New form of data piracy growing in the digital advertising industry?

Here's a new thing to worry about, although I'm not sure how prevalent it is... Opposed to the tradition of hacking into someone's databases, a new kind of data piracy involves capturing interactions between brands and their customers in real time. The more data we collect about our customers, especially on mobile devices, the more we have to worry about this. 

AdExchanger: Brand Privacy: Who’s Knocking Off Your Consumer Data? 2018-Jun-13 by Mark Shedletsky of Vertical Mass

Brands spend billions of dollars to cultivate one-to-one relationships with consumers and create audience profiles in exchange for discounts and other rewards. There’s a give and take here, with a direct relationship between the data provided with consent and the benefit received.

Where things have run afoul, however, is the gaggle of third parties accessing and using that data without permission. Data companies gain access to publisher and brand audiences through mobile analytics SDKs, social media scraping, programmatic ad serving and more.

Apps may want access to the microphone or the location of our device when it seems irrelevant to the casual game being played or the service being downloaded. It’s likely to aid in the piracy of a consent-based relationship between a consumer and a brand. For instance, microphones may get deployed to help ad tech platforms identify audience signals in your living room and sell retargeting.

These kinds of practices have created a growing need for a transparency framework, as the IAB has recently introduced, that audits where data comes from and helps media buyers trust what they’re getting and from whom they’re getting it. It’s a potential fix for a universal intellectual property issue that’s at the crux of the need for greater brand privacy.

It's not all procrastination

I appreciate this article for breaking down the challenges of procrastination. I'm trying to institute some new routines, and the transitions are killing me. But I guess they will until I'm in the habit of plunging. 

HBR.org: How to Actually Start the Task You’ve Been Avoiding, 18-May-30 by Peter Bregman

The biggest challenge to moving forward on anything is the transition to working on it. It almost always represents a shift from doing something comfortable (a warm bath, sending simple emails, knocking straightforward tasks off a to-do list, completing transactional conversations) to doing something uncomfortable (a cold bath, starting that proposal, initiating that hard conversation, facing a blank page).

We tend to think that getting traction on our most important work requires that we be skilled and proficient at that work — but that’s not quite right. The real thing we need to be skilled and proficient in is moving through the moment before the work.... 

In some cases you just need to force yourself through a moment to get to the other side. Since, at first, there was no way to make the plunge easier, I simply had to use sheer will and discipline — pure courage — to get myself in.

Commit to repetition. As the week — and my plunging — progressed, it became easier. Both because I got used to it and because my expectation, habit, and commitment solidified.

 

Why we need to look at other ways to reduce the risk of hiring

The safest way to hire is to find someone you've worked with before. Unfortunately, it perpetuates bias.  

NY Times: Karina Lake of Stitch Fix on Building Diverse Teams, 2018-Jun-1 by David Gelles

One of the biggest challenges standing in the way of diversity and equal opportunity for people is the way that people build founding teams. People tend to bring on my buddy from this thing and then my buddy from that thing, and it’s like, “You’re just kind of bringing the same people that you’ve worked with back together, getting the gang together again to found another company.” That just creates this circle of capital raising that I think is not healthy, and I don’t think people are looking at the whole world and saying, “Who are the best people for these jobs?”

 

Why SEO isn't about building traffic, it's about understanding customers

SEO is often seen as a matter of gaming the search engines, but it's actually a powerful fundamental marketing tool on the internet. This article arms us to use it for the long-term benefit of our business. 

The Wiglaf Journal: Why Every Business Should Invest in SEO, 2018-May by Brooklin Nash 

The bedrock of building up your SEO is good research – which will benefit your entire business in the long run. SEO requires learning more about your target audience through keyword research. You start with something small—using one word or phrase that you think people will use to find your service or product.

From there, you can create lists of relevant keywords that you can use in creating new SEO content, branching out into new areas, and informing other marketing efforts. On the tail end, SEO analysis will help you research your customers, who’s visiting your site, where they are coming from, and how they act.

Grant McCracken: Value comes from meaning

As entrepreneurs, if we want to survive... we have to know what our customers want. That changes... it sucks but it happens. 

CultureBy: American culture and the story of OJ, 2018-May-2 by Grant McCracken

We are accustomed to thinking about value as something that comes from utility, from functional benefits, from what Christensen calls “purpose.”

This is merely part of value. Value also comes from meaning.

But functional value is the thing we measure when we price. Meaning is largely invisible to our calculations. This is why culture is the “dark matter” of American capitalism.

And this brings us to the story of OJ.

Not very long ago, a new idea stole into the American consciousness.

The glass of OJ, once the picture of health, was now being called “a glass of sugar.”

The effect was spectacular. Between 2002 and 2017, the Nielsen-measured retail U.S. orange juice market declined by 50 percent. The WSJ heralded the death of this “breakfast table star.” Everyone suffered, farmers, an agricultural industry, and brands like Tropicana, Florida’s Natural, and Minute Maid.

It was a beautiful, if painful, experiment. OJ still had all its functional benefits. It was still charged with Vitamin C, minerals and all that non-specific “goodness.” The only thing that had changed was the cultural meaning. What was once “the very image of refreshment” had become an object of suspicion.

So what changed, precisely? American culture changed. What culture gave, it took away. What it valued, it devalued. What it charged with one meaning, it charged with another.

Specifying what OJ meant in its heyday is the work historians, semioticians, anthropologists, sociologists, strategists, planners, and other “trained professionals” who can comb through American culture and tease out the what, when, who and how of OJ’s rise to its place as “the very image of refreshment.”

Specifying how OJ fell, this falls to the manager, the C-Suite, the leaders of the organization. They may take these truths to be incontrovertible:

1) the meaning of OJ is arbitrary. It’s a little like the price of OJ on commodity markets. It responds to forces outside itself.... https://cultureby.com/2018/05/american-culture-and-the-story-of-oj.html

Making rewards portable, but not too portable

The MobileBridge Momentum Platform is the most developed blockchain loyalty solution I've seen, although it doesn't have a track record yet. Consumers certainly want rewards they can use outside the company that provides them, and we have that now with multi-retailer platforms like Nectar, as well as offerings from American Express Membership Rewards. 

What struck me about Momentum is that a company using the platform is expected to set up the rules for its own rewards, having the ability to customize their own reward program but still use the underlying platform, and allowing them to evolve their program. It made me wonder... 

Suppose I have a reward program and a segment of my customers are loyal but not using their points. Could I let the points sit for a few months then invite just that group to transfer the points? If I had that much flexibility, it sounds very inviting. 

Chipin: Meet the Boss – Exclusive Interview with Momentum CEO Kees de Vos, 2018-May-21 by Daniel

We use blockchain to make the storage and usage of consumer data more transparent and hand the user control over their own data and how it’s used. At the same time blockchain inherently offers great ledger capability to distribute value in the form of loyalty points, globally and accurately. And in both cases, the security of blockchain offers tremendous benefits. 

Having arrived at this point, it allowed us to expand our proposition to address some real-world frustration around loyalty systems that exist these days, for both end-consumers and the companies that are running them.... 

Consumers have the overriding feeling that they can’t [earn] enough loyalty points in the loyalty programs they have joined over the years. And even if they get to the point where they do have enough points, they find it simply too hard to find the rewards that they really value. Globally around $250Bn worth of loyalty points expire every year and are simply wasted! This is not only frustrating for the consumer; the companies that run these loyalty programs simply don’t get the return on investment that they are looking for.

Using these unused points to actively build more engagement with consumers and make it easier to redeem them across not one, but multiple loyalty systems address a huge issue in the market. The hugely positive response we have received so far seems to suggest we have hit a nerve!... 

Yes, companies will have the tooling to create their own tokens and set their own specifications, such as the token value, the number of tokens created and the ability to exchange with none, some or all other loyalty programs on the platform, for example. The Momentum team or one of our partners will be able to assist in this process, based on our experience.

Once that has been set up, the company branded tokens can be used to earn and redeem rewards within that companies loyalty scheme, transferred to another companies loyalty scheme or exchanged for Momentum Tokens, which can be traded on the open market for Bitcoin, Ether or any other crypto-currency.

Sponsors vs. mentors

Early in my career, I had mentors who steered me wrong. They encouraged me to follow the business mainstream in a way that was just wrong for me. I don't blame them: I was hard to understand. It took me years to understand myself.

Since then I have avoided having a mentor, but reading these articles has convinced me that even at my age, I could use a sponsor. I hope I can find someone who appreciates what I can contribute and will help me find a good place to use it.

Fortune: Why I'm Over Women's 'Empowerment', 2017-Jan-17 by Sallie Krawcheck

In the workplace, women are recognizing that they need to move from having mentors (a mentor being “an experienced and trusted advisor,” according to the dictionary...in other words, sort of passive) to more “sponsors” (someone who actually advocates on your behalf at work). Today, women have three times as many mentors as men do—but half as many sponsors. Women are recognizing that this needs to shift, and smart companies are moving from mentorship to sponsorship programs.

Penelope Trunk Careers: How to manage your career if you're black, 2018-May-7, Recommendations based on an interview of anonymous black professional by Penelope Trunk

Black kids need credentials and a network of high performers who will support them in their adult life. Because people in the US have so much guilt about racism, people love helping high performing black kids. It’s so much easier than helping poor, low performing, probably destitute black kids.

Know what you want. As a high performing black kid, singled out by a college for high-performers, you make it easy for white people to help you. They will talk with you about your major, ask you what you want to do, and help you get that job. But you have to know what you want. You need help as early as possible and people can’t help you early if you don’t specialize early. Saying you want to try a lot of things means no one can help you....

Say yes when someone influential asks if you need help. Say yes first and then figure out how they can help you. They want to feel good about helping a black kid. They are looking for a way to help. You have to find the way, though, because they don’t know what you’re up against. So be sure to start by asking for help that’s easy for them to give. Then they’ll come back to help again. Keep in touch. Show them they’re making a difference. You’re their project.