The Ethics of Understanding People
By Chris Marine, Founder/CEO of Campfire Consulting
The fields of marketing and advertising have never known more about people. We know what they search for, what they buy, what they watch, where they go, what they click, and increasingly what they’re likely to do next. AI is accelerating that ability, giving us better tools to recognize patterns across more information than any planning or strategy team could reasonably process on its own.
That sounds like progress, and most of the time it is. But I keep coming back to a more uncomfortable question. If we’re becoming dramatically better at understanding people, what are we actually planning to do with that understanding?
I recently talked about this with Thom Kennon, a professor at New York University and author of The Bigger Leap: An Ethics of NextCapitalism. Thom has spent decades working in strategy, research and advertising, and he’s certainly not arguing that we should abandon data or technology. He’s asking us to think harder about the purpose behind them. At one point he told me, “the methodology can only get you so far.”
That stuck with me because paid media has gotten exceptionally good at finding patterns. We can identify an audience, predict behavior, optimize toward a conversion and measure what happened afterward. What’s harder is understanding why something mattered to someone in the first place. A model can find similarities across millions of people, but an insight usually requires getting closer to the smaller communities, relationships and cultural forces shaping how those people see the world.
That’s where Thom’s idea of the commons became especially interesting to me.
The commons, as he describes it, is rooted in the idea that humans have always created value together. Community isn’t simply an audience waiting to be monetized. It’s something people participate in, contribute to and maintain collectively. Thom argues that our instinct to share and collaborate runs much deeper than the systems we’ve built around extracting value from those relationships.
There’s an obvious connection here to media.
We tend to talk about the media ecosystem as though it’s a collection of channels. TV. Radio. Search. Social. Streaming. Print. But people don’t experience media as a spreadsheet. They experience it through communities. The local journalist they’ve followed for years, the morning radio host they listen to on the drive to work, the regional sports team everyone talks about the next day, the creator who understands a particular subculture because they’re actually part of it.
Those are commons too.
And I think national brands sometimes underestimate how much of their understanding of people can come from looking smaller, not bigger. America isn’t one giant consumer segment. It’s thousands of overlapping microcommunities with their own rituals, references, histories, anxieties and senses of identity. The things that eventually become national cultural signals often begin inside smaller communities long before they show up cleanly in a national dataset.
This is why when we approach brand strategy and media planning, we don’t really see them as separate disciplines anymore. How people engage with information, entertainment, culture and community increasingly shapes how they make decisions, so understanding the media environments around them is part of understanding the brand opportunity itself. If you separate the message from the places and communities where people actually encounter it, you risk missing the forces that are influencing them before your campaign ever shows up.
If we only use data to aggregate people upward into larger and larger addressable audiences, we risk smoothing away the very differences that might explain why they care. Sometimes the most useful insight doesn’t come from finding what millions of people have in common. It comes from understanding why a particular community behaves differently and what that tells us about a larger shift underway.
Local media plays an important role in that. These organizations don’t simply distribute information inside a geography. At their best, they help communities understand themselves. They reflect local interests, tell local stories, create shared reference points and give people something to gather around. When national brands invest in those environments, they’re not just buying geographically targeted impressions. They’re entering an existing relationship between a media property and the people it serves.
That doesn’t mean every local media investment is automatically good strategy, nor does it mean performance marketing suddenly matters less. We should still measure what works, challenge waste and understand whether advertising is contributing to business outcomes. But measurement shouldn’t flatten every environment into the same unit of inventory.
Context tells us something. Community tells us something. Where people choose to spend their attention tells us something.
The ethical question is what we do once we know it.
Thom talked about shifting businesses from an obsession with growth toward the idea of thriving, where value isn’t created only for the company but shared across employees, customers, suppliers and communities. I think anyone responsible for planning media media investments can ask a similar question. Can the investment work for the advertiser while also strengthening the ecosystem that made the audience worth reaching in the first place?
That’s a much more interesting challenge than simply finding another way to target someone on the latest app or social trend.
Our full conversation goes much deeper into the commons, trust, kindness, AI, research and Thom’s idea of NextCapitalism. It also ends somewhere I didn’t expect. When I asked Thom what part of human behavior no algorithm will ever be able to replicate, he paused and answered with one word: “wonder.”
Maybe that’s worth remembering as our industry gets better at predicting almost everything else.
Listen to The Ethics of Understanding People with Thomas Kennon, part of the new season of Responsibly Different™, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
