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Re: [projectvrm] How Marketers Will Win… And Why Concerns About Privacy are Overwrought


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Dan Miller < >
  • To: Doc Searls < >
  • Cc: "T.Rob" < >, Graham Reginald Hill < >, ProjectVRM list < >
  • Subject: Re: [projectvrm] How Marketers Will Win… And Why Concerns About Privacy are Overwrought
  • Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2014 14:04:45 -0800
Here's to Doc and company making it back to EWR!

Y'know who I think would be a great person to talk to about Marketo? Chris Carfi. I think he was there during its formative year. What struck me from their mid-year financials was (a) 60% year-over-year revenue growth and (b) its own description of what it does, which I had thought of as "content marketing" - but it clearly sees as community building... I mean (ahem) "Marketing Nation(r)"... there's a fraternity fer ya. He's at GoDaddy now, building its community building chops.

"Marketo’s applications are known for their ease-of-use, and are complemented by the Marketing Nation®, a thriving network of more than 320 third-party solutions through our LaunchPoint ® ecosystem and over 50,000 marketers who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results."

I guess my point is that "advertising inserts" or "sponsored content" is something that just about every publication with a decent circulation has done from time-to-time. Shoot, when I worked for a subsidiary of IDC, they would get a few sponsors together to fund my "New Electronic Media" staff at Link Resources to put fill the "news hole" in a 20-page ad insert on the future of home automation or telework or some such. I don't condemn the content just because it's in a pull-out and has a single sponsor.

As for Marketo being that sponsor, to me it is living up to its reputation; trying to reach and expand "Marketing Nation ®" via a very reputable brand "The Economist Intelligence Unit". I think of Marketo as a force-multiplier for business-created content. The tools are ones that make it easy to create blogs and then expose them across as many channels or search engines as possible. Others, who have better and more first-hand experience with Marketo and its cohort (Act-On Software, Eloqua, Genius.com, HubSpot, IBM Unica, Neolane, Oracle CRM on Demand, Pardot, Silverpop and Teradata Aprimo), might be better sources of analysis.

-Dan






On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 12:47 PM, Doc Searls < " target="_blank"> > wrote:
(We’re sitting on the tarmac at LAX waiting for weather to clear in Newark <http://flightaware.com/miserymap/all/1418068800>, so I’m back online…)

Just noticed the Economist piece is “Sponsored by Marketo.” Meaning it’s “native” advertising (aka advertorial0 — made to look like editorial, but not. So we were all snookered by it. 

Life in the uncanny valley <http://bit.ly/1yIGmdO>.

As for Marketo’s business...

Engagement Marketing Platform
I guess the whole piece is one big ad for this stuff.

I understand why The Economist is running it: they need the money. But it also compromises their editorial integrity. They should stop. Or make much clearer that this is an advertorial.

cc’ing Dan Miller, who I think can tell us more about Marketo and what their game is.

Okay, they’re turning the plane back on, so I gotta get off the (virutal) air…

Doc


Comments inline…


Hi Graham,
 
I wonder how long "Concerns About Privacy are Overwrought" can last.  Is that really a long-term strategy?
 
A friend recently pointed me at Jibo.  It is pitched as a personal robot with a cute voice, personality and the ability to respond to natural language conversations.  In addition to these features, it has an incredible amount of agency and can take action on your behalf across a wide array of services from ordering dinner delivery to updating your social accounts.  According to the pitch video, it's not just a robot - it's part of the family.

The most uncanny robot in the valley?

Or to put it another way, the idea is to deploy a state-of-the-art environmental sensor platform, with presence detection, the ability to differentiate individuals with high accuracy, microphones, cameras, inside the one remaining legal perimeter (at least in the US) in which a person has "a reasonable expectation of privacy," and to grant it elevated privileges with access to your accounts and agency to act on your behalf, and access to information about people in its presence to a degree of intimacy roughly equivalent to being a member of the family.
 
This would not be so bad if the consumer were the primary (or better - the only) beneficiary of the personal data collected.  But the TOS declares openly that "Google may use the Data collected to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network."  So yeah, it's a member of the family.  One that hoovers up all your data and delivers it to the vendor, to Google, and to as-yet-unnamed 3rd parties.  Short of hooking this thing up to your body and wearing it 24x7, this is almost as invasive as ad-tech could possibly be.
 
Even if we accept the premise that privacy is a non-issue today, can that continue to hold true as "things" attain unprecedented levels of instrumentation, agency, and presence, and they co-habit our most intimate private spaces?   
 
Second scenario - what if companies like Uber screw it up for everyone else?  Uber has been all over the news lately for wanton misuse of the data it has about drivers and customers and the cavalier attitude of top execs bragging about how that data has been or could be used.  Anyone who hadn't given much thought to the data held by Uber now has to think twice before they hire a car.  But there's nothing special about Uber.  It's just another company whose service requires access to data about you.  Each app on the phone and connected device is one of these companies.  As the number of companies with your data increases, the chance that one of them will act in bad faith increases, eventually to a certainty.  A bad enough transgression could become the watershed moment when suddenly consumers care about privacy and dump their accounts en masse like Germans bailing out of What's App.
 
Even if we accept the premise that privacy is a non-issue today, is it possible that irresponsible companies can abuse the public trust so badly that privacy becomes a top concern for consumers? 
 
What if both of those trends collided?  Suppose for example that naked photos taken by Jibo robots in people's bedrooms turned up on the Internet?  
(The pitch video shows a Jibo robot next to a young girl's bed as she's about to retire for the night.)  
(And I'm not saying the folks at Jibo are of bad character, they just happen to have a device with enormous potential for abuse and it makes a handy example.)
 
In light of this, do you still believe business models whose revenue depends on continued apathy about privacy are sound long-term strategies?  If so, is it because you believe the scenarios described will never change privacy attitudes?  Or perhaps that they could, but if and when they do pivoting to a privacy-protecting business model will be no big deal so we needn't be concerned at all today?  Or maybe that the scenarios I've outlined are inconsequential?
 
Kind regards,
-- T.Rob
 
T.Robert Wyatt, Managing partner
IoPT Consulting, LLC
+1 704-443-TROB (8762) Voice/Text
 
From: Graham Reginald Hill [ " style="color:purple;text-decoration:underline" target="_blank">mailto: ] 
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2014 12:11 PM
To: Doc Searls
Cc: Project VRM
Subject: [projectvrm] How Marketers Will Win… And Why Concerns About Privacy are Overwrought
 
Hi Doc
 
The Economist Intelligence Unit recently interviewed six leading marketers (P&G, Unilever, etc) for their opinions about how marketing will change over the next five years. Out of the interviews they distilled 15 principles that marketers should be paying attention to. Principle No11 is 'Concerns About Privacy are Overwrought'. Sounds familiar? 
 
Economist Intelligence Unit
How Marketers will Win

Specifically, they say this:

11. Concerns over privacy are overwrought.

The customers of Target, EBay and Home Depot know all too well that privacy is important. At the same time, and more relevant to marketers, the new generation of digital natives has grown up seeing the value in sharing everything. They want to share.

With each other. Not necessarily with marketers.

They want personalisation. They see the tradeoff between what they are giving up and what they are getting as positive. Sharing personal information is not going away. In fact, it will become more widespread.

That's a broad statement, and at odds with mounds of research. (See danah boyd’s book, “It’s Complicated,” in addition to much else.)

Asking leading marketers about privacy is like asking the tobacco industry about lung cancer or the liquor industry about liver disease. I say that not because I believe marketing has moral equivalence to either of those businesses, but because its leading practitioners rationalize negative externalities the same way. And those externalities are both large and real.

 
Food for thought.  It is of course only their opinions, but as they do or did control billions of dollars in marketing expenditure over several decades their opinion is surely worth listening to. They are the sort of people that MeCommerce will have to pursuade to think differently if it to be anything other than just a comfortable middle-class libertarian obsession. So far, I would suggest it has not been entirely successful in doing that.

Yes, the glass is always partly empty isn’t it?

 
I wil respond to your earlier email when I have a little time. You deserve that (in both senses of the _expression_).

Thanks!

From Seat 11a of a flight about to head from LAX to EWR…

Doc





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