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.
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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.)
For the past few months I have been posting some of Bredemarket’s reels on Flip, but my (mostly) business-related reels didn’t resonate with Flip’s consumer-oriented audience.
(Which makes my posting life easier, to be honest, but I will keep the app on my phone for a bit just in case someone with money buys the company’s assets.)
Is Instagram next?
No, seriously.
What if you based your entire business model on a single social media channel…and it suddenly disappeared?
“We convince ourselves to hold on just a little longer, to give one more chance, to extend one more ounce of patience. We hope things will change, that people will appreciate us, that circumstances will finally shift in our favor. But sometimes, despite our best efforts, the change never comes.
“That’s when the lesson arrives—not in a single, dramatic flash, but in a quiet realization: I deserve better than this. I deserve to feel seen, valued, respected.”
This was never supposed to go on the Bredemarket blog, but here it is. Because when a product marketing consultant wants to improve his storytelling skills, he practices with…toilet paper.
Wylie likes to share art challenges, and she recently shared this one. The text below, including the emojis, is straight from the challenge.
📣 New Weekly Wednesday Challenge 📣
🌟 Glitch N’ Sass and AI Anonymous Present:
🎭✨ MESMERIZE THE MUNDANE ✨🎭
Where glitter drips from code and imagination struts in stilettos. @everyone 💥
Take the forgotten, the overlooked, the tragically basic —
and unleash the glam-core magic of AI.
Allow creativity to glitch the system, let sass polish the mundane, all while reshaping reality.
⸻
Flip the script on the everyday:
🥄 A spoon stirs time’s secrets
👟 A shoelace coils into cosmic scales
📎 A paperclip snaps open hidden realms
✨ Rewire purpose.
✨ Reframe presence.
✨ Reveal what the world forgets to see.
📌 Tag it: #AIAnonymous #GlitchNSass #MesmerizeTheMundane
⸻
💬 This isn’t an art drop — it’s an everyday clutch, transformed into a chasm of creativity .
A call to those who see depth in the digital, beauty in glitches, and freedom behind the mask.
We are not escaping the world — we are a reminder, to view it. For all the purposes they told us it never possessed. 🔥
✨ So go on… Mesmerize us, With glitter in one hand and encrypted vision in the other. ✨
Preparing my response
Now on the surface such an exercise has nothing to do with “know your business” or “biometric product marketing expert” or “content – proposal – analysis”…
…but it does.
In essence, written business communications are opportunities for storytelling. As I noted, case studies are inspiring stories about how a challenged company realized amazing success, all thanks to the wonderful Green Widget Gizmo.
Now that’s a riveting story.
Tell us about the Green Widget Gizmo again PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE! Imagen 4.
And of course I’ve performed AI image storytelling before: for example, with my three “Biometric product marketing expert” reels. Here’s the second:
Biometric product marketing expert, the content for tech marketers version.
But back to the “Mesmerize the Mundane” challenge. So to participate in the challenge I had to find something mundane. Now some of you think a single finger sensor is mundane…but I don’t. (There’s actually a connection between fingerprint sensors and art, but I’m under NDA.)
My response
So I picked a mundane topic: toilet paper.
What’s even better is that toilet paper is filled with emotion. Particularly relative to the ongoing debate about whether…
I’m not going to say it. I hope this reel—my entry into the “Mesmerize the Mundane” challenge—speaks for itself.
The over/under.
When I shared this reel on Facebook and elsewhere, I did so with the following text.
A storytelling exercise…and a challenge.
You can’t get more mundane than toilet paper, or spawn fiercer battles over orientation. But love conquers battles.
One of the challenges in multi-image storytelling is the need for consistency between the images. You can’t have the hero wildebeest wearing a blue cap in the first picture and a red one in the second.
So to enforce consistency, I’ve been bundling all my picture prompts into a single request to Google Gemini, and including instructions to enforce similarity between the pictures in the series.
AI art creation. This is the picture I use for the Bredemarket Picture Clubhouse Facebook group.
So here is the specific request used to create the four pictures in the reel above.
Draw realistic pictures based upon the following four prompts:
Prompt 1: Draw a realistic picture of a toilet paper holder on a blue tiled bathroom wall, next to the toilet. The toilet paper is white. The toilet paper end is hanging in front of the roll.
Prompt 2: Draw a realistic picture similar to the image in the previous prompt, a toilet paper holder on a blue tiled bathroom wall, next to the toilet. The toilet paper is still white. This time, however, the toilet paper end is hanging behind the roll.
Prompt 3: Draw a realistic picture similar to the image in the previous prompts, a toilet paper holder on a blue tiled bathroom wall, next to the toilet. Now the toilet paper is glowing in a neon red. Due to mesmerizing magic, there is a toilet paper end hanging in front of the roll, and there is also a duplicate toilet paper end hanging behind the roll. The presence of both toilet paper ends removes the conflict of whether to hang toilet paper in front of our behind the roll; now, both are simultaneously true.
Prompt 4: Draw a realistic picture similar to the image in the previous prompts, a toilet paper holder next to the toilet. But now the tiles on the bathroom wall are colored gold, vibrating, and throbbing. The toilet itself is glowing with a bright light. Now the toilet paper is glowing in red, green, and blue, and sparkles are shooting away from the toilet paper roll like fireworks. Again, due to mesmerizing magic, there is a toilet paper end hanging in front of the roll, and there is also a duplicate toilet paper end hanging behind the roll. The bathroom floor is covered in hundred dollar bills and shiny gold coins.
And here are the full square pictures, which do not completely display in the reel.
Now I just have to tell the riveting story of a single finger sensor.
My personal Facebook account is technically a “professional” account, and therefore has Meta’s silly weekly contests. I have the content part down, but I’m NOT creating a Meta personal AI bot. (The Bredemarket Instagram account has two.)
The relative’s outpatient surgery was a success, and recovery is progressing.
Meanwhile, I met with one client and advanced several client product marketing projects, including a requirements document (done those for years), some product talking points (done those for years), a price/cost/supplier exercise (done those for years), and a project status report (done those for years).
I also published four Bredemarket posts (including this one) and the usual assortment of social media content on various channels (with the exception of one).
U.S. persons should pay special attention to my coverage of IDGA’s DoD/DHS border security report (blog, Substack, elsewhere).
Bredemarket 