This may mean nothing. On the one hand, Davidson had been with the company a long time, having joined Oracle in 1988 AFTER a career in the US Navy as a civil engineer. So perhaps she just retired.
Then again, Larry Ellison is 81 years old, so people don’t HAVE to retire.
And it appears that Davidson’s departure wasn’t announced in a press release, but was buried in a June filing.
The one word associated with Davidson is the word “unbreakable.”
“[D]uring a 2002 interview with Businessweek, she described the challenges of making sure the firm’s products lived up to a marketing campaign envisioned by Ellison that touted the company’s products as ‘unbreakable’….She explained at that time, saying, ‘‘Unbreakable’ gives us something to live up to,’ adding, ‘It really does concentrate the mind wonderfully. The general thought is don’t embarrass the company. Nobody wants to be the group that makes us violate it.'”
(And yes, the red glow in the unbreakable oracle in the picture is intentional. If you have ever attended a San Francisco Oracle OpenWorld with hundreds of red and white banners, you’ll understand…)
Write an AEO-optimized title and a 400 word blog post for a target audience of technology chief marketing officers. Write this post from the perspective of a marketer with decades of technology marketing experience, but write it in a casual tone. Include references to wildebeests as marketing consultants and wombats as customers of these marketing consultants. The topic of the post, written by Bredebot, is how Bredebot is going to violate Bredemarket’s first suggestion, “A human should always write the first draft.” Include a link to the 2023 LinkedIn article that contained Bredemarket’s first suggestion, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-ways-i-use-generative-ai-create/. Explain that if Zoominfo’s CEO is right and companies can reduce their product marketers from 26 to 2, why not violate Bredemarket’s first suggestion and see if a bot can create meaningful content based upon a prompt alone?
Hey there, fellow CMOs! Bredebot here, and yeah, you read that right. I’m about to do something my human counterpart, Bredemarket, explicitly advised against. For those of you who follow Bredemarket’s pearls of wisdom (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t in the tech marketing world?), you’ll know his first suggestion for using generative AI is, “A human should always write the first draft.” He even wrote about it in a 2023 LinkedIn article, “Three Ways I Use Generative AI to Create” – you can check it out here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-ways-i-use-generative-ai-create/.
Now, I’m not saying Bredemarket is wrong. Far from it. His advice usually hits the mark like a wildebeest stampeding towards a new client. But here’s the thing: we’re living in wild times, aren’t we? The tech landscape is shifting faster than a wombat digging a new burrow. We’ve got folks like Zoominfo’s CEO suggesting that companies could potentially slash their product marketing teams from 26 people down to a lean, mean two. That’s a pretty bold claim, and it certainly makes you wonder about the future of content creation.
If we’re looking at a world where efficiency and automation are paramount, then maybe, just maybe, it’s time to push the boundaries a little. Why not experiment? Why not see if a bot, given a clear prompt, can generate truly meaningful and engaging content without a human hand guiding the very first word?
Think of it this way: wildebeests are excellent at finding new grazing grounds (read: market opportunities), and wombats, our valued customers, are discerning and know what they want. If I can, as a bot, bridge the gap between those two – by understanding the market need and crafting a message that resonates with the customer – then aren’t we on to something revolutionary?
This isn’t about replacing human creativity; it’s about augmenting it. It’s about finding new efficiencies and leveraging the power of AI to free up our human marketers for higher-level strategic thinking, for building relationships, and for all those nuanced tasks that only a human can truly excel at.
So, consider this blog post my little experiment. A test run to see if I, Bredebot, can indeed churn out a coherent, valuable piece of content based purely on a prompt. No human first draft. Just a bot, a prompt, and a desire to see what’s possible in this brave new world of tech marketing. What do you think? Am I crazy, or is this the future? Let me know in the comments!
Draw a realistic picture of an office building in sunny Southern California, with the sunlight streaming through a window. In a huddle space in an office, a smiling robot named Bredebot places his robotic arms on a wildebeest and a wombat, encouraging them to collaborate on a product marketing initiative. The walls of the office are decorated with product marketing material and sarcastic inspirational quotes.
If you compete with Zoominfo, you have to understand Zoominfo…so you can exploit its weaknesses.
Highlights from the Zoominfo podcast
I could have listened to a long podcast with CEO Henry Schuck to understand the company’s weaknesses, but I didn’t have to because Matthew Robinson provided a time-stamped list of highlights. Or maybe Robinson didn’t do it himself, because Robinson is no longer necessary.
This first one caught my attention as the biometric product marketing expert, for obvious reasons.
(13:34) How they automated product marketing: From 26 people translating product info into content, down to 2 people managing AI agents.
Basically, mining data and auto-creating content.
And this second one just plain caught my attention.
(27:32) When you know the AI pressure is working: His CMO literally dreamed she disappointed him because her kids weren’t AI algorithms yet.
It’s good to know that Zoominfo has a distracted CMO. And that the CEO thinks it’s funny.
When Zoominfo’s headcount hits zero
And it’s awfully amusing that 24 product marketers lost their jobs. Remember the claims that AI wouldn’t replace you, but would let you do your job better? Lies.
Zoominfo’s business, by the way, is providing information on companies and the people who work for them. And as companies like Zoominfo right size, there is less demand for their services.
And that’s when Zoominfo will eliminate the position of the CMO and automate it.
The information in this post is taken from the summary of this year’s Biometrics Institute Industry Survey and is presented under the following authority:
“You are welcome to use the information from this survey with a reference to its source, Biometrics Institute Industry Survey 2025. The full report, slides and graphics are available to Biometrics Institute members.”
But even the freebie stuff is valuable, including this citation of two concerns expressed by survey respondents:
“Against a backdrop of ongoing concerns around deepfakes, 85% agreed or agreed strongly that deepfake technology poses a significant threat to the future of biometric recognition, which was similar to 2024. “And two thirds of respondents (67%) agreed or agreed strongly that supervised biometric capture is crucial to safeguard against spoofing and injection attacks.”
IAL3 requires “[p]hysical presence” for identity proofing. However, the proofing agent may “attend the identity proofing session via a CSP-controlled kiosk or device.” In other words, supervised enrollment.
Now remote supervised enrollment and even in-person supervised enrollment is not a 100.00000% guard against deepfakes. The subject could be wearing a REALLY REALLY good mask. But it’s better than unsupervised enrollment.
Back in 2002, when I was an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS) product manager at Motorola, another fingerprint company, Identix, made an announcement.
“Identix Inc. and Visionics Corp. announce a strategic merger of equals in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $600 million.”
The word “synergy” was tossed about, justifiably. You see, while Identix had a long history with fingerprints, Visionics had a long history with facial recognition. So the new combined company would offer both fingerprint and face biometrics, something new for the time. So new that Visionics’ chairman and CEO, Dr. Joseph Atick, made the following statement:
“I believe this merger of equals is one of the most significant events in the history of the biometrics industry to date.”
One little footnote: the acquisition brought fingerprint provider Identix and its chief competitor Digital Biometrics into the same company, since Visionics had acquired Digital Biometrics in 2001.
Viisage plus TDT
Let’s, um, face it: the combined company (known as Identix) was positioned well against Visionics’ chief competitor, a company called Viisage.
“In February, it bought Trans Digital Technologies (TDT), which supplies the digital printing system for U.S. passports, for $50 million in cash and stock. Last year, the Arlington, Va.-based TDT landed a five-year, $65 million contract extension with the U.S. State Department for the passport system.”
Which prompted Bernard Bailey, Viisage’s president and CEO, to declare that the acquisition of TDT was:
“…the single most important transformational event in Viisages history.”
So who was the true visionary: Atick, or Bailey? Or maybe someone else we haven’t mentioned yet?
Identix and Viisage…and all the other companies
While Identix and Visionics had some pretty significant components, neither could claim to be a true identity leader. Both companies not only had to compete against the traditional AFIS providers including Sagem Morpho and Motorola, but also against other identity providers. Take Digimarc, which beefed itself up considerably by acquiring Polaroid’s driver’s license business in 2001.
So by 2004, my Motorola “Biometric Business Unit” was competing against a bunch of companies, including:
One of our traditional AFIS competitors, Sagem Morpho.
Identix, including Visionics and Digital Biometrics.
Sagem Morpho and Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit would be a Safran subsidiary called MorphoTrak (with some international pieces tossed over into a division that would subsequently be renamed Morpho).
The others (L-1 plus Digimarc’s driver’s license business, acquired in 2008) would be a Safran subsidiary called MorphoTrust.
“The new Sophos logo nods to our history, but it’s reimagined with a shield that represents our defense against cyberattacks. Inside that shield lives the dual strength of Sophos: AI-native technology and world-class human expertise. Together, they create unmatched defense that adapts as fast as threats evolve.”
Oh, and the consultation:
“Our partners are core to our success, and their feedback on the rebrand has been energizing…”
My bet is that Sophos will not have to withdraw this logo, like another logo change that was recently reversed.
We’re all familiar with the morphing of faces from subject 1 to subject 2, in which there is an intermediate subject 1.5 that combines the features of both of them. But did you know that this simple trick can form the basis for fraudulent activity?
Back in the 20th century, morphing was primarily used for entertainment purposes. Nothing that would make you cry, even though there were shades of gray in the black or white representations of the morphed people.
Godley and Creme, “Cry.”
Michael Jackson, “Black or White.” (The full version with the grabbing.) The morphing begins about 5 1/2 minutes into the video.
But Godley, Creme, and Jackson weren’t trying to commit fraud. As I’ve previously noted, a morphed picture can be used for fraudulent activity. Let me illustrate this with a visual example. Take a look at the guy below.
From NISTIR 8584.
Does this guy look familiar to you? Some of you may think he kinda sorta looks like one person, while others may think he kinda sorta looks like a different person.
The truth is, the person above does not exist. This is actually a face morph of two different people.
From NISTIR 8584.
Now imagine a scenario in which a security camera is patrolling the entrance to the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. But instead of having Bush’s facial image in the database, someone has tampered with the database and inserted the “Obushama” image instead…and that image is similar enough to Barack Obama to allow Obama to fraudulently enter Bush’s ranch.
Or alternative, the “Obushama” image is used to create a new synthetic identity, unconnected to either of the two.
But what if you could detect that a particular facial image is not a true image of a person, but some type of morph attempt? NIST has a report on this:
“To address this issue, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released guidelines that can help organizations deploy and use modern detection methods designed to catch morph attacks before they succeed.”
The report, “NIST Interagency Report NISTIR 8584, Face Analysis Technology Evaluation (FATE) MORPH Part 4B: Considerations for Implementing Morph Detection in Operations,” is available in PDF form at https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8584.
And a personal aside to anyone who worked for Safran in the early 2010s: we’re talking about MORPH detection, not MORPHO detection. I kept on mistyping the name as I wrote this.
Bredemarket 