as GoT’s Great Houses built whirling alliances around self-interest and defence, the DoJ claims Google and Meta teamed up to try and, ‘dry out’ the header-bidding innovation that threatened to weaken their power base.
This particular battle continues today. With the tsunami of cash on offer from the growing realms of connected TV (CTV), these programmatic media markets may soon be of even greater value, thereby setting the scene for further combat. For example, when Netflix selected Microsoft last year as its adtech partner for its long-anticipated ad-supported service, a new alliance was borne. One into which the other Great Platforms will undoubtedly feel they must pile in.
A Battle For The Digital Ages
These battles and clashes may all sound like the power-plays of gazillionaires in Silicon Valley and beyond, battling for supremacy in a digital landscape far away from the day-to-day operations of media and marketing. However, as in Game of Thrones, where the Great Houses fight for dominance, the tectonic plates of digital empire-building create the media and marketing ecosystem in which the world’s biggest brands all operate. Many, such as Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble, the mega-brand business, are fighting back against the Great Platforms by building their own tech armies, stating that,‘the best way to deal with disruption is to lead it’. And first-party data rich retailers are following suit.
Recognising the familiar violent humanity behind the scenes of this complex digital warfare can help us see through the fog of war. I once attended an event where Sir Tim Berners-Lee was asked if people expected too much from his invention of the World-Wide-Web. In words that could have come straight from Game Of Thrones, Sir TBL responded, ‘the web is merely a reflection of humanity. If your sink is blocked for a few weeks and you remove the plug to dig out the obstruction, the offending mangled mess of soap, fish bones, human hair and other horrible gunk in which bacteria has set up home, is exactly like the World Wide Web.’
Similarly, the pre-tech world of Game of Thrones is dirty, corrupt, flawed and violent but there’s plenty of humanity on offer too. Which is why Westeros is a helpful lens through which to view the digital world and the Great Platforms. Understanding their motivations, ambitions and plotting can provide insights into macro-technological trends that sweep through the global digital infrastructure upon which, like it or not, commerce, entertainment, governance, politics and innovation now reside.
The Great Platforms may, like Game of Throne’s Lord Baelish, believe, 'knowledge is power’, when fighting one another for the Digital Throne. However, increasingly, nation state Kingdoms, like Queen Cersei Lannister, smirk and demonstrate that, in fact, ‘power is power’. Let battle commence, a battle for the digital ages.
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