Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
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Why do you need this content, and what is your goal?
How will you create the content? Do you need an extra, experienced hand to help out?
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#biometric #contentmarketing #identity
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
If you listen closely, you can hear about all sorts of wonderful biometric identifiers. They range from the common (such as fingerprint ridges and detail) to the esoteric (my favorite was the 2013 story about Japanese car seats that captured butt prints).
A former coworker who left the biometric world for the world of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) expert consulting brought one of the latter to my attention.
Tongue prints.
This article, shared with me by Krassimir Boyanov of KBWEB Consult, links to this article from Science ABC.
As is usual with such articles, the title is breathless: “How Tongue Prints Are Going To Revolutionize Identification Methods.”
Forget about fingerprints and faces and irises and DNA and gait recognition and butt prints. Tongue prints are the answer!
To its credit, the article does point out two benefits of using tongue prints as a biometric identifier.
But the article also makes these claims.
Two main attributes are measured for a tongue print. First is the tongue shape, as the shape of the tongue is unique to everyone.
From https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/how-tongue-prints-are-going-to-revolutionize-identification-methods.html
The other notable feature is the texture of the tongue. Tongues consist of a number of ridges, wrinkles, seams and marks that are unique to every individual.
From https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/how-tongue-prints-are-going-to-revolutionize-identification-methods.html
So tongue shape and tongue texture are unique to every individual?
Prove it.
Even for some of the more common biometric identifiers, we do not have scientific proof that most biometric identifiers are unique to every individual.
But at least these modalities are under study. Has anyone conducted a rigorous study to prove or disprove the uniqueness of tongues? By “rigorous,” I mean a study that has evaluated millions of tongues in the same way that NIST has evaluated millions of fingerprints, faces, and irises?
We know that NIST hasn’t studied tongues.
I did find this 2017 tongue identification pilot study but it only included a whopping 20 participants. And the study authors (who are always seeking funding anyway) admitted that “large-scale studies are required to validate the results.”
So if a police officer tells you to stick out your tongue for identification purposes, think twice.
On September 30, FindBiometrics and Acuity Market Intelligence released the production version of the Biometric Digital Identity Prism Report. You can request to download it here.
Central to the concept of the Biometric Digital Identity Prism is the idea of the “Big 3 ID,” which the authors define as follows:
These firms have a global presence, a proven track record, and moderate-to-advanced activity in every other prism beam.
From “The Biometric Digital Identity Prism Report, September 2023.”
The Big 3 are IDEMIA, NEC, and Thales.
But FindBiometrics and Acuity Market Intelligence didn’t invent the Big 3. The concept has been around for 40 years. And two of today’s Big 3 weren’t in the Big 3 when things started. Oh, and there weren’t always 3; sometimes there were 4, and some could argue that there were 5.
So how did we get from the Big 3 of 40 years ago to the Big 3 of today?
Back in 1986 (eight years before I learned how to spell AFIS) the American National Standards Institute, in conjunction with the National Bureau of Standards, issued ANSI/NBS-ICST 1-1986, a data format for information interchange of fingerprints. The PDF of this long-superseded standard is available here.
When creating this standard, ANSI and the NBS worked with a number of law enforcement agencies, as well as companies in the nascent fingerprint industry. There is a whole list of companies cited at the beginning of the standard, but I’d like to name four of them.
While all four of these companies produced computerized fingerprinting equipment, three of them had successfully produced automated fingerprint identification systems, or AFIS. As Chapter 6 of the Fingerprint Sourcebook subsequently noted:
After the success of the San Francisco and California AFIS systems, many other jurisdictions began clamoring for AFIS of their own, and turned to these three vendors to supply them.
But in 1990, these three firms were joined by a fourth upstart, Cogent Systems of South Pasadena, California.
While customers initially preferred the Big 3 to the upstart, Cogent Systems eventually installed a statewide system in Ohio and a border control system for the U.S. government, plus a vast number of local systems at the county and city level.
Between 1991 and 1994, the (Immigfation and Naturalization Service) conducted several studies of automated fingerprint systems, primarily in the San Diego, California, Border Patrol Sector. These studies demonstrated to the INS the feasibility of using a biometric fingerprint identification system to identify apprehended aliens on a large scale. In September 1994, Congress provided almost $30 million for the INS to deploy its fingerprint identification system. In October 1994, the INS began using the system, called IDENT, first in the San Diego Border Patrol Sector and then throughout the rest of the Southwest Border.
From https://oig.justice.gov/reports/plus/e0203/back.htm
I was a proposal writer for Printrak (divested by De La Rue) in the 1990s, and competed against Cogent, Morpho, and NEC in AFIS procurements. By the time I moved from proposals to product management, the next redefinition of the “big” vendors occurred.
There are a lot of name changes that affected AFIS participants, one of which was the 1988 name change of the National Bureau of Standards to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). As fingerprints and other biometric modalities were increasingly employed by government agencies, NIST began conducting tests of biometric systems. These tests continue to this day, as I have previously noted.
One of NIST’s first tests was the Fingerprint Vendor Technology Evaluation of 2003 (FpVTE 2003).
For those who are familiar with NIST testing, it’s no surprise that the test was thorough:
FpVTE 2003 consists of multiple tests performed with combinations of fingers (e.g., single fingers, two index fingers, four to ten fingers) and different types and qualities of operational fingerprints (e.g., flat livescan images from visa applicants, multi-finger slap livescan images from present-day booking or background check systems, or rolled and flat inked fingerprints from legacy criminal databases).
From https://www.nist.gov/itl/iad/image-group/fingerprint-vendor-technology-evaluation-fpvte-2003
Eighteen vendors submitted their fingerprint algorithms to NIST for one or more of the various tests, including Bioscrypt, Cogent Systems, Identix, SAGEM MORPHO (SAGEM had acquired Morpho Systems), NEC, and Motorola (which had acquired Printrak). And at the conclusion of the testing, the FpVTE 2003 summary (PDF) made this statement:
Of the systems tested, NEC, SAGEM, and Cogent produced the most accurate results.
Which would have been great news if I were a product manager at NEC, SAGEM, and Cogent.
Unfortunately, I was a product manager at Motorola.
The effect of this report was…not good, and at least partially (but not fully) contributed to Motorola’s loss of its long-standing client, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to Cogent.
So what happened in the years after FpVTE was released? Opinions vary, but here are three possible explanations for what happened next.
Now I probably have a bit of bias in this area since I was a Motorola employee, but I maintain that Motorola overcame this temporary setback and vaulted back into the Big 4 within a couple of years. Among other things, Motorola deployed a national 1000 pixels-per-inch (PPI) system in Sweden several years before the FBI did.
Motorola’s arch-enemies at Sagem Morpho had a different opinion, which was revealed when the state of West Virginia finally got around to deploying its own AFIS. A bit ironic, since the national FBI AFIS system IAFIS was located in West Virginia, or perhaps not.
Anyway, Motorola had a very effective sales staff, as was apparent when the state issued its Request for Proposal (RFP) and explicitly said that the state wanted a Motorola AFIS.
That didn’t stop Cogent, Identix, NEC, and Sagem Morpho from bidding on the project.
After the award, Dorothy Bullard and I requested copies of all of the proposals for evaluation. While Motorola (to no one’s surprise) won the competition, Dorothy and I believed that we shouldn’t have won. In particular, our arch-enemies at Sagem Morpho raised a compelling argument that it should be the chosen vendor.
Their argument? Here’s my summary: “Your RFP says that you want a Motorola AFIS. The states of Kansas (see page 6 of this PDF) and New Mexico (see this PDF) USED to have a Motorola AFIS…but replaced their systems with our MetaMorpho AFIS because it’s BETTER than the Motorola AFIS.”
But were Cogent, Motorola, NEC, and Sagem Morpho the only “big” players?
While the Big 3/Big 4 took a lot of the headlines, there were a number of other companies vying for attention. (I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worthwhile to review it again.)
In short, there were a bunch of small identity companies all over the place.
But in the course of a few short years, Dr. Joseph Atick (initially) and Robert LaPenta (subsequently) concentrated on acquiring and merging those companies into a single firm, L-1 Identity Solutions.
These multiple mergers resulted in former competitors Identix and Digital Biometrics, and former competitors Viisage and Visionics, becoming part of one big happy family. (A multinational big happy family when you count Bioscrypt.) Eventually this company offered fingerprint, face, iris, driver’s license, and passport solutions, something that none of the Big 3/Big 4 could claim (although Sagem Morpho had a facial recognition offering). And L-1 had federal contracts and state contracts that could match anything that the Big 3/Big 4 offered.
So while L-1 didn’t have a state AFIS contract like Cogent, Motorola, NEC, and Sagem Morpho did, you could argue that L-1 was important enough to be ranked with the big boys.
So for the sake of argument let’s assume that there was a Big 5, and L-1 Identity Solutions was part of it, along with the three big boys Motorola, NEC, and Safran (who had acquired Sagem and thus now owned Sagem Morpho), and the independent Cogent Systems. These five companies competed fiercly with each other (see West Virginia, above).
In a two-year period, everything would change.
Hang on to your seats.
If you’re keeping notes, the Big 5 have now become the Big 3: 3M, Safran, and NEC (the one constant in all of this).
While there were subsequent changes (3M sold Cogent and other pieces to Gemalto, Safran sold all of Morpho to Advent International/Oberthur to form IDEMIA, and Gemalto was acquired by Thales), the Big 3 has remained constant over the last decade.
And that’s where we are today…pending future developments.
This was written by John Bredehoft of Bredemarket.
If you work for the Big 3 or the Little 80+ and need marketing and writing services, the biometric content marketing expert can help you. There are several ways to get in touch:
Remember in mid-August when I said that the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology was splitting its FRVT tests into FRTE and FATE tests?
Well, the FATE side of the house has released its first two studies, including one entitled “Face Analysis Technology Evaluation (FATE) Part 10: Performance of Passive, Software-Based Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) Algorithms” (NIST Internal Report NIST IR 8491; PDF here).
I’ve written all about this study in a LinkedIn article under my own name that answers the following questions:
My LinkedIn article, “Why NIST Cares About Presentation Attack Detection…and Why You Should Also,” can be found at the link https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-nist-cares-presentation-attack-detectionand-you-should-bredehoft/.
Machine learning models need training data to improve their accuracy—something I know from my many years in biometrics.
And it’s difficult to get that training data—something else I know from my many years in biometrics. Consider the acronyms GDPR, CRPA, and especially BIPA. It’s very hard to get data to train biometric algorithms, so they are trained on relatively limited data sets.
At the same time that biometric algorithm training data is limited, Kevin Indig believes that generative AI large language models are ALSO going to encounter limited accessibility to training data. Actually, they are already.
A few months ago, generative AI models like ChatGPT were going to solve all of humanity’s problems and allow us to lead lives of leisure as the bots did all our work for us. Or potentially the bots would get us all fired. Or something.
But then people began to ask HOW these large language models work…and where they get their training data.
Just like biometric training models that just grab images and associated data from the web without asking permission (you know the example that I’m talking about), some are alleging that LLMs are training their models on copyrighted content in violation of the law.
I am not a lawyer and cannot meaningfully discuss what is “fair use” and what is not, but suffice it to say that alleged victims are filing court cases.
Comedian and author Sarah Silverman, as well as authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey — are suing OpenAI and Meta each in a US District Court over dual claims of copyright infringement.
The suits alleges, among other things, that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s LLaMA were trained on illegally-acquired datasets containing their works, which they say were acquired from “shadow library” websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are “available in bulk via torrent systems.”
From https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23788741/sarah-silverman-openai-meta-chatgpt-llama-copyright-infringement-chatbots-artificial-intelligence-ai
This could be a big mess, especially since copyright laws vary from country to country. This description of copyright law LLM implications, for example, is focused upon United Kingdom law. Laws in other countries differ.
Just today, Kevin Indig highlighted another issue that could limit LLM access to online training data.
Systems that get data from the web, such as Google, Bing, and (relevant to us) ChatGPT, use “crawlers” to gather the information from the web for their use. ChatGPT, for example, has its own crawler.
Guess what Indig found out about ChatGPT’s crawler?
An analysis of the top 1,000 sites on the web from Originality AI shows 12% already block Chat GPT’s crawler. (source)
From https://www.kevin-indig.com/most-sites-will-block-chat-gpt/
But that only includes the sites that blocked the crawler when Originality AI performed its analysis.
Indig believes that in the future, the number of the top 1000 sites that will block ChatGPT’s crawler will rise significantly…to 84%. His belief is based on analyzing the business models for the sites that already block ChatGPT and assuming that other sites that use the same business models will also find it in their interest to block ChatGPT.
The business models that won’t block ChatGPT are assumed to include governments, universities, and search engines. Such sites are friendly to the sharing of information, and thus would have no reason to block ChatGPT or any other LLM crawler.
The business models that would block ChatGPT are assumed to include publishers, marketplaces, and many others. Entities using these business models are not just going to turn it over to an LLM for free.
As Indig explains regarding the top two blocking business models:
For publishers, content is the product. Giving it away for free to generative AI means foregoing most if not all, ad revenue. Publishers remember the revenue drops caused by social media and modern search engines in the late 2,000s.
Marketplaces build their own AI assistants and don’t want competition.
From https://www.kevin-indig.com/most-sites-will-block-chat-gpt/
One possibility is that LLMs will run into the same training issues as biometric algorithms.
Of course, there’s another solution to the problem: have the companies SELL their data to the LLMs.
In theory, this could provide the data holders with a nice revenue stream while allowing the LLMs to be extremely accurate. (Of course the users who actually contribute the data to the data holders would probably be shut out of any revenue, but them’s the breaks.)
But that’s only in theory. Based upon past experience with data holders, the people who want to use the data are probably not going to pay the data holders sufficiently.
Even today, Google and Meta (Facebook et al) are greeting Canada’s government-mandated Bill C-18 with resistance. Here’s what Google is saying:
Bill C-18 requires two companies (including Google) to pay for simply showing links to Canadian news publications, something that everyone else does for free. The unprecedented decision to put a price on links (a so-called “link tax”) breaks the way the web and search engines work, and exposes us to uncapped financial liability simply for facilitating access to news from Canadian publications….
As a result, we have informed them that we have made the difficult decision that, when the law takes effect, we will be removing links to Canadian news publications from our Search, News, and Discover products.
From https://blog.google/canada-news-en/#overview
But wait, it gets better:
In addition, we will no longer be able to operate Google News Showcase – our product experience and licensing program for news – in Canada.
From https://blog.google/canada-news-en/#overview
Google News Showcase is the program that gives money to news organizations in Canada. Meta has a similar program. Peter Menzies notes that these programs give tens of millions of (Canadian) dollars to news organizations, but that could end, despite government threats.
The federal and Quebec governments pulled their advertising spends, but those moves amount to less money than Meta will save by ending its $18 million in existing journalism funding.
From https://thehub.ca/2023-09-15/peter-menzies-the-media-is-boycotting-meta-and-nobody-cares/
Bearing in mind that Big Tech is reluctant to give journalistic data holders money even when a government ORDERS that they do so…
…what is the likelihood that generative AI algorithm authors (including Big Tech companies like Google and Microsoft) will VOLUNTARILY pay funds to data holders for algorithm training?
If Kevin Indig is right, LLM training data will become extremely limited, adversely affecting the algorithms’ use.
If I hired myself to update the Bredemarket website, I’d be employed full time.
My “opportunity” that allowed me to service identity clients again necessitated several changes to the website, which I documented in a June 1 post entitled “Updates, updates, updates…“
Then I had to return to this website to make some hurried updates, since my April 2022 prohibition on taking certain types of work is no longer in effect as of June 2023. Hence, my home page, my “What I Do” page, and (obviously) my identity page are all corrected.
From https://bredemarket.com/2023/06/01/updates-updates-updates/
Basically, I had gone through great trouble to document that Bredemarket would NOT take identity work, so I had to reverse a lot of pages to say that Bredemarket WOULD take identity work.
I may have found a few additional pages after June 1, but eventually I reached the point where everything on the Bredemarket website was completely and totally updated, and I wouldn’t have to perform any other changes.
You can predict where this is going.
Today it occurred to me that some of the readers of the LinkedIn Bredemarket page may not know the person behind Bredemarket, so I took the opportunity to share Bredemarket’s “Who I Am” web page on the LinkedIn page.
Only then did I read what the page actually said.
So THAT page was also updated (updates in red).
So yes, this biometric content marketing expert/identity content marketing expert IS available for your content marketing needs. If you’re interested in receiving my help with your identity written content, contact me.
To be continued, probably…
As a child, did you sleep at night dreaming that someday you could become a biometric content marketing expert?
I didn’t either. Frankly, I didn’t even work in biometrics professionally until I was in my 30s.
If you have a mad adult desire to become a biometric content marketing expert, here are five topics that I (a self-styled biometric content marketing expert) think you need to understand.
Sorry to be Captain Obvious, but if you’re going to talk about biometrics you need to know what you’re talking about.
The days in which an expert could confine themselves to a single biometric modality are long past. Why? Because once you declare yourself an iris expert, someone is bound to ask, “How does iris recognition compare to facial recognition?”
And there are a number of biometric modalities. In addition to face and iris, the Biometrics Institute has cataloged a list of other biometric modalities, including fingerprints/palmprints, voice, DNA, vein, finger/hand geometry, and some more esoteric ones such as gait, keystrokes, and odor. (I wouldn’t want to manage the NIST independent testing for odor.)
As far as I’m concerned, the point isn’t to select the best biometric and ignore all the others. I’m a huge fan of multimodal biometrics, in which a person’s identity is verified or authenticated by multiple biometric types. It’s harder to spoof multiple biometrics than it is to spoof a single one. And even if you spoof two of them, what if the system checks for odor and you haven’t spoofed that one yet?
In the same way that I don’t care for people who select one biometric and ignore the others, I don’t care for some in the “passwords are dead” crowd who go further and say, “Passwords are dead. Use biometrics instead.”
Although I admire the rhyming nature of the phrase.
If you want a robust identity system, you need to use multiple factors in identity verification and authentication.
Again, use of multiple factors protects against spoofing. Maybe someone can create a gummy fingerprint, but can they also create a fake passport AND spoof the city in which you are physically located?
Don’t assume that biometrics answers all the ills of the world. You need other factors.
And if you master these factors, you are not only a biometric content marketing expert, but also an identity content marketing expert.
It’s not enough to understand the technical ins and outs of biometric capture, matching, and review. You need to know how biometrics are used.
Any identity content marketing expert or biometric content marketing expert worth their salt will understand these and related issues.
This is another Captain Obvious point. If you want to present yourself as a biometric contet marketing expert or identity content marketing expert, you have to have a feel for content marketing.
Here’s how HubSpot defines content marketing:
The definition of content marketing is simple: It’s the process of publishing written and visual material online with the purpose of attracting more leads to your business. These can include blog posts, pages, ebooks, infographics, videos, and more.
From https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-marketing
Here are all the types of content in which one content marketer claims proficiency (as of July 27, 2023, subject to change):
Articles • Battlecards (80+) • Blog Posts (400+) • Briefs/Data/Literature Sheets • Case Studies (12+) • Competitive Analyses • Email Newsletters (200+) • Event/Conference/Trade Show Demonstration Scripts • FAQs • Plans • Playbooks • Presentations • Proposal Templates • Proposals (100+) • Quality Improvement Documents • Requirements • Scientific Book Chapters • Smartphone Application Content • Social Media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Threads, TikTok, Twitter) • Strategic Analyses • Web Page Content • White Papers and E-Books
From https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbredehoft/, last updated 7/27/2023.
Now frankly, that list is pretty weak. You’ll notice that it doesn’t include Snapchat.
But content marketers need to be comfortable with creating at least one type of content.
Yes, an identity content marketing expert needs to thoroughly understand how L-1 Identity Solutions came to be.
I’m only half joking.
Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s (I’ll ignore FpVTE results for a moment), the fingerprint world in which I worked recognized four major vendors: Cogent, NEC, Printrak (later part of Motorola), and Sagem Morpho.
And then there were all these teeny tiny vendors that offered biometric and non-biometric solutions, including the fierce competitors Identix and Digital Biometrics, the fierce competitors Viisage and Visionics, and a bunch of other companies like Iridian.
Wel, there WERE all these teeny tiny vendors.
Until Bob LaPenta bought them all up and combined them into a single company, L-1 Identity Solutions. (LaPenta was one of the “Ls” in L-3, so he chose the name L-1 when he started his own company.)
So around 2008 the Big Four (including a post-FpVTE Motorola) became the Big Five, since L-1 Identity Solutions was now at the table with the big boys.
But then several things happened:
So as of 2023, the Big Three (as characterized by Maxine Most and FindBiometrics) are IDEMIA, NEC, and Thales.
Why do I mention all this? Because all these mergers and acquisitions have resulted in identity practitioners working for a dizzying number of firms.
As of August 2023, I myself have worked for five identity firms, but in reality four of the five are the same firm because the original Printrak International kept on getting acquired (Motorola, Safran, IDEMIA).
And that’s nothing. One of my former Printrak coworkers (R.M.) has also worked for Digital Biometrics (now part of IDEMIA), Cross Match Technologies (now part of ASSA ABLOY), Iridian (now part of IDEMIA), Datastrip, Creative Information Technology, AGNITiO, iTouch Biometrics, NDI Recognition Systems, iProov, and a few other firms here and there.
The point is that everybody knows everybody because everybody has worked with (and against) everybody. And with all the job shifts, it’s a regular Peyton Place.
Not sure which one is me, which one is R.M., and who the other people are.
Do you need someone who not only knows biometrics and content marketing, but also all the other factors, their uses, and even knows the tangled history of L-1?
Someone who offers:
If I can help you create your identity content, contact me.
This post explains what “pillar pages” are, the pros and cons of Bredemarket’s pillar pages, what I’ve learned from the “Target Audience” pillar page that I created, and how this can help your business deliver effective, converting messages to your prospects.
I’ve been working on “pillar pages” for the Bredemarket website for over a year now.
As I stated before in an April 2022 blog post, a “pillar page” is simply a central “cluster” page on your website that discusses an important topic, and which is linked to other pages that provide more detail on the topic.
Think of a wheel with a hub and spokes. The pillar page is the hub, and the related pages are the spokes.
As of July 5, 2023, I have created five pillar pages, which I label as “topics of interest” on Bredemarket’s “Information” page.
Now these pillar pages aren’t as mature as I’d like them to be.
But the pillars do their work in terms of navigation and search engine optimization. If you want to find out what Bredemarket says about a topic such as benefits, it’s fairly easy to find this.
This post delves into the fifth of my five pillar pages, the Target Audience page.
I’ve recently worked on beefing up this pillar page by linking to more Bredemarket blog posts that discuss target audiences. And in the process of making these additions, I’ve realized some things about target audiences that I wanted to summarize here. (Repurposing content refocuses the mind, I guess.)
In the process of improving my pillar page, I’ve gleaned five truths about target audiences:
I’ll discuss each of these truths and suggest how they can improve your firm’s content.
The first and most important thing is that you need a target audience before you start writing.
If you have no target audience, who is receiving your message? How do you know what to say?
For example, the primary target audience for THIS blog post is anyone from any type of company who could use Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services. It’s not limited to just the identity folks, or just the Inland Empire folks. If it were, I’d write it differently.
Here’s another target audience example that I used in an October 2022 blog post:
From https://bredemarket.com/2022/10/30/six-questions-your-content-creator-should-ask-you/
- If you’re a lollipop maker and you’re writing for kids who buy lollipops in convenience stores, you’ll write one way.
- If you’re a lollipop maker and you’re writing to the convenience stores who could carry your lollipops, you’ll write another way.
Do you see how target audiences influence what you write?
I recently criticized myself in jest because my self-promotional LinkedIn post identified two target audiences: companies who could use my services as a full-time employee, and companies who could use my services as a Bredemarket contract consultant.
This does have some drawbacks, since if I had chosen one or the other, I could have streamlined my post and made my message stronger.
But in this particular case, I chose to “muddy the waters.” Mary, grab the baby, targets rising.
The content addressed two target audiences at the same time, although this post prioritized the companies looking for full-time employees.
As long as you know in advance what you’re going to do, you can define multiple target audiences. Just don’t define a dozen target audiences for a 288-character tweet.
Perhaps you are writing a single piece of content that must address multiple target audiences. A proposal is an example of this. For example, a proposal in response to a request for proposal (RFP) for an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) affects multiple target audiences.
Here’s an example of multiple target audiences for a theoretical Ontario, California ABIS proposal, taken from a May 2021 Bredemarket post:
That’s a lot of target audiences, but if you’re submitting a 300 page proposal that answers hundreds of individual questions, you have the ability to customize each of the hundreds of responses to address the affected target audience(s).
For example, if the RFP asks about the maximum resolution of captured latent fingerprint images, your response will address the needs of the “examiner” target audience. Your response to that question won’t need to say anything about your compliance with city purchasing regulations. (Unless you have a really weird city, which is possible I guess.)
At the same time, if the RFP asks if you comply with E-Verify, this is NOT the time to brag about supporting 4,000 pixels per inch image capture.
If you haven’t read the Bredemarket blog that much, you should know that I’m not very hung up on processes—unless my client (or my employer) insists on them. Then they’re the most important thing in the world.
If you find yourself trapped in a room (preferably padded) with a bunch of certified marketing professionals, they’ll probably toss around the word “persona” a lot. A persona helps you visualize your target audience by writing to someone with a particular set of attributes. Here’s an example from the October 2022 post I cited earlier:
Jane Smith is a 54 year old single white owner of a convenience store in a rural area with an MBA and a love for Limp Bizkit…
From https://bredemarket.com/2022/10/30/six-questions-your-content-creator-should-ask-you/
If I’m going to write a particular piece of content, this persona helps me focus my writing. As I write, I can picture Jane in my mind, fetching the giant cups for the soda dispenser, planning her next trip to the big city, and wondering if her customers would mind if she started blasting this song.
Having this persona in my mind can be an excellent writing support.
So you can create personas, either on the fly (take a LinkedIn profile of a real person and change a few facts so that the persona becomes Jim, a 35 year old product/content marketer who specializes in healthcare) or through an extensive and expensive persona research program.
But what if you escape from the padded room, run away from the marketing professionals, and swear up and down that you will never ever create a persona?
Will your marketing efforts die?
No they won’t.
You can still target your writing without inventing demographic information about the person reading your content.
It depends upon the effort you want to invest in the task.
I kind of already said this, but I wanted to explicitly repeat it and emphasize it.
Regardless of whether your target audience is defined by an expensive research effort, a tweak of a real person’s LinkedIn profile, or the simple statement “we want to target latent fingerprint examiners,” the simple act of defining your target audience focuses your content.
Your text addresses the target audience, and doesn’t go off on tangents that bear no relation to your target audience.
This makes your message much more effective.
If you’re still reading, I guess it is.
Bredemarket can help you define your target audience for your content, and can help you define other things also that are necessary for effective content.
Would you like to talk to me about the content you want to create, and the message you want to deliver to your target audience?
Are you ready to take your firm to the next level with a compelling message that addresses your target audience(s) and increases awareness, consideration, conversion, and long-term revenue?
Let’s talk today!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to cross-reference this blog post with my Target Audience pillar page.
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
Are you an executive with a small or medium sized identity/biometrics firm?
If so, you want to share the story of your identity firm. But what are you going to say?
How will you figure out what makes your firm better than all the inferior identity firms that compete with you?
How will you get the word out about why your identity firm beats all the others?
Are you getting tired of my repeated questions?
Are you ready for the answers?
Over the last 29 years, I (John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket) have worked for and with over a dozen identity firms, either as an employee or as a consultant.
You’d think that since I have worked for so many different identity firms, it’s an easy thing to start working with a new firm by simply slapping down the messaging that I’ve created for all the other identity firms.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Every identity firm needs different messaging.
So which messaging is right?
It depends on who is paying me.
When creating messaging for your identity firm, one size does not fit all, for the reasons listed above.
The content of your messaging will differ, based upon your differentiators.
In addition, the channels that you use for your messaging will differ.
Identity firms will not want to market on every single social media channel. They will only market on the channels where their most motivated buyers are present.
It may be more than one of these channels, but it probably won’t be all of them.
But before you work on your content or channels, you need to know what to say, and how to communicate it.
As we’ve noted, your firm is different than all others.
Here are three methods to get you started on knowing and communicating your differentiators in your content.
If you talk to a marketer for more than two seconds about positioning a company, the marketer will probably throw the acronym “SWOT” back at you. I’ve mentioned the SWOT acronym before.
For those who don’t know the acronym, SWOT stands for
If you’re interested in more detail on the topic, there are a number of online sources that discuss SWOT analyses. Here’s TechTarget’s discussion of SWOT.
The common way to create the output from a SWOT analysis is to create four boxes and list each element (S, W, O, and T) within a box.
Once this is done, you’ll know that your messaging should emphasize the strengths and opportunities, and downplay or avoid the weaknesses and threats.
Or alternatively argue that the weaknesses and threats are really strengths and opportunities. (I’ve done this before.)
Personally, I believe that a SWOT analysis is not enough. Before you use the SWOT findings to create content, there’s a little more work you have to do.
I recommend that before you create content, you should hold a kickoff of the content creation process and figure out what you want to do before you do it.
During that kickoff meeting, you should ask some questions to make sure you understand what needs to be done.
I’ve written about kickoffs and questions before, and I’m not going to repeat what I already said. If you want to know more:
Now that you’ve locked down the messaging, it’s time to actually create the content that differentiates your identity firm from all the inferior identity firms in the market. While some companies can proceed right to content creation, others may run into one of two problems.
This is where you supplement you identity firm’s existing staff with one or more knowledgeable writers who can work with you to create the content that leaves your inferior competitors in the dust.
So do you need a knowledgeable biometric content marketing expert to create your content?
One who has been in the biometric industry for 29 years?
One who has been writing short and long form content for more than 29 years?
Are you getting tired of my repeated questions again?
Well then I’ll just tell you that Bredemarket is the answer to your identity/biometric content marketing needs.
Are you ready to take your identity firm to the next level with a compelling message that increases awareness, consideration, conversion, and long-term revenue? Let’s talk today!
Compulsions and obsessions can be bad things, or they can be good things if channeled correctly.
What if Bredemarket provided me an outlet to chnnel my compulsions and obsessions to help your business grow?
I recently wrote a three-post series (first post in the series here) that frequently used the word “compulsion.”
I almost used the word “obsession” in conjunction with the word compulsion, but decided not to make light of a medical condition that truly debilitates some people.
I used the word compulsion to refer to two things about me:
While compulsions and obsessions can certainly be bad things, when harnessed properly they can provide good for the world.
Like a butterfly.
When people of a certain age hear the word “obsession,” they may think of the 1980s song by the band Animotion.
Unfortunately for us, 90% of the song deals with the negative aspects of a person obsessing over another person. If you pick through the lyrics of the Animotion song “Obsession” and forget about what (or who) the singer is obsessing about, you can find isolated phrases that describe how an obsession can motivate you.
But thankfully, there are more positive ways to embrace an obsession.
While Justin Welsh’s July 2022 post “TSS #028: Don’t Pick a Niche. Embrace an Obsession” is targeted for solopreneurs, it could just as easily apply to those who work for others. Regardless of your compensation structure, why do you choose to work where you do?
For Welsh, the practice of picking a niche risks commoditization.
They end up looking like, sounding like, and acting like all of their competition. The internet is full of copycats and duplicates.
From https://www.justinwelsh.me/blog/dont-pick-a-niche-embrace-an-obsession
(For example, I’d bet that all of the people who are picking a niche know better than to cite the Animotion song “Obsession” in a blog post promoting their business.)
Perhaps it’s semantics, but in Welsh’s way of thinking, embracing an obsession differs from picking a niche. To describe the power of embracing an obsession, Welsh references a tweet from Daniel Vassalo:
Find something you want to do really badly, and you won’t need any goals, habits, systems, discipline, rewards, or any other mental hacks. When the motivation is intrinsic, those things happen on their own.
From https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1547230105805754369
Find something you want to do really badly, and you won’t need any goals, habits, systems, discipline, rewards, or any other mental hacks. When the motivation is intrinsic, those things happen on their own.
— Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) July 13, 2022
I trust you can see the difference between picking something you HAVE to do, versus obsessing over something you WANT to do.
Welsh was addressing this post to me and people like me, and his message resonates with me.
But frankly, YOU don’t care about me and about whether I’m motivated. All that you care about is that YOU get YOUR content that you need from me.
So why should you care what Justin Welsh and Daniel Vassllo told me?
The obvious answer is that if you contract with Bredemarket for your marketing and writing services, you’ll get a “pry my keyboard out of my cold dead hands” person who WANTS to write your stuff, and doesn’t want to turn the writing process over to some two-year-old bot (except for very small little bits).
Regarding the use of two-year-old bots:
“Pry my keyboard,” indeed.
Of course, if you need someone to write YOUR stuff, then I won’t have time to work on a TikTok dance. This is a good thing for me, you, and the world.
As I’ve stated elsewhere, before I write a thing for a Bredemarket client, I make sure that I understand WHY you do what you do, and understand everything else that is relevant to the content that we create.
As I work on the content, you have opportunities to review it and provide your feedback. This ensures that both of us are happy with the final copy.
And that your end users become obsessed with YOU.
So if you need me to create content for you, please contact me.
Feel free to share YOUR favorite 1980s song if you like.
Even if it’s THIS song that your favorite temperamental writer detests.
Bredemarket