Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
Identity/biometric firms: does anyone know who you are?
Who can help your firm create content?
Who knows identity/biometrics:
Who can provide content:
I know who can help.
Contact Bredemarket: https://bredemarket.com/contact/
Identity professionals, what’s in a name?
You cannot uniquely identity someone by name alone.
A unique identification relies on multiple factors.
If your firm desires to tell a story about how your identity solution surpasses name-based solutions, Bredemarket can help.
If you book a free 30 minute meeting with Bredemarket, you’ll now find an additional option in the “What Type of Content Do You Need?” section: Market/competitor analysis. I’ve done these for years, but never added the option to the form.
My analyses ONLY use publicly available information that is NOT subject to NDA. So you won’t get access to the analyses I’ve performed for other clients, and they won’t get access to the analysis I prepare for you.
While I primarily provide these analyses in the identity/biometrics industry, I’m open to discussing analysis needs in other industries.
Book a meeting to discuss your content needs.
“If you’re not careful, you might learn something before it’s done.”
(Quote from William H. Cosby, M.A., Ed.D., L.H.D. (resc), from the Fat Albert TV show theme song. From https://www.streetdirectory.com/lyricadvisor/song/upujwj/fat_albert/.)
When I write about space aliens, there’s a reason. And that reason may be to warn identity vendors that silence is NOT golden.
As a frequent reader and writer on LinkedIn, I’ve seen all the tips and tricks to drive engagement. One popular trick is to make up a story that will resonate with the LinkedIn audience.
For example, the writer (usually a self-proclaimed career expert who is ex-FAANG) will tell the entirely fictional story of a clueless hiring manager and an infinitely wise recruiter. The clueless hiring manager is shocked that a candidate accepted a competing job offer. “Didn’t she like us?” asks the hiring manager. The wise recruiter reminds the clueless hiring manager that the candidate had endured countless delays in numerous interviews with the company, allowing another company to express interest in and snatch her.
Job seekers have endured countless delays in their own employment searches. When they read the post, they hoot and holler for the candidate and boo the clueless hiring manager. Most importantly, readers like and love the writer’s post until it goes viral, making the author an ex-FAANG top recruiting voice.
Even though no sources are cited and the story is fictional, it is very powerful.
Well…until you’ve read the same story a dozen times from a dozen recruiters. Then it gets tiresome.
But those fake stories powerfully drive clicks on LinkedIn, so I wanted to get in on the action. But I was going to add two wrinkles to my fake story.
First, I would explicitly admit that my story is fake. Because authenticity. Sort of.
Second, my story would include space aliens to make it riveting. And to hammer the point that the story is fake.
Now I just had to write a fake story with space aliens.
Or did I?
It turned out that I had already written a fake story. It didn’t have space aliens, but I liked the story I had spun in the Bredemarket blog post “(Pizza Stories) Is Your Firm Hungry for Awareness?”
I just needed to make one of the characters a space alien, and since Jones was based on the striking Grace Jones, I went ahead and did it. If you can imagine Grace Jones with tentacles, two noses, and eight legs.
With a few additional edits, my fake space alien story was ready for the Sunday night LinkedIn audience.
As the space alien’s tentacles quivered, I snuck something else into the LinkedIn story—some facts.
Kids who watched Fat Albert on TV not only enjoyed the antics, but also learned an Important Life Lessons. Now I don’t have multiple advanced degrees like Cosby, but then again I never had multiple degrees rescinded either.
But my life lesson wasn’t to stay in school or pull your pants up. My life lesson was to blog. The lesson was in the form of a statement by Jones’ humanoid colleague Smith, taken verbatim from the Pizza Stories post.
“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.”
The stats originally appeared in an earlier post, “How Identity and Biometrics Firms Can Use Blogging to Grow Their Business.”
And the fake story also talked about companies (unnamed, but real) who ignored these facts and remained silent on their blog and social channels.
A huge mistake, because their competitors ARE engaging with their prospects, with real stories.
Is your company making the same mistake?
I guess I should mention David Byrne. OK, I did.
I’ve talked about synthetic identity fraud a lot in the Bredemarket blog over the past several years. I’ll summarize a few examples in this post, talk about how to fight synthetic identity fraud, and wrap up by suggesting how to get the word out about your anti-synthetic identity solution.
But first let’s look at a few examples of synthetic identity.
As far back as December 2020, I discussed Kris’ Rides’ encounter with a synthetic employee from a company with a number of synthetic employees (many of who were young females).
More recently, I discussed attempts to create synthetic identities using gummy fingers and fake/fraudulent voices. The topic of deepfakes continues to be hot across all biometric modalities.
I shared a video I created about synthetic identities and their use to create fraudulent financial identities.
I even discussed Kelly Shepherd, the fake vegan mom created by HBO executive Casey Bloys to respond to HBO critics.
And that’s just some of what Bredemarket has written about synthetic identity. You can find the complete list of my synthetic identity posts here.
It isn’t enough to talk about the fact that synthetic identities exist: sometimes for innocent reasons, sometimes for outright fraudulent reasons.
You need to communicate how to fight synthetic identities, especially if your firm offers an anti-fraud solution.
Here are four ways to fight synthetic identities:
If you conduct all four tests, then you have used multiple factors of authentication to confirm that the person is who they say they are. If the identity is synthetic, chances are the purported person will fail at least one of these tests.
If you fight synthetic identity fraud, you should let people know about your solution.
Perhaps you can use Bredemarket, the identity content marketing expert. I work with you (and I have worked with others) to ensure that your content meets your awareness, consideration, and/or conversion goals.
How can I work with you to communicate your firm’s anti-synthetic identity message? For example, I can apply my identity/biometric blog expert knowledge to create an identity blog post for your firm. Blog posts provide an immediate business impact to your firm, and are easy to reshare and repurpose. For B2B needs, LinkedIn articles provide similar benefits.
If Bredemarket can help your firm convey your message about synthetic identity, let’s talk.
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
There are a LOT of biometric companies out there.
With over 100 firms in the biometric industry, their offerings are going to naturally differ—even if all the firms are TRYING to copy each other and offer “me too” solutions.
I’ve worked for over a dozen biometric firms as an employee or independent contractor, and I’ve analyzed over 80 biometric firms in competitive intelligence exercises, so I’m well aware of the vast implementation differences between the biometric offerings.
Some of the implementation differences provoke vehement disagreements between biometric firms regarding which choice is correct. Yes, we FIGHT.
Let’s look at three (out of many) of these implementation differences and see how they affect YOUR company’s content marketing efforts—whether you’re engaging in identity blog post writing, or some other content marketing activity.
Firms that develop biometric solutions make (or should make) the following choices when implementing their solutions.
I will address each of these questions in turn, highlighting the pros and cons of each implementation choice. After that, we’ll see how this affects your firm’s content marketing.
Back in June 2023 I defined what a “presentation attack” is.
(I)nstead of capturing a true biometric from a person, the biometric sensor is fooled into capturing a fake biometric: an artificial finger, a face with a mask on it, or a face on a video screen (rather than a face of a live person).
This tomfoolery is called a “presentation attack” (becuase you’re attacking security with a fake presentation).
Then I talked about standards and testing.
But the standards folks have developed ISO/IEC 30107-3:2023, Information technology — Biometric presentation attack detection — Part 3: Testing and reporting.
And an organization called iBeta is one of the testing facilities authorized to test in accordance with the standard and to determine whether a biometric reader can detect the “liveness” of a biometric sample.
(Friends, I’m not going to get into passive liveness and active liveness. That’s best saved for another day.)
Well…that day is today.
Now I could cite a firm using active liveness detection to say why it’s great, or I could cite a firm using passive liveness detection to say why it’s great. But perhaps the most balanced assessment comes from facia, which offers both types of liveness detection. How does facia define the two types of liveness detection?
Active liveness detection, as the name suggests, requires some sort of activity from the user. If a system is unable to detect liveness, it will ask the user to perform some specific actions such as nodding, blinking or any other facial movement. This allows the system to detect natural movements and separate it from a system trying to mimic a human being….
Passive liveness detection operates discreetly in the background, requiring no explicit action from the user. The system’s artificial intelligence continuously analyses facial movements, depth, texture, and other biometric indicators to detect an individual’s liveness.
Briefly, the pros and cons of the two methods are as follows:
So in truth the choice is up to each firm. I’ve worked with firms that used both liveness detection methods, and while I’ve spent most of my time with passive implementations, the active ones can work also.
A perfect wishy-washy statement that will get BOTH sides angry at me. (Except perhaps for companies like facia that use both.)
There are a lot of applications for age assurance, or knowing how old a person is. These include smoking tobacco or marijuana, buying firearms, driving a car, drinking alcohol, gambling, viewing adult content, using social media, or buying garden implements.
If you need to know a person’s age, you can ask them. Because people never lie.
Well, maybe they do. There are two better age assurance methods:
I’ve gone back and forth on this. As I previously mentioned, my employment history includes time with a firm produces driver’s licenses for the majority of U.S. states. And back when that firm was providing my paycheck, I was financially incentivized to champion age verification based upon the driver’s licenses that my company (or occasionally some inferior company) produced.
But as age assurance applications moved into other areas such as social media use, a problem occurred since 13 year olds usually don’t have government IDs. A few of them may have passports or other government IDs, but none of them have driver’s licenses.
But does age estimation work? I’m not sure if ANYONE has posted a non-biased view, so I’ll try to do so myself.
How precise is age estimation? We’ll find out soon, once NIST releases the results of its Face Analysis Technology Evaluation (FATE) Age Estimation & Verification test. The release of results is expected in early May.
Fingerprints, palm prints, faces, irises, and everything up to gait. (And behavioral biometrics.) There are a lot of biometric modalities out there, and one that has been around for years is the voice biometric.
I’ve discussed this topic before, and the partial title of the post (“We’ll Survive Voice Spoofing”) gives away how I feel about the matter, but I’ll present both sides of the issue.
No one can deny that voice spoofing exists and is effective, but many of the examples cited by the popular press are cases in which a HUMAN (rather than an ALGORITHM) was fooled by a deepfake voice. But voice recognition software can also be fooled.
(Incidentally, there is a difference between voice recognition and speech recognition. Voice recognition attempts to determine who a person is. Speech recognition attempts to determine what a person says.)
Take a study from the University of Waterloo, summarized here, that proclaims: “Computer scientists at the University of Waterloo have discovered a method of attack that can successfully bypass voice authentication security systems with up to a 99% success rate after only six tries.”
If you re-read that sentence, you will notice that it includes the words “up to.” Those words are significant if you actually read the article.
In a recent test against Amazon Connect’s voice authentication system, they achieved a 10 per cent success rate in one four-second attack, with this rate rising to over 40 per cent in less than thirty seconds. With some of the less sophisticated voice authentication systems they targeted, they achieved a 99 per cent success rate after six attempts.
Similar to Gender Shades, the University of Waterloo study does not appear to have tested hundreds of voice recognition algorithms. But there are other studies.
You’ll note that the top performers don’t have error rates anywhere near the University of Waterloo’s 99 percent.
So some firms will argue that voice recognition can be spoofed and thus cannot be trusted, while other firms will argue that the best voice recognition algorithms are rarely fooled.
Obviously, different firms are going to respond to the three questions above in different ways.
There is no universal truth here, and the message your firm conveys depends upon your firm’s unique characteristics.
And those characteristics can change.
Bear this in mind as you create your blog, white paper, case study, or other identity/biometric content, or have someone like the biometric content marketing expert Bredemarket work with you to create your content. There are people who sincerely hold the opposite belief of your firm…but your firm needs to argue that those people are, um, misinformed.
And as a postscript I’ll provide two videos that feature voices. The first is for those who detected my reference to the ABBA song “Waterloo.”
The second features the late Steve Bridges as President George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
The identity/biometric company (not named here) never formally learned why prospects shunned the outdated information on its website.
The identity/biometric company never formally learned how its references to renamed companies and non-existent companies were repelling those very companies…and the prospects who knew the website information was inaccurate.
With those types of mistakes, the entire company’s positioning became suspect.
It could have learned…if it had met with me. But it chose not to do so.
NOTE TO SELF: INSERT STRONG FEAR UNCERTAINTY AND DOUBT PARAGRAPH HERE. TAKE OUT THESE TWO SENTENCES BEFORE POSTING THE FINAL VERSION!!!
(By the way…while the identity/biometric company never received this information formally, it did receive it informally…because such information is presumably critically important to the company.)
How many other companies are in the same situation, with:
(T)here are clues within the content itself as to its age, such as “Our product is now supported on Windows 7.”
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.
Is there a 29-year veteran of the identity industry, an identity content marketing expert who can help the companies fix these gaps?
And yes, the ALL CAPS paragraph was a setup. But I’m sure you can compose a FUD paragraph on your own without my help.
Age assurance shows that a customer meets the minimum age for buying a product or service.
I thought I knew every possible use case for age assurance—smoking tobacco or marijuana, buying firearms, driving a car, drinking alcohol, gambling, viewing adult content, or using social media.
But after investigating a product featured in Cultivated Cool, I realized that I had missed one use case. Turns out that there’s another type of company that needs age assurance…and a way to explain the age assurance method the company adopts.
Psst…don’t tell anyone what you’re about to read.
The so-called experts say that a piece of content should only have one topic and one call to action. Well, it’s Sunday so hopefully the so-called experts are taking a break and will never see the paragraphs below.
This is my endorsement for Cultivated Cool. Its URL is https://cultivated.cool/, which I hope you can remember.
Cultivated Cool self-identifies as “(y)our weekly guide to the newest, coolest products you didn’t know you needed.” Concentrating on the direct-to-consumer (DTC or D2C) space, Cultivated Cool works with companies to “transform (their) email marketing from a chore into a revenue generator.” And to prove the effectiveness of email, it offers its own weekly email that highlights various eye-catching products. But not trendy ones:
Trends come and go but cool never goes out of style.
From https://cultivated.cool/.
Bredemarket isn’t a prospect for Cultivated Cool’s first service—my written content creation is not continuously cool. (Although it’s definitely not trendy either). But I am a consumer of Cultivated Cool’s weekly emails, and you should subscribe to its weekly emails also. Enter your email and click the “Subscribe” button on Cultivated Cool’s webpage.
And Cultivated Cool’s weekly emails lead me to the point of this post.
Today’s weekly newsletter issue from Cultivated Cool is entitled “Dig It.” But this has nothing to do with the Beatles or with Abba. Instead it has to do with gardening, and the issue tells the story of Stella, in five parts. The first part is entitled “Snip it in the Bud,” and begins as follows.
Stella felt a shiver go down her spine the first time the pruner blades closed. She wasn’t just cutting branches; she was sculpting air.
From https://cultivated.cool/dig-it/.
The pruner blades featured in Cultivated Cool are sold by Niwaki, an English company that offers Japanese-inspired products. As I type this, Niwaki offers 18 different types of secateurs (pruning shears), including large hand, small hand, right-handed, and left-handed varieties. You won’t get these at your dollar store; prices (excluding VAT) range from US$45.50 to US$280.50 (Tobisho Hiryu Secateurs).
But regardless of price, all the secateurs sold by Niwaki have one thing in common: an age restriction on purchases. Not that Niwaki truly enforces this restriction.
Please note: By law, we are not permitted to sell a knife or blade to any person under the age of 18. By placing an order for one of these items you are declaring that you are 18 years of age or over. These items must be used responsibly and appropriately.
From https://www.niwaki.com/tobisho-hiryu-secateurs/#P00313-1.
That’s the functional equivalent of the so-called age verification scheme used on some alcohol websites.
I hope you’re sitting down as I reveal this to you: underage people can bypass the age assurance scheme on alcohol websites by inputting any year of birth that they wish. Just like anyone, even a small child, can make any declaration of age that they want, as long as their credit card is valid.
Now I have no idea whether Ofcom’s UK Online Safety Act consultations will eventually govern Niwaki’s sales of adult-controlled physical products. But if Niwaki finds itself under the UK Online Safety Act, or some other act in the United Kingdom or any country where Niwaki conducts business, then a simple assurance that the purchaser is old enough to buy “a knife or blade” will not be sufficient.
Niwaki’s website would then need to adopt some form of age assurance for purchasers, either by using a government-issued identification document (age verification) or examining the face to algorithmically surmise the customer’s age (age estimation).
And then the seller would need to explain why it was doing all of this.
How can a company explain its age assurance solution in a way that its prospects will understand…and how can the company reassure its prospects that its age assurance method protects their privacy?
Which brings me to the TRUE call to action in this post. (Sorry Mark and Lindsey. You’re still cool.)
I’ve stated ad nauseum that identity companies need to explain their identity solutions: why they developed them, how they work, what they do, and several other things.
In the same way, firms that incorporate solutions from identity companies got some splainin’ to do.
This applies to a financial institution that requires customers to use an identity verification solution before opening an account, just like it applies to an online gardening implement website that uses an age assurance method to check the age of pruning shear purchasers.
So how can such companies explain their identity and biometrics features in a way their end customers can understand?
I’ve previously noted that product marketers sometimes function as de facto content marketers. I oughta know.
For example, during my most recent stint as a product marketing employee at a startup, the firm had no official content marketers, so the product marketers had to create a lot of non-product related content. So we product marketers were the de facto content marketers for the company too. (Sadly, we didn’t get two salaries for filling two roles.)
Why did the product marketers end up as content marketers? It turns out that it makes sense—after all, people who write about your product in the lower funnel stages can also write about your product in the upper funnel stages, and also can certainly write about OTHER things, such as company descriptions, speaker submissions, and speaker biographies.
From https://bredemarket.com/2023/08/28/the-22-or-more-types-of-content-that-product-marketers-create/.
That’s from my post describing the 22 (or more) types of content that product marketers create. Or the types that one product marketer in particular has created.
So it stands to reason that I am not only the biometric content marketing expert, but also the biometric product marketing expert.
I just wanted to put that on the record.
And in case you were wondering what the 22 types of content are, here is the external content:
And here is the internal content:
And here is the content that can be external or internal on any given day:
So if you need someone who can create this content for your identity/biometrics product, you know where to find me.
Business-to-business (B2B) writing isn’t as complex as some people say it is. It may be hard, but it’s not complex.
Neil Patel (or, more accurately, his Ubersuggest service) um, suggested that I say something about B2B writing.
And then he (or it) suggested that I use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to write the piece.
I had a feeling the result was going to suck, but I clicked the “Write For Me” button anyway.
Um, thanks but no thanks. When the first sentence doesn’t even bother to define the acronym “B2B,” you know the content isn’t useful to explain the topic “what is B2B writing.”
And this, my friends, is why I never let generative AI write the first draft of a piece.
Before I explain what B2B writing is, maybe I’d better explain what “B2B” is. And two related acronyms.
I included the “B2G” acronym because most of my years in identity and biometrics were devoted to local, state, federal, and international government sales. My B2G experience is much deeper than my B2B experience, and way deeper than my B2C expertise.
I’m sure that Ubersuggest could spin out a whole bunch of long-winded paragraphs that explain the critical differences between the three marketing efforts above. But let’s keep it simple and limit ourselves to two truths and no lies.
TRUTH ONE: When you market B2B or B2G products or services, you have FEWER customers than when you market B2C products or services.
That’s pretty much it in terms of differences. I’ll give you an example.
The sheer scale of B2C marketing vs. B2B/B2G marketing is tremendous and affects how the company markets its products and services.
But one thing is similar among all three types of writing.
TRUTH TWO: B2B writing, B2G writing, and B2C writing are all addressed to PEOPLE.
Well, until we program the bots to read stuff for us.
This is something we often forget. We think that we are addressing a blog post or a proposal to an impersonal “company.” Um, who works in companies? People.
(Again, until we program the bots.)
Whether you’re marketing a business blog post writing service, a government software system, or a pseudo rib sandwich, you’re pitching it to a person. A person with problems and needs that you can potentially solve.
So solve their needs.
Don’t make it complex.
Let’s return to the original question. Sorry, I got off on a bit of a tangent. (But at least I didn’t trail off into musings about “the dynamic and competitive world.”)
When I write something for a business:
Again, this is hard, but not complex.
It’s possible to make this MUCH MORE complex and create a 96 step plan to author B2B content.
But why?
So now I’ve answered the question “What is B2B writing?”
Can Bredemarket write for your business? If so, contact me.
Bredemarket