tires, myths, and reality

Previously: reinventing Gosplan

Doc Searls went to Tieman Tire in Bloomington, Indiana to get a tire fixed. Tieman Tire is clearly a post-surveillance business, far out ahead of the innovation curve.

surveillance myth: the most valuable parts of a business are based on personalization
reality: for almost all brands the most valuable parts are common to most or all customers (there aren’t some people who want leaky tires and some people who want the fixed kind)

surveillance myth: small businesses want social media advertising
reality: they wanted social networking and got switched over. Policy changes that limit surveillance will make independent businesses better off.

surveillance myth: it’s cheaper to acquire new customers with surveillance ads than to keep customers
reality: even if it ever was cheaper, customer acquisition costs on big platforms keep increasing (platforms are growth stocks, which means they have to grow faster than the economy as a whole, which means faster than the rate at which people buy stuff. So each attributable “conversion” has to keep costing more, and more and more of the economy has to go to the big surveillance ad platforms. Do the math, I don’t make the rules). Meanwhile customer acquisition and retention done in-house has the same kinds of learning curves as other skills, so will trend down over time as employee expertise increases.

surveillance myth: content is fungible, targeting algorithms are uniquely valuable
reality: expert brands such as King Arthur Baking and Tieman Tire have product and service knowledge that differentiates them, and that the company can keep and build on.

More: living with a bigger ad duopoly

Related

the Linux device driver hacker’s guide to giant Internet monopoly dominance

Bonus links

Off Kilter 205: Personal Insanity. by Paul Worthington. For twenty years, marketers have chased the fantasy of the right message to the right person at the right time. What we got is a costly, complex, and bloated tech stack, flattened performance, and, increasingly, strategic irrelevance.

The accelerating enshittification of search by Adrian Segar. I am a trusted expert on participant-driven and participation-rich conference design and facilitation. My blog is the most visited resource on meeting design in the world. And yet, in just a year, the traffic to my site has shifted from engaged human readers to bots that relentlessly harvest my content to feed an ever-increasing number of LLMs.

NYC mom whose teen son died subway surfing can sue TikTok, Instagram, judge says - Gothamist by Samantha Max. Norma Nazario sued TikTok parent company ByteDance, Instagram parent company Meta, the MTA and the New York City Transit Authority after her son, Zackery Nazario, fell off the top of a subway car and died in February 2023. She accused the social media companies of creating addictive apps that inundate young people with videos that encourage them to participate in unsafe activities. (Original Decision + Order on Motion (PDF) Difference between this case and the Gonzalez v Google case is that this time, the complaint alleges that the victim was targeted based on age, not on previous content they visited.)