Hi Graham,
+1 to that Consumer Futures report for using the word
"confusopoly". Combine confuseopoly-based price
parsing time with transparency-based privacy policy
parsing time, and how is anybody going to have time
to buy the right anything?
I don't agree that marketing in general is a zero-sum
game.
Targeted marketing is zero-sum or worse, but mass
marketing done right can pay for content that's
directly useful to the audience, and even has positive
externalities. People are still reading the Kurt
Vonnegut stories paid for by ads in _Collier's_
magazine in the 1950s.
You're going to have intermediaries for any ad medium,
even putting up handbills. In the case of tracking,
the intermediaries have to sell to marketing people
and persuade regular people to accept it. In the case
of privacy protection, the regular people already
accept it, or think they already have it, but who's
going to pay for it?
The intermediaries in database marketing...
http://www.lumapartners.com/lumascapes/marketing-technology-lumascape/
are already making themselves heard with
pro-surveillance policy positions. A few
intermediaries on the privacy side could help balance
it out.
But the problem remains: even though privacy creates
more and longer-lasting wealth than database marketing,
database marketing gets overfundeded while privacy is
underfunded.
Don
begin Graham Reginald Hill quotation of Fri, Apr 18, 2014 at 09:19:39AM +0200:
> Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 09:19:39 +0200
> From: Graham Reginald Hill <
>
> To: Don Marti <
>
> Cc: ProjectVRM list <
>
> Subject: Aw: Re: [projectvrm] Some possibly VRooMy stuff from the NYTimes
> R&D lab… Realising Consumer Rights
> X-Priority: 3
>
> Hi Don
>
> The blog post was very interesting. It reminds me a lot of a recent Consumer
> Futures report on 'Realising Consumer Rights: From JFK to the Digital Age'
> (
http://www.consumerfutures.org.uk/files/2014/03/
> Realising-consumer-rights.pdf). The report took JFK's four rights taken from
> his 1962 spage on consumer rights, added four newer ones and showed how they
> were being enabled by a range of technology-driven consumer behaviours. One of
> the consumer behaviours is Radivcal Transparency. The report is well worth
> reading and triggered a lot of thought on my 90 minute flight home yesterday.
>
> I agree entirely with you about consumers and transparency. All of the studies
> suggest that consumers would like to opt-out of much of the tracking that they
> know they are subject to but don't know the extent of. Fixing this requires
> consumers to take responsibility for managing how they are marketed at, for the
> marketing industry to change its targeting approach, or for an intermediary to
> sit between them to mediate on the consumer's behalf. Each brings their own
> challenges. The challenge for consumers in taking responsibility for managing
> how they are marketed at is that to do so requires a degree of technical
> knowledge and skill on the part of consumer and the time to use it. Your
> Average Joe has none of these. So he isn't going to change. The challenge for
> marketers to change their targeting approach is the fear that the process of
> change will put marketers at a temporary or permanent conpetitive advantage.
> Targeted marketing clearly works for marketers. It's purpose is short-term
> sales in support of marketers' product P&L focus. A customer-responsive
> intent-driven MeCommerce model would clearly work better for those consumers
> who express their intent, but it would practically rule out all market-making
> activities where marketing creates response that otherwise wouldn't exist. So
> marketers aren't going to change. The challenge for an intermediary sitting
> between consumers and marketers is that they have to win the trust of both
> parties for their business model to work. As intermediaries are a fundamentally
> a cost to the market as a whole, they have to be paid for either out of the
> customer or the marketer's pocket. They are the most likely source of change in
> the zero-sum game that has become marketing today. That is not without its
> problems. A quick look at current markets where intermediaries play a
> significant role suggests that they often capture cashflows in the market to
> the detriment of other actors, including consumers. Just look at the airline
> travel and car insurance markets.
>
> We should be careful what we wish for; we might get it!
>
>
> Easter greetings from Cologne, Graham
>
> --
> Dr. Graham Hill
>
> UK +44 7564 122 633
> DE +49 170 487 6192
>
http://twitter.com/GrahamHill
>
http://www.linkedin.com/in/grahamhill
>
http://www.customerthink.com/graham_hill
>
> Partner
> Optima Partners
>
http://www.optimapartners.co.uk
>
> Senior Associate
> Nyras Capital
>
http://www.nyras.co.uk
>
>
> Gesendet: Donnerstag, 17. April 2014 um 23:09 Uhr
> Von: "Don Marti" <
>
> An: "Doc Searls" <
>
> Cc: "ProjectVRM list" <
>
> Betreff: Re: [projectvrm] Some possibly VRooMy stuff from the NYTimes R&D lab
> begin Doc Searls quotation of Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 03:51:08PM -0400:
> >
> > <
http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/04/07/
> in-the-loop-designing-conversations-with-algorithms/>
> >
> > Angles: market conversations and the Internet of Things.
> >
> > Thoughts?
>
> "Transparency" seems to be the first thing that
> people come up with when they start thinking about
> surveillance marketing. Let's make the vendors be
> "transparent" about what they're doing, and the users
> can decide whether or not to participate.
>
> But the problem with transparency is exactly that
> it does require people to spend time thinking about
> surveillance marketing. This doesn't seem like a
> problem to people who already spend time thinking
> about surveillance marketing. It doesn't impose any
> extra work on them. But for normal people there are
> only so many hours in the day, and little time to
> think about some new business model.
>
> In the best case -- secure, well-communicated
> transparency -- privacy becomes limited not by the
> user's technical skill, but by the cognitive load
> on the user of understanding how he or she is being
> tracked in more and more situations.
>
> Jonathan Levitt, at Advertising Age...
> "In-Store Cell Phone Tracking Pits Consumers Against
> Retailers"
>
http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/
> store-cell-phone-tracking-pits-consumers-stores/292628/
>
> "Industry research shows that consumers overwhelmingly
> reject cell phone tracking. In a recent OpinionLab
> study of 1,042 consumers, 77.0% said that in-store
> cell phone tracking was unacceptable, and 81.0% said
> that they didn't trust retailers to keep their data
> private and secure."
>
> So here's the VRM-ish part of all this. Users are
> already communicating about their privacy norms.
> There are vacant niches for information technology
> products and services to help the users enforce
> these norms.
>
> --
> Don Marti
>
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
>
--
Don Marti
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/