互联网在日渐发展，从过去用户筛选信息到如今信息筛选用户，点开推送广告的你，是否有时候会惊异于“广告好像越来越懂自己了”？看微信的你，时常会发现朋友圈官方的广告引起很多共同好友围观；上百度的你，可能会发现两侧的小广告跟你前几日搜索的问题有关系；刷淘宝的你，会发现首页总是默默更新成你近日购买的商品；用音乐App的你，也许还会感慨“猜你想听”还能压中自己的品味。而这一切，都是大数据和算法的功劳。

作者Ken Auletta就这种广告投放趋势进行了分析。英文原标题玩了一个小小的文字游戏，用Math Men 和Mad Men 的谐音来引出文章内容：有一部美剧叫做《广告狂人（Mad Men）》，字面意义上来说“Mad Men” 指的是“疯狂的人”，但是由于有了这部老美剧的借鉴（非常经典，也值得大家一看），这个翻译运用到这篇文章里也恰如其分，指的是会用营销手段与文案技巧的传统广告公司，具有内容导向。Math Men在文中比较像它的字面意思，指的就是会利用机器和算法分析数据的科技巨头公司，具有科技导向。但是这两类怎么在标题中相提并论了，和大数据又有什么关系呢？

如果你只有半分钟时间，我来直接总结文章内容：作者觉得拥有大数据加成的科技公司目前在广告市场占上风，超越了传统的广告公司。但科技巨头对数据的专横垄断、恶意欺瞒，以及近期“数据门”和“俄罗斯干预美国大选”等事件暴露出的诸多问题，都让人们对Facebook 和Google这类公司的信任下降许多。尽管如此，作者还是认为，炙手可热的大数据依然是广告商业发展的关键，对传统广告公司和科技公司的发展都不可或缺。

如果你有时间慢慢阅读，那一起来拆解这篇文章吧！

这篇文章的网址是：https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/how-the-math-men-overthrew-the-mad-men 你可以在电脑或者手机浏览器中打开。文章的长度是2697个英文单词，一共有2个部分，每一个首段大写的字母就代表着一个部分的开始。为了方便阅读，我还在每个部分的小段落中取了小标题，这样能帮助理清文章的论证思路。

第一部分

第一部分中，作者介绍了科技巨头公司是如何占据大数据的风口，收集信息投放广告来获取巨额利润，再加上它们独占信息资源，对利益相关者有所保留，传统广告公司的地位就这么被挤下去了。而大数据收集信息的方法如同远程监控，用户在社交媒体、购物网站的一举一动都在被运营商偷偷记录着。 

来看看文章第1部分精选句子吧：

Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. Yet Math Men are beleaguered, as Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated when he humbled himself before Congress, in April. Math Men’s adoration of data—coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their “science” is nearly flawless—has aroused government anger, much as Microsoft did two decades ago. 曾经，广告狂人统治了广告行业。然而，它们的风头正在渐渐被数据达人所占据。正当这些科技公司的大佬们暗自得意的时候，天有不测风云，他们对数据的狂热和好斗自负的性格激怒了政府——大家还记得年初Facebook “数据门”事件吗？（新闻实验室曾发表过对此事件的分析）

The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America’s newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook. 数据达人的力量是极其强大的。作为科技公司，Google 和Facebook 的市值都已经分别超过了美国六大广告和营销公司的总和。光是Facebook一家公司，从广告获取的利益已经超越了所有美国报纸行业从刊登广告所获取的全部，Google的广告收入还是Facebook的两倍。

In the advertising world, Big Data is the Holy Grail, because it enables marketers to target messages to individuals rather than general groups, creating what’s called addressable advertising. And only the digital giants possess state-of-the-art Big Data. “The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising,” Shoshana Zuboff, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, wrote on faz.net, in 2016. “The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life—your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” Success at this “game” flows to those with the “ability to predict the future—specifically the future of behavior,” Zuboff writes. She dubs this “surveillance capitalism.” 这些科技巨头是靠什么可以冲击传统媒体广告行业，获得如此丰厚的广告利润？没错，就是大数据。通过用户的浏览习惯，大数据可以帮忙建立用户的数据库，来达到准确定位广告投放的效果，这被称作“定址广告”（Addressable Advertising）。 通常，只有科技巨头掌握精准投放广告的核心科技，不仅是投到你的准确地址，更针对你日常生活中的各种行为进行精准定位，哈佛商学院教授Shoshana Zuboff 把企业抓取用户数据的行为称作“监控资本主义”（Surveillance Capitalism）。

Holy Grail 圣杯，最早出自中世纪传说，后来有些人认为这个杯子因为这个特殊的场合而具有某种神奇的能力。

However, to thrash just Facebook and Google is to miss the larger truth: everyone in advertising strives to eliminate risk by perfecting targeting data. Protecting privacy is not foremost among the concerns of marketers; protecting and expanding their business is. The business model adopted by ad agencies and their clients parallels Facebook and Google’s. Each aims to massage data to better identify potential customers. Each aims to influence consumer behavior. To appreciate how alike their aims are, sit in an agency or client marketing meeting and you will hear wails about Facebook and Google’s “walled garden,” their unwillingness to share data on their users. When Facebook or Google counter that they must protect “the privacy” of their users, advertisers cry foul: You’re using the data to target ads we paid for—why won’t you share it, so that we can use it in other ad campaigns? 大数据如此风靡，其实基本的模式和传统广告公司没什么不一样：广告公司从来都是在追求精准投放。所以你会听见传统广告公司抱怨：Google 和Facebook 这样的科技巨头并不愿意分享他们的数据，就好像建立起一座有围墙的花园。当科技公司声称他们这么做是为了“保护隐私”的时候，广告商会高呼不公：我们付钱投广告让你精准定位，你为什么不能跟我们共享数据，以便我们用于下一次的广告投放呢？

Walled Garden 字面意思是有围墙的花园，现在越来越多用来比喻互联网上的信息孤岛。

This preoccupation with Big Data is also revealed by the trend in the advertising-agency business to have the media agency, not the creative Mad Men team, occupy the prime seat in pitches to clients, because it’s the media agency that harvests the data to help advertising clients better aim at potential consumers. Agencies compete to proclaim their own Big Data horde. W.P.P.’s GroupM, the largest media agency, has quietly assembled what it calls its “secret sauce,” a collection of forty thousand personally identifiable attributes it plans to retain on two hundred million adult Americans. Unlike Facebook or Google, GroupM can’t track most of what we do online. To parade their sensitivity to privacy, agencies reassuringly boast that they don’t know the names of people in their data bank. But they do have your I.P. address, which yields abundant information, including where you live. For marketers, the advantage of being able to track online behavior, the former senior GroupM executive Brian Lesser said—a bit hyperbolically, one hopes—is that “we know what you want even before you know you want it.” 大数据的风口也促使一些大型广告公司内部发生变化：做创意的“广告狂人”不再占据中心地位，而是受众掌握数据的媒介部门成为中心。广告公司的核心竞争力正是数据库的大小。全球最大的广告集团WPP旗下的群邑集团（Group M）拥有涵盖2亿美国人资料的数据库。为了显示他们对用户隐私的足够重视，它声称不像Facebook和Google一样知道用户的姓名，知道用户在互联网上的一举一动。这样真的安全吗？其实，只要拥有你的IP地址，这类公司就能掌握你足够的信息，不需要特地知道姓名。而记录用户的信息目的是什么呢？群邑集团前高级执行官Brian Lesser 曾经夸张地说，他们未来想实现“能提前比用户知道用户想要什么”的目标。

Worried that Brian Lesser’s dream will become a nightmare, ProPublica has ferociously chewed on the Big Data privacy menace like a dog with a bone: in its series “Breaking the Black Box,” it wrote, “Facebook has a particularly comprehensive set of dossiers on its more than two billion members. Every time a Facebook member likes a post, tags a photo, updates their favorite movies in their profile, posts a comment about a politician, or changes their relationship status, Facebook logs it . . . When they use Instagram or WhatsApp on their phone, which are both owned by Facebook, they contribute more data to Facebook’s dossier.” Facebook offers advertisers more than thirteen hundred categories for ad targeting, according to ProPublica. 这些公司如何通过追寻用户的习惯，来构建数据库里的你？美国非营利性的调查新闻网站ProPublica（拉丁语意思为“为了人民”）曾经写过有关大数据对人们威胁的系列文章，文中举了个例子：Facebook 用户的每一次点赞，标签，标榜他们近期最爱的电影，评论一位政治家，或者更新一次个人情感生活状态的时候，Facebook 就会记录下这些信息。久而久之，就可以建立非常饱满的用户形象了。

Secret Sauce 秘密武器

Like a dog with a bone 形容对某件事情的执着

Google, for its part, has merged all the data it collects from its search, YouTube, and other services, and has introduced an About Me page, which includes your date of birth, phone number, where you work, mailing address, education, where you’ve travelled, your nickname, photo, and e-mail address. Amazon knows even more about you. Since it is the world’s largest store and sees what you’ve actually purchased, its data are unrivaled. Amazon reaches beyond what interests you (revealed by a Google search) or what your friends are saying (on Facebook) to what you actually purchase. With Amazon’s Alexa, it has an agent in your home that not only knows what you bought but when you wake up, what you watch, read, listen to, ask for, and eat. And Amazon is aggressively building up its meagre ad sales, which gives it an incentive to exploit its data. Google和Amazon就更不用说了，他们的服务多种多样，收集着你各种各样的数据。尤其是Amazon，在网购渐渐成为人们首选的年代，用户的购买记录差不多暴露了一切。而它的智能音箱则收集着你每天说的、听的、问的……

第二部分

第二部分中，作者点明飞速发展的行业需求正是数据达人胜过广告狂人的原因。正当数据达人风头正盛之时，接二连三的风波至使他们口碑滑落，政府部门也开始介入市场。数据达人处境尴尬，而广告狂人更要面临四面楚歌的压力。虽说如此，大数据这块烫手山芋还是两类公司争锯广告市场的法宝。

来看看文章第2部分精选句子吧：

Engineers and data scientists vacuum data. They see data as virtuous, yielding clues to the mysteries of human behavior, suggesting efficiencies (including eliminating costly middlemen, like agency Mad Men), offering answers that they believe will better serve consumers, because the marketing message is individualized. The more cool things offered, the more clicks, the more page views, the more user engagement. Data yield facts and advance a quest to be more scientific—free of guesses. As Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, said at the company’s 2017 shareholder meeting, “We start from the principles of science at Google and Alphabet.” 数据达人们像吸尘器一样获取信息。因为数据就是解开人类行为的钥匙，比起传统的广告行业的运作方式，这样高效很多。

They believe there is nobility in their quest. By offering individualized marketing messages, they are trading something of value in exchange for a consumer’s attention. They also start from the principle, as the TV networks did, that advertising allows their product to be “free.” But, of course, as their audience swells, so does their data. Sandy Parakilas, who was Facebook’s operations manager on its platform team from 2011 to 2012, put it this way in a scathing Op-Ed for the Times, last November: “The more data it has on offer, the more value it creates for advertisers. That means it has no incentive to police the collection or use of that data—except when negative press or regulators are involved.”  数据达人认为获取大数据是一件有益甚至高尚的事情。根据数据投放每位消费者的“私人订制广告”，他们其实是把资源有效地利用起来，而不像是从前一样在信息流中大海捞针。他们给消费者一种“我很懂你”的感觉，同时也帮助广告商利益最大化，双赢看起来没什么不好的。Facebook 2011至2012年的运营经理Sandy Parakilas 去年11月在《纽约时报》说：“越多的数据能为广告商带来越多的价值，所以为什么要管理呢（限制用途）？除非媒体或者监管者来故意找茬。”

With a chorus of marketers and citizens and governments now roaring their concern, the limitations of Math Men loom large. Suddenly, governments in the U.S. are almost as alive to privacy dangers as those in Western Europe, confronting Facebook by asking how the political-data company Cambridge Analytica, employed by Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign, was able to snatch personal data from eighty-seven million individual Facebook profiles. Was Facebook blind—or deliberately mute? Why, they are really asking, should we believe in the infallibility of your machines and your willingness to protect our privacy? 然而，当越来越多的群众和广告商在表达他们的担忧，大数据带来的隐私问题开始被熟知重视。美国政府质疑Facebook公司是怎么给予剑桥分析公司如此权利来获取八亿七千万的个人主页信息。

Ad agencies and advertisers have long been uneasy not just with the “walled gardens” of Facebook and Google but with their unwillingness to allow an independent company to monitor their results, as Nielsen does for TV and comScore does online. This mistrust escalated in 2016, when it emerged that Facebook and Google charged advertisers for ads that tricked other machines to believe an ad message was seen by humans when it was not. Advertiser confidence in Facebook was further jolted later in 2016, when it was revealed that the Math Men at Facebook overestimated the average time viewers spent watching video by up to eighty per cent. And in 2017, Math Men took another beating when news broke that Google’s YouTube and Facebook’s machines were inserting friendly ads on unfriendly platforms, including racist sites and porn sites. These were ads targeted by keywords, like “Confederacy” or “race”; placing an ad on a history site might locate it on a Nazi-history site. 广告公司不仅仅积怨于科技巨头筑起的信息围墙，它们还不满意这些巨头拒绝让任何一家公司来监督审计这些数据，就好像Nielsen（全球著名市场调研公司）监测电视收视率和comScore（美国知名互联网市场调研公司）监测网络流量分析一样。这种不满在2016年进一步上升，因为Facebook和Google 被广告方发现数据造假的情况；同年Facebook 还被发现视频点击率数据造假；2017年广告投放还出现了尴尬的景象：关键词匹配之后，一些广告被投放到了种族主义网站和色情网站。

The credibility of these digital giants was further subverted when Russian trolls proved how easy it was to disseminate “fake news” on social networks. When told that Facebook’s mechanized defenses had failed to screen out disinformation planted on the social network to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, Mark Zuckerberg publicly dismissed the assertion as “pretty crazy,” a position he later conceded was wrong. 还有，“俄罗斯利用Facebook 干预美国大选”的事件，也在应证着在社交媒体发布不实信息是一件极其容易的事情，因为通过后台操纵用户所看到的东西，用户就很容易被媒介影响判断能力和政治倾向。于是，科技巨头的公信力被进一步削弱。

By the spring of 2018, Facebook had lost control of its narrative. Their original declared mission—to “connect people” and “build a global community”—had been replaced by an implicit new narrative: we connect advertisers to people. It took Facebook and Google about five years before they figured out how to generate revenue, and today roughly ninety-five per cent of Facebook’s dollars and almost ninety per cent of Google’s comes from advertising. They enjoy abundant riches because they tantalize advertisers with the promise that they can corral potential customers. This is how Facebook lured developers and app makers by offering them a permissive Graph A.P.I., granting them access to the daily habits and the interchange with friends of its users. This Graph A.P.I. is how Cambridge Analytica got its paws on the data of eighty-seven million Americans. 在经历“美国大选门”，“数据门”等事件之后，Facebook 被推到了风口浪尖之上，失去话语权。它的宗旨“连接人类”和“构建更好的全球社区”，其实主要只是连接广告和人。这是它的主要商业模式，Facebook 95%的收入来自于广告，Google 90%的收入也都是广告的功劳。

The humiliating furor this news provoked has not subverted the faith among Math Men that their “science” will prevail. They believe advertising will be further transformed by new scientific advances like artificial intelligence that will allow machines to customize ads, marginalizing human creativity. With algorithms creating profiles of individuals, Airbnb’s then chief marketing officer, Jonathan Mildenhall, told me, “brands can engineer without the need for human creativity.” Machines will craft ads, just as machines will drive cars. But the ad community is increasingly mistrustful of the machines, and of Facebook and Google. During a presentation at Advertising Week in New York this past September, Keith Weed offered a report to Facebook and Google. He gave them a mere “C” for policing ad fraud, and a harsher “F” for cross-platform transparency, insisting, “We’ve got to see over the walled gardens.” 今后，人工智能的发展据说还会进一步提高广告的精准定位能力，人的创造力进一步靠边站。不过，广告界对机器的不信任越来越多。

That mistrust has gone viral. A powerful case for more government regulation of the digital giants was made by The Economist, a classically conservative publication that also endorsed the government’s antitrust prosecution of Microsoft, in 1999. The magazine editorialized, in May, 2017, that governments must better police the five digital giants—Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft—because data were “the oil of the digital era”: “Old ways of thinking about competition, devised in the era of oil, look outdated in what has come to be called the ‘data economy.’ ” Inevitably, an abundance of data alters the nature of competition, allowing companies to benefit from network effects, with users multiplying and companies amassing wealth to swallow potential competitors. 一直支持政府反垄断（Antitrust）的《经济学人》认为，在这个“数据比石油值钱”的年代，如果不想让数据掌握在少数企业公司的手里，政府就得介入市场竞争中，帮助更多有发展空间的、那些五大科技巨头之外（Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft）公司。

The politics of Silicon Valley is left of center, but its disdain for government regulation has been right of center. This is changing. A Who’s Who of Silicon notables—Tim Berners-Lee, Tim Cook, Ev Williams, Sean Parker, and Tony Fadell, among others—have harshly criticized the social harm imposed by the digital giants. Marc Benioff, the C.E.O. of Salesforce.com—echoing similar sentiments expressed by Berners-Lee—has said, “The government is going to have to be involved. You do it exactly the same way you regulated the cigarette industry.”  硅谷一贯是反对政府监管的，但是这种心态正在变化，包括Tim Berners-Lee、Tim Cook在内的一众大佬都曾批评科技巨头的社会影响。垄断局面必然会迫使政府出面，就好像过去烟草行业和政府部门的拉锯战再到妥协的过程。

Cries for regulating the digital giants are almost as loud today as they were to break up Microsoft in the late nineties. Congress insisted that Facebook’s Zuckerberg, not his minions, testify. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating Facebook’s manipulation of user data. Thirty-seven state attorneys general have joined a demand to learn how Facebook safeguards privacy. The European Union has imposed huge fines on Google and wants to inspect Google’s crown jewels—its search algorithms—claiming that Google’s search results are skewed to favor their own sites. The E.U.’s twenty-eight countries this May imposed a General Data Protection Regulation to protect the privacy of users, requiring that citizens must choose to opt in before companies can horde their data. 现在，对政府监管的呼吁，就和1990年代反对微软垄断时的呼声一样高。联邦商务委员会（ Federal Trade Commission）和欧盟（European Union）已经开始行动起来为保护用户隐私而努力，比如在用户有主动选择权利来决定是否同意服务条款去使用该应用程序，而不是那些应用帮用户把条款上的勾打好了只等用户按一个“开始使用”，后者容易让用户丧失警惕。（试想一下你下载应用程序时候的时候，那些很长的服务条款后面的框框，是你自己打的勾，还是软件已经帮你打好了等着你直接使用？）

Here’s where advertisers and the digital giants lock arms: they speak with one voice in opposing opt-in legislation, which would deny access to data without the permission of users. If consumers wish to deny advertisers access to their cookies—their data—they agree: the consumer must voluntarily opt out, meaning they must endure a cumbersome and confusing series of online steps. Amid the furor about Facebook and Google, remember these twinned and rarely acknowledged truisms: more data probably equals less privacy, while more privacy equals less advertising revenue. Thus, those who rely on advertising have business reasons to remain tone-deaf to privacy concerns. 当然，广告狂人和数据达人是反对这些组织的做法，他们希望默认选项是允许收集数据。毕竟，更多的隐私，就意味着更少的广告收入。

Those reliant on advertising know: the disruption that earlier slammed the music, newspaper, magazine, taxi, and retail industries now upends advertising. Agencies are being challenged by a host of competitive frenemies: by consulting and public-relations companies that have jumped into their business; by platform customers like Google and Facebook but also the Times, NBC, and Buzzfeed, that now double as ad agencies and talk directly to their clients; by clients that increasingly perform advertising functions in-house. 互联网改变了音乐、纸媒、出租车、零售业，现在也在改变广告行业。咨询公司、公关公司、互联网平台等等都成了新的竞争者。

frenemy是friend + enemy 的组合词，有时可写作frienemy，意为“友敌”

But the foremost frenemy is the public, which poses an existential threat not just to agencies but to Facebook and the ad revenues on which most media rely. Citizens protest annoying, interruptive advertising, particularly on their mobile phones—a device as personal as a purse or wallet. An estimated twenty per cent of Americans, and one-third of Western Europeans, employ ad-blocker software. More than half of those who record programs on their DVRs choose to skip the ads. Netflix and Amazon, among others, have accustomed viewers to watch what they want when they want, without commercial interruption. 但摆在首位的友敌当然是公众。相信没有人不会无比讨厌那些“不需要”的骚扰小广告。

Understandably, those dependent on ad dollars quake. The advertising and marketing world scrambles for new ways to reach consumers. Big Data, they believe, promises ways they might better communicate with annoyed consumers—maybe unlock ways that ads can be embraced as a useful individual service rather than as an interruption. If Big Data’s use is circumscribed to protect privacy, the advertising business will suffer. In this core conviction, at least, Mad Men and Math Men are alike. 从理想的角度出发，若是人们看到的广告都是“需要的”，那说明大数据投放是可以更好地服务于每个人的——广告就可以不再成为一种困扰了。但是现在，因为暴露出的诸多问题，大数据的使用面临着巨大的威胁。如果果真被严格管起来，做广告生意的各方都将会被严重波及。无论是数据达人，还是广告达人，都变成了拴在一根绳上的蚂蚱。

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