Our Lives Made Public

                I know I said I’d address Privacy last week and I intend to keep my promise.  Last week I talked about how new technology is connecting us to the world around us with increasing frequency and substance.  Soon it will be possible to target all advertising directly to a person based upon personal history the way we currently try to target our online advertising.  The fly in the ointment of this new age of connectivity is the very serious issue of personal privacy.  Just because it becomes possible to display advertisements anywhere a person goes does not make it strictly ethical. 

 

As the personalization revolution continues people are finding new means of keeping advertisements out of their lives.  DVRs allow us to skip past commercials on television, and for every new method of internet advertising invented, a new blocker or filter is introduced to remove that advertising from consumer’s screens.  This backlash has been created in response to tactics employed by guerilla marketing firms and unscrupulous scam artists.  There is fear, therefore, that further connection with the digital world will lead to further misuse of that connection to spam customers, scam them, or even steal identities.  

 

There is a dearth of trust in what we see online, and consumers will often pass up legitimate offers on the assumption that the offer is a scam or otherwise has some malicious purpose.  In order to bring marketing into the new era and take advantage of all the wonderful new technology we will be seeing in the near future, it is imperative that a standard for best practices and possibly a form of regulation be put in place in order to regain the trust of the consumer.  We have approached marketing on the internet thus far as a game of numbers.  As such a sort of shotgun approach has been the norm for most firms getting started online.  It has been thought that, like television commercials, the important thing is to get your ad in front of as many people as possible.  This strategy has led to an environment in which we are overloaded with ads on a daily basis.  Further complicating the situation, many of these ads are actually not for legitimate businesses or are delivery systems for viruses. 

 

With this kind of environment dominating the present marketplace, is it any wonder that privacy is such a hot button issue when people think about further connecting their lives to a global information network?  While such a world would provide amazing possibilities for finding niche audiences and for making sure consumers no longer have to sort through tons of information that they don’t find interesting, it also opens great dangers of identity theft and exposure of people’s personal information, even current location, to the world at large.  Reclusiveness is becoming not just a social faux pas, but a nigh impossibility.  As our interconnectivity continues to grow, marketers will need to work extra hard to make sure they respect the privacy and desires of the people receiving their ads, or as ad blocking software evolves, marketers will find more and more doors closed to them.

 

Opening a New World

When I read our blog topic for this week I had to chuckle a little bit.  This is a subject I have already talked at length about on my Facebook blog and it is a question that I have no hesitation in answering.  I can say with absolute certainty that reading the novel The Amber Spyglass, the third in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy defined my philosophical beliefs in several areas.  I originally began the series with The Golden Compass, Which is a well known and beloved children’s fantasy novel.  The first book is very light and entertaining, and I enjoyed reading it immensely.  I greedily grabbed the second when I finished it.  While the first book was light and presented a fun fantasy world dealing with the concept of multiple realities and the concept of identity being granted by a substance called “dust.”  The second novel began to explore more complex ideas, as the Author shifted focus to our world and presented directly the idea that the world as it is could reasonably have turned out in any number of different ways.  Things as simple as the English language could have evolved wholly differently based upon small decisions made in history.  Simple things like the word anbaric replacing the word electric (The word electric is derived from the Greek for amber, because it was noted that rubbing two pieces of amber together produced a static electric spark.  Anbaric uses the Arabic root word anbar, instead of the Greek electrum) word serve to shape Pullman’s idea of a world that is not dominated by absolute concepts.  He constantly sets the church as his opponent, but he is really railing against any institution that would seek to define reality in concrete and fatalistic terms.  In the end what really inspired me about the book was his message about coming of age in general.  He shows how many people in the world equate the ideal of innocence with purity and goodness but how this is a mistaken concept.  Rather, he states that we should be unashamed of growing up and that innocence is meant to give way to wisdom.  It is the opposite of the Genisis story which equates wisdom to sin.  It was thanks to Pullman’s story that I was able to reconcile my own beliefs on the nature of our existence as human beings.  I feel like it is because of this worship of innocence that many of our hatreds have been fostered.  The idea that experiencing new things or forming relationships with new people somehow taints our being is a concept driven by this idea that we should be striving to stay as close to our childhood identities as possible.  The idea that being good and pure is being as childlike as possible is absolutely anathema to my values, and it was a great boon to find a novel that could present this concept as eloquently as Pullman has in his trilogy.

 

The Age of Infinite Interconnectivity

We've become very blasé about the rate at which our technology advances these days.  It's considered par for course that we see a major technological advancement every year.  This has been very present on my mind as I've been reading a book written in 2007 and published in 2008 about the future of digital marketing.  I have been struck by the amount to which the predictions of the book have already come to fruition, or to which the world has presented an answer that has taken the digital world in different directions.  The last two years have seen the advent of the iPhone and the explosion of mobile apps.  It's also seen the advance of e-reader technology culminating in this year's release of the iPad and its competitors.  4G networks have begun springing up here and there and 3G penetration has covered much of the nation.  Soon it will not be inconceivable for everyone to have internet everywhere without the need of a modem or router in their homes, but instead will connect to their WiMax provider at all times indoor and outdoor.  The proliferation of wireless connection and mobile internet has led to the question: what we can do with this new tech in the future?  Suggestions have been raised that this constant connection to a global information network can lead to a greater interconnectivity between our personal devises and the world around us.  New advances in AR (augmented reality) allow us to manipulate the things we see with computer imagery on the fly.  (For more on AR check out this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality.  For an example of AR in action, take a look here)  The proposal is thus:  Using personal information stored in a person's mobile devise, we can tailor not only the ads the customer is receiving, but the look of the very world around the customer using constant radio connection to the customer's equipment.  For example, instead of a window ad, a screen can be imbedded with an rfid tag, this tag sends a signature to your mobile devise, which then chooses an ad to serve up based upon your personal information and sends the ads unique identifier to the billboard or sign, which will display an advertisement that is directly targeted at the person viewing it.  Thus when entering a store, you will always see an ad that is relevant to your interests within a short period of time.  These ads would be an immense boon to the bookselling industry, allowing us to tool genre specific ads to customers, ensuring that every book published is finding its market as soon as it hits stores, without the cost of having to compete for ad space within the store.

Furthermore, the eventual incorporation of AR into this model will allow multiple customers viewing the same ad space to see different advertisements!  Imagine a world where every niche product can achieve blanket advertising to its niche for a fraction of the price paid today.  Imagine pay per click adverting becoming the standard for normal advertising fees.  I leave you today with the thought of that future, where the consumers, not the marketers, decide what advertisements become a part of their lives.  Next week we'll talk about the issue of privacy!    

Sex, Lies, and E-mail

Sorry, completely forgot to put this up on the blog last night.

I have a confession to make. I have never once purchased any products in response to an email advertisement. I know, as a young person living in this digital world this seems like a shocking announcement. My reasons for this are mostly based upon paranoia about opting in to just about anything. I worked as a fraud investigator for eBay.com for nearly a year in 2003. During that time I saw more phishing schemes perpetuated through email opt-in lists than anyone could believe. Not only that, I saw that many of these schemes were very cleverly put together and, if one is not careful, need very little from you to ruin your day. In fact the most successful scheme I came across involved posting links to inflammatory or inappropriate content on public sites like eBay, and then adding a very official looking complaint button at the bottom of the page. Clicking the button brought you to a prompt requesting your user name and password in order to lodge a complaint. Of course this lead to the poster gaining access to your account, after which they could use your account to run their more malicious schemes. So you can see why I would generally beware any opt in buttons that may lead to my personal information being available for someone to view. Furthermore, I have seen many reputable companies fall prey to having their email lists leaked or stolen, leading to floods of spam that can be very hard to escape from. Due to my habit of not ever opting in to any email marketing, I have thus had little reason to trust any ads I have received, as I know they were sent without my consent.
In order to make email marketing live up to its full potential, I believe it is necessary for a company to provide redundant opt-in and a legal disclaimer with customer acknowledgment that the customer’s email cannot be sold or given to other marketing agents. By redundant opt-in, I mean that I should be first given the option to click on a box stating that I want to receive ads, after which an email should be sent to me requesting confirmation of my opt-in. This insures that I don’t get signed up for something accidentally, which will poorly color my opinion of the company and their ads from that point onward. As far as the legal disclaimer goes, the clause stating that my information will remain private should be presented in a summarized form with a check box next to it to ensure that I understand that signing up for the ad program is safe.

Blog #42

I really didn’t know what to write about on this post. The news has been all about a topic that we’ve already discussed. The battle over the e-Book continues to rage, with most consumers blissfully oblivious to the realities of why MacMillan would want to control its pricing structure and honestly feeling like they should get all of their products for nothing. There’s already a major outcry against the “Multi-million dollar” Publishers who are pushing this agenda out of greed in order to improve their bottom lines, with little being done by publishers to show what the impact of Amazon’s model will have on this small margin field. Publishers have basically been labeled the bad guys here because people are still demonizing the music production industry and think that publishers are basically the same. I feel like MacMillan and publishers in general have not done nearly enough to explain their position and the precarious nature of the field. People just see that they are owned by big corps like Viacom and assume that they are billion dollar powerhouses. I feel like if publishers would release more news explaining what their problem with the $9.99 price point is, they may be able to avoid a lot of fallout later. If the fall of the music industry has taught us anything, it’s that PR is important in order to maintain the image of publishers as companies interested in the proliferation of literature, not media conglomerates interested only in the bottom line. If we can humanize the industry, then maybe, just maybe, we’ll be able to weather the oncoming storm without resorting to the drastic price models that the music industry has had to adopt in order to maintain their business.

Keywords

Here's an experiment in writing an ad blurb for a book using search keywords!

Keywords:

Abraham Lincoln

Civil War

President

Lincoln in 1955

Lincoln Trillogy

Time Travel

Sent through time

Evanston, Illinois

Tony Wolk

Historical Fantasy

Abraham Lincoln: A Novel Life is an inspired piece of Historical Fantasy that brings one of our greatest leaders to life.  Inexplicably sent through time, Lincoln finds himself in Evanston, Illinois, 1955.  There he witnesses the future of the Union and the results of his Legacy.  Briefly relieved of his burdens as president, Lincoln soon is faced with the results of the war and the idealized images that modern society has ascribed to a very human president.  His adventure is highlighted by his meeting with a 1950’s woman whose understanding of his nature proves too intriguing to pass on.  In the end he returns to the Civil War reinvigorated and more resolved than ever to ensure that his vision of the future comes to pass.

Written by Tony Wolk, this novel is the first in his unique Lincoln Trilogy.  In this story Wolk gives us a side to Lincoln that we almost never witness in our idealized perception of the Civil War President.  Though his storytelling, he brings this character to life, and shows us the man behind the legend.  Skillfully blending history with drama and fantasy, Wolk brings us into the mind of a man upon whose shoulders the fate of the world very literally did rest.

Being Dragged into a New Age

With the battle over e-books still raging, I would like to take this opportunity to address the publishing industry as a whole and the danger the industry faces as it moves into the digital era.  Presently, book publishing is on the cusp of a complete change in the way books are perceived as a product.  As a result, publishers will need to carefully decide how to proceed in the near future if they want the industry to be about the books rather than about the business of selling a product.  The closest likeness to the current situation that publishers have found themselves in can be found by looking at the Music and Movie industries.  Both are industries based upon providing entertainment to a customer and both have gone through the rocky road to digitization.  The first thing we can learn from these industries is simple; digitization cannot be resisted or put off.  It will happen and it will need to be dealt with regardless of the desires of those controlling the majority of the industry.  Furthermore, the slower the industry moved in accepting digitization, the less control the industry will have over the methods in which the media is produced and distributed.  It is absolutely necessary for publishers to move upon this new media form quickly and aggressively.  We should be seeking to broaden our e-product horizons by releasing more media at low costs and with fast and easy access online.  This is the time when readers need to become aware of who the publishers of their favorite books are and how they operate.  By seeing the publisher as the powerful money holder who will produce anything that might make a profit, consumers are left with little desire to fight for their favorite publishers and less moral conflict over stealing e-books through online sharing programs. 

The greatest mistake that the music and movie industries made when dealing with the move to digitization was to try preventing the free flow of data from one person to another online rather than taking advantage of the media to become the main online distributor.  For the most part, people are willing to pay for the entertainment they consume, however when you present someone with the option to either pay a high price for a product that has only minor value to them (e.g. One song off an album of 13) or easily steal the one part they want with very little chance of reconciliation, the choice becomes much fuzzier than it should be.  The battle that raged over digital music media and the record industries failed attempts to control it have spawned a new beast which is forced to keep selling hit singles at an astounding pace just to make ends meet.  The consumers have completely lost trust in the industry, and will often seek to support the bands directly by going to concerts and purchasing other merchandise rather than buying albums.  iTunes has helped to stem the tide, but the resulting model of selling only hit songs has left the industry forced to abandon fringe artists and artists that have fallen out of vogue in order to turn a profit.

Publishing is now where recording was about 10 years ago.  As it becomes easier to consume books digitally, the demand for these books will continue to grow.  If publishers take the queues that the Recording industry left behind and act aggressively to become the primary distributors of electronic books, we may see publishers gain from this paradigm shift.  If publishers follow in the recording industries wake and allow third parties to control prices while attempting to control the proliferation of the product with an iron fist, they will find themselves steamrolled by the unforgiving torrent that is the internet.

Clash of the Titans

So this past week saw Amazon's thus far unabated surge to dominance in the e-publishing market finally challenged and turned back by Macmillan publishing.  It seems like Amazon has up until this point been aiming to be just under the level at which anti-trust laws can really apply to a company.  By selling e- books at a loss, Amazon had sought to drive away competition in the market, becoming sole producer, distributor, and vendor of e-books created in the eDocs format.  Macmillan challenged their dominance by refusing to supply books to Amazon if they continued to short sell the product.  Amazon fought for a while, but finally capitulated under the pressure and bad press.  The question we are discussing today is what problems may publishers face in the future if the Amazon hegemony continues to grow, and how can this actually be advantageous to some publishers?

The downsides of an Amazon hegemony should be fairly obvious.  Publishers would continue to be unable to create any sort of direct sales support online, as they would simply be unable to compete with Amazon's prices.  Furthermore, Amazon's short selling of e-books may lead to an impact on sales of physical books as more people begin to shift formats.  New devices like the iPad and the Adam make the e-book market more accessible to traditional readers than ever, and it is likely that the e-book format will become a major competitor to watch out for in little time.  Publisher's are wise to be leery, as watching the fall of the newspaper industry should be taken as a lesson of what can happen if publishers don't approach the growing demand for electronic material both strategically and aggressively.  Amazon's hegemony threatens the options these publishers have and unless the publishers get control over the evolution of their business and work closely with the technology companies that are pushing it forward, they will find themselves going extinct.

The upside to Amazon's work has been the general opening up of the industry to make all of this possible.  As more and more people are becoming exposed to electronic publishing, the medium is becoming more and more desirable and advanced to keep up with the developing market.  This provides a great opportunity for book publishers to work with Amazon as a distributor to get their books to a wider market without having to deal with the costs of printing and shipping distribution.  With overhead costs cut, smaller publishers now have the potential to get their material to a wider audience.  In addition, with Amazon now on the defensive following the dispute with Macmillan, publishers may have an opportunity to negotiate a new distribution model for e-books that provides a greater profit for small publishers than the current model in which more than 50% of the money a book brings in goes to the vendor and distributor.