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Did the Columbia Study “Discover” Fingerprint Patterns?

As you may have seen elsewhere, I’ve been wondering whether the widely-publicized Columbia University study on the uniqueness of fingerprints isn’t any more than a simple “discovery” of fingerprint patterns, which we’ve known about for years. But to prove or refute my suspicions, I had to read the study first.

My initial exposure to the Columbia study

I’ve been meaning to delve into the minutiae of the Columbia University fingerprint study ever since I initially wrote about it last Thursday.

(And yes, that’s a joke. The so-called experts say that the word “delve” is a mark of AI-generated content. And “minutiae”…well, you know.)

If you missed my previous post, “Claimed AI-detected Similarity in Fingerprints From the Same Person: Are Forensic Examiners Truly ‘Doing It Wrong’,” I discussed a widely-publicized study by a team led by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science undergraduate senior Gabe Guo. Columbia Engineering itself publicized the study with the attention-grabbing headline “AI Discovers That Not Every Fingerprint Is Unique,” coupled with the sub-head “we’ve been comparing fingerprints the wrong way!”

There are three ways to react to the article:

Gabe Guo, who freely admits that he knows nothing about forensic science, is an idiot. For decades we have known that fingerprints ARE unique, and the original forensic journals were correct in not publishing this drivel.
The brave new world of artificial intelligence is fundamentally disproving previously sacred assumptions, and anyone who resists these assumptions is denying scientific knowledge and should go back to their caves.
Well, let’s see what the study actually SAYS.

Until today, I hadn’t had a chance to read the study. But I wanted to do this, because a paragraph in the article that described the study got me thinking. I needed to see the study itself to confirm my suspicions.

“The AI was not using ‘minutiae,’ which are the branchings and endpoints in fingerprint ridges – the patterns used in traditional fingerprint comparison,” said Guo, who began the study as a first-year student at Columbia Engineering in 2021. “Instead, it was using something else, related to the angles and curvatures of the swirls and loops in the center of the fingerprint.”
From https://www.newswise.com/articles/ai-discovers-that-not-every-fingerprint-is-unique

Hmm. Are you thinking what I am thinking?

What were you thinking?

I’ll preface this by saying that while I have worked with fingerprints for 29 years, I am nowhere near a forensic expert. I know enough to cause trouble.

But I know who the real forensic experts are, so I’m going to refer to a page on onin.com, the site created by Ed German. German, who is talented at explaining fingerprint concepts to lay people, created a page to explain “Level 1, 2 and 3 Details.” (It also explains ACE-V, for people interested in that term.)

Here are German’s quick explanations of Level 1, 2, and 3 detail. These are illustrated at the original page, but I’m just putting the textual definitions here.

“Level 1 includes the general ridge flow and pattern configuration. Level 1 detail is not sufficient for individualization, but can be used for exclusion. Level 1 detail may include information enabling orientation, core and delta location, and distinction of finger versus palm.”
“Level 2 detail includes formations, defined as a ridge ending, bifurcation, dot, or combinations thereof. The relationship of Level 2 detail enables individualization.”
“Level 3 detail includes all dimensional attributes of a ridge, such as ridge path deviation, width, shape, pores, edge contour, incipient ridges, breaks, creases, scars and other permanent details.”

We’re not going to get into Level 3 in this post. But if you look at German’s summary of Level 2, you’ll see that he is discussing the aforementioned MINUTIAE (which, according to German, “enables individualization”). And if you look at German’s summary of Level 1, he’s discussing RIDGE FLOW, or perhaps “the angles and curvatures of the swirls and loops in the center of the fingerprint” (which, according to German, “is not sufficient for individualization”).

Did Gabe Guo simply “discover” fingerprint patterns? On a separate onin.com page, common fingerprint patterns are cited (arch, loop, whorl). Is this the same thing that Guo (who possibly has never heard of loops and whorls in his life) is talking about?

From Antheus Technology page, from NIST’s Appendix B to the FpVTE 2003 test document. I remember that test very well.

I needed to read the original study to see what Guo actually said, and to determine if AI discovered something novel beyond what forensic scientists consider the information “in the center of the fingerprint.”

So let’s look at the study

I finally took the time to read the study, “Unveiling intra-person fingerprint similarity via deep contrastive learning,” as published in Science Advances on January 12. While there is a lot to read here, I’m going to skip to Guo et al’s description of the fingerprint comparison method used by AI. Central to this comparison is the concept of a “feature map.”

Figure 2A shows that all the feature maps exhibit a statistically significant ability to distinguish between pairs of distinct fingerprints from the same person and different people. However, some are clearly better than others. In general, the more fingerprint-like a feature map looks, the more strongly it shows the similarity. We highlight that the binarized images performed almost as well as the original images, meaning that the similarity is due mostly to inherent ridge patterns, rather than spurious characteristics (e.g., image brightness, image background noise, and pressure applied by the user when providing the sample). Furthermore, it is very interesting that ridge orientation maps perform almost as well as the binarized and original images—this suggests that most of the cross-finger similarity can actually be explained by ridge orientation.
From https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi0329.

(The implied reversal from the forensic order of things is interesting. Specifically, ridge orientation, which yields a bunch of rich data, is considered more authoritative than mere minutiae points, which are just teeny little dots that don’t look like a fingerprint. Forensic examiners consider the minutiae more authoritative than the ridge detail.)

Based upon the initial findings, Guo et al delved deeper. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) Specifically, they interrogated the feature maps.

We observe a trend in the filter visualizations going from the beginning to the end of the network: filters in earlier layers exhibit simpler ridge/minutia patterns, the middle layers show more complex multidirectional patterns, and filters in the last layer display high-level patterns that look much like fingerprints—this increasing complexity is expected of deep neural networks that process images. Furthermore, the ridge patterns in the filter visualizations are all generally the same shade of gray, meaning that we can rule out image brightness as a source of similarity. Overall, each of these visualizations resembles recognizable parts of fingerprint patterns (rather than random noise or background patterns), bolstering our confidence that the similarity learned by our deep models is due to genuine fingerprint patterns, and not spurious similarities.
From https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi0329.

So what’s the conclusion?

(W)e show above 99.99% confidence that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person share very strong similarities.
From https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi0329.

And what are Guo et al’s derived ramifications? I’ll skip to the most eye-opening one, related to digital authentication.

In addition, our work can be useful in digital authentication scenarios. Using our fingerprint processing pipeline, a person can enroll into their device’s fingerprint scanner with one finger (e.g., left index) and unlock it with any other finger (e.g., right pinky). This increases convenience, and it is also useful in scenarios where the original finger a person enrolled with becomes temporarily or permanently unreadable (e.g., occluded by bandages or dirt, ridge patterns have been rubbed off due to traumatic event), as they can still access their device with their other fingers.
From https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi0329.

However, the researchers caution that (as any good researcher would say when angling for funds) more research is needed. Their biggest concern was the small sample size they used in their experiments (60,000 prints), coupled with the fact that the prints were full and not partial fingerprints.

What is unanswered?

So let’s assume that the study shows a strong similarity between the ridges of fingerprints from the same person. Is this enough to show:

that the prints from two fingers on the same person ARE THE SAME, and
that the prints from two fingers on the same person are more alike than a print from ANY OTHER PERSON?

Or to use a specific example, if we have Mike French’s fingers 2 (right index) and 7 (left index), are those demonstrably from the same person, while my own finger 2 is demonstrably NOT from Mike French?

And what happens if my finger 2 has the same ridge pattern as French’s finger 2, yet is different from French’s finger 7? Does that mean that my finger 2 and French’s finger 2 are from the same person?

If this happens, then the digital authentication example above wouldn’t work, because I could use my finger 2 to get access to French’s data.

This could get messy.

More research IS needed, and here’s what it should be

If you have an innovative idea for a way to build an automobile, is it best to never talk to an existing automobile expert at all?

Fair use. From https://interestingengineering.com/transportation/bizarre-concept-cars-you-never-even-knew-existed.

Same with fingerprints. Don’t just leave the study with the AI folks. Bring the forensic people on board.

And the doctors also.

Initiate a conversation between the people who found this new AI technique, the forensic people who have used similar techniques to classify prints as arches, loops, whorls, etc., and the medical people who understand how the ridges are formed in the womb in the first place.

By National Museum of Health and Medicine – http://nmhm.washingtondc.museum/exhibits/single_cell/imgs/14_Fetus_3_months.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9998241

If you get all the involved parties in one room, then perhaps they can work together to decide whether the technique can truly be used to identify people.

I don’t expect that this discussion will settle once and for all whether every fingerprint is unique. At least not to the satisfaction of scientists.

But bringing the parties together is better than not listening to critical stakeholders at all.

By Lorelei7, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3164780

You Can’t Make a Silk Purse Out of an AI-generated Sow’s Ear

By Rictor Norton & David Allen from London, United Kingdom – Show Pig, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43222404

I’m sure that you’ve heard the saying that “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Alternative phrases are “putting lipstick on a pig” or “polishing a turd.”

In other words, if something is crappy, you can’t completely transform it into something worthwhile.

Yet we persist on starting with crappy stuff anyway…such as surrendering our writing to generative AI and then trying to fix the resulting crap later.

Which is why I’ve said that a human should ALWAYS write the first draft.

The questionable job description

Mike Harris found a job post asking for a human copyeditor to rework AI-generated content. See the details here.

I’m sure that the unnamed company thought it was a great idea to have AI generate the content…until they saw what AI generated.

Rather than fix the source of the problem, the company has apparently elected to hire someone to rework the stuff.

A human should always write the first draft

Why not have a human write the stuff in the first place..as I recommended last June? Let me borrow what I said before…

I’m going to stick with the old fashioned method of writing the first draft myself. And I suggest that you do the same. Doing this lets me:

Satisfy my inflated ego. I’ve been writing for years and take pride in my ability to outline and compose a piece of text. I’ve created thousands upon thousands of pieces of content over my lifetime, so I feel I know what I’m doing.
Iterate on my work to make it better. Yes, your favorite generative AI tool can crank out a block of text in a minute. But when I’m using my own hands on a keyboard to write something, I can zoom up and down throughout the text, tweaking things, adding stuff, removing stuff, and sometimes copying everything to a brand new draft and hacking half of it away. It takes a lot longer, but in my view all of this iterative activity makes the first draft much better, which makes the final version even better still.
Control the tone of my writing. One current drawback of generative AI is that, unless properly prompted, it often delivers bland, boring text. Creating and iterating the text myself lets me dictate the tone of voice. Do I want to present the content as coming from a knowledgeable Sage? Does the text need the tone of a Revolutionary? I want to get that into the first draft, rather than having to rewrite the whole thing later to change it.

I made a couple of other points in that original LinkedIn article, but I’m…um…iterating. I predict that there’s a time when I WON’T be able to sleep on my text any more, and these days the “generated text” flag has been replaced by HUMAN detection of stuff that was obviously written by a bot.

And that’s more dangerous than any flag.

But if you insist on going the cheap route and outsourcing your writing to a bot…you get what you pay for.

If you want your text to be right the FIRST time…

Drive content results with Bredemarket Technology Firm Services.

Claimed AI-detected Similarity in Fingerprints From the Same Person: Are Forensic Examiners Truly “Doing It Wrong”?

I shared some fingerprint-related information on my LinkedIn feed and other places, and I thought I’d share it here.

Along with an update.

You’re doing it wrong

Forensic examiners, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG based on this bold claim:

“Columbia engineers have built a new AI that shatters a long-held belief in forensics–that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person are unique. It turns out they are similar, only we’ve been comparing fingerprints the wrong way!” (From Newswise)

Couple that claim with the initial rejection of the paper by multiple forensic journals because “it is well known that every fingerprint is unique” (apparently the reviewer never read the NAS report), and you have the makings of a sexy story.

Or do you?

And what is the paper’s basis for the claim that fingerprints from the same person are NOT unique?

““The AI was not using ‘minutiae,’ which are the branchings and endpoints in fingerprint ridges – the patterns used in traditional fingerprint comparison,” said Guo, who began the study as a first-year student at Columbia Engineering in 2021. “Instead, it was using something else, related to the angles and curvatures of the swirls and loops in the center of the fingerprint.”” (From Newswise)

Perhaps there are similarities in the patterns of the fingers at the center of a print, but that doesn’t negate the uniqueness of the bifurcations and ridge ending locations throughout the print. Guo’s method uses less of the distal fingerprint than traditional minutiae analysis.

But maybe there are forensic applications for this alternate print comparison technique, at least as an investigative lead. (Let me repeat that again: “investigative lead.”) Courtroom use will be limited because there is no AI equivalent to explain to the court how the comparison was made, and if any other expert AI algorithm would yield the same results.

Thoughts?

https://www.newswise.com/articles/ai-discovers-that-not-every-fingerprint-is-unique

The update

As I said, I shared the piece above to several places, including one frequented by forensic experts. One commenter in a private area offered the following observation, in part:

What was the validation process? Did they have a qualified latent print examiner confirm their data?
From a private source.

Before you dismiss the comment as reflecting a stick-in-the-mud forensic old fogey who does not recognize the great wisdom of our AI overlords, remember (as I noted above) that forensic experts are required to testify in court about things like this. If artificial intelligence is claimed to identify relationships between fingers from the same person, you’d better make really sure that this is true before someone is put to death.

I hate to repeat the phrase used by scientific study authors in search of more funding, but…

…more research is needed.

Working With Familiar Faces

Often consultants work with someone whom they have never met before.

Sometimes they get to work with friends they have known from previous experiences, which can be a good thing.

From “We Are Your Friends.” https://vimeo.com/11277708.

First example: A couple of years ago, when consulting for a large client, I worked on a proposal with one of the client’s partners, and one of the employees in the partner organization happened to be a former coworker from MorphoTrak.

Second example: This morning I’m meeting with Gene Volfe, a former coworker at Incode Technologies (we started at Incode on the same day). We’re working on a project together that requires Gene’s demand generation skills and my content skills…which we will be employing for the benefit of another former MorphoTrak coworker.

Third example: Speaking of Incode, two of my former coworkers are reuniting at a different company. As a sign that these two know each other well, one made a point of saying to the other, “Go Bills!”

And yes, Gene, I remember how you like Google Docs…

When Follower Counts Matter

I see social posts in which the authors thank their followers for getting them to a certain follower count, and I receive Instagram messages promising me that for just a little money I can get tens of thousands of followers.

I definitely ignore the latter messages, and personally I ignore the former messages also.

Because follower counts don’t matter.

Just because Bredemarket has X followers doesn’t necessarily mean that Bredemarket will make lots of money. I could use viral tactics to attract countless followers that would never, ever purchase Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services.

In fact, I could live just fine with 25 followers…provided that they’re the RIGHT followers.

But while this is normally true, I’ve run into a couple of instances in which follower counts DO matter. Because you need a certain heft to get the large companies to pay attention to you.

My invisible WhatsApp channel

A little over a month ago I started a WhatsApp channel devoted to identity, biometrics, ID documents and geolocation. Why?

I began mulling over whether I should create my own WhatsApp channel, but initially decided against it….

I’d just follow the existing WhatsApp channels on identity, biometrics, and related topics.

But I couldn’t find any.
From https://bredemarket.com/2023/11/29/announcing-a-whatsapp-channel-for-identity-biometrics-id-documents-and-geolocation/.

So I started my own to fill the void, then waited for similarly interested WhatsApp users to find my channel via search.

But there was a catch.

Although it isn’t explicitly documented anywhere, it appears that using the WhatsApp channel search only returns channels that already have thousands of subscribers. When I searched for a WhatsApp channel for “identity,” WhatsApp returned nothing.

As a result, I found myself promoting my WhatsApp channel everywhere EXCEPT WhatsApp.

Including this blog post. If you want to subscribe to my WhatsApp channel “Identity, Biometrics, ID Documents, and Geolocation,” click on the link https://www.whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaARoeEKbYMQE9OVDG3a.

Click the link https://www.whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaARoeEKbYMQE9OVDG3a to view the channel.

My non-linkable YouTube channel

I also have a YouTube channel, and you CAN find that. But it also suffers from a lack of subscribers.

On Monday I received an onimous-sounding email from YouTube with the title “Your channel has lost access to advanced features.”

The opening paragraph read as follows:

To help keep our community safe, we limit some of our more powerful features to channels who have built and maintained a positive channel history or who have provided verification.

Ah, verification. I vaguely remember having to provide Alphabet with my ID a few months ago.

The message continued:

As of now, your channel doesn’t have sufficient channel history. It has lost access to advanced features. This may have happened because your channel did not follow our Community Guidelines.

While I initially panicked when I read that last sentence, I then un-panicked when I realized that this may NOT have happened because of a Community Guidelines violation. The more likely culprit was an insufficient channel history.

Your channel history data is used to determine whether your content and activity has consistently followed YouTube’s Community Guidelines.

Your channel history is a record of your:

Channel activity (like video uploads, live streams, and audience engagement.)

Personal data related to your Google Account.

When and how the account was created.

How often it’s used.

Your method of connecting to Google services.

Most active channels already have sufficient channel history to unlock advanced features without any further action required.
From https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9891124#channelhistory.

Frankly, my YouTube channel doesn’t have a ton of audience engagement. Now I could just start uploading a whole bunch of videos…but then I risk violating the Community Guidelines by getting a “spamming” accusation.

As it turns out, there’s only one “advanced feature” that I really miss: the ability to “Add external links to your video descriptions.” And I’m trying to tone down my use of external links because Alphabet (on YouTube) and Meta (on Instagram) discourage their use anyway.

But for now the previously-added external links to videos such as this one are now disabled.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIB9SPI-yiI. The link at the bottom of the description is non-clickable.

Perhaps if I post long-form videos more frequently and get thousands of subscribers, I will get enough “audience engagement” to restore the advanced features.

So if you want to increase my YouTube follower count, go to https://www.youtube.com/@johnbredehoftatbredemarket2225 and click the Subscribe button.

So let’s get followers

But the question remains: how do I get thousands of people to subscribe to my WhatsApp channel and my YouTube channel?

Perhaps I can adapt a really cool TikTok challenge to WhatsApp and YouTube.

You can create the exciting Savage Challenge on TikTok and ask your audience to participate in it. In this challenge, people will have to learn and follow the choreography of Megan Thee Stallions’ highly loved song, “Savage.”
From https://www.engagebay.com/blog/tiktok-challenges/

I’m not familiar with that particular song, so I’d better check it out.

Well…

I’m not sure if this fits into my “sage” persona.

And if I go to the local car wash with a baseball bat and start knocking out car windows, I may end up in jail. And that usually does NOT increase the follower count. Because as Johnny Somali persumably found out in Japan, you can’t film videos when you’re in jail.

Five Reasons Why 17X Certified Resume Writer Pitches Fail

Are you a 17X Certified Resume Writer?

Do you seek your prospects by searching for LinkedIn profiles with green #OpenToWork banners?

From https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbredehoft/.

Do you find that your prospects resist your pitches?

From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jbredehoft_i-have-a-question-for-people-who-need-to-activity-7150154185278144512-tPMt/.

Here are five reasons why your pitches may not be resonating.

You don’t say WHY you exist.
You don’t say HOW you’ll make me a lot of money.
You don’t say WHAT you will emphasize in my resume…because you never read my profile.
You’re a “me too” resume writer.
You say nothing about product marketing, identity, biometrics, or technology.

If you’re a 17x Certified Resume Writer with generic failing pitches, Bredemarket can’t fix your issues, but maybe someone else can.

The five reasons

Reason One: You don’t say WHY you exist

Let’s face it. 99% of the 17X Certified Resume Writer pitches read “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services.”

This tells me NOTHING about you, or why you do what you do.

Was there a childhood experience that propelled you into the resume writing field?
Or did a simple tweak to your own resume propel you forward?
Or are you just doing this because it beats delivery driving?

Who are you? Why should I care?

Maybe you should do something like this. For example, here’s why my consulting firm Bredemarket exists:

I am John E. Bredehoft, and I have enjoyed writing for a while now….I guess I’m a “you can pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” type.
From https://bredemarket.com/who-i-am/.

Reason Two: You don’t say HOW you’ll make me a lot of money

Remember that I don’t care about your service. I care about how I’m going to get a company to hire me and pay me billions of dollars every year. (More or less.)

I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money. By US Federal Reserve – Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70290373.

So, how will you do this? Do you have a process that results in stellar resumes? Or do you just type stuff at random and hope it comes out OK?

For example, here’s Bredemarket’s process. Did you see that my first two reasons in this particular post were “Why” and “How”? Now you know where I got those terms. And guess what comes next.

Reason Three: You don’t say WHAT you will emphasize in my resume…because you never read my profile

Be honest. When I see these pitches, I draw one of two conclusions:

You saw my #OpenToWork banner and immediately fired off a generic pitch without looking at my LinkedIn profile, in which case I have no reason to work with you.
You DID read my LinkedIn profile, but you’re such a poor communicator that you didn’t bother to say what you saw in my LinkedIn profile, in which case I have no reason to work with you.

Reason Four: You’re a “me too” resume writer

You may not realize this, but you are not the only 17X Certified Resume Writer out there. At the same time that you are sending your “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services” pitch, other people are sending THEIR “You have an #OpenToWork banner, and I write resumes, so you should buy my services” pitch.

Your pitch doesn’t say why I should pick YOU. Or why you are great and why everyone else sucks. You all look the same to me.

*Dionne Quintuplets – School Days*, painting by Andrew Loomis, 1938. By Andrew Loomis – https://www.flickr.com/photos/lac-bac/7797309642/in/album-72157631099965608/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56000992

As I look at your undifferentiated “me too” pitch and all of their undifferentiated “me too” pitches, none of which cover the “why,” “how,” or “what” of your 17X Certified Resume Writer services. When everyone says “me too” without differentiation, no one stands out.

By Ben Schumin – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1123246

As I said earlier: “If the 17x certified resume writers are unable to convey THEIR OWN unique value, why should I believe that they can convey MINE?”

Reason Five: You say nothing about product marketing, identity, biometrics, or technology

I end up shaking my head at the pitches that use the following introductory question to send me through their sequence:

I’m curious about which specific role you intend to apply for?

(I had to edit that pitch quote because the original version I received had a space between “for” and the question mark. I am in the United States. Punctuate accordingly.)

If you had actually read my profile (see reason 3 above), you’d know that I self-describe (at least this week, pending future edits) as a “Senior Product Marketing Manager experienced in identity and technology.” You’d also know that I talk about #identity, #biometrics, #facialrecognition, and #productmarketingmanager. You’d also know that my advertised top skills are Product Marketing, Content Marketing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Competitive Intelligence.

From Sandeep Kumar, A. Sony, Rahul Hooda, Yashpal Singh, in Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education | Multidisciplinary Academic Research, “*Multimodal Biometric Authentication System for Automatic Certificate Generation*.”

That’s a wealth of information right there, even without looking at my work history, my skills, or my posts.

Too bad you didn’t use it in your pitch.

Time to fix it

I’ll grant that an introductory pitch doesn’t have a lot of real estate, but you should be able to rework your pitch to accommodate all five gaps in your current marketing.

Unfortunately, the word count for your pitch will be well below 400 words, the minimum word count that Bredemarket supports.

But you should be able to find someone.

Just avoid the people with the generic pitch.

From https://www.pinterest.com/pin/121737996155096419/.

SOMEONE is Using my 29 Years of Identity/Biometrics Experience

On behalf of a recruiter I am re-examining my consulting experience in the identity/biometric industry, and came to this realization:

If Bredemarket hasn’t consulted for you, it’s a guarantee that Bredemarket has applied its 29 years of identity/biometric experience consulting for your competitors.

Do you want your competitors to realize all the benefits?

I didn’t think so.

Drive content results with Bredemarket Identity Firm Services.

(Pizza Stories) Is Your Firm Hungry for Awareness?

Leftover pizza is the best pizza. Preparation credit: Pizza N Such, Claremont, California. Can I earn free pizza as a powerful influencer? Probably not, but I’ll disclose on the 0.00001% chance that I do.

I wrote a post about pizza that concluded as follows:

Tal’s lead was hungry for ghostwriting services, and when they saw that Tal offered such a service, they contacted him.

What does this mean? I’ll go into that in a separate post.
From (Pizza Stories) The Worst Time to READ a Pizza Post on Social Media.

Now that it’s time to write the “separate post,” I really don’t want to get into the mechanics of how posts that attract prospects (hungry people, target audience) increase awareness and help you convert prospects for your products and services.

So forget that. I’m going to tell a story instead about two executives at a fictional company that has a real problem. The executives’ names are Jones and Smith.

The story

Jones was troubled. Sales weren’t increasing, prospects weren’t appearing, and if this malaise continued the company would have to conduct a second round of layoffs. Jones knew that “rightsizing” would be disastrous, so the company needed another solution.

So Jones videoconferenced Smith and asked, “How can we make 2024 better than 2023?”

Smith replied, “Increasing sales calls could help, and ads could help, but there’s another way to increase our awareness with our prospects. We could create content on our website and on our social channels that spreads knowledge of our products and services.”

Jones exclaimed, “That’s great! We could get generative AI to create content for us!”

“No, not that!” Smith replied. “Generative AI text sounds like a bot wrote it, and makes us sound boring, just like everyone else using generative AI text. Do we want to sound like that and put our prospects to sleep?”

By Ilya Repin – Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60387757

“So we need a human writer,” Jones realized, “one who can describe all of the features of our products.”

“Absolutely not,” Smith emphasized. “Customers don’t care about our features. They care about the benefits we can provide to them. If we just list a bunch of features, they’ll say, ‘So what?'”

By Mindaugas Danys from Vilnius, Lithuania, Lithuania – scream and shout, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44907034

“OK, we’ll go with benefits,” said Jones. “But why is content so important?”

“Take blogging,” replied Smith. “The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors. B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those who do not. Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI. And 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.”

Data source: Daily Infographic, https://www.dailyinfographic.com/state-of-blogging-industry

“Wow.” Jones was silent for a moment. “How do you know all of this stuff, Smith?”

“Because of the content that I’ve read online from a marketing and writing services company called Bredemarket. The company creates content to urge others to create content. Bredemarket eats its own wildebeest food.”

“Wildebeest?” Jones eyed Smith quizzically.

Black wildebeest. By derekkeats – Flickr: IMG_4955_facebook, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14620744

“Never mind. The important thing is that Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services could help us increase awareness, and vault us over the companies that have blogs but don’t bother to post to them. In one industry, about one-third of the companies with blogs HAVEN’T SAID A SINGLE THING to their prospects and customers in the last two months. If we were in that industry, we could leapfrog over the silent companies.”

“That sounds great,” said Jones. “Let’s contact Bredemarket today.”

“Wonderful idea, Jones. By the way, I hear that Bredemarket excels at repurposing content also.”

The excited Jones asked Smith to contact Bredemarket, and then walked to a nearby venue and sang a song.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifhcWeXIOZs

(Pizza Stories) The Worst Time to READ a Pizza Post on Social Media

Have you ever seen those posts from self-appointed gurus?

Specifically, the ones that authoritatively state the BEST time to WRITE a post on Instagram, or LinkedIn, or TikTok, or whatever?

I religiously ignore those posts for a simple reason: My country has multiple time zones. So the best time in one time zone may be the worst time in another time zone.

However, I can tell you the WORST time to READ a post in the PACIFIC Time Zone…if the post concerns pizza.

And I’ll explain what all this means…eventually.

Ophir Tal on awareness

In addition to saying WHEN to post, the gurus also provide authoritative (and often contradictory) advice about WHAT to post.

For example, some gurus assert that you MUST prioritize bottom of funnel (conversion) content over top of funnel (awareness) content because it’s most important to get people to buy.

Ophir Tal disagrees, and has evidence to support his position.

Ophir Tal on pizza

From https://www.linkedin.com/in/ophir-tal/.

Ophir Tal self-identifies as a “LinkedIn Ghostwriter & Personal brand Builder for CEOs & Founders”…and part of the way he builds personal brands is via awareness. Here’s where Tal made this assertion about the importance of awareness.

Let’s look at Tal’s hook:

How I Got An Inbound Lead From A Post About Pizza
From Ophir Tal on LinkedIn.

This hook caught my attention. People want leads, and people like pizza, so I paid attention. But I also paid attention for a third reason that I’ll discuss later.

Tal describes how he wrote a LinkedIn post about a piece of pizza that he dropped by mistake, and how he acquired 9,400 views, 97 likes, and 112 comments from that single post. So he told the story a second time.

Tal then noted that the gurus would have recommended NOT posting this because he was “doing it wrong.” Specifically:

The post didn’t solve a problem for his potential clients. (Unless they regularly drop slices of pizza, I guess.)
It didn’t have a strong call to action.
It wasn’t targeted to his ideal clients. (Again, unless they regularly drop slices of pizza, or unless they love chicken wings.)

But despite doing everything wrong, that particular piece of content attracted the attention of someone “at a 6 figure ecom company.” After viewing the content, the reader looked at Tal’s profile and realized Tal could meet their need for ghostwriting services.

Tal earned a lead from his pizza post.

Again, this is only part of Tal’s story. I encourage you to read the rest here.

And now I’ll tell you the third reason why I paid attention to Tal’s post.

John Bredehoft on birthdays

As I noted above, I paid attention to Ophir Tal’s pizza post for two reasons:

People want leads.
People like pizza.

Now let’s jump back to a post I wrote all the way back in 2023, one that described why I’ve soured on the term “target audience.” (Or, in Tal’s words, “ideal clients.”) I started that post by wondering if the term “needy people” would be better than “target audience.” Yes, but not good enough.

I’ll grant that “needy people” has a negative connotation, like the person who is sad when people forget their birthday.
From “I’m Questioning Everything About Target Audiences, Including the Name.”

Why did I include that sentence?

I’ll let you in on a personal secret. When I wrote that, I was myself sad because a few people had forgotten my birthday.

Teddy alone at his pizza birthday party in 2018. Picture shared by Nick VinZant. Story here.

It turns out that these people had a VERY GOOD reason for forgetting my birthday. However, I cannot reveal this reason to you because the disclosure would force me to reveal someone’s personal identifiable information, or PII. (Mine.)

So after they remembered my birthday, one of them asked what I did for my birthday…and I told them that my wife, father-in-law, and brother-in-law went out to dinner.

For pizza.

And I also told them that there were leftovers, which my wife and I enjoyed a few days later.

A nice story, and while I was reading Ophir Tal’s story on dropped pizza, I realized that I had missed an opportunity to tell my own story about leftover pizza.

Time to channel Steve Jobs…

Oh, and there’s one more thing

I forgot to mention one thing about the Ophir Tal story.

When I read the story, it was around 4:00 pm in California.

So when I read about Tal’s dropped pizza, and thought about my leftover pizza (which I had already eaten)…I was hungry.

Target audience, needy people…hungry people

Coincidentally, “hungry people” is the phrase that I eventually decided was better than “needy people.”

Tal’s lead was hungry for ghostwriting services, and when they saw that Tal offered such a service, they contacted him.

What does this mean? I’ll go into that in a separate post.

But for now, remember that stories that raise awareness with your “hungry people” (target audience) are good stories to tell.

Maybe I should tell more stories.

I’m Questioning Everything About Target Audiences, Including the Name

As we close out 2023, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things.

Will 2024 be like 2021, in which the new year (2024) offers mimimal improvement over the preceding year (2023)? Reply hazy, try again later. (“And while tech layoffs slowed down in the summer and fall, it appears that cuts are ramping up yet again.”)

What new ways will we develop to better ghost people? Or will the old ways of ghosting continue to dominate the (lack of) conversation? (And if the person who ghosts is the ghoster, and the person who is ghosted is the ghostee…who is the ghost?)

Most importantly for this post, I’ve been thinking about the following: why are target audiences TARGETS, and why are they AUDIENCES? And is the term “target audience” the best description? (TL;DR: No.) If not, what’s a better description? (TL;DR: I don’t know.)

So let’s look at target audiences. And if you don’t mind, I’ve asked William Tell, Cheap Trick, Steve Dahl, Google Bard, Andrew Loog Oldham, and others to help me examine the topic, which will probably be Bredemarket’s last blog post of 2023.

What I’ve said about target audiences

Bredemarket has written a ton about the idea of a “target audience.” I have an information page devoted to target audiences, which cites a number of the posts I have written about target audiences. It’s even one of the seven sections of one of my e-books.

And now I’m thinking about changing it.

By Christian Gidlöf – Photo taken by Christian Gidlöf, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2065930

But first I’ll explain where I’m coming from. Rather than diving into great detail, I’ll take a more, um, targeted approach and just quote a bit from the relevant information page.

There are roughly 8 billion people in the world. Most businesses don’t care about 7.99999 billion of these people; the businesses only care about 0.00001 billion (or fewer) people who will buy or recommend the business’ product or service.

Your content (or proposal) needs to resonate with these people. The others don’t matter.
From https://bredemarket.com/target-audience/.

That part is true…to a, um, point. But the quote obscures a lot. And the phrase “target audience” obscures even more.

The problem with the phrase “target audience”

I first started questioning the phrase “target audience” when I read this post from the Daily Copywriting page on LinkedIn. I’ll quote the part that, um, resonated with me.

Stop talking to people like they’re targets, start talking to them like they’re humans.
From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/daily-copywriting_copywriting-tip-stop-talking-to-people-activity-7144365103054819328-vy33/.

Daily Copywriting’s use of the word “target” as a pejorative got me thinking about my fave phrase “target audience.”

Let’s start with the first word. At its worst, “target” implies something that you shoot, in a William Tell sort of way. If your weapon hits the target, you and your son don’t die. If your weapon misses low, you kill your son. Is that what we marketers do? Hopefully not.

By Daniel Schwegler (ca. 1480 – ca. 1546), Hans Rudolf Manuel Deutsch (1525–1571) – Sebastian Münster, Cosmographia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12813293

Even at its best, “target” is just something that you get right. You’ve narrowed the 8 billion people to the few that really matter. So what?

Then we move to the second word of the fave phrase “target audience.” An audience is a group of people that sit in chairs while you perform your song and dance in front of them. (“These are the seven questions your content creator should ask you. Thank you for coming to my BRED talk.”)

Sometimes the audience just sits. Not good.
Sometimes the audience claps. A little better.
If you’re the Beatles or Cheap Trick, the audience screams. But still not enough.

From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qgpewMCVjs.

Clapping or screaming is nice, but this doesn’t count as true engagement. I mean, in a way it would be nice if you scream with joy at this post, but it counts for nothing if you don’t actually buy Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services.

I’m forced to admit that there was one time where someone truly engaged his target audience—and that was during Steve Dahl’s “Disco Demolition Night.”

By Eddie Wagner – Original publication: 1979, Chicago Tribune Immediate source: https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/july-2016/the-night-disco-died/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72807463

Dahl was not a disco fan, since he lost his WDAI radio job when his then-employer switched to a disco format. As a counter-reaction to disco, Dahl entertained baseball fans on Disco Demolition Night by destroying disco records between two games of a doubleheader. 7,000 fans stormed the field in delirious joy, wrecking the field, and the second game of the doubleheader was never played. This was NOT a good thing. But the White Sox survived, and even celebrated the 40th anniversary of the promotion. Dahl threw out the first pitch. Nothing exploded. But nothing was accomplished.

So if “target audience” isn’t the right term to use, what is?

The problem with the term “needy people”

I know that blogs are supposed to be the place where you mull about things and finalize them later, but sometimes I break the rules and mull about them BEFORE blogging about them. And that’s what I did when I reshared the Daily Copywriting post to the Bredemarket LinkedIn page, adding this comment:

Perhaps I should rework my phrase “target audience.”

Hmm…”needy people”?
From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/bredemarket_copywriting-tip-stop-talking-to-people-activity-7144742535775592448-UAGh/.

I’ll grant that “needy people” has a negative connotation, like the person who is sad when people forget their birthday. (Not “ghosting” per se, but perhaps a little “boo.”) But “needy people” is certainly better than “target audience.”

“Needy” is stronger than “target.” Rather than just representing a demographic, it actually represents people who truly NEED things. Just because a company needs content for its website doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs Bredemarket. Many companies have their own people to create content.
And for the reasons stated by Daily Copyrighting, “people” is stronger than “audience.” You are not a faceless audience that claps (or screams) when Bredemarket does its song and dance. You are people who work in a certain way, which I why I talk to people before creating content for them.

This “needy people” phrase sounded good a few days ago, but now that I’ve thought about it some more I see some problems with this formulation also. In addition to the negative connotations of the phrase, the mere fact that someone is “needy” doesn’t necessary mean that they will buy Bredemarket’s services. Take my identification of “needy people” from a few days ago:

My mini-survey shows that of the 40+ identity firms with blogs, about one-third of them HAVEN’T SAID A SINGLE THING to their prospects and customers in the last two months.
From https://bredemarket.com/2023/12/19/why-your-identity-company-isnt-saying-anything/

Yes, these companies are damaging their future prospects and need Bredemarket. But none of these companies has approached Bredemarket, or any other marketing and writing consultant, or their in-house people.

Perhaps they don’t see the problem at all.
Perhaps they see the problem, but don’t want to spend money (even a few hundred dollars) to fix it.
Perhaps they see the problem but don’t consider it as critically important as the other problems they face. Rather than spending a few hundred dollars, some companies are saving millions of dollars by “rightsizing” by 10-20% and cutting marketing budgets. They’re just fine with spiderweb-covered blog pages.

Because “needy people” doesn’t capture my meaning, I’ll do the recommended thing and use this blog post to throw up another idea.

The problem with the term “hungry people”

My latest iteration of “target audience” is “hungry people.” I figure that unlike “needy people,” “hungry people” are more inspired to act on their needs. They don’t just clap or scream; they are motivated to search for something to eat.

By Heart Attack Grill – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17291715

Using my example of the non-blogging identity firms, perhaps some of those quiet firms are troubled by their lack of communication with their prospects and clients. Rather than doing nothing, these firms are ready to plug their communications gap. But will they plug it with healthy food, or with junk food?

Even without writers, companies can unleash a content creation boom with generative AI. By feeding the AI brand guidelines, target audience data, and product specifics, they can churn out blog posts, ad copy, product descriptions, and even social media snippets. This AI assistant generates captivating headlines, outlines engaging narratives, and drafts basic texts, all while maintaining brand voice and SEO optimization. AI handles the heavy lifting, freeing up resources for strategic planning and audience engagement, boosting content output from silence to symphony.

I know this may surprise you, but I didn’t write the paragraph above. Google Bard did. And perhaps some hungry companies will opt for the free route and let generative AI write their content rather than contracting or employing a content marketer. Silence to symphony for a $0 budget! I consider this bittersweet.

I let the melody shine, let it cleanse my mind, I feel free now. Even though the melody was from Andrew Loog Oldham, uncredited, resulting in a decades-long copyright dispute between the Verve and the Rolling Stones. From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lyu1KKwC74.

So “hungry” doesn’t quite cut it, since I seek the people who are not only hungry, but who will pay for quality fare such as Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services.

To be continued

In this case, the blog post IS a temporary expression of thought. I’ve determined that “target audience” is an imperfect phrase and that I need to replace it with SOMETHING, but I haven’t figured out what that “something” is yet.

Until I get a better idea, I’ll use “hungry people” in my internal work, but I won’t change my customer-facing work (such as the e-book) until I come up with an effective alternative to “target audience.”

And one more thing

And unless I get a sudden brainstorm, this will probably be the last Bredemarket blog post for 2023, and I’m currently ruminating about the first question I asked in this post regarding prospects for 2024. While there were some positive things that happened this year, the negatives during the last seven months tended to outweigh the positives. A lot of other people are also experiencing this, so I’m sharing this song for those who are glad that 2023 is almost over, and who hope that 2024 isn’t more of the same.

Small Town Alien, with apologies to Ervin Drake. From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwYL_Anc_Gc.

Happy New Year.