Your company probably spends a lot of money exhibiting and presenting at trade shows and conferences. And you probably email your prospects and customers about your participation in these events.
But what about the people not on your mailing list?
You can do what the Biometrics Institute has done and create an events page on your website. As I write this, the Biometrics Institute’s events page lists upcoming appearances from March to June, including both in-person events and (for those of us nowhere near Sydney) online events.
How many Biometrics Institute members (and non-members) have their own events pages? One major identity firm (I won’t name it) has an events page…with no events.
But even if you don’t have a web page per se, you can email your prospects and customers as mentioned above. Another identity firm just sent me an email listing several future events, their dates, their locations, and why I would want to go to any of these events.
Do your prospects know about your upcoming events? Bredemarket can help you create a blog post, social media post, email, or even some web page content so that your prospects can see you. Let’s talk.
By the way, here are all the services Bredemarket provides.
If you’re on a platform such as Facebook, you sometimes receive advertisements that are VERY specific. Such as, “This is the perfect drink holder for California white males over the age of 50!” It’s almost as if they know everything about you…because they do.
Unless you implement privacy restrictions and don’t allow platform advertisers to reference your personal information.
Of course, if the advertiser isn’t able to narrowcast directly to you, the advertiser will broadcast to everybody.
And Facebook will start showing you advertisements in Chinese.
Qiaobi.
And if you complain to Facebook and ask why you’re seeing Chinese ads, Facebook will simply reply, “We are prohibited from using your personal information. Since there are a billion Chinese, we take a guess that you’re Chinese and show you those ads.”
Which brings us to age and social media.
The Under 16s Are Blocklisted
Back when Marky Mark created The Facebook, he initially targeted college-age users. But as time went on, Facebook and its competitors started aiming for younger ages.
This makes sense. Advertisers want to target consumers who are suspectible to changing their minds and are not set in their ways. So while a super kewl soft drink manufacturer isn’t going to target me, it is going to target 18 year olds…and 16 year olds…and 14 year olds…and 12 year olds.
A recent DKC report stated that 42% of all household spending is influenced by 8- to 14-year-olds, and that this age group is DIRECTLY spending over $100 billion per year.
So you can bet that advertisers are clamoring to purchase ad time on Facebook, TikTok, and the other social media services to get a pipeline to the brains of these 8 to 14 year olds…whoops, 12 to 14 year olds, since most social media services require you to be at least 12 years old to have an account.
But what if access to that entire age group is cut off entirely?
We’re seeing all over the world that jurisdictions are enacting or trying to enact bans on the use of social media for people under 16 years of age. The latest country to propose such a move is Indonesia:
“Authorities in the country, which is Southeast Asia’s largest economy, said Friday they expect social media platforms to deactivate the accounts of under-16s from March 28, starting with YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, Bigo Live and Roblox.”
In other words, all the popular sites that teens love.
And in certain jurisdictions, the companies will implement age verification and age estimation technology to ensure that kids don’t like about their ages to get in.
Assuming these prohibitions stand, this causes a huge problem for B2C marketers that target teens: how do you market to them when the direct pipelines to this age group are cut off?
I’m just thankful that Bredemarket and its clients sell to adults. You don’t really see 13 year olds buying biometric technology.
In this video, the Cranky Cynic (Tom Peracchio) contemplates how the “rabbit hole” has evolved over the centuries, from Lewis Carroll to Jefferson Airplane to the Matrix to today’s so-called social media.
More and more jurisdictions are mandating age assurance (either age verification or age estimation) to access online services. Perhaps racy content, perhaps gambling content, or in some cases even plain old social media. But in a technical sense these age assurance mechanisms are a network problem…and you can just route yourself around a problem.
Your jurisdiction doesn’t allow you to visit the Sensuous Wildebeests website? Just install a virtual private network (VPN) to pretend that you’re in a different jurisdiction that allows access.
“After the Online Safety Act triggered a 6,000+% surge in VPN usage, the House of Lords tabled an amendment to ban children from using VPNs. Under the proposal, VPN providers would have to verify the age of all UK users. The government has said it will “look very closely” at VPN usage.”
For more information on this proposal, see TechRadar.
Google Gemini.
And this is just one of many examples of government examination, and perhaps regulation, of VPN use.
But as Secrets of Privacy points out, there’s one big problem. VPN users aren’t only kids trying to dodge the law, or individuals trying to protect their privacy. There’s one very big class of VPN users who would NOT appreciate government regulation.
“VPNs are fundamental to modern business IT, which makes a “ban” hard to envision. Every corporation with remote workers uses them. Diverse industries, such as banking, law, finance, and ecom giants all depend on VPN technology. You can’t ban VPNs without breaking the backbone of modern IT systems.”
“VPNs were developed when networks were different than they are now. Before the advent of cloud applications, resources were isolated within a secure corporate network perimeter. Now, modern networking infrastructures are being deployed that can quickly adapt and scale to new business requirements, which means applications and data are no longer contained within the corporate data center. Instead they reside across distributed multi-cloud and hybrid data center networks.
“This change has led to a rapid expansion of the attack surface, and in the face of this changing cybersecurity environment, Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) has received more attention as an alternative to VPNs for remote access.”
Of course, VPNs will fade away at the same time the password dies…in other words, not any time soon. And while Secrets of Privacy speculates about a two-tier solution in which corporations can use VPNs but individuals cannot…we’ll see.
Do you have trust, or zero trust, that VPNs will be regulated in ALL jurisdictions in the future?
I confess that I love my promotional videos. After all, someone has to.
If you haven’t figured it out yet, my current super-sweet saccharine crush is “Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing,” originally shared here on the Bredemarket blog last Wednesday.
= = reel
Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing.
But I’m forced to admit that there are billions of people who never read the Bredemarket blog, and therefore will never see this post or the original one. Their loss. Thank you to those of you who do stop by; it’s appreciated.
But I can catch a few of them by sharing my video on other social platforms.
If you want to lose 15 minutes of your life, redundantly watch all of them.
So here’s my ask, if you are so inclined. Share this video with your friends on one of the platforms to help me get the word out about how Bredemarket can help technology marketing leaders…um, get the word out.
Last night I saw a Substack post from one of my subscriptions, but I immediately distrusted the post.
The post was purportedly from Kathy Kristof from SideHusl.com. Now Kristof herself is legitimate, and her SideHusl website evaluates…well, side hustles.
But this message didn’t sound like Kathy, and my spidey sense was aroused.
First part of scam post.
Second part of scam post.
Let me count the ways.
“We.” Normally if an entity suffers a breach, the entity uses its name.
“Your device”…”the firmware level.” Substack posts can be viewed on a variety of devices. So this supposed breach affected all of them?
“If you are receiving this email.” While Substack subscribers can receive emails of posts, they also appear on the Substack website. I happened to be on the Substack website when I saw the post. I was not reading an email.
“Take immediate action…by updating your firmware.” The typical scam sense of urgency, coupled with a non-sensical request (see 2).
“The FBI has been notified.” Such a report should probably go to a different agency.
“support@trezor.io.” Trezor is a legitimate company that secures crypto assets…which has nothing to do with SideHusl or Substack. And by the way…
“Substack” (not). In the same way that the post does not explicitly mention SideHusl, it doesn’t explicitly mention Substack either.
“Access Dashboard button.” The reader is asked to click this button, supposedly to update their firmware (see 2).
In a private Facebook share, Rahsheen Porter quoted from Cal Newport:
“We know these platforms are bad for us, so why are they still so widely used? They tell a compelling story: that all of your frantic tapping and swiping makes you a key part of a political revolution, or a fearless investigator, or a righteous protestor – that when you’re online, you’re someone important, doing important things during an important time.
“But this, for the most part, is an illusion. In reality, you’re toiling anonymously in an attention factory, while billionaire overseers mock your efforts and celebrate their growing net worths.”
The algorithms only show you what they think will cause you to maximally engage. Even in the days of FriendFeed, I never saw content from the extremely active Turkish and Italian communities. Why should I? I saw what FriendFeed wanted me to see.
But I’m thankful that Facebook shows me Rahsheen’s content.
And I am also thankful for those who understood the “Go See Cal” post title.
And finally, I am thankful to the residents and former residents of south Arlington, Virginia who detected the inside joke in the picture above. (Hint: the hoodie was originally gray.)
Bredemarket 