To be strictly accurate - we should be talking about Blocking Trackers
… I came across this article (note if you are using an ‘ad blocker’ … then guess what - they tell you that you have an ‘ad blocker’ on …. actually I don’t use an ‘ad blocker’ - I use a ’tracking blocker’.
That aside, I thought I would extract some pertinent quotes from the piece and add my comments. The piece appeared in Adage and was written by Jason Jercinovic - and so all the quotes below I attribute to him. Adage says that “Jason Jercinovic is global head of marketing innovation and global brand director at Havas.”
Havas is a pretty good agency that has produced some great campaigns for Air New Zealand, Global Mental Health and Canal+ - so I kind of feel that they (should at least) know what they are doing. I’ll go further. They do - but it is clear that they remain bought into the narrative of ‘poor us - we have to do this [efn_note]Use Ad Trackers[/efn_note] for it to work’. They don’t.
So - let’s get too it …
and no one can blame the advertising industry for rapidly adopting them.
I can!
Advertisers may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
… there are more practical considerations around the use of AI in advertising: inherently biased data, algorithms that make flawed decisions and violations of personal privacy.
That is happening now - and nothing to do with AI.
The more complete our understanding of an individual, the more persuasive our marketing can be.
Why does he assume I want to be persuaded?
But each new insight into a consumer raises new questions about our moral obligations to that individual – and to society at large.
… then ask out permission
AI is fueled by data, which is used to train algorithms and sustain the system.
‘Back in the day’, we had an experession ‘Crap in … Crap out’ …. thatadage (which is different to the publication) is as relevant as ever.
In order to make an informed choice, consumers need a clear explanation of the value exchange in any given campaign. What are they giving up? What are they getting in return? And they should be allowed to opt out if they are uncomfortable with the transaction.
At last …. sadly - I don’t see much of that happening.
I’m very much a Darwinian. This means I must ask myself questions like ‘How come all surviving cultures until modern time have been based on religion?’ and I draw the conclusion that religion has somehow helped people and civilizations to survive.
In the same way I ask ‘how come all sexually reproducing forms of life age (unlike e.g. amoebas, or yeast)?’ and its the same conclusion - in different words now: ‘if there has ever been a sexually reproducing species that did not age, they have not survived to tell the story’. Have there existed such failed species, then? I’m suggesting that its likely, because (unless I’m misinformed) aging is a ‘feature’.
Around the age of 45 the human body ’switches on’ aging, or rather, it switches off the function that keeps us young. Much of the research today is (unless I’m misinformed) about how to keep the stay-young-function ON.
To be provocative - the ambition to stop aging can be seen as disrespectful of the wisdom of Darwinian nature and it has a slant toward man-made creationism.
It’s not going to end well, in each case.
David Nordfors
It struck me as so very right - little to argue with, so recording for posterity!
RelBasil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be.
I have had versions of this article on a number of different blogs and publications for years. The time has come to formalize it, since content, its ownership and how we think about it, is central to the principles of People First.
A recent question from someone in one of my many groups …
“Why is it so difficult to find a freelance writing gig?
My reply …
Because the people who pay for writing have no clue of the value, which is why they call it ‘content’ which we know has no value and is homogenous ‘filler’ that can be swapped out at a moments notice.
My Content Rule …
‘Don’t Call It Content’
…. book, novel, short story, article, white paper, promotional piece, advert, painting, sculpture, song, opera, photograph, image, graphic art, poster, fine art … anything … anything but ‘content’.
If you want a general catchall phrase, how about material? It’s the words that creative used to use - it meant something. Stood for something. It had value.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
Why?
Because as long as ‘we the creators’ fall into the trap of using low cost, homogenous, non-descript words like ‘content’ to describe our work, our soul, our passion, our beliefs then our work will continue to be viewed as ’free - to - cheap - to - low - cost’, as ‘homogenized, non differentiated, interchangeable fodder’. Moreover, we then only have ourselves to blame and the resultant payment for your art, your thinking, your ideas, will continue to race to the bottom.
It is not in the interests of any creator to allow that, so why allow their interests to define how we think?
Content is a horrible, generic, cheap, ‘anything will do’ kind of word. Which is why ‘content’ has no value. It is also important to know that it is in the best interests of the buyers of our sweat, labour, thought and time to keep their price down. But our costs are not kept down. So our net earnings suffer. And they are suffering badly.
And it has to start with you - the creator, because it isn’t in the interests of buyers to change their behaviour and vocabulary - ‘they’ want great work at no cost.
From a while back now - but well worth repeating ….
It’s the amateurs who make it tough for the professionals
💬 Harlan Ellison
I wonder if that is how this kind of thinking comes about? As I wrote when I first saw this …
For all those of us attempting to get paid for value by people who wouldn’t get value if it smacked them between the eyes.
💬 John Philpin
Content is a horrible, generic, cheap, ‘anything will do’ kind of word. Which is why ’content’ has no value.
“I draw and paint on paper using pen, ink, and watercolor. I then scan and publish my work on this web site. People then visit and read this graphic novel, or if you prefer, webcomic. Occasionally, I write a blog post like this one. There is art and there is commentary, but there is no content and there are certainly no consumers.”
💬 Don Macdonald - August 24th, 2011
All Creators Should
STOP using THEIR words to describe OUR work. OUR soul. OUR passion. OUR beliefs.
A N D
START using OUR words to describe OUR work. OUR soul. OUR passion. OUR beliefs.
Celebrating my 4 part series on data, it is designed to be;
“Non-technical, hopefully fun, definitely not definitive and absolutely a work in progress.”
John Philpin
Because if you don’t understand what it is and how it is being used against you, then you are in for a shock …
“Failure of society and ‘we the people’ to do this (understand what data is and how it is being used) will mean that the last few hundred years of societal development was for naught and we will return to the feudal states from whence we came.”
John Philpin
Exaggeration? This is what Shoshana Zuboff said in her recent book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’.
“Many scholars have taken to describing these new conditions as neo-feudalism, marked by the consolidation of elite wealth and power far beyond the control of ordinary people and the mechanisms of democratic consent. Piketty calls it a return to “patrimonial capitalism,” a reversion to a premodern society in which one’s life chances depend upon inherited wealth rather than meritocratic achievement.”
“Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt look at countries threatened by potential strongmen or anti-democratic movements. They found the nations that successfully resisted such movements – like Finland and Belgium during the Great Depression – had leaders who united despite their opposing views because they thought the long-term goal of democracy trumped their short-term self-interest. Countries where would-be opponents stayed silent for reasons of self-preservation, they found, slid into dictatorship.”
Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.
Nobody told The Vogues to retire. Up every morning just to keep a job, I gotta fight my way through the hustling mob, Sounds of the city pounding in my brain, While another day goes down the drain (Yeah, yeah, yeah). but it’s a five o’clock world when the whistle blows, No-one owns a piece of my time, And there’s a five o’clock me inside my clothes, Thinking that the world looks fine, yeah, A-da-lay-ee-ee (up, up, up!). Trading my time for the pay I get, Living on money that I ain’t made yet, Gotta keep goin’ gotta make my way, But I live for the end of the day (Yeah, yeah, yeah), ‘cause it’s a five o’clock world when the whistle blows, No-one owns a piece of my time, And there’s a long-haired girl who waits, I know, To ease my troubled mind, yeah, A-da-lay-ee-ee (up, up, up!). In the
shelter of her arms everything’s okay (yeah-yeah), She talks and the world goes slipping away (it slips away), And I know the reason I can still go on, When every other reason is gone (Yeah, yeah, yeah), in my five o’clock world she waits for me, Nothing else matters at all’, Cause every time my baby smiles at me, I know that it’s all worthwhile, yeah, A-da-lay-ee-ee (up, up, up!) A-da-lay-ee-ee (up, up, up!)
“Platforms have become one of the most important business models of the 21st century. Five of the six most valuable firms in the world are built around these types of platforms. However, a study of 252 platform companies showed that 209 of them failed. The most common mistakes into four categories:
mispricing on one side of the market,
failure to develop trust with users and partners,
prematurely dismissing the competition, and
entering too late.
Researchers have extensively studied pricing decisions, yet managers still get them wrong. A platform often requires underwriting one side of the market to encourage the other side to participate. But knowing which side should get charged and which side should get subsidized may be the single most important strategic decision for any platform.”
Kyle Westaway
Interesting what each of us takes away when we read articles. The quote above is from Kyle Westaway - and indeed nothing wrong with his takeaway. But there is more - and even the HBR article doesn’t really get down to it.
For me, platforms have been a key to my thinking ever since I read Platform Scale, which I first discovered by reading this blog, which I came to know through Jobsworth’s Blog … that I was certainly reading 10 years ago.
People, Passion, Platforms were even my ‘three words’ for a few years - but more recently I have been moving on. More on this to come - but increasingly I am seeing platforms as yes, a way to ‘lubricate a market place’, a way to do ‘better business’ and certainly ‘good platforms’ fall into place under this particular lens …
BUT
But … I can’t help thinking there is more. Platforms serve the corporate masters well. Look no further than Uber for that, but in fact do they really serve people well?
Jeremy Heimans’ ‘Power and Values’ model, I think highlights the issue perfectly. The graphic below is old, but I haven’t been able to find a more recent one. Like all good 2*2 quadrants, top right is best, bottom left is worst and the other two quadrants have their challenges [efn_note]To be fair JH would disagree with my assessment - he argues that no quadrant is wrong - so long as you understand which quadrant you are in and work accordingly. And yes of course. But I am not in any of those quadrants. I am arguing for how people can operate in a ‘Corporate First’ society - and to me - the best chance they stand is in the top right quadrant.[/efn_note].
Platforms are indeed lubricators of a a market place, but they are also a series of silos. Deep, inpenetrable tanks that inside are wonderful - but don’t work well for the outside.
Quick Example …. imagine that you work for Uber. You clock up 10,000 rides. You have a five-star rating and then you decide that you want to move to Lyft. (The same argument applies the other way round). You now have 0 rides to your name, there is no star count, your reputation is effectively locked up in Uber. You have to start again.
How hard would it be to have a universal reputation that travels with you. Spoiler alert - not hard at all (technically). Very hard if you actually want these silo’d platforms to adopt your reputation system.
More to come, but just as Sangeet was talking all that time ago abou the transition from Pipes to Platforms - so too I am asking you today to think about the transition from Platforms to Protocols. Specifically open protocols.
John Mayall’s First Album arrived nine years after forming his first band.
John Mayall’s First Album arrived nine years after forming his first band.
Trading my time for the pay I get (up!)
Living on money that I ain’t made yet (up!)
Gotta keep goin’ gotta make my way (up!)
But I live for the end of the day (up!)
The Vogues
Written in 1965 - and nothing has changed. This newsletter introduced you to the 4P model of People First … Pay, Purpose, Play and Passion.
With a more open, enlightened recruiting process there is so much more that people could do in any company if they were given the chance. The answer is to stop job filling and start fulfilling.
Funny. Been thinking of doing a kick starter for my book, but I am too busy writing to spend another chunk of time thinking about what the campaign would look like.
Needless to say I have done my pledge - it is such a People First topic that I couldn’t resist and as an extra message, the campaign deadline is my birthday. The ether was in alignment!
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Nobody told The Vogues to retire. Up every morning just to keep a job, I gotta fight my way through the hustling mob, Sounds of the city pounding in my brain, While another day goes down the drain (Yeah, yeah, yeah). but it’s a five o’clock world when the whistle blows, No-one owns a piece of my time, And there’s a five o’clock me inside my clothes, Thinking that the world looks fine, yeah, A-da-lay-ee-ee (up, up, up!). Trading my time for the pay I get, Living on money that I ain’t made yet, Gotta keep goin’ gotta make my way, But I live for the end of the day (Yeah, yeah, yeah), ‘cause it’s a five o’clock world when the whistle blows, No-one owns a piece of my time, And there’s a long-haired girl who waits, I know, To ease my troubled mind, yeah, A-da-lay-ee-ee (up, up, up!). In the
shelter of her arms everything’s okay (yeah-yeah), She talks and the world goes slipping away (it slips away), And I know the reason I can still go on, When every other reason is gone (Yeah, yeah, yeah), in my five o’clock world she waits for me, Nothing else matters at all’, Cause every time my baby smiles at me, I know that it’s all worthwhile, yeah, A-da-lay-ee-ee (up, up, up!) A-da-lay-ee-ee (up, up, up!)
