Re: [projectvrm] Signalling Intent

[Doc Searls < >]

On Dec 13, 2013, at 7:23 PM, Kevin Cox < "> > wrote:

Peter,

I want to know how people can "say" it - not the mechanism.  Giving keywords is one way.  What ways are there for me to express my intentions?  Phil has given another way in his post http://www.windley.com/archives/2013/12/intention_generation_fuse_and_vrm.shtml

I am looking for ways for people to express their intentions.  They may not even know their intentions.  We want ways that a person can express themselves to save advertisers having to guess.

Kevin

We can start with intentions we know. There are lots of those. This is the example I give in The Customer as a God, in The Wall Street Journal. It's behind a paywall now, so I've attached a .pdf reprint.

Note that I did not sell that piece to the Journal. They asked for it. Specifically, the Editor-in-Chief read The Intention Economy, liked its premises, and wanted Journal readers — who are mostly on the selling side of the marketplace — to get the message.

We have to stop framing our thinking in terms of what-sellers-need-before-anything-can-happen and advertising — especially advertising of the personalized sort. The adtech business is drunk on the belief that they can infer what we want better than we can communicate it ourselves, because they have Big Data and Big Analytics. That they flunk the Turing Test 99+% of the time means nothing to them. Nor that the misses waste time, space and bandwidth.

There are some things only we — as individuals — can do, and say. We shouldn't work only on that, but it's the best place to start.

Doc

Attachment: cust-as-god.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 10:29 AM, Peter Cranstone < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Easiest way is to have your app send a header that expresses the intent of the user.

User Interface for the App:

• Checkbox on a custom field that the user can edit

What the Vendor sees as part of the users request:

1. HTTP_X_MY_INTENT=BUYER
2. HTTP_X_MY_AD_INTEREST=CARS

All the Vendor has to do is read the incoming headers (any web server script is capable of doing that) and then sending that data to the ad guys. 

User can control the content of the header/signal and whether or not to send it all.

Peter

From: Kevin Cox < " target="_blank"> >
Date: Friday, December 13, 2013 at 4:18 PM
To: ProjectVRM list < " target="_blank"> >, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> >
Subject: [projectvrm] Signalling Intent

(Note I have included Doc in the list to help him while he gets his emails sorted out)

I am looking for good ways for people to signal intent.  Here is the problem.

Assume you visit a website that earns its keep by providing a place for advertisers to put their ads.  When I go to the website I want to see ads that are relevant to me.  What are good ways for me to do this?  Google do it by looking at the words I have used in searches and the websites I have visited as a result of that search.  That is, easy for me and seems to work well in many cases.  However, what I have been searching for is often unrelated to my purchasing needs and often I have not searched.

Before I visit websites I could have a way of putting in keywords that express my interest in purchasing and would tell the website what ads, from their inventory of ads, are most relevant. 

What other methods are there to make it easy for me to signal intent to transact when I am doing unrelated activities like looking up the weather for the next week?

Kevin