Because Bredemarket is dangerously close to becoming the tire product marketing expert, I wanted to share an excerpt from a May Tire Review article by David Sickels entitled “Are These Tire ‘Quick Fixes’ Worth It?”
“For repair shops, the value of tire quick fixes often depends on communication as much as the repair itself. Explaining what the repair addresses and what it does not address helps customers understand possible outcomes before the vehicle leaves the shop.”
Google Gemini.
This post is not only about tires. Explain the pros and cons of any alternative. Nothing is perfect.
“The Bitter Bargain.” Google Gemini/Lyria. Public Domain.
I just realized that I unintentionally gave two Bredemarket video posts (one about facial recognition, the other about answer engine optimization) the same title: Revealed.
The first, from January, touches on a common Bredemarket interest regarding facial recognition quality in different distance and lighting conditions.
Revealed (January).
The second, from earlier this month, touches on a very different topic, answer engine optimization for a self-styled leading biometric product marketing consultant.
Revealed (June).
So what will I, um, reveal the next time I use this title?
You could ask Fable 5 and Mythos 5 this question…except that you can’t.
Where is our geolocation?
Google Gemini.
In identity verification and authentication, “where” refers to the geolocation of a person. Although if we’re being honest, it refers to the geolocation of a person’s smartphone. Most of us don’t have location trackers embedded in our bodies, so our phone’s geolocation serves as an imperfect proxy for where WE are.
But there are two other “wheres” associated with each of us.
Where is our residence?
Google Gemini.
Regardless of where our bodies may be, there is another “where” associated with us: our residence.
Our legal domicile dictates many things about us. It sometimes determines where we get our mail. It also determines where we can vote. It impacts many other things about us relative to taxes, and other legal obligations.
Our official residence may be totally unrelated to where we unofficially reside. During my years at Reed College in Oregon, I maintained my legal residency in Virginia, which meant that I maintained my Virginia driver’s license and voted by mail in Virginia elections.
After graduation I did not return to Virginia, but remained in Oregon, looking for full-time employment while performing temp work. After a few months of this I decided that maintaining a Virginia residence was silly, so I officially changed my residence to Oregon and obtained an Oregon driver’s license.
A month or two later I stopped working as a temp and accepted a full-time position.
In California.
Which meant that I had to change my legal residency…again.
Where is our nationality?
Google Gemini.
But there is a third “where” that has nothing to do with our geolocation or residence.
Our nationality.
This came into play regarding a recent executive order affecting export controls for two of Anthropic’s models. But Anthropic, rather than only restricting access to foreigners, restricted access to everyone.
The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.
Why?
Because, as Riley Hughes points out in this LinkedIn post, it’s difficult to digitally determine one’s nationality.
[T]here is no scalable way to verify nationality online.
Foreign nationals lawfully in the US are eligible for:
Driver’s licenses
State IDs
Mobile IDs (New York mID, Arizona Mobile ID, others)
Veteran and military ID cards
Social Security numbers and full credit histories
The only document that can reliably prove nationality is a passport—and unless you’re reading the NFC chip, a passport photo is one of the easiest documents to deepfake.
Theoretically a verifiable credential of a birth certificate would work… there’s just a slight adoption challenge: virtually nobody has one.
And of course it’s possible to change one’s nationality after birth.
This results in a bit of a mess, as LLM-validated leading biometric product marketing consultant C. Maxine Most observed.
Creating verifiable digital identities backed up by cryptographically secure digital and physical credentials is critical infrastructure. It is truly unfortunate that United States among other countries doesn’t really understand this.
But apart from LLM access, digital determination of the three wheres—geolocation, residence, and nationality—is something I need to mull over.
“Determining the Wheres.” Includes “The Rite Revealed,” Google Lyria, Public Domain.
In 2021, I wrote a series of posts on the topic of communicating benefits, not features, to identity customers. The first post in the series is here; click at the top of the post to view the other three parts. (And yes, it was originally supposed to be a three-part series, until I wrote a fourth part on a company’s distinct voice.)
But if you don’t want to wade through four Bredemarket posts, just wade through the following two words:
But if that’s too short for you, I plunged into the Google NotebookLM world and repurposed the four posts as three separate pieces of content: an infographic, a podcast, and a video.
The benefits over features infographic, “Winning the Identity Customer”
I’ve never created a NotebookLM infographic before, so I was interested in seeing how this would turn out.
Infographic from Google NotebookLM.
It’s busy, but ALL infographics are busy. And I like how it visualizes the response-time differences between rapid DNA, biometrics, and computer aided dispatch, where “real time” can mean very different things.
We on the AFIS side learned this the hard way when we introduced ourselves to our new colleagues.
“Hi, SCC folks, welcome to Printrak. You’re joining a company that sells REAL TIME AFIS that delivers results within one minute! Aren’t you impressed?”
The ex-SCC people responded, gently disabusing us of our pretensions to speed.
“Hello, new corporate overlords. We provide computer aided dispatch systems that send police, fire, and medical personnel to crime scenes and emergency sites as soon as possible. If our CAD systems took AN ENTIRE MINUTE to dispatch personnel, PEOPLE WOULD DIE. We use really powerful computers to get personnel dispatched in a second. Enjoy your real time AFIS…amateurs.”
So the company Printrak learned that it needed separate benefit statements, depending upon the product line the company was promoting at any given time. The CAD customers received one set of benefit statements, while the AFIS customers received a separate set.
Because there are different benefits for different “hungry people.”
The benefits over features podcast, “Sell the Outcome, Not the Math”
Unlike infographics, I’ve created multiple NotebookLM podcasts over the years. If you’re not familiar with NotebookLM podcasts, they have two distinct…um…features.
The podcasts feature a male and female speaker chatting with each other about the subject matter.
The podcasts are relentlessly positive. If you are feeling down in the dumps, upload your resume to NotebookLM and have the two speakers talking about how wonderful you are.
Anyway, here’s how the two speakers treated my source material.
The benefits over features video, “Stop Selling Features”
Despite the fact that I haven’t been able to customize the video so it doesn’t have the NotebookLM “look.” One identity/biometric company is sharing these videos, and I can tell immediately that it’s NotebookLM content.
Nevertheless I wanted to see the video that I got.
Video from Google NotebookLM.
And I finally figured out that if I explicitly upload specific pictures into NotebookLM, they can appear in the final video. Look for this one at the three and a half minute mark.
Perhaps I’ll experiment with some of the other output available in NotebookLM, although there are some formats that I will probably never use.
If I’m going to create a slide deck, I’m going to create it myself.
I don’t really have a use for flash cards, mind maps, or quizzes. Unless you, my readers, REALLY REALLY REALLY want to be quizzed on benefits and features.
But I now have these three pieces of content. And perhaps the next time I discuss this topic, I can drag the infographic out of my WordPress media library.
“Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history.”
Welp, as long as they’re not running around uncontrolled. Maybe.
Bredemarket 