The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

by Scott Galloway

No other media firm in history has combined Facebook’s scale with its ability to target individuals. Each of Facebook’s 2 billion users has created his or her own page, with years’ worth of personal content.9 If advertisers want to target an individual, Facebook collects data on behavior connected to identities. This is its advantage over Google—and why the social network is taking market share from the search giant. Powered by its mobile app, Facebook is now the world’s biggest seller of display advertising—an extraordinary achievement, given Google’s brilliant theft of advertising revenues from traditional media just a few years ago. The irony is that Facebook, by analyzing every bit of data about us, might come closer to understanding us than our friends. Facebook registers a detailed—and highly accurate—portrait from our clicks, words, movements, and friend networks. By comparison, our actual posts, the ones designed for our friends, are mostly self-promotion. Your Facebook self is an airbrushed image of you and your life, with soft lighting and a layer of Vaseline smeared across the lens. Facebook is a platform for strutting and preening. Users post about peak experiences, moments they want to remember, and be remembered by—their weekend in Paris or great seats at Hamilton. Few people post pictures of their divorce papers or how tired they look on a Thursday. Users are curators. A study found that on Facebook, the top descriptors to complete the phrase “My husband is ...

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