Re: [projectvrm] Ad Tech Is About To Get Boring, And That’s Good For Marketers | TechCrunch

[Katherine Warman Kern < >]

The truth is that the high road has always been an effective strategy for higher and sustainably higher profits. 

The trouble happens when companies who started out on the high road mistakenly think they are still on it or has been hijacked by a management team who doesn't get it.

Katherine Warman Kern

@comradity

On Jun 10, 2015, at 12:45 AM, =Drummond Reed < "> > wrote:

Right on, Doc. Apple is not just taking the high road here, they are taking the road to higher profits.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 8:06 PM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

Thanks, all.  Good points. 

I hated that piece the first time I read it, when it ran last October. "Privacy vs. User Experience" is like “Clothes vs. Work.” It’s a strange and wrong distinction. Particulars from the piece:

Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made a grave mistake by positioning itself as a bastion of privacy against Google, the evil invader of everyone’s secrets.

Wrong. It's a totally smart move, and in full compliance with the zeitgeist as measured by Pew, TRUSTe, Customer Commons and others. Privacy is a huge issue hardly being addressed at all by Google, Facebook and the adtech world — all of which are in degrees of denial about it. And the issue is caused by surveillance, pure and simple.

The truth is that collecting information about people allows you to make significantly better products, and the more information you collect, the better products you can build.

Sure. And stealing people’s money makes you richer too. 

Apple can barely sync iMessage across devices because it uses an encryption system that prevents it from being able to read the actual messages.

Yeah, a lot of Apple apps suck. But it learns constantly through the best customer support in the business, and constant intelligence gathered, face to face, with customers at its stores. The B2B surveillance-o-sphere has nothing of the sort, and it makes them blind in a critical way that companies with paying customers are not.

Google knows where I am right now, where I need to be for my meeting in an hour, what the traffic is like, and whether I usually take public transportation, a taxi, or drive myself. Using that information, it can tell me exactly when to leave. This isn’t science fiction; it’s actually happening.

That stuff for most of us is fine, at least in those areas (maps, search, etc.) where we know what’s going on and roughly how it works. What's not fine is having highly personal ads, that are clearly based on being tracked who-knows-where, show up in places where we don’t appreciate them and they creep us out.

And Apple’s hardline stance on privacy is going to leave it in Google’s dust.

No, it’s going to position Apple clearly on the individual’s side. That’s a sharp and huge distinction.

In a recent public letter about privacy, Tim Cook incorrectly characterized Google’s intentions when collecting user information:

Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you. Our software and services are designed to make our devices better. Plain and simple.

Cook is being disingenuous, because he knows that the same information Google uses to target advertising is also used to make its products, like Google Maps, so great.

Both companies get plenty of information to improve their products, and in ways that aren’t creepy. All Tim Cook does here is position his company in sharp relief against exactly what creeps people about Google and its lesser ilk.

I find it very odd that Cook implies the only use for such data is to “monetize” through advertising. iPhone and iCloud could be made much better if the computer systems could analyze the data people are storing in them. This is obvious.

And much less useful. Apple’s whole app ecosystem is much more robust and healthy because Apple doesn’t know any of the users’ personal data. 

Look at Apple Health. None of the research, or app and data integration that’s possible there could happen at all if Apple — or any other one company — was spying on it. (Adrian, weigh in on this one if you like.)

A fact not yet obvious is that people can do more with their own data than any central system can. This proved out with personal computing, with networking and with mobility. Assuming that only BigCos like Google should have full agency with personal data is nuts, and will prove wrong in time. In fact, it’s our job here to prove it wrong.

The real issue that Apple is trying to address is not really privacy, but rather security.

No, it’s both.

Though Google has all of my data, it is still private. Google does not sell access to my data; it sells access to my attention. Advertisers do not get my information from Google. So as long as I trust Google’s employees, the only two potential breaches of my privacy are from the government or from a hacker. If we accept this as a fact, the fundamental privacy question changes from, “Do you respect my privacy?” to “Is the user experience improvement worth the security risk to my private information?”

So why do we get ads for things mentioned in Gmail? And email pitches offering help from companies we complain about in private emails? Even if Google isn’t responsible for those ads and emails, the fact that Google reads our emails makes them suspect. And there is a cost to that: a seriously icky social and economic externality.

As long as people understand the potential risks, the answer to the second question is almost always, “Yes.”

But most people don’t understand the risks. Or if they do, they acquiesce to them, because they’re not wizards, and shouldn’t have to be.

And with the emergence of artificial intelligence, the answer to that question will become increasingly more clear. The vast improvements in user experience far, far outweigh the potential security risks to private information.

Which would you rather trust — a company that has a clear privacy policy of not touching your data, plus an economic incentive to back that commitment up, or a company committed to following everything you do, building a big AI machine to run your life, and saying “Trust us, everything will be fine. We know you better than you do?”

Unfortunately, Apple has answered, “No.”

Unfortunately for Apple’s competitors.

BTW, Apple is no saint. They’re just not the dummy this dude makes them out to be.

Doc

On Jun 9, 2015, at 8:54 PM, Deb Personal email < " target="_blank"> > wrote:

I love you guys. 

Oh - and - plus 100 to what Doc said. Marketers are running down a rat hole to get more data - it's replaced the BIG IDEA of creative ads [aka mad men]. They will soon learn that data without understanding that human beings are behind those screens is just plain dumb. It is not about them. It is about us - hence the logic of VRM.

If we are in a relationship economy , no two relationships are the same - this stuff is hard messy and subtle - but the big guys always go for "scale" and "efficiency". Perhaps a "win" in the short term but not the long run. 

Rant over. 

------------

Cheers,

D

Apologies for the brevity. Sent from mobile phone.

On Jun 9, 2015, at 5:46 PM, Nathan Schor < " style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"> > wrote:

Drummond,

Nicely put –> 

every service currently being offered by the surveillance economy without any of the downsides of  the surveillance economy. That's a VRM economy.

 

Nathan Schor 305.632.1368  " style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">

 

From: =Drummond Reed [ " style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">mailto: ] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 9, 2015 4:30 PM
To: Johannes Ernst
Cc: Don Marti; Doc Searls; James Pasquale; ProjectVRM list
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Ad Tech Is About To Get Boring, And That’s Good For Marketers | TechCrunch

 

+1. If you have a smart way to give the vendors you want access the data you want them to have—and if you feel confident that the data is remaining under your control—then you can get every service currently being offered by the surveillance economy without any of the downsides of the surveillance economy.

 

That's a VRM economy.

 

On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 4:19 PM, Johannes Ernst < " style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"> > wrote:

This is a common, but to me rather unconvincing argument.

 

Yes, certain data is needed in order to accomplish certain things. But it does not follow that a third party (Google) needs to have that data, only that the data needs to be somewhere.

 

This article essentially argues that because people need spreadsheets to do their budgets, the spreadsheet needs to be hosted by Google. No, it only needs to exist somewhere, and can also run on my local PC.

 

Admittedly it is a lot easier for Google to run their algorithms in their data centers, than for Apple or anybody to run the same algorithm on the user’s own hardware. However, given that Apple doesn’t know what to do with all the cash they are generating, this seems to be a solvable problem IMHO.

 

 

On Jun 8, 2015, at 23:20, Don Marti < " style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"> > wrote:

 

Dustin Curtis (via Daring Fireball):

 Apple is going to realize very soon that it has made
 a grave mistake by positioning itself as a bastion of
 privacy against Google, the evil invader of
 everyone’s secrets. The truth is that collecting
 information about people allows you to make
 significantly better products, and the more
 information you collect, the better products you can
 build. Apple can barely sync iMessage across devices
 because it uses an encryption system that prevents it
 from being able to read the actual messages. Google
 knows where I am right now, where I need to be for my
 meeting in an hour, what the traffic is like, and
 whether I usually take public transportation, a taxi,
 or drive myself. Using that information, it can tell
 me exactly when to leave. This isn’t science fiction;
 it’s actually happening. And Apple’s hardline stance
 on privacy is going to leave it in Google’s dust.

 http://dcurt.is/privacy-vs-user-experience

Some good points.  It's possible that Google is going
to make the "much better Yellow Pages" (as Bob Hoffman
puts it) kind of medium out of Android -- which makes
Google's platform much worse for brand advertising, but
that's fine, because there's money in search ads too.

Are we rebuilding the two-class system of
directory/search ads (was Yellow Pages, now mobile)
and branding ads (was magazines, now web)?  That might
not be so bad.

begin =Drummond Reed quotation of Mon, Jun 08, 2015 at 09:08:30PM -0700:

Giant +1. Notice that Apple, taking the privacy stand, is not touting Big
Data.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 8:32 AM, Doc Searls < " style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"> >
wrote:

Marketing got the tech budget. (And other budgets as well.) The sellers of
Big Data Solutions to Marketing made sure of that. IBM and its competitors
did a brilliant job of both driving the Big Data meme and addressing their
pitches to CMOs. (“No, we can’t talk to your CIO or your CTO. We need to
talk to your CMO. Don’t have one? Call us when you do. Meanwhile, have this
analyst report on Big Data we paid for.”)

Thus we have a mania in business today, where every company is a Jones
trying to keep up with the other Joneses. You can’t have too much data, too
much tech for data, and know too much about everything your business
touches, especially your markets and your customers. Hence all the focus on
surveillance, “data driven creative” and the rest of it.

I don’t know where it ends, but I do know VRM — by making customers more
independent and engaging — can help burst the bubble. Data matters within
VRM, of course. But capabilities are the main thing.

Doc



On Jun 8, 2015, at 11:19 AM, James Pasquale < " style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank"> > wrote:

And this is good news for VRM efforts…  Why rest now when we are so close
to it: Time to convince the CMT to let the individual drive the
conversation and focusing on marketing signals based on permissions.

Copied TEXT from article link
“Marketing is rapidly becoming one of the most
technology-dependent functions in business,” a CTO and marketing analyst
for Gartner wrote in a Harvard Business Review article titled The Rise of
the Chief Marketing Technologist
<https://hbr.org/2014/07/the-rise-of-the-chief-marketing-technologist>.
In the most recent Accenture CMO Insights survey, 78 percent of marketers
said they believe marketing will undergo a “fundamental” change over the
next five years, becoming significantly more focused on technology. And for
the past few years, marketers have come to accept as gospel,
the Gartner prediction that CMOs will outspend CIOs on technology by 2017.



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-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
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