So often I hear MiQ proudly referred to…
So often I hear MiQ proudly referred to as the think tank behind many a holding company's finest international marketing and insight output. MiQ is comprised of a huge number of engineers, analysts, and data scientists who are passionate about solving challenges burdened by margin squeezed agencies across the globe. 85% of the employees at MiQ (approaching 1000 now globally, I believe) are brilliant, independent, and given courage by our founders to find bravery. Run into a brick wall. You'll learn more than than approaching with caution and peaking at the grout. My team has often been approached by big tech and wonder how we deliver generous education at conferences. It because red tape that a G**** or F***** has to go through to find sanction for a Canadian marketing talk track renders them frozen and infective in almost every speaking engagement. Unless, of course, their 7 figure client is sitting front row, then the old college try can be heard from the podium, quietly, like a distance trumpet call from a once optimistic time when degrees suggested pssibility. My point is MiQ has enormous talent. We are the smartest media innovation team (outside a generalized consultancy) that straddles SaaS and productization of media services. But I have a bone to pick. In perfect rhythm with almost every marketing company in the world, purpose-led products, new ways of thinking about improving mental health, a thirstn for IOs peppered with age, ethnicity, HHI, and the traits we are born with makes us slightly less stale then every other entity slapping words and images throughout our cities. Gender, diversity, equity, inclusion, neurodiversity are profound opportunities in product design, creative best practices, understanding our world and how we can accelerate innnovation. Instead we are using the '22, '23 hooks as no more than mandated pitch bait in H2 pamphlets, mail blasts, HR policy (which is where it's done well), websites, and fire side chats that come off like confused diatribes of how to be an awkward panel. We all want to do better for our brothers and sisters but are not making real monetary commitment in the spirit of the hurting crowds, communicaties and countries that have been damaged by almost three years of isolation. My OKRS in the spirit of this evolution disappeared when I was on my own mental health leave. Finding a way to build prediction models that strip bias and out perform the white man who we assume like cruises is not an easy sell.
Our only opportunity is to foster connectivity with the under serviced. With the misunderstood. We are not drawing even the faintest accountable commitments to underrepresented publisher owners, and we aren't budgeting for resource that serves algorithms aware of positive context, automated audience products that unearths wonderful insights we have yet to discover about unknown cultures. My wonderful teams have already proven that attitudes, culture, context, migratory movements and perceived injustice outperforms Don Draperesque ideas about what people want. Caucasians, vacations, and suncreen. Its all I see. Every digital billboard in Toronto at the moment looks like a middle aged family in the ocean who are in all likely who preparing for an affair on their all inclusive.
African Americans are dying of melonoma at sobering rates and it is in part to blame because of our opaque and assumptive ways of marketing sunny beaches and unltrasheer neutregena to white people.
I'm tired it is 2022 and we are still pretending that LGBTQ communities don't have purchasing power to make the world a mcuh better place. I think of MiQ as Cambridge Analytica, but the good guys. Adverse to politics and embedded with a desire to better the world. But we've got about a dozen employees who are brave enough to fight for it. We prioritize where the impression volumes are and it is short sighted. Noone watches free Connected TV. Will someone give me a break? At least they aren't paying attention to it. Big tech is too disorganized to pull their disparate tentacles (departments) together and grasp hold of anything meaning anymore. No one communicates. Save Apple. Apple may be the company that pulls us out of this economic crisis and comes to surprise us all. Just please stop being so boring and suprise your manager with what you really are interest in. No one cares about money anymore. No one has any. The people that do, are hiding in their wine cellars, losing time.
If you want some of mine, holler with a good business idea.