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Valley.
    But this frightens his clients, because they know China is a hard market to crack, and they know the U.S. companies that control mobile will drive hard bargains with agencies and advertisers. They also know the limitations of mobile. Ads on mobile phones soak up battery life, are constricted by small screens, and are so intrusive and irksome to consumers that about one quarter of Americans and one third of Western Europeans sign up for ad blockers to prevent the interruptions. How, clients anxiously want to know, do they reach the mass audience so essential to introducing new products and to building brand identity when ads on mobile phones are not as effective and consumers are dispersed among many new channel choices and social networks? And what the hell do they do to reach the next generation—including the digitally savvy millennials age twenty-one to thirty-four, and the even younger Generation Z born after 1997, who detest being hawked to? A reason people might be annoyed by ads is because, onaverage, citizens are bombarded daily by an astonishing five thousand marketing messages.
    Kassan’s clients and agencies do marvel at new data mining tools that offer advertising and marketing companies more weapons to target consumers. But they’re also frightened by some of Kassan’s digital clients—Facebook and Google in particular—who cooperate with advertisers but also compete by collecting massive amounts of data, which they do not fully share. These digital frenemies use this data and the marketing services they’ve acquired—like Google’s DoubleClick and Facebook’s Atlas—to become agency and platform rivals. More and more of his clients are terrified of Amazon, for Amazon has even better data than Facebook or Google, because it tells when a consumer made an actual purchase decision, and like Facebook and Google it walls off its data. Particularly worrisome to brand clients, Amazon promotes its own products, as Google is accused by the European Union of using search to steer users to its own products. For example, if you ask Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, to choose a battery, it will choose an Amazon battery, the reason Amazon batteries dominate battery sales on Amazon.
    Kassan’s clients and agencies also worry about something else: the data that will yield rich targeting information could trigger a backlash if citizens come to believe their privacy is violated and clamor for government protection. While more data fortifies agencies with better tools to target consumers, it also unnerves them because it arms clients with information about which of their ads sell and which don’t. And technology does something else: it democratizes information, giving citizens more choices, more ability to skip ads, to voice their opinions, to vote with their fingers and flee traditional media platforms.
    Everyone in the advertising and marketing business marvels at the platform choices technology enables. Consumers can be reached viaan ever-expanding number of TV channels, social networks, apps, blogs, podcasts, and e-mail alerts. But they fear the miniaturization of the mass audience and wonder how to introduce a new product so that it captures people’s attention in this new world.
    The advertising industry collectively worries that what they think of as their art—big creative ideas—will be replaced by machines weaponized with data and algorithms and artificial intelligence. The primary machine we increasingly rely on is the smartphone, and many in the industry would not be comforted to listen to Tim Armstrong, the CEO of AOL and before that Google’s senior vice president of advertising for the United States and Latin America. In 2015, Armstrong sketched a future in which marketers will have to talk to a consumer via their mobile machine: “And the machine is going to highly disrupt what kind of advantage and what kind of messaging and what