Category: Intentcasting (Page 1 of 3)

A New Way

May 5, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Cross-posted from Customer Commons

Some questions:

  1. Why do you always have to accept websites’ terms? And why do you have no record of your own of what you accepted, or when‚ or anything?
  2. Why do you have no way to proffer your own terms, to which websites can agree?
  3. Why did Do Not Track, which was never more than a polite request not to be tracked off a website, get no respect from 99.x% of the world’s websites? And how the hell did Do Not Track turn into the Tracking Preference Expression at the W2C, where the standard never did get fully baked?
  4. Why, after Do Not Track failed, did hundreds of millions—or perhaps billions—of people start blocking ads, tracking or both, on the Web, amounting to the biggest boycott in world history? And then why did the advertising world, including nearly all advertisers, their agents, and their dependents in publishing, treat this as a problem rather than a clear and gigantic message from the marketplace?
  5. Why are the choices presented to you by websites called your choices, when all those choices are provided by them? And why don’t you give them choices?
  6. Why does the GDPR call people mere “data subjects,” and assign the roles “data controller” and “data processor” only to other parties?* And why are nearly all the 200+million results in a search for GDPR+compliance about how companies can obey the letter of the law while violating its spirit (by continuing to track people)?
  7. Why does the CCPA give you the right to ask to have back personal data others have gathered about you on the Web, rather than forbid its collection in the first place? (Imagine a law that assumes that all farmers’ horses are gone from their barns, but gives those farmers a right to demand horses back from those who took them. It’s kinda like that.)
  8. Why, 22 years after The Cluetrain Manifesto said, we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it. —is that statement still not true?
  9. Why, 9 years after Harvard Business Review Press published The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, has that not happened? (Really, what are you in charge of in the marketplace that isn’t inside companies’ silos and platforms?)

The easiest answer to all of those is the cookie.  Partly because without it none of those questions would be asked, and partly because it’s at the center of attention for everyone who cares today about the issues involved in those quesions.

The idea behind the cookie (way back in 1994, when Lou Montulli thought it up) was for a site to remember its visitors by planting reminder files—cookies—in visitors’ browsers. That would make it easy for site visitors to pick up where they left off when they arrived back. It was an innocent idea at the time; but it reified a construct: one that has permanently subordinated visitors to websites.

And it has thus far proven impossible to change that construct. It is, alas, the way the Web works.

Hey, maybe we can still change it. But why bother when there should be any number of other ways for demand and supply to signal each other in a networked marketplace? Better ways: ones that don’t depend on sites, search engines, social media and other parties inferring, mostly through surveillance, what might be “relevant” or “interest-based” for the individual? Ones that give individuals full agency and signaling power?

So we’d like to introduce one. It’s called the Intention Byway. It’s the brain-baby of our CTO, Hadrian Zbarcea, and it is informed by his ample experience with the Apache Software Foundation, SWIFT, the FAA and other enterprises large and small.

In this model, the byway is the path along which messages signaling intent travel between individuals and companies (or anyone), each of which has a simple computer called an intentron, which sends and receives those messages, and also executes code for the owner’s purposes as a participant in the open marketplace the Internet was designed to support.

As computers (which can be physical or virtual), intentrons run apps that can come from any source in the free and open marketplace, and not just from app stores of controlling giants such as Apple and Google. These apps can run algorithms that belong to you, and can make useful sense of your own data. (For example, data about finances, health, fitness, property, purchase history, subscriptions, contacts, calendar entries—all those things that are currently silo’d or ignored by silo builders that want to trap you inside their proprietary systems.) The same apps also don’t need to be large. Early prototypes have less than 100 lines of code.

Messages called intentcasts can be sent from intentrons to markets on the pub-sub model, through the byway, which is asynchronous, similar to email in the online world and package or mail forwarding in the offline world. Subscribers on the sell side will be listening for signals from markets for anything. Name a topic, and there’s something to subscribe to. Intentcasts on the customers’ side are addressed to markets by topical name. Responsibilities along the way are handled by messaging and addressing authorities. Addresses themselves are URNs, or Uniform Resource Names.

These are some businesses that can thrive along the Intention Byway:

  • Intentron makers
  • Intentron sellers
  • App makers
  • App sellers (or stores)
  • Addressing authorities
  • Messaging authorities
  • Message routers (operating like CDNs, or content distribution networks)

—in addition to sellers looking for better signals from the demand side of the market than surveillance-based guesswork can begin to equal.

We are not looking to boil an ocean here (though we do see our strategy as a blue one). The markets first energized by the promise of this model are local and vertical. Real estate in Boston and farm-to-table in Michigan are the two we featured on VRM/CuCo Day and in all three days of the Internet Identity Workshop, which all took place last week. Over the coming days and weeks, we will post details on how the Intention Byway works, starting with those two markets.

We also see the Intention Byway as complementary to, rather than competitive with, developments with similar ambitions, such as SSI, DIDcomm, picos, and JLINC. Once we take off our browser blinders, a gigantic space for new e-commerce development appears. All of those, and many more, will have work to do in it.

So stay tuned for more about life after cookies—and outside the same old bakery.

*Specifically, a “data controller” is “a legal or natural person, an agency, a public authority, or any other body who, alone or when joined with others, determines the purposes of any personal data and the means of processing it.”

While this seems to say that any one of us can be a data controller, that was not what the authors of the GDPR had in mind. They only wanted to maximize the width of the category to include solo operators, rather than to include the individual from whom personal data is collected. (Read what follows from that last link to see what I mean.) Still, this is a loophole through which personal agency can move, because (says the GDPR) the “data subject” whose rights the GDPR protects, is a “natural person.”

Personal scale

April 27, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Way back in 1995, when our family was still new to the Web, my wife asked a question that is one of the big reasons I started ProjectVRM: Why can’t I take my own shopping cart from one site to another?

The bad but true answer is that every site wants you to use their shopping cart. The good but not-yet-true answer is that nobody has invented it yet. By that I mean: not  a truly personal one, based on open standards that make it possible for lots of developers to compete at making the best personal shopping cart for you.

Think about what you might be able to do with a PSC (Personal Shopping Cart) online that you can’t do with a physical one offline:

  • Take it from store to store, just as you do with your browser. This should go without saying, but it’s still worth repeating, because it would be way cool.
  • Have a list of everything parked already in your carts within each store.
  • Know what prices have changed, or are about to change, for the products in your carts in each store.
  • Notify every retailer you trust that you intend to buy X, Y or Z, with restrictions (meaning your terms and conditions) on the use of that information, and in a way that will let you know if those restrictions are violated. This is called intentcasting, and there are a pile of companies already in that business.
  • Have a way to change your name and other contact information, for all the stores you deal with, in one move.
  • Control your subscriptions to each store’s emailings and promotional materials.
  • Have your  own way to express genuine loyalty , rather than suffering with as many coercive and goofy “loyalty programs” as there are companies
  • Have a standard way to share your experiences with the companies that make and sell the products you’ve bought, and to suggest improvements—and for those companies to share back updates and improvements you should know about.
  • Have wallets of your own, rather than only those provided by platforms.
  • Connect to your collection of receipts, instruction manuals and other relevant information for all the stuff you’ve already bought or currently rent. (Note that this collection is for the Internet of your things—one you control for yourself, and is not a set of suction cups on corporate tentacles.)
  • Your own standard way to call for service or support, for stuff you’ve bought or rented, rather than suffering with as many different ways to do that as there are companies you’ve engaged

All of these things are Me2B, and will give each of us scale, much as the standards that make the Internet, browsers and email all give us scale. And that scale will be just as good for the companies we deal with as are the Internet, browsers and email.

If you think “none of the stores out there will want any of this, because they won’t control it,” think about what personal operating systems and browsers on every device have already done for stores by making the customer interface standard. What we’re talking about here is enlarging that interface.

I’d love to see if there is any economics research and/or scholarship on personal scale and its leverage (such as personal operating systems, devices and browsers give us) in the digital world). Because it’s a case that needs to be made.

Of course, there’s money to me made as well, because there will be so many more, better and standard ways for companies to deal with customers than current tools (including email, apps and browsers) can by themselves.

A positive look at Me2B

November 9, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Somehow Martin Geddes and I were both at PIE2017 in London a few days ago and missed each other. That bums me because nobody in tech is more thoughtful and deep than Martin, and it would have been great to see him there. Still, we have his excellent report on the conference, which I highly recommend.

The theme of the conference was #Me2B, a perfect synonym (or synotag) for both #VRM and #CustomerTech, and hugely gratifying for us at ProjectVRM. As Martin says in his report,

This conference is an important one, as it has not sold its soul to the identity harvesters, nor rejected commercialism for utopian social visions by excluding them. It brings together the different parts and players, accepts the imperfection of our present reality, and celebrates the genuine progress being made.

Another pull-quote:

…if Facebook (and other identity harvesting companies) performed the same surveillance and stalking actions in the physical world as they do online, there would be riots. How dare you do that to my children, family and friends!

On the other hand, there are many people working to empower the “buy side”, helping people to make better decisions. Rather than identity harvesting, they perform “identity projection”, augmenting the power of the individual over the system of choice around them.

The main demand side commercial opportunity at the moment are applications like price comparison shopping. In the not too distant future is may transform how we eat, and drive a “food as medicine” model, paid for by life insurers to reduce claims.

The core issue is “who is my data empowering, and to what ends?”. If it is personal data, then there needs to be only one ultimate answer: it must empower you, and to your own benefit (where that is a legitimate intent, i.e. not fraud). Anything else is a tyranny to be avoided.

The good news is that these apparently unreconcilable views and systems can find a middle ground. There are technologies being built that allow for every party to win: the user, the merchant, and the identity broker. That these appear to be gaining ground, and removing the friction from the “identity supply chain”, is room for optimism.

Encouraging technologies that enable the individual to win is what ProjectVRM is all about. Same goes for Customer Commons, our nonprofit spin-off. Nice to know others (especially ones as smart and observant as Martin) see them gaining ground.

Martin also writes,

It is not merely for suppliers in the digital identity and personal information supply chain. Any enterprise can aspire to deliver a smart customer journey using smart contracts powered by personal information. All enterprises can deliver a better experience by helping customers to make better choices.

True.

The only problem with companies delivering better experiences by themselves is that every one of them is doing it differently, often using the same back-end SaaS systems (e.g. from Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, et. al.).

We need ways customers can have their own standard ways to change personal data settings (e.g. name, address, credit card info), call for support and supply useful intelligence to any of the companies they deal with, and to do any of those in one move.

See, just as companies need scale across all the customers they deal with, customers need scale across all the companies they deal with. I visit the possibilities for that here, here, here, and here.

On the topic of privacy, here’s a bonus link.

And, since Martin takes a very useful identity angle in his report, I invite him to come to the next Internet Identity Workshop, which Phil Windley, Kaliya @IdentityWoman and I put on twice a year at the Computer History Museum. The next, our 26th, is 3-5 April 2018.

 

 

Our radical hack on the whole marketplace

April 30, 2017 / / 4 Comments

In Disruption isn’t the whole VRM story, I visited the Tetrad of Media Effects, from Laws of Media: the New Science, by Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Every new medium (which can be anything from a stone arrowhead to a self-driving car), the McLuhans say, does four things, which they pose as questions that can have multiple answers, and they visualize this way:

tetrad-of-media-effects

The McLuhans also famously explained their work with this encompassing statement: We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us.

This can go for institutions, such as businesses, and whole marketplaces, as well as people. We saw that happen in a big way with contracts of adhesion: those one-sided non-agreements we click on every time we acquire a new login and password, so we can deal with yet another site or service online.

These were named in 1943 by the law professor Friedrich “Fritz” Kessler in his landmark paper, “Contracts of Adhesion: Some Thoughts about Freedom of Contract.” Here is pretty much his whole case, expressed in a tetrad:

contracts-of-adhesion

Contracts of adhesion were tools industry shaped, was in turn shaped by, and in turn shaped the whole marketplace.

But now we have the Internet, which by design gives everyone on it a place to stand, and, like Archimedes with his lever, move the world.

We are now developing that lever, in the form of terms any one of us can assert, as a first party, and the other side—the businesses we deal with—can agree to, automatically. Which they’ll do it because it’s good for them.

I describe our first two terms, both of which have potentials toward enormous changes, in two similar posts put up elsewhere: 

— What if businesses agreed to customers’ terms and conditions? 

— The only way customers come first

And we’ll work some of those terms this week, fittingly, at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, starting tomorrow at VRM Day and then Tuesday through Thursday at the Internet Identity Workshop. I host the former and co-host the latter, our 24th. One is free and the other is cheap for a conference.

Here is what will come of our work:
personal-terms

Trust me: nothing you can do is more leveraged than helping make this happen.

See you there.

 

VRM Day: Starting Phase Two

October 17, 2016 / / 0 Comments

VRM Day is today, 24 October, at the Computer History Museum. IIW follows, over the next three days at the same place. (The original version of this post was October 17.)

We’ve been doing VRM Days since (let’s see…) this one in 2013, and VRM events since this one in 2007. Coming on our tenth anniversary, this is our last in Phase One.

sisyphusTheRolling snowball difference between Phase One and Phase Two is that between rocks and snowballs. In Phase One we played Sisyphus, pushing a rock uphill. In Phase Two we roll snowballs downhill.

Phase One was about getting us to the point where VRM was accepted by many as a thing bound to happen. This has taken ten years, but we are there.

Phase Two is about making it happen, by betting our energies on ideas and work that starts rolling downhill and gaining size and momentum.

Some of that work is already rolling. Some is poised to start. Both kinds will be on the table at VRM Day. Here are ones currently on the agenda:

  • VRM + CRM via JLINC. See At last: a protocol to link VRM and CRM. , and The new frontier for CRM is CDL: customer driven leads. This is a one form of intentcasting that should be enormously appealing to CRM companies and their B2B corporate customers. Speaking of which, we also have—
  • Big companies welcoming VRM.  Leading this is Fing, a French think tank that brings together many of the country’s largest companies, both to welcome VRM and to research (e.g. through Mesinfos) how the future might play out. Sarah Medjek of Fing will present that work, and lead discussion of where it will head next. We will also get a chance to participate in that research by providing her with our own use cases for VRM. (We’ll take out a few minutes to each fill out an online form.)
  • Terms individuals assert in dealings with companies. These are required for countless purposes. Mary Hodder will lead discussion of terms currently being developed at Customer Commons and the CISWG / Kantara User Submitted Terms working group (Consent and Information Sharing Working Group). Among other things, this leads to—
  • 2016_04_25_vrmday_000-1Next steps in tracking protection and ad blocking. At the last VRM Day and IIW, we discussed CHEDDAR on the server side and #NoStalking on the individual’s side. There are now huge opportunities with both, especially if we can normalize #NoStalking terms for all tracking protection and ad blocking tools.  To prep for this, see  Why #NoStalking is a good deal for publishers, where you’ll find the image on the right, copied from the whiteboard on VRM Day.
  • Blockchain, Identity and VRM. Read what Phil Windley has been writing lately distributed ledgers (e.g. blockchain) and what they bring to the identity discussions that have been happening for 22 IIWs, so far. There are many relevancies to VRM.
  • Personal data. This was the main topic at two recent big events in Europe: MyData2016 in Helsinki and PIE (peronal information economy) 2016 in London.  The long-standing anchor for discussions and work on the topic at VRM Day and IIW is PDEC (Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium). Dean Landsman of PDEC will keep that conversational ball rolling. Adrian Gropper will also brief us on recent developments around personal health data as well.
  • Hacks on the financial system. Kevin Cox can’t make it, but wants me to share what he would have presented. Three links: 1) a one minute video that shows why the financial system is so expensive, 2) part of a blog post respecting his local Water Authority and newly elected government., and 3) an explanation of the idea of how we can build low-cost systems of interacting agents. He adds, “Note the progression from location, to address, to identity, to money, to housing.  They are all ‘the same’.” We will also look at how small business and individuals have more in common than either do with big business. With a hint toward that, see what Xero (the very hot small business accounting software company) says here.
  • What ProjectVRM becomes. We’ve been a Berkman-Klein Center project from the start. We’ve already spun off Customer Commons. Inevitably, ProjectVRM will itself be spun off, or evolve in some TBD way. We need to co-think and co-plan how that will go. It will certainly live on in the DNA of VRM and VRooMy work of many kinds. How and where it lives on organizationally is an open question we’ll need to answer.

Here is a straw man context for all of those and more.

  • Top Level: Tools for people. These are ones which, in legal terms, give individuals power as first parties. In mathematical terms, they make us independent variables, rather than dependent ones. Our focus from the start has been independence and engagement.
    • VRM in the literal sense: whatever engages companies’ CRM or equivalent systems.
    • Intentcasting.
    • PIMS—Personal Information Management Systems. Goes by many names: personal clouds, personal data stores, life management platforms and so on. Ctrl-Shift has done a good job of branding PIMS, however. We should all just go with that.
    • Privacy tools. Such as those provided by tracking protection (and tracking-protective ad blocking).
    • Legal tools. Such as the terms Customer Commons and the CISWG are working on.
    • UI elements. Such as the r-button.
    • Transaction & payment systems. Such as EmanciPay.

Those overlap to some degree. For example, a PIMS app and data store can do all that stuff. But we do need to pull the concerns and categories apart as much as we can, just so we can talk about them.

Kaliya will facilitate VRM Day. She and I are still working on the agenda. Let us know what you’d like to add to the list above, and we’ll do what we can. (At IIW, you’ll do it, because it’s an unconference. That’s where all the topics are provided by participants.)

Again, register here. And see you there.

 

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We’re done with Phase One

October 9, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Here’s a picture that’s worth more than a thousand words:

maif-vrm

He’s with MAIF, the French insurance company, speaking at MyData 2016 in Helsinki, a little over a month ago. Here’s another:

sean-vrm

That’s Sean Bohan, head of our steering committee, expanding on what many people at the conference already knew.

I was there too, giving the morning keynote on Day 2:

cupfu1hxeaa4thh

It was an entirely new talk. Pretty good one too, especially since  I came up with it the night before.

See, by the end of Day 1, it was clear that pretty much everybody at the conference already knew how market power was shifting from centralized industries to distributed individuals and groups (including many inside centralized industries). It was also clear that most of the hundreds of people at the conference were also familiar with VRM as a market category. I didn’t need to talk about that stuff anymore. At least not in Europe, where most of the VRM action is.

So, after a very long journey, we’re finally getting started.

In my own case, the journey began when I saw the Internet coming, back in the ’80s.  It was clear to me that the Net would change the world radically, once it allowed commercial activity to flow over its pipes. That floodgate opened on April 30, 1995. Not long after that, I joined the fray as an editor for Linux Journal (where I still am, by the way, more than 20 years later). Then, in 1999, I co-wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, which delivered this “one clue” above its list of 95 Theses:

not

And then, one decade ago last month, I started ProjectVRM, because that clue wasn’t yet true. Our reach did not exceed the grasp of marketers in the world. If anything, the Net extended marketers’ grasp a lot more than it did ours. (Shoshana Zuboff says their grasp has metastasized into surveillance capitalism. ) In respect to Gibson’s Law, Cluetrain proclaimed an arrived future that was not yet distributed. Our job was to distribute it.

Which we have. And we can start to see results such as those above. So let’s call Phase One a done thing. And start thinking about Phase Two, whatever it will be.

To get that work rolling, here are a few summary facts about ProjectVRM and related efforts.

First, the project itself could hardly be more lightweight, at least administratively. It consists of:

Second, we have a spin-off: Customer Commons, which will do for personal terms of engagement (one each of us can assert online) what Creative Commons (another Berkman-Klein spinoff) did for copyright.

Third, we have a list of many dozens of developers, which seem to be concentrated in Europe and Australia/New Zealand.  Two reasons for that, both speculative:

  1. Privacy. The concept is much more highly sensitive and evolved in Europe than in the U.S. The reason we most often get goes, “Some of our governments once kept detailed records of people, and those records were used to track down and kill many of them.” There are also more evolved laws respecting privacy. In Australia there have been privacy laws for several years requiring those collecting data about individuals to make it available to them, in forms the individual specifies. And in Europe there is the General Data Protection Regulation, which will impose severe penalties for unwelcome data gathering from individuals, starting in 2018.
  2. Enlightened investment. Meaning investors who want a startup to make a positive difference in the world, and not just give them a unicorn to ride out some exit. (Which seems to have become the default model in the U.S., especially Silicon Valley.)

What we lack is research. And by we I mean the world, and not just ProjectVRM.

Research is normally the first duty of a project at the Berkman Klein Center, which is chartered as a research organization. Research was ProjectVRM’s last duty, however, because we had nothing to research at first. Or, frankly, until now. That’s why we were defined as a development & research project rather than the reverse.

Where and how research on VRM and related efforts happens is a wide-open question. What matters is that it needs to be done, starting soon, while the “before” state still prevails in most of the world, and the future is still on its way in delivery trucks. Who does that research matters far less than the research itself.

So we are poised at a transitional point now. Let the conversations about Phase Two commence.

The new frontier for CRM is CDL: Customer Driven Leads

October 6, 2016 / / 1 Comment

cdlfunnelImagine customers diving, on their own, straight down to the bottom of the sales funnel.

Actually, don’t imagine it. Welcome it, because it’s coming, in the form of leads that customers generate themselves, when they’re ready to buy something. Here in the VRM world we call this intentcasting. At the receiving end, in the  CRM world, they’re CDLs, or Customer Driven Leads.

Because CDLs come from fully interested customers with cash in hand, they’re worth more than MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) or  SQLs (Sales Qualifed Leads), both of which need to be baited with marketing into the sales funnel.

CDLs are also free.  When the customer is ready to buy, she signals the market with an intentcast that CRM systems can hear as a fresh CDL. When the CRM system replies, an exchange of data and permissions follows, with the customer taking the lead.

It’s a new dance, this one with the customer taking the lead. But it’s much more direct, efficient and friendly than the old dances in which customers were mere “targets” to be “acquired.”

The first protocol-based way to generate CDLs for CRM is described in At last, a protocol to connect VRM and CRM, posted here in August. It’s called JLINC. We’ll be demonstrating it working on a Salesforce system on VRM Day at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, on Monday, October 24. VRM Day is free, but space is limited, so register soon, here.

We’ll also continue to work on CDL development  over the next three days in the same location, at the IIW, the Internet Identity Workshop. IIW is an unconference that’s entirely about getting stuff done. No keynotes, no panels. Just working sessions run by attendees. This next one will be our 23rd IIW since we started them in 2005. It remains, in my humble estimation, the most leveraged conference I know. (And I go to a lot of them, usually as a speaker.)

As an additional temptation, we’re offering a 25% discount on IIW to the next 20 people who register for VRM Day. (And it you’ve already reigstered, talk to me.)

Iain Henderson, who works with JLINC Labs, will demo CDLs on Salesforce. We also invite all the other CRM companies—IBM, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, SugarCRM… you know who you are—to show up and participate as well. All CRM systems are programmable. And the level of programming required to hear intentcasts is simple and easy.

See you there!

VRM at MyData2016

August 30, 2016 / / 0 Comments

mydata2016-image

As it happens I’m in Helsinki right now, for MyData2016, where I’ll be speaking on Thursday morning. My topic: The Power of the Individual. There is also a hackathon (led by DataBusiness.fi) going on during the show, starting at 4pm (local time) today. In no order of priority, here are just some of the subjects and players I’ll be dealing with,  talking to, and talking up (much as I can):

Please let me know what others belong on this list. And see you at the show.

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Is Facebook working on a VRM system? Or just another way to do ads?

August 30, 2016 / / 0 Comments

It’s easy to get caught up in news that WhatsApp is starting to accept advertising (after they said they would never do that), and miss the deeper point of what’s really going on: Facebook setting up a new bot-based channel through which companies and customers can communicate. Like this:

vrmcrmbot

The word balloon is Facebook Messenger. But it could be WhatsApp too. From a VRM perspective, what matters is whether or not “Messenger bots” work as VRM tools, meaning they obey the individual user’s commands (and not just those of Facebook’s corporate customers). We don’t know yet. Hence the question mark.

But before we get to exploring the possibilities here (which could be immense), we need to visit and dismiss the main distractions.

Those start with Why we don’t sell ads, posted on the WhatsApp blog on 18 June 2012. Here are the money grafs from that one:

We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads.
No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn’t). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake… and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement.

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

Great stuff. But that was then and this is now. In WhatsApp’s latest post, Looking Ahead for WhatsApp (25 August), we have the about-face:

But by coordinating more with Facebook, we’ll be able to do things like track basic metrics about how often people use our services and better fight spam on WhatsApp. And by connecting your phone number with Facebook’s systems, Facebook can offer better friend suggestions and show you more relevant ads if you have an account with them. For example, you might see an ad from a company you already work with, rather than one from someone you’ve never heard of. You can learn more, including how to control the use of your data, here.

Pretty yucky, huh?

Earlier in the same post, however, WhatsApp says,

we want to explore ways for you to communicate with businesses that matter to you too

Interesting: Mark Zuckerberg said the same thing when he introduced messenger bots, back in April. In the video at that link, Zuck said,

Now that Messenger has scaled, we’re starting to develop ecosystems around it. And the first thing we’re doing is exploring how you can all communicate with businesses.

You probably interact with dozens of businesses every day. And some of them are probably really meaningful to you. But I’ve never met anyone who likes calling a business. And no one wants to have to install a new app for every service or business they want to interact with. So we think there’s gotta be a better way to do this.

We think you should be able to message a business the same way you message a friend. You should get a quick response, and it shouldn’t take your full attention, like a phone call would. And you shouldn’t have to install a new app.

Note the similarities in the set-up:

  1. Zuck:  “how you can all communicate with business.”
  2. WhatsApp: “explore ways for you to communicate with businesses.”

This is, or should be, pure VRM:  a way for a customer to issue a service request, or to intentcast for bids on a new washing machine or a car. In other words, what they seem to be talking about here is a new communication channel between customers and businesses that can relieve  the typical pains of being a customer while also opening the floodgates of demand notifying supply when it’s ready to buy. Back to Zuck:

So today we’re launching Messenger Platform. So you can build bots for Messenger.

By “you” Zuck means the developers he was addressing that day. I assume these were developers working for businesses that avoid customer contact and would rather have robots take over everything possible, because that’s the norm these days. But I could be wrong. He continues,

And it’s a simple platform, powered by artificial intelligence, so you can build natural language services to communicate directly with people. So let’s take a look.

CNN, for example, is going to be able to send you a daily digest of stories, right into messenger. And the more you use it, the more personalized it will get. And if you want to learn more about a specific topic, say a Supreme Court nomination or the zika virus, you just send a message and it will send you that information.

The antecedents of “you” move around here. Could be he’s misdirecting attention away from surveillance. Can’t tell. But it is clear that he’s looking past advertising alone as a way to make money.

Back to the WhatsApp post:

Whether it’s hearing from your bank about a potentially fraudulent transaction, or getting notified by an airline about a delayed flight, many of us get this information elsewhere, including in text messages and phone calls.

This also echoes what Zuck said in April. In both cases it’s about companies communicating with you, not about you communicating with companies. Would bots work both ways?

In “‘Bot’ is the wrong name…and why people who think it’s silly are wrong”, Aaron Batalion says all kinds of functionality now found only in apps will move to bots—Messenger’s in particular. “In a micro app world, you build one experience on the Facebook platform and reach 1B people.”

How about building a one-experience bot so 1B people can reach businesses the same way?

Imagine, for example, that you can notify every company you deal with that your last name has changed, or you’ve replaced a credit card. It would be great to do that in one move. It would also be VRM 101. But, almost ten years into our project, nobody has built that yet. Is Facebook doing it?

Frankly, I hope not, because I don’t want to see VRM trapped inside a giant silo.

That’s why I just put up Market intelligence that flows both ways, over in Medium. (It’s a much-updated version of a post I put up here several years ago.)

In that post I describe a much better approach, based on open source code, that doesn’t require locating your soul inside a large company for which, as WhatsApp put it four years ago, you’re the product.

Here’s a diagram that shows how one person (myself, in this case) can relate to a company whose moccasins he owns:

vrmcrmconduit

The moccasins have their own pico: a cloud on the Net for a thing in the physical world. For VRM and CRM purposes, this one is a relationship conduit between customer and company.

A pico of this type comes in to being when the customer assigns the QR code to the moccasins and scans it. The customer and company can then share records about the product, or notify the other party when there’s a problem, a bargain on a new pair, or whatever. It’s tabula rasa: wide open.

The current code for this is called Wrangler. It’s open source and in Github. For the curious, Phil Windley explains how picos work in Reactive Programming With Picos.

I’ll continue on this theme in the next post. Meanwhile, my main purpose with this one is to borrow interest in where Facebook is going (if I’m guessing right) with Messenger bots, and do it one better in the open and un-silo’d world, while we still have one to hack.

 

 

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Humanizing the Great Ad Machine

July 19, 2016 / / 0 Comments

This is a comment I couldn’t publish under this post before my laptop died. (Fortunately I sent it to my wife first, so I’m posting it here, from her machine.)

OMMA’s theme is “Humanizing the Great Ad Machine”  Good one. Unfortunately, the agenda and speaker list suggest that industry players are the only ones in a position to do that. They aren’t..

The human targets of the Great Ad Machine are actually taking the lead—by breaking it.

Starting with ad blocking and tracking protection.

I see no evidence of respect for that fact, however, in the posts and tweets (at #MPOMMA) coming out of the conference so far. Maybe we can change that.

Let’s start by answering the question raised by the headline in Ad Blocking and DVRs: How Similar? I can speak as an operator of both technologies, and as a veteran marketer as well. So look at the rest of this post as the speech I’d give if I was there at OMMA…

Ad blocking and DVRs have four main things in common.

1) They are instruments of personal independence;

2) They answer demand for avoiding advertising. That demand exists because most advertising wastes time and space in people’s lives, and people value those two things more than whatever good advertising does for the “content” economy;

3) Advertising agents fail to grok this message; which is why—

4) Advertising agents and the “interactive” ad industry cry foul and blame the messengers (including the makers of ad blockers and other forms of tracking protection), rather than listening to, or respecting, what the market tells them, loudly and clearly.

Wash, rinse and repeat.

The first wash was VCRs. Those got rinsed out by digital TV. The second wash was DVRs. Those are being rinsed out right now by the Internet. The third wash is ad blocking.

The next rinse will happen after ad blocking succeeds as chemo for the cancer of ads that millions on the receiving end don’t want.

The next wash will be companies spending their marketing money on listening for better signals of demand from the marketplace, and better ways of servicing existing customers after the sale.

This can easily happen because damn near everybody is on the Net now, or headed there. Not trapped on TV or any other closed, one-way, top-down, industry-controlled distribution system.

On the Net, everybody has a platform of their own. There is no limit to what can be built on that platform, including much better instruments for expressing demand, and much better control over private personal spaces and the ways personal data are used by others. Ad blocking is just the first step in that direction.

The adtech industry (including dependent publishers) can come up with all the “solutions” they want to the ad blocking “problem.” All will fail, because ad blocking is actually a solution the market—hundreds of millions of real human beings—demands. Every one of adtech’s “solutions” is a losing game of whack-a-mole where the ones with hammers bang their own heads.

For help looking past that game, consider these:

1) The Interent as we know it is 21 years old. Commercial activity on it has only been possible since April 30, 1995. The history of marketing on the Net since then has been a series of formative moments and provisional systems, not a permanent state. In other words, marketing on the Net isn’t turtles all the way down, it’s scaffolding. Facebook, Google and the rest of the online advertising world exist by the grace of provisional models that have been working for only a few years, and can easily collapse if something better comes along. Which it will. Inevitably. Because…

2) When customers can signal demand better than adtech can manipulate it or guess at it, adtech will collapse like a bad soufflé.

3) Plain old brand advertising, which has always been aimed at populations rather than people, isn’t based on surveillance, and has great brand-building value, will carry on, free of adtech, doing what only it can do. (See the Ad Contrarian for more on that.)

In the long run (which may be short) winners will be customers and the companies that serve them  respectfully. Not more clueless and manipulative surveillance-based marketing schemes.

Winning companies will respect customers’ independence and intentions. Among those intentions will be terms that specify what can be done with shared personal data. Those terms will be supplied primarily by customers, and companies will agree to those terms because they will be friendly, work well for both sides, and easily automated.

Having standard ways for signaling demand and controlling use of personal data will give customers the same kind of scale companies have always had across many customers. On the Net, scale can work in both directions.

Companies that continue to rationalize spying on and abusing people, at high costs to everybody other than those still making hay while the sun shines, will lose. The hay-makers will also lose as soon as the light of personal tolerance for abuse goes out, which will come when ad blocking and tracking protection together approach ubiquity.

But the hay-makers can still win if they start listening to high-value signals coming from customers. It won’t be hard, and it will pay off.

The market is people, folks. Everybody with a computer or a smart mobile device is on the Net now. They are no longer captive “consumers” at the far ends of one-way plumbing systems for “content.” The Net was designed in the first place for everybody, not just for marketers who build scaffolding atop customer dislike and mistake it for solid ground.

It should also help to remember that the only business calling companies “advertisers” is advertising. No company looks in the mirror and sees an advertiser there. That’s because no company goes into business just so they can advertise. They see a car maker, a shoe store, a bank, a brewer, or a grocer. Advertising is just overhead for them. I learned this lesson the hard way as a partner for 20 years in a very successful ad agency. Even if our clients loved us, they could cut their ad budget to nothing in an instant, or on a whim.

There’s a new world of marketing waiting to happen out there in the wide-open customer-driven marketplace. But it won’t grow out of today’s Great Ad Machine. It’ll grow out of new tech built on the customers’ side, with ad blocking and tracking protection as the first examples. Maybe some of that tech is visible at OMMA. Or at least maybe there’s an open door to it. If either is there, let’s see it. Hashtag: #VRM. (For more on that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_relationship_management.)

If not, you can still find developers here .

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