NOW YOU SEE ME, NOW YOU DON'T

Until the 1990s, promoting a product/service or brand was reasonably simple: a good idea, a good budget, and a good media plan. Back then, people gathered around the TV, most around a good magazine, others reading the same newspaper or listening to the same radio station. Not only were the options infinitely fewer, but the difference in audience size was also greater. So, if the goal was impact, the choices were fairly obvious. Once the campaign and media were defined, it was just a matter of producing (this part was much more difficult) and checking.

It was so obvious that legend has it that when Panasonic entered Brazil, the marketing team that came to choose the agency spent a week in a hotel watching TV programs and noting all the advertisements they thought were best. Then they chose to give the budget to the agency that had made the best advertisements. Everything simple and straightforward.

If you wanted to do an outdoor campaign, with a small budget, but wanted the company president to see it, you just had to create a so-called "president's route" and put up posters where he usually passed by. And that wasn't all: Porto Seguro became famous for parking its tow trucks (it was the first in several things, including customizing the trucks used by the company) in highly visible areas, such as the Marginal Pinheiros highway, near Cidade Jardim, during rush hour. A strategy similar to Subaru's, with the car stuck to the dashboard in the same spot, at a 90º angle to the ground, to talk about traction. They say this started with a strategy by a Ford competitor to tarnish the image of the newly launched Corcel in 1968, placing several parked with their hoods open (a sign of overheating) on ​​the uphill section of the old Santos road. And who doesn't remember the always-moving piston from Metal Leve on the dashboard next to the Detran (traffic department)?

Good times. Or not, depending on the point of view. The truth is that the audience today is where it's not seen. And it's not because there are many channels and options: it's because the mechanism for building and sustaining an audience has changed a lot. Previously, a 30-second or 1-minute commercial on Fantástico (a popular Brazilian TV show) would resonate with everyone. Today, this strategy, besides not reaching "everyone," will also cause a large part of the audience to not want to know about your product because the media is associated with image.

When I studied Advertising at the School of Communications and Arts at USP (University of São Paulo), the famous ECA, in 1987, I learned that demographic profiles existed: sex, age, social class (based on the ABA/ABIPEME questionnaire, which included the number of VCRs, CD players, etc.) and that these profiles had their consumption times and preferred media. In the US, using zip codes, it was possible to accurately predict consumption profiles with 85% accuracy.

Today, all of that still exists, but in a much more complex way. Household has gained a much broader context in recent times, with multiple profiles encompassing everything from gender identity, sexual orientation, political position, social group, eating habits, allergies, and so on. And it doesn't stop there: the internet, once a large layer, has become multi-layered; social networks have gained nuances; the means and channels have multiplied within the thousands of options that have emerged, like cable TV, which became a package, which became streaming, which became a package again... Even watching a simple football game requires a strategy.

Before, media work ended with the campaign launch and signed purchase orders. Today, that's where the work begins, with daily adjustments by media, by ad, by strategy, A/B testing, integration problems, ATM issues, etc. And everything has become less transparent: what are the criteria of the Google, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube algorithms? What criteria do AIs use to recommend your brand? From the meta-tags used to try to influence Google, today we have tags, meta-tags, hashtags, prompts, share of voice, visibility, viewable impressions, share of pocket, share of mind, engagement rate, acquisition cost, conversion cost, ROI, ROAS… well, you get the idea.

Controlling all of this without tools is far from feasible. Controlling it with spreadsheets is almost the same as doing nothing. Isolated reports only create extra work. That's where AI comes in. It's impossible to do this work with a minimum of quality without AI. Because it helps us see and measure what we don't see, which is becoming less and less visible. Before, we saw the whole iceberg, then we started seeing the tip of the iceberg, and today, even sonar doesn't know exactly where it is anymore, because, on top of everything else, it moves faster than your boat. So, it's better to improve the boat or its tools.

I'm not afraid of the unknown and I'm always optimistic about new tools and technologies, because my life is proof that they help a lot, but the speed of evolution sometimes scares me. Especially because we have the other side of the story. When I was a child, I had the gift of having an encyclopedia at home, the Mirador, and the research department to do special homework, which I almost never used because of the time it took: a month. But I had them. When the personal computer came along, I learned programming. And when video-text came along, I dove into video chat.

Today, teenagers have the world in their hands, literally, and they use their time to log into profiles they don't know to complain about a subject they don't understand. Or to complain that they don't like beans in a bean soup recipe. They use freedom of expression and knowledge to further restrict their already narrow views of life. They prefer to resort to social obscurantism using a tool that allows exactly the opposite.

But even that doesn't discourage me. Because at the same time we have 15-year-olds discovering simple tests for complex diseases, creating innovative materials using AI, or simply reinventing the way they see reality. These opposites are just another layer of complexity in a reality that insists on transforming itself every day, despite all the deliberate efforts of those who resist technology and just wait for the world to end.

The conclusion? The world will increasingly be made up of what we don't see, what we don't understand, what isn't part of our reality, and what we don't even like, but which insists on evolving against all odds. Our consumers and clients are becoming increasingly specific, idiosyncratic, and unreachable manually.

It is up to us, marketing professionals, and those in what is now called Growth, to act not out of self-interest or affinity, but based on clear business objectives. Each nano-niche has its value and potential, and each brand needs to understand who it wants to target. And understand that this target is neither in sight nor clearly defined. Worse: it moves as we pursue it and blends into the landscape or into something completely different from what we expect. A mobile, obscure, complex target that, to paraphrase Raul, prefers to be this walking metamorphosis rather than have that old, fixed opinion about everything.

There will be a lot of data centers needed for so many queries and prompts.