In Product Marketing, Strategy Precedes Tactics

I’ve decided to tweak Bredemarket’s public presentation by talking more about strategy. And although I’ve written some new strategy content recently, it’s a heck of a lot easier to repurpose some of the old content I’ve already written.

Such as my July 31, 2025 personal LinkedIn article (separate from Bredemarket’s “The Wildebeest Speaks”…which reminds me, I gotta write another one of those).

Job duties and SMART OKRs

The personal LinkedIn article was called “The Joy of Product Marketing Strategy, or SMART OKRs.”

Let me define the acronyms in the article title:

  • SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
  • OKRs: Objectives and Key Results.

Putting it simply, the article talked about the myriad of things a product marketer was expected to do at one company.

Or at any company, frankly. Product marketing job descriptions are fairly interchangeable. Go-to-market. Sales enablement. Competitive analysis. Metrics. Cross-functional collaboration. If you think YOUR company’s product marketing is amazing and different…it isn’t.

The entire list of product marketing duties is a bunch of tactical moves. A brochure here, a battlecard there. It could devolve into a lot of meaningless busywork. (Says the guy who has now written over 2,000 blog posts.)

But WHY are you doing all this junk?

That’s where the strategy comes to play.

Why?

For example, why are you establishing and obtaining approval for this?

“a multi-tiered go-to-market process identifying the go-to-market tiers, the customer-facing and internal deliverables for each tier, as well as the responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed organizations for each deliverable”

Let me list three reasons:

  • To ensure your go-to-market efforts contain the correct deliverables for the tier. Running around like a headless chicken to guess what you need to produce is idiotic.
  • To make sure everybody knows what they have to do. You don’t want a go-to-market effort to tank because the VP of Product won’t approve the customer success internal deliverable.
  • And let’s not forget the biggest reason of all: to allow the product in your go-to-market revenue to get a ton of orders and make a ton of revenue.

Because that’s why you’re marketing products…I hope.

Ask before you act

A helpful tip: before I get into the minutiae (tip your servers, I’m here all week) of a project, I ask a lot of questions first. “Why?” is the first question, but there are more.

The seven questions I ask. One you’ve seen the movie, now read the book.

Speaking of asking, if you want to ask Bredemarket for help with your strategy and tactics for content, proposal, and analysis work, click on the Content for Tech Marketers image below and schedule a free meeting with me.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

Yet Another Presentation Attack Detection Independent Testing Body

I’ve been compiling a list (April 2 update here) of PAD 3 conforming solutions, or biometric solutions (so far only face) that satisfy a high level of presentation attack detection (liveness detection). This satisfaction is determined by independent testing bodies such as BixeLab, iBeta, Ingenium, and Tüvit.

While nosing around, I found one other entity that performs these assessments: the Swiss Biometrics Center of the Idiap Research Institute.

The SBC’s attestation letters can be found here, including PAD Level A and PAD Level B conformance letters for entities such as Mobai and Identy.

No PAD Level C attestation letters yet.

I Like Wildebeests. 4Chan Likes Hamsters. But There Are Serious Jurisdictional Issues Involved.

In a recent article, Biometric Update’s Joel R. McConvey manages to be silly and serious simultaneously. The topic? 4Chan’s non-compliance with Ofcom’s age control rules.

The silliness originated with 4Chan, not McConvey.

“In keeping with its generally adversarial stance, 4chan says it won’t follow Ofcom’s rules because “the United Kingdom lost the American Revolutionary War,” and as such UK speech law doesn’t apply to companies based in the U.S.”

Preston Byrne of 4Chan apparently incorporated a picture of a hamster in his response to Ofcom. Byrne explains why on X:

“I told Ofcom in Oct that their letters, which were not properly served, would be shredded for my pet hamster’s enclosure.”

But there are obviously serious issues involved: in a dispute involving multiple nations, which laws govern? In this case, the apparent conflicting laws are the United States’ First Amendment, which 4Chan maintains lets it say whatever it wants regardless of the ages of the people involved, and the United Kingdom’s Ofcom regulations, which Ofcom maintains lets it regulate any website accessible in the UK, including 4Chan.

Of course, there’s a way to handle these demands from competing jurisdictions: block the age-insistent jurisdiction from accessing the website at all. As of November 28, 2025, Pornhub is inaccessible from the following states (unless you use a VPN, wink, wink): Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming.

So 4Chan, Wikipedia, Meta, or anyone else who objects to UK age assurance regulations could simply block people in the UK from accessing its website. Google blocked Spanish access to Google Noticias (Google News) for years.

But it doesn’t appear that 4Chan is going to do that, instead opting for a “come over here and collect your stupid fines” stance.

Knowledge of Age Without Birthdate Does Not Provide Complete Privacy

In the past, I have gone on ad nauseam about how mobile driver’s licenses are more private than physical driver’s licenses. Here is how I stated it in July 2024:

“When you hand your physical driver’s license over to a sleazy bartender, they find out EVERYTHING about you, including your name, your birthdate, your driver’s license number, and even where you live.

“When you use a digital mobile driver’s license, bartenders ONLY learn what they NEED to know—that you are over 21.”

Which is extremely limited information.

But some age verification systems may provide your age in years, without necessarily revealing your exact date of birth.

That single number—whether it is 17, 27, or 57—reveals a lot more than we realize.

Let’s say that we know that Jill is 57 years old. This means that she was born in either 1968 or 1969. If Jill has lived her entire life in the United States, we immediately know several things about her with some certainty.

  • First, we know that she is part of Generation X, which means she may exhibit skepticism rather than corporate loyalty, and a comfort level with email rather than Telegram or what we now refer to as “voice calls.”
  • Second, we know the types of experiences she probably had in her childhood and teenage years. She probably played with Star Wars toys as a kid. She knew a little bit about Billy Carter, the funny Presidential brother. She feared for the lives of the hostages in Iran.
  • Third, we know the types of experiences she didn’t have. She never saw a cigarette commercial on TV. If she watched Star Trek, she saw it on an “independent” station, not on NBC during prime time. She never feared for the lives of the Israeli Olympians in Munich.

It’s not a lot to go on, and it may not be 100% accurate if Jill grew up in a household that viewed television as demonic.

But it’s enough for a product marketer to shape age-sensitive product marketing.

This isn’t true for all products. Biometric system marketing, for example, isn’t affected by the age of the government procurement officer who is buying the biometric system.

But if your product appeals to some ages more than others, knowing the ideal age of your target audience personas shapes your content. If your target audience is just out of college, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” is meaningless to them.

CITeR and Combating Facial Recognition Demographic Bias

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) isn’t the only entity that is seeking to combat facial recognition demographic bias. The Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) is doing its part.

The Problem

NIST and other entities have documented facial recognition accuracy differences related to skin tone. This is separate from the topic of facial analysis: this relates to facial recognition, or the identification of an individual. (As a note, “Gender Shades” had NOTHING to do with facial recognition.)

It’s fair to summarize that the accuracy of an algorithm depends upon the data used to train the algorithm. For example, if an algorithm is trained entirely on Japanese people, you would expect that it would be very accurate in identifying Japanese, but less accurate in identifying Native Americans or Kenyans.

Many of the most-used facial recognition algorithms are authored by North American/European or Asian companies, and while the good ones seek to employ a broad data set for algorithm training, NIST and other results document clear demographic differences in accuracy.

The Research

The Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) is a consortium of universities, government agencies, and private entities. The lead entity in CITeR, Clarkson University, has initiated research on “improving equity in face recognition systems.” Clarkson is using the following methods:

  • Establish a continuous skin color metric that retains accuracy across different image acquisition environments.
  • Develop a statistical approach to measure equity, ensuring FR results fall within a precise margin of error.
  • Employ new FR systems in combination with or instead of existing measures to minimize bias of results.

In this work, Clarkson is cooperating with other entities, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the FIDO Alliance.

The final goal is to make facial recognition usable for everyone.

Your problem

Is your identity company and its product marketers also working to reduce demographic bias? How are you telling your story? Bredemarket (the biometric product marketing expert) can help with strategic and tactical solutions for your marketing and writing needs.

Bredemarket services, process, and pricing.

If I can help your firm with analysis, content, or even proposals in this area, talk to me.

Let Your Competitors Market Your Product

They’ll be happy to talk about you.

As I noted in February.

One: You save money. Why spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on go-to-market or sales enablement materials? Let your competitors incur those costs.

Two: You save time. The best product marketing initiatives occur in a joint process between the marketing leader and the product marketing consultant. But this requires commitment on your part: in initial project definition, draft review, and final publication.

Three: You save trouble. If your product marketing content has an effective call to action, there is the danger that a prospect may act on it, creating more work for your sales organization.

You can save money, time, and trouble by your silence. Let your competitors bear the burden of defining your product to your prospects. They will be more than happy to do so.

Surviving Without Electricity or Internet, Part Two

(Yes, the picture is technically inaccurate, as you shall see.)

Last month I wrote about surviving without electricity or internet, in the midst of my eight days with very unreliable internet.

Which brought me to roughly 3:40 this afternoon.

At 3:40 the phone in my bedroom made a funny noise and displayed a message that the power was out at the main handset.

Oh, and my clock wasn’t displaying the time.

So, how about that router light?

  • When wi-fi is available, the router light is blue.
  • When it isn’t, the light is red.
  • This afternoon, there was no light at all.

I’m a Southern California Edison customer, but I had problems getting to its website on cellular. The power outage affected a good swath of northwest Ontario, so I guess everyone was trying to use cellular internet.

My Facebook app could (somewhat) connect, and people on the O.N.Z group were reporting estimated fix times between 5:30 pm and 9:30 pm.

Then I received a text: not from SCE, but from my Internet Service Provider.

“There is a service outage affecting your area. Restoration estimated by 9:30 PM.”

How would they know? It wasn’t the ISP’s problem.

A second text followed.

“The service interruption affecting…services in and around your area is being caused by a power outage. Restoration estimated by 4:40 PM.”

By this time I had left home to go to a place outside the affected area…with air conditioning. But I continued to monitor O.N.Z. (a private Facebook group, so no links or quotes). And someone reported that power was back.

So I checked my ISP and thermostat apps and confirmed this.

A technical problem can have so many causes…including a loss of electricity that affects all things power-dependent.

Whether You Call It ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2025 or NIST SP 500-290e4…It’s Out

Regardless of the concerns of Europeans and others about U.S. de facto governance of biometric standards, countries around the world still base their data interchange formats on a document written by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and approved by the American National Standards Institute.

This document has been revised many times over the years. I first worked with the 1993 version of the document, which concentrated on binary and grayscale fingerprints with resolutions as high as 500 pixels per inch, but sometimes lower.

The new 2025 version (PDF), released in March 2026, covers a lot more. And sometimes a lot less.

  • 1 Transaction information
  • 2 User-defined descriptive text
  • 3 Deprecated
  • 4 Legacy
  • 5 Deprecated
  • 6 Deprecated
  • 7 User-defined image
  • 8 Signature image
  • 9 Friction ridge metadata
  • 10 Photographic body part imagery (including face and SMT)
  • 11 Voice data
  • 12 Forensic dental and oral data
  • 13 Variable-resolution latent friction ridge image
  • 14 Variable-resolution fingerprint image
  • 15 Variable-resolution palm print image
  • 16 User-defined variable-resolution testing image
  • 17 Iris image
  • 18 DNA data
  • 19 Variable-resolution plantar image
  • 20 Source representation
  • 21 Associated context
  • 22 Non-photographic imagery
  • 23-97 Reserved for future use
  • 98 Information assurance
  • 99 CBEFF biometric data record

Note the “deprecated” and “legacy” data types. In 1993, Type 4 was the gold standard for fingerprint images; now it’s just “legacy.” And forget about binary representations or anything less than 500 ppi.

Time marches on.

But some people have been around for much of the ride. I scanned the lists of working group members and found Kenneth Blue, Tom Buss, Roland Fournier, Patrick Grother, Mike McCabe, John Splain, Mark Walch, and many others who remember Type 4 and 250 ppi binary images.

And the canvassees included government and industry representatives from within and outside of the United States, including Canada, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Slovakia, Switzerland, other countries I probably mnissed, and INTERPOL.

If Europe or other countries do break away from NIST standards, it will be a rupturing break.