I can sum up my solution with the simple phrase “put yourself in your prospect’s shoes.”
Your prospect doesn’t care about your solution, or about your company. Your prospect only cares about its problems, such as a re-election campaign.
Here’s what a Bredemarket client might say to the mayor’s campaign manager.
VENDOR: “No mayor wants the political nightmare of arresting an innocent person because of a tech glitch. It damages community trust and creates a major liability. The Really Cool ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System) can drastically cut down the risk of “false positives” (the system wrongly flagging an innocent person). “
Kinda long, but I had some splainin to do.
Google Gemini.
But for a vendor to say this, the vendor (or its consultant) must really know ABIS products and function as a biometric product marketing expert.
“Markets are messy. Buyers describe their problems in one language, vendors describe their products in another, regulators describe obligations in a third, and practitioners try to hold all of it in their heads at once. Finding trusted market intelligence is hard enough; agreeing on what we’re even looking at is harder still.
“That’s what a market taxonomy is for: one structure that connects what buyers need to what vendors offer, with regulations and market forces shaping the picture at every level.”
So how are they linked? The demand side (buyers) mirrors the supply side (vendors) at every level.
Liminal.
The domain maps to the solution segment. Use cases map to solutions. Requirements map to product capabilities. And translation occurs.
Google Gemini.
In short: even if you’re not a biometric product marketing expert, Liminal lets you fake it.
“Adobe PostScript® was at the forefront of the Desktop Publishing Revolution. It was released in 1984 and was not only the first device-independent Page Description Language (PDL) but also a programming language. It was originally designed to print documents on laser printers but was soon adapted to produce high-resolution files for imagesetters used by commercial printers.”
From the days when “desktop” publishing was cutting edge…like “wired.”
But in truth, the idea that an average human could create 300 dpi papers that didn’t look like typewritten text truly democratized design…for better or worse.
Now some users of Adobe’s subsequent products bypass printers altogether. (And desktop computers. I’m writing this on a phone.)
Sometimes I write pieces that cover multiple topics, in this case both a technical analysis of digital asset taxonomies and classifications in a multi-faceted sense, and a musical analysis of the multi-faceted genres present in a single song. Whoops, two songs. (One track.)
Because the source picture used to generate the song is not exclusively biometric in nature.
Identity and non-identity technologies. Gemini.
If you look in the lower right corner of the picture you can see a reference to digital asset taxonomy, a reference to a Bredemarket client that specializes in Adobe Experience Manager implementations.
Which brings us to Spotify.
Building the perfect Spotify playlists
Every month without fail I build at least one Spotify playlist for my listening pleasure. Normally these are a mixture of different decades and genres, all thrown together.
Saturday (February 21) I thought I’d be more thematic and create multiple playlists sorted by genre. So far I’ve created four:
Dance, including the Andrea True Connection and Britney Spears.
Electronic, including Kraftwerk and Röyksopp.
Folk, including the Brothers Four and R.E.M.
Punk, including Public Image Ltd. and Hole.
I tried to stay away from traditional categories such as country and disco, and didn’t try to distinguish between punk and hardcore, or genre and NEO-genre.
And I recognize that artists can span multiple genres. Some Devo songs are in my electronic playlist, others are in my punk playlist, and when I get to “Disco Dancer” it won’t go in either.
Which brings us to Elton John.
Building the imperfect digital asset taxonomy
Elton John’s career has spanned multiple genres. The bespectacled piano player has covered simple love songs, energetic power trios (17-11-70), bombastic orchestral episodes, crocodile rock, an island girl, and everything else. And that’s just in his first decade, before he became Disney soundtrack guy.
However, in most cases Elton, Bernie Taupin, and his other collaborators would stick with a particular genre for an entire song. Because that’s what good product marketers do: stick to a single message. Bad product marketers like me tend toward multiple message overload…I seem to have strayed from my point. *** EDIT THIS LATER
But perhaps you noticed the music I incorporated here.
How do you taxonomize THIS digital asset?
1973 in music
Before I describe the problem, let me set the scene.
“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was the second of two albums that Elton John released in 1973. It was a sprawling double album.
Elton’s predecessor album, “Don’t Shoot Me I’m The Only Piano Player,” was a number one album with a number one single, the aforementioned “Crocodile Rock.” The album also included the popular song “Daniel” and a character piece (in the Randy Newman tradition) “Texan Love Song.” (Lyricist Bernie Taupin often courted controversy.)
But much was going on outside the pop star world that Elton John seemingly occupied. Progressive music was reaching its peak. While Elton’s first 1973 album rhapsodized on elderberry wine and backed away from the Paul Buckmaster arrangements, 1973 saw releases from Emerson Lake and Palmer, Genesis, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, and Yes. Oh, and an album by Pink Floyd entitled “Dark Side Of The Moon.” When I asked Google Gemini about 1973 progressive albums, it replied in part, “If you enjoy odd time signatures and 20-minute compositions, 1973 is your playground.”
However, music is governed by Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and some definitely anti-progressive works were just starting to appear. The New York Dolls released an album, and underground recordings were circulating of a band called The Modern Lovers.
A significant portion of American teenagers didn’t care about any of this. For them, the ONLY album of importance was Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy.”
Side one of four, track one, songs one and two
Which brings us to “Funeral For A Friend”/“Love Lies Bleeding.” Technically a two-song medley, but distributed (both physically and electronically) as a single asset.
Elton had tons of fans who were all too happy to rush out, slap $9.98 on the counter to buy “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” upon its release, and plunk side one of the first record on their turntables.
Time to listen
I suspect that the “WTF” acronym was invented in November 1973.
WTF?
Because the listeners weren’t hearing “the only piano player.”
And they weren’t hearing a Paul Buckmaster-conducted orchestra.
You couldn’t hear a recognizable piano until the 1:40 mark of the song. Slowly you hear Dee, Nigel, and Davey, and the song slowly (but not completely) transitions away from the Hall of the Progressive Masterpiece in the Court of the Multi-Coloured Bespectacled Lunatic on the Top of the Charts. (And no, “lunatic” is not too strong here, since this song falls between Elton John’s known suicide attempts in 1968 and 1975.)
Then, after the band (augmented by Hentschel) brings “Funeral for a Friend” to an energetic conclusion, the piano player transitions to the second song at the 5:22 mark. And Elton, who has been silent all this time, finally sings.
And time to reflect
Let’s review, shall we?
Although the tone is dark with themes of breakup and demise, portions of this sound like a typical Elton John pop song.
But before that it begins with sounds that made American teenagers wondered if they had picked up a Yes album by mistake.
And while few portions of the songs are minimal like Mr. Richman, or include towering solos like Mr. Page, parts would have fit well into a New York studio performance three years earlier. And Elton at his best could outdress the Dolls.
That was fun. Now comes the challenge.
How do you classify THIS?
I’ve already implicitly noted that music classification is a tricky affair.
Take “MacArthur Park,” a song recorded by everyone from Richard Harris to Waylon Jennings to Donna Summer. There are over 200 versions of the song spanning multiple genres. And composer Jimmy Webb is challenging to classify.
Now look at Elton’s song and my four playlists.
The track isn’t folk, dance, or punk.
But is it electronic? Portions are decidedly NOT.
Multi-faceted
You could cheat and place it in two (or more) classifications. Heather Hedden addresses faceted classification:
“The idea of faceted classification as a superior alternative to traditional hierarchical classification, whereby an item (such as book or article) can be classified in multiple different ways instead of in just a single classification class/category, is not new. The first such faceted classification was developed and published by mathematician/librarian S.R. Ranganathan in 1933, as an alternative to the Dewey Decimal System for classifying books, called Colon Classification (since the colon punctuation was originally used to separate the multiple facets).”
A taxonomy, however, is different—ideally:
“[F]aceted taxonomies should…ideally be mutually exclusive, in contrast to the principle of faceted classification…”
My solution
Returning to my Spotify playlist problem:
I could simply place the song in multiple playlists: for example, an electronic playlist and some type of guitar/rock/whatever playlist.
Or I could create a single hyphenated playlist, such as an electronic-guitar playlist. (Many Depeche Mode songs, beginning with “Route 66,” would be ideal here.)
For now I followed neither option, but added “Funeral for a Friend”/“Love Lies Bleeding” into my existing electronic playlist (because it starts electronically) and nowhere else.
I recently downloaded an ebook from Canto entitled “The ROI of DAM: How to Prove the Business Value of Digital Asset Management.” If you would like to download it also, visit this page.
Why do you need to manage digital assets? Because if your company has thousands or millions of digital assets, individual ones will be so hard to find that you’ll start adding an “N” to the “DAM” acronym.
Canto argues that its digital asset management solution delivers positive ROI by the following:
Saving time and reducing waste
Accelerating speed to market and improving content quality
Reducing asset production costs
Boosting revenue with brand consistency
Minimizing business risk
The ebook quotes some numbers: $20,000 savings here, more savings there.
Of course, Canto isn’t the only DAM in town, as my former coworker Krassimir Boyanov will not hesitate to tell you. Krassimir heads KBWEB Consult, a boutique technology firm that provides consulting services for Adobe Experience Manager users.
In July 2024, IDC examined the business value of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Assets. Based on interviews with AEM Assets customers, IDC concluded that the interviewed customers could realize an average annual cost saving of $9.04 million per organization. These cost savings came from multiple sources:
Reduced risk of using out-of-date/unapproved assets (52%)
Reduced risk of accidental disclosure of assets (27%)
Reduced spending of duplicative (62%) or unused (40%) assets
Reduced agency spending by completing work in-house (24%)
Reduced go-to-market time (55%)
Reduced time for content to go from creation to production (47%)
Reduced time for content in a new form factor (39%)
Reduced time to create a new digital asset (66%)
Reduced time to repurpose an existing digital asset (73%)
Reduced time to create a rendition of an asset (60%)
Those are some DAM good numbers. And KBWEB Consult (and IDC) didn’t gate them.
Tech marketers, do you have similar return on investment numbers you would like to share with your end customers? Bredemarket can help you share those numbers. Talk to me before your competitors return YOUR investment to THEM.
Are you having trouble finding an asset such as a digital identity or a commercial asset? If you are, there are ways to make things easier to find.
An example from the identity world
Identity Jedi David Lee recently shared his thoughts on “The Hidden Cost of Bad Identity Data (and How to Fix It).” Lee didn’t focus on the biometric data, but instead on the textual data that is associated with a digital identity.
“Let’s say you’re kicking off a new identity program. You know you need user location to drive access policies, governance rules, or onboarding flows. But your authoritative source has location data in five different formats—some say “NY,” others say “New York,” and some list office addresses with zip codes and floor numbers.
“You tell yourself: “We’ll clean it up later.”
“What you’ve really done is commit your future self to a much more expensive project.”
Garbage in, garbage out.
An example from the commerce world
Krassimir Boyanov of KBWEB Consult provides another example of a problem in his post “Why AEM Assets Smart Tagging Makes Your Marketing Work Easier.” Let’s say that you’re managing the images (the “assets”) that display on a company’s online website. You have thousands if not millions of images to manage. How do you find a particular image?
One way to do this is to “tag” each image with descriptive information.
But if you do it wrong, there will be problems.
“Tagging is inconsistent. If 10 people are tagging the items, the tags will probably be inconsistent. While one person tags an item as a “car,” another may tag a similar item as an “automobile.” Although the two assets are similar, this is hidden because of inconsistent tag use.”
Again, garbage in, garbage out.
An organizational solution from the identity world
Lee and Boyanov approach these similar problems from two perspectives.
Lee, as an Identity and Access Management (IAM) expert, approaches this as a business problem and offers the following recommendations (among others):
“Clean early, not late: Push for authoritative sources to normalize and codify the data before it hits the IAM system….
“Push accountability upstream: Don’t accept ownership of fixing problems you don’t control. Instead, elevate the data issue to the right stakeholder (hint: HR, IT, or Legal).”
While Lee can certainly speak to the technologies that can normalize and codify the data, he prefers in this post to concentrate on the organizational issues that cause dirty data, and on how to prevent these issues from reoccurring in the future.
A technological solution from the commerce world
Boyanov can also speak to business and organizational issues as an Adobe Experience Manager consultant who has helped multiple organizations implement the Adobe product. But in this case he concentrates on a technological approach offered by Adobe:
A Taxonomy is a system of organizing tags based on shared characteristics, which are usually hierarchical structured per organizational need. The structure can help finding a tag faster or impose a generalization. Example: There is a need to subcategorize stock imagery of cars. The taxonomy could look like:
Once the taxonomy is defined, assets can be tagged (preferably automatically) in accordance with the hierarchy.
Presumably David Lee’s identity world can similarly come up with a method to standardize addresses BEFORE they are added to an IAM system.
As deep as any ocean
Whether you’re dealing with a digital identity or a commercial asset, you need to ensure that you can find this asset in the future. This requires planning beforehand.
And a content creation project also requires planning beforehand, such as asking questions before beginning the project.
If you are an identity/biometric or technology firm that requires content creation, or perhaps proposal or analysis services, Bredemarket can help. After all, content creation is science…and art.
Adobe is implementing C2PA-compliant content credentials in AEM [Adobe Experience Manager]. These can tell you the facts about an asset (in C2PA terms, the “provenance“): whether the image of a product from a particular manufacturer was created by that manufacturer, whether a voice recording of Anil Chakravarthy was created by Anil Chakravarthy, or whether an image of a peaceful meadow was actually generated by artificial intelligence (such as Adobe Firefly).
How do you elicit feedback from your customers? Pop-ups on your website? Emails?
Well, back when dinosaurs roamed the planet, none of these methods was available.
So you had to resort to other methods.
Corporate comedian Jan McInnis likes to share stories of her early days in comedy, when she was working comedy clubs instead of corporate conventions. Comedy clubs feature several comedians a night, and some do better than others.
And sometimes the same comedian gets different reactions from different audiences.
McInnis was once booked at a club for a week. The club owner was there for the first show, which went great. The owner went on a trip, and as McInnis relates in detail, she bombed for the next several shows. Afterwards, the club owner returned and asked how the week went.
“My first thought was to say the shows were fine and pretend that I didn’t notice the silent stares from 7 separate audiences….BUT I knew she’d see the comment cards and then know that I was not only a terrible comic, but a liar.”
Ah, those pesky comment cards, the dinosaur era version of Google Forms or Adobe Experience Manager Forms. (Gotta promote my favorite AEM consultant. But I digress.)
I won’t give away how McInnis answered the question (read about it here), but I will say that honesty is (usually) the best policy.
But regardless of how you survey your customers, the very act of doing so provides you with important knowledge. Not just data—knowledge.
For many years, the baseline for high-quality capture of fingerprint and palm print images has been to use a resolution of 500 pixels per inch. Or maybe 512 pixels per inch. Whatever.
The crime scene (latent) folks weren’t always satisfied with this, so they pushed to capture latent fingerprint and latent palm print images at 1000 pixels per inch. Pardon me, 1024.
But beyond this, the resolution of captured prints hasn’t really changed in decades. I’m sure some people have been capturing prints at 2000 (2048) pixels per inch, but there aren’t massive automated biometric identification systems that fully support this resolution from end to end.
But that may be changing.
One important truth about infant fingerprints
For about as long as latent examiners have pursued 1000 ppi print capture, people outside of the criminal justice arena have been looking at fingerprints for a very different purpose.
Our normal civil fingerprint processes require us to identify people via fingerprints beginning at the age of 18, or perhaps at the age of 12.
But gow do we identify people in those first 12 years?
More specifically, can we identify someone via their fingerprints at birth, and then authenticate them as an adult by comparing to those original prints?
It’s a dream, but many have pursued this dream. Dr. Anil Jain at Michigan State University has pursued this for years, and co-authored a 2014 paper on the topic.
Given that children, as well as the adults, in low income countries typically do not have any form of identification documents which can be used for this purpose [vaccination], we address the following question: can fingerprints be effectively used to recognize children from birth to 4 years? We have collected 1,600 fingerprint images (500 ppi) of 20 infants and toddlers captured over a 30-day period in East Lansing, Michigan and 420 fingerprints of 70 infants and toddlers at two different health clinics in Benin, West Africa.
At the time, it probably made sense to use 500 pixel per inch scanners to capture the prints, since developing countries don’t have a lot of money to throw around on expensive 1000 ppi scanners. But the use of regular scanners runs counter to a very important truth about infants and their fingerprints. Are you sitting down?
Because infants are smaller than adults, infant fingerprints are smaller than adult fingerprints.
Think about it. The standard FBI fingerprint card assumes that a rolled fingerprint occupies 1.6 inches x 1.5 inches of space. If you were to roll an infant fingerprint, it would occupy much less than that. Heck, I don’t even know if an infant’s entire FINGER is 1.6 inches long.
So the capture device is obtaining these teeny tiny ridges, and these teeny tiny ridge endings, and these teeny tiny bifurcations. Or trying to. And if those second-level details can’t be captured, then you’re not going to get the minutiae, and your fingerprint matching is going to fail.
So a decade later, researchers today are adopting a newer approach, according to a Biometric Update summary of an ID4Africa webinar. (This particular portion is at the very end of the webinar, at around the 2 hour 40 minute mark.)
A video presentation from Judge Lidia Maejima of the Court of Justice of Parana, Brazil introduced the emerging legal framework for biometric identification of infants. Her representative Felipe Hay explained how researchers in Brazil developed 5,000 dpi scanners, he says, which accurately record the minutiae of infants’ fingerprints.
Did you capture that? We’re moving from five hundred pixels per inch to FIVE THOUSAND pixels per inch. (Or maybe 5120.) Whether even that resolution is capable of capturing infant fingerprint detail remains to be seen.
And as Dr. Joseph Atick noted, all this research is still in its…um…infancy. We won’t know for years whether the algorithms can truly match infant fingerprints to child or adult fingerprints.
By the way, when talking about digital images, Adobe notes that the correct term is pixels per inch, not dots per inch. DPI specifically refers to printer resolution, which is appropriate when you’re printing a fingerprint card but not when you’re displaying an image on a screen.
Back before Jobs co-founded Apple Computer, typing “71077345” into a dedicated calculator (with an “LCD” style typeface) and flipping it upside down showed a recognizable word. Isn’t that cool?
Now, hardly anyone has dedicated calculators, and the one on my smartphone has a “normal” typeface that ruins the trick.
A single loss does not define your entire life. As the sporting world teaches us, Olympic losers and other competitive losers can become winners—if not in sports, then elsewhere.
The human drama of athletic competition
When I was young, the best variety show on television didn’t involve Bob Mackie dresses. It instead featured Jim McKay, introducing the show as follows.
Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport…the thrill of victory…and the agony of defeat…the human drama of athletic competition…This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!
A technological marvel when originally introduced, this variety show brought sporting events to American viewers from all over the world.
And these viewers learned that in competitions, there are winners and losers.
But since Wide World of Sports focused on the immediate (well, with a bit of tape delay), viewers never learned about the losers who became winners.
Jim McKay and his colleagues were not retrospective, but were known for the moment. In one instance that was NOT on tape delay, Jim McKay spoke his most consequential words, “They’re all gone.”
Vinko Bogataj
(Note: some of this content is repurposed because repurposing is cool.)
Turning to less lethal sporting events, remember Jim McKay’s phrase “the agony of defeat”?
For American TV watchers, this phrase was personified by Vinko Bogataj.
The agony of defeat.
Hailing from a country then known as Yugoslavia (now Slovenia), Bogataj was competing in the 1970 World Ski Flying Championships in Oberstdorf, in a country then known as West Germany (now Germany). His daughter described what happened:
It was bad weather, and he had to wait around 20 minutes before he got permission to start. He remembers that he couldn’t see very good. The track was very bad, and just before he could jump, the snow or something grabbed his skis and he fell. From that moment, he doesn’t remember anything.
While Bogataj suffered a concussion and a broken ankle, the accident was captured by the Wide World of Sports film crew, and Bogataj became famous on the “capitalist” side of the Cold War.
“He didn’t have a clue he was famous,” (his daughter) Sandra said. That changed when ABC tracked him down in Slovenia and asked him to attend a ceremony in New York to celebrate the 20th anniversary of “Wide World of Sports” in 1981.
At the gala, Bogataj received the loudest ovation among a group that included some of the best-known athletes in the world. The moment became truly surreal for Bogataj when Muhammad Ali asked for his autograph.
Bogataj is now a painter, but his 1970 performance still follows him.
Over 20 years after the infamous ski jump, Terry Gannon interviewed Bogataj for ABC. As Gannon recounted it on X (then Twitter), Bogataj “got in a fender bender on the way. His first line..’every time I’m on ABC I crash.'”
Some guy at the Athens Olympics in 2004
Since the Paris Olympics is taking place as I write this, people are paying a lot of attention to present and past Olympics.
The 2004 Olympics in Athens was a notable one, taking place in the country where the original Olympics were held.
But during that year, people may have missed some of the important stories that took place. We pay attention to winners, not losers.
Take the men’s 200 meter competition. It began with 7 heats, with the top competitors from the heats advancing.
Within the 7 heats, Heat 4 was a run-of-the-mill race, with the top four sprinters advancing to the next round. If I were to read their names to you you’d probably reward me with a blank stare.
But if I were to read the 5th place finisher to you, the guy who failed to advance to the next round, you’d recognize the name.
KBWEB Consult tells the story of another competitor in the same 200 meter event in Athens. Chris Lambert participated in Heat 3, but didn’t place in the first four positions and therefore didn’t advance.
Nor did he place in the fifth position like Usain Bolt did in Heat 4.
Actually, he technically didn’t place at all. His performance is marked with a “DNF,” or “did not finish.”
You see, at about the 50 meter point of the 200 meter event, Lambert pulled a hamstring.
And that ended his Olympic competition dreams forever. By the time the Olympics were held in Lambert’s home country of the United Kingdom in 2012, he was not a competitor, but a volunteer for the London Olympics.
But Lambert learned much from his competitive days, and now works for Adobe.
KBWEB Consult (who consults on Adobe Experience Manager implementations) tells the full story of Chris Lambert and what he learned in its post “Expert Coaching From KBWEB Consult.”
I haven’t done one of these in a while, but it’s important to remember that just because you lost a particular competition doesn’t mean that all is lost. We need to remember this whether we are a 200 meter runner who didn’t advance from their heat, or whether we are a job applicant receiving yet another “we are moving in a different direction” form letter.
In the meantime, take care of yourself, and each other.
Bredemarket 