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Re: [projectvrm] Signalling Intent


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Peter Cranstone < >
  • To: Tom Crowl < >, Doc Searls < >
  • Cc: Kevin Cox < >, ProjectVRM list < >, David Brin < >, Douglas Rushkoff < >, Michel Bauwens < >, "Grant, Frank (Perkins Coie)" < >, Andy Oram < >
  • Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Signalling Intent
  • Date: Sat, 14 Dec 2013 17:18:09 +0000
  • Accept-language: en-US
Good idea.

Create a wallet for the customer that supports ALL micro-payment systems. Partner with those payment systems to get them into that wallet. Plug that wallet into the web via a browser (or if you want via an app). The value of it being inside the browser is that it can now interact with the long tail of the web.

I keep harping on about that browser - but when you look at who controls the current browsers there’s a good reason for it. It’s the consumers gateway (toll road) to the money machines. 

You have to get inside that and leverage in a way that the Big Co’s never will - do it better.



Peter

From: Tom Crowl < "> >
Date: Saturday, December 14, 2013 at 10:09 AM
To: Doc Searls < "> >
Cc: "Peter J. Cranstone" < "> >, Kevin Cox < "> >, ProjectVRM list < "> >, David Brin < "> >, Douglas Rushkoff < "> >, Michel Bauwens < "> >, "Grant, Frank (Perkins Coie)" < "> >, Andy Oram < "> >
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Signalling Intent

Hello Doc Searls et al,

added cc's: David Brin, Douglas Rushkoff, Michael Bauwens, Frank Grant, Andy Oram

I'm no expert on VRM... but I very much support the idea of placing the consumer in a stronger position vis-a-vis the net as well as those who dominate it...and those attempting to reach that consumer through the net (i.e. advertisers)

My interest is the web-based micropayment (e.g. less than $1)...

And while most of a consumers purchases won't fall into that category... There's a certain unification (core entity) required to make that capability widely available... a core which most everyone will eventually need to be a part of.

I believe its possible that such a core could play a role here? It seems to me worth thinking about.

SO I wanted to throw it out there:


It may be that the natural monopoly required for at least some aspects of this.... lend themselves to offering a role for VRM within its structure. Maybe not... but I wanted to throw it out for thought.

Its also possible that a competing method for a user to obtain certain content (e.g. via micropayment) could induce motivation within the advertising community... to offer something to the consumer... to NOT choose to use a micropayment... but take the ads instead.

Just spinning ideas here.



On Sat, Dec 14, 2013 at 8:52 AM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> > wrote:
On Dec 14, 2013, at 10:32 AM, Peter Cranstone < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Doc,

Some food for thought…

Lets first stipulate that the adtech business is clueless,

They are quite clueful. But they are mono-clueful. In other words, clueful about just one thing: what's surveilled.

but they are a clueless business that generates billions in revenue a year and employees 100’s of thousands of people.

So, in a less mannerly and remunerative way, do their brothers in the spam business.

For VRM to have an meaningful impact it must effect that ecosystem in a positive fashion e.g. More money and more jobs. 

I'd rather see VRM disrupt it from the outside.

Here's the thing. I've talked — hell, I've been paid to talk — a number of times, with the adtech people. Many there are friends as well. Even when they listen, they can't do anything welcoming VRM, because they are too bound up in their own bubble-world, smoking their own exhaust, which is full of money. You can't argue against increasing revenues, even when it's doing something that appears to be working almost too well. It's like selling against the housing bubble, tulip bulbs, dot-com madness and Groupon when it was plain as day outside those bubbles that they were all doomed, even as their upswings hockey-sticked toward the sky.

Look at the CRM companies. I know Marc Benioff. Our friends JP Rangaswami, Steve Gillmor and Kevin Marks all work for Marc as well. (I think, other than Marc, all are also on this list.) These guys are highly familiar with VRM and have opened doors for VRM companies within Salesforce, to talk about how VRM and CRM could work together. None of it has gone anywhere. Meanwhile, Salesforce has been buying up one Big Data-driven analytics and marketing company after another. Same goes for other CRM companies. They all talk up CX — "customer experience" — but, as Catriona Wallace now famously pointed out, to Marc himself at Dreamforce, after Marc gave a talk about its new Serviceforce offering, they're all about "selling more shit." Later we heard that Marc dismissed us VRooMers as "socialists."

So we won't see a welcome mat from adtech or CRM until one of our companies is making $millions doing something they see as disruptive. Then they'll overpay for the company.

IMHO on a Saturday morning, anyway.


Now lets look at the current signaling ecosystem and who controls the money.
  1. Apple & Microsoft control the desktop operating systems
  2. Apple & Google & Microsoft control the mobile operating systems
  3. Apple & Google & Microsoft control the ad revenue from search
  4. Microsoft & Google &  Apache control the web servers
  5. Apple & Google & Microsoft control the browsers
(See a theme here?)

I think "control" is the wrong word. So is "dominate." They all currently hold strong positions in those categories, all of which are subject to disruption and are fluxy in the meantime.

Not saying there aren't opportunities here, or that these companies should be avoided. Just that we should deal with them as facts in the world, and "embrace and extend" where it makes sense.

Now lets look at mobile…
  1. Apple, Google & Microsoft control the operating systems and you have to use their ad engines. You cannot plugin to their browsers to divert revenue away from them
  2. Apple, Google & Microsoft control the mobile browsers and also the apps that go on their PLATFORMS
What devices do consumers currently use to signal intent?
  1. Mobile followed by desktop
    • On mobile ads are primarily delivered by apps and on the desktop by the browser
I was talking with a successful mobile app developer a couple days ago. He said something like this: "The ad-supported commercial Web is a bunch of AOLs and Compuserves, corrupted by advertising and hostile to users. When ad blocking comes to mobile in a serious way, it will all be over. Standing in the rubble will be .orgs, .govs and .coms like Amazon, which sell directly to customers." What about Google search? "Adwords will do fine. It didn't need surveillance in the first place, and still doesn't."

Summary…
  • Google, Microsoft and Apple control the entire ecosystem that creates the conduit for advertisers to make MONEY. It’s a symbiotic relationship where one hand washes the other. The consumer is addicted to this ecosystem via FREE services. Think of this as financial engineering at it’s finest (well except for Wall Street which runs at a whole other level)
What you're talking about here is the railroad business, running the world where cars are on their way but not here yet. VRM is about cars. Think about it. Cars are instruments of independence and engagement and therefore VRM vehicles.

Now lets examine VRM’s challenge…

You have to provide the consumer with a new signaling method. The only way that the consumer will switch to this new method is if it does something for them which is better than the current approach.

No. If that were true we wouldn't have cars, or for anything new and disruptive.

There’s ONLY ONE place that you can insert that signaling method and that’s the browser. Why? Because on mobile you cannot get into the app which is tied to the ad servers directly via either Google, Apple or Microsoft.The whole notion of plugins on a mobile browser is destabilizing is BS.

Browsers are fine. But they are onboarding methods for the railroads: fine as far as they go, but not far enough, which is toward real independence for individuals.

Note: browsers could have been cars, but instead they became shopping carts that get re-skinned at every site, and depart carrying tracking beacons users didn't ask for. This is an offensive system and a shitty norm. Soon as something better comes along, it will fail.


Don’t believe me? Then fire up your smartphone and tell me how you’re going to send a new signal to an advertiser?

I have no interest in that. Moreover, I don't think of companies as advertisers and neither do they. They define themselves by name as companies. 

I was in the advertising business for a long time. My name was on a building in Palo Alto, and our agency did very well. Here is an important fact I learned many times the hard way: To the companies we call' "advertisers," advertising is just overhead: an expense that can be cut at any time. Right now it's being increased because analytics are cool and companies can now get measurable results from their advertising spend. But the waste is huge, with massive negative externalities. Worse, old-fashioned high-signal brand advertising is getting sidelined. (See Don Marti for more about that.)

Go watch Fred Wilson's talk at Le Web. In it he talks about today's advertising glut as "pollution." He also sees surveillance and social logins as something worse than failures, because they support unwanted data spillage and privacy invasions.

Nobody knows money better than Fred. I suggest following where he's headed with his own money right now. I think it's straight toward VRM (among other things, but VRM is in the bulls-eye). He wasn't ready two years ago, but I think he's ready now.

The current method is that you’ll build an app - great idea, but that costs money to scale across multiple platforms and just from the FUSE example you can see these apps are more about a single feature versus a complete solution.

Not sure what you mean by that.

Bottom line - lots of costs, and no way to capture revenue because you have to go through the Big 3’s ad engines. Also there’s no way for the current 100’s of millions of ‘Long Tail’ content providers who ad share revenue with the big three to participate in your scheme.

Irrelevant, imho.


So how do you change a consumer who is addicted to FREE and a Ad revenue ecosystem that is addicted to MONEY? 

You don't. You offer new things that cause change and make money, and/or improve old things that aren't doomed.


And the answer - build a better signaling method that makes MORE MONEY for advertisers because that’s the only person who is ‘vested financially’ in this play. (The consumer is already getting everything for free). VRM is a great vision - but until it focuses on how to make money it will go nowhere.

Who here isn't focused on how to make money, at least downstream from developments you're working on today? Let me see a show of posts.

The second you come up with a new signaling intent mechanism that consumers can be incentivized to use (by better ads) then it takes off.

There are thousands of companies already focused on better ads. Some are here. Hats off to them. I wish them success.

But better advertising is just better treatment of passengers on the old railroads. It's not cars, bikes or motorcycles. BTW, adtech companies are as unlikely to do VRM tomorrow as the railroad companies were likely to make cars in 1900.

And there’s ONLY one place that you put that signaling solution and that’s INSIDE the protocol that runs the entire ecosystem that CONNECTS ALL of the players (billions of them).  Good old fashioned HTTP. The ONE thing that nobody controls.

HTTP is great. We'll have it forever and you're right about it being outside any one company's control. But it's not the only way. There are lots of other extant, evolving and future protocols that are just as NEA (Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them and Anybody can improve them).


Can you build a new protocol like XDI to layer in on top of HTTP to do this? YES. But like any new protocol you have to A) give it away for free and B) get the ecosystem to use it (means all browsers, all apps and all web servers). That’s bloody hard work when the current ecosystem untouched already produces HUGE amounts of money.

All it takes is an invention that mothers necessity.


So what do you do to get the VRM vision rolling on your way to a new protocol like XDI? 

Build a solution that supports BOTH protocols and then VALIDATE that with XDI support, VRM is better than with just plain HTTP i.e. You want GOOD then use HTTP, you want BEST then use XDI - but allow the ecosystem to chose the solution they want.

I'll let Drummond take that one. FWIW, I think, after many years of pushing the XDI rock up a hill, it's ready to snowball down the other side.


Whether you like or not you have to show the ecosystem more money. Otherwise you remain in the "adtech is drunk holding pattern” and they could care less what you say because they’re laughing all the way to the bank.

I still don't care what they think, and I don't care how hard they laugh or how much they put in the bank. Here we're about building new tech and new business by supporting the independence and engagement powers of human beings in the open marketplace.
Doc


Peter


On Dec 13, 2013, at 7:23 PM, Kevin Cox < " target="_blank"> > 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

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


(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 

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