Yes.
Um…
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For the truly paranoid you can spread the rumor that the push pins are really miniature wifi antennas.
I think the term is “bulletin board”. In the USA billboards usually refer to the ones along highways and byways and are mostly 10 feet by 22 feet wide.
Attached is a pic of a bulletin board with a glass covering that I converted into shelves for my model ships. I had to strip the cork off and attached the shelves with upholstery nails.
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What scale are the models?
1:1200 scale.
(Mindless filler here to meet the minimum posting size requirement.)
This poster example is one way to do “strategic fuzzyness” and (relative) level of minimal accuracy that makes a connection, is aimed and still ethical (and very private). A good pick. I’m sure there are still banner adds online as well that are just pictures that are at sites/places that targeted people may have interest in - without the people specifically being targeted. The term escapes me, but weren’t there sharing rings or such for these?
The next problem that could be hashed is, how to reach people beyond the bubbles (of already knowing and frequenting these sites… but also social media, which makes these bubbles as well with algorithms). Is part of the ethical experience trusting that unwanted adds do not burst our bubbles?
I had a thought today about assessing how effective are marketing dollars. Does it work to just ask people? I know some sites do this (maybe Purism already does? I don’t remember.): at checkout, offer a dropdown menu with options for how a person heard about the company or the specific product that they bought. As long as Purism keeps the answers internal, I believe that would be a far less abusive option than opting for Google and Facebook tracking technologies. Purism could even include a message about how the company strives for ethical advertising, so the answers are really important. I know it’s not new or earth-shattering, but maybe it could help.
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The most successful marketing formula isn’t that difficult. But the technology makes it too tempting for most advertisers to be creepy, because of how well it pays to be creepy if buyers allow it.
If everyone used my standards to decide which sellers deserve to be rewarded with a sale, no advertiser would be creepy. No one would ever buy anything from any creepy sellers. Sellers are creepy because not enough buyers ever punish them for being creepy.
I spend tens of thousands of dollars at work each year, making purchases for my employer. I really try to be fair before cutting some of my suppliers off. But that rarely works because most of them sick automated electronic attacks on my in-box any time after I place an order with them. Sometimes I have to cut-off an otherwise good supplier for a good reason. For several weeks after I make any purchase from them, I under-go a barrage of e-mail attacks by them, trying to use technology to beat me in to submission by making even more purchases from their company by plastering my in-box with offers for things that I know that I will never buy from them. I warn them that I can’t buy anything from them after I block them because I need to be able to still receive invoices and order status updates from them and I can’t do that if I have to block them. Even so, I eventually have to block some of them, and put them on a company blacklist because I refuse to reward them by making any purchase from them after they send dozens of new daily offers that clutter my in-box as a direct result after I place an order with them.
I have at some times been able to get an executive from the selling company on the phone because of how big my employer’s company is and how much we spend with them. Upon telling them that the business relationship is in peril and that we are on the verge of cutting them off, the same thing often happens. They apologize profusely and blame everything on an over-zealous IT employee who acted without authority. A few months later, it happens again with the same seller. Not enough customers punish them for this behavior. Apparently their advertising attacks on recent buyers is working for them because they continue doing it. What a mess! There are too many idiot buyers out there. It’s like they have nothing else to do all day other than to read all of the ads that appear in their in-box and buy more stuff, as a result of those junk ads. Some people just don’t set any boundaries against things that waste their time or that costs them money, either in their personal life, or at work.
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Your buyers reading ads? What happened to established networks of suppliers? Thomas Guides? Company “approved” sources?
Of course I put out an ad in the paper for my Wargame convention next week in Carlisle PA. Cost me about 200 bucks. I got a BOGO because it was normally for one weekend advert, but they printed it for two weekends. Bottom line is that if I get 8 convention attendees just because of the ads, it paid for itself. (Ad was a 4.89 inch square with a Vargas girl holding a Tiger I tank in her palm. I’d post it here but I’d probably get complaints.)
Independent of ethical online ads, I think the best advertising is just a byproduct: being known.
Being known, being visible & the network effect
The omnipresent apple logo does that (but I applaud Purism for being more modest).
To my knowledge, the main point of print and TV ads is often not to make somebody go shopping immediately. It’s to make you think “I know that’s a good brand” when you’re scanning the shelves the next time you need something. I spent some time in the US 15 years ago, and I still remember where to get my car insured, easy enough for a caveman.
Google used to be so hyped, they could just add a link to their newest beta labs product, and everybody, including press, would just flock to it.
And then of course, all products that snowball (social networks, chats) build an audience.
Purism’s problem
I think one major problem for Purism is that there is no entry-level product that basically everybody wants or needs (Amazon started with books, not with Alexa).
The hardware prices are not easy to swallow even for those who already are convinced of the value.
Librem One has acceptable prices, but a different weakness: I have no urge to use VPN, and Mail with 1GB quota and all unencrypted mails deleted after 30 days also has no appeal to me. I like Chat and Social, and voluntarily pay for them. But even these don’t have any real network effect, even though chat is close and has potential (but the barrier is still high).
Squaring the circle
What you want is a product that makes people visit your website from time to time, has a network effect and is not addictive / unethical. Free/cheap would be nice.
One of the best such products might be a Doodle alternative, like framadate.org
It has a very low entry barrier, and everybody who needs to find a date for some group (family, friends, students, colleagues) is a potential user, who brings in others to that page.
Make it very clear that this is a privacy friendly offer.
Some will come back to create their own poll.
Some will notice the pointers to related Librem One services, hardware offerings and blog posts on privacy.
There could be pro-features for paying LO customers, but the main point is: the free offering should be well invested marketing money in my humble opinion.
(There certainly are other similar helpful products that could draw in an audience. Framasoft has some more.)
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Please post – at least a link.
This convention ended Saturday and there was no website (and consequently, no link).
It is a word of mouth convention. But since you asked here is the advert.
By the way, advert images were found using Duck Duck Go with the Licenses filter: “Free to Modify, Share, and Use Commercially”.
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I always liked Vargas’ work. Did you put the tank in her hand? Well done!
My guess it was released because the artist wanted others to use the open hand in derivative works. And it “may” be a copycat done in Vargas’ style, not necessarily Vargas.
An early version of my ad had this Charles Laughton pic underneath the other pic. (Also with the same license.) My wife nixed it as too risque.
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This is the email I sent to Purism Marketing (marketing@puri.sm) in response to both this thread and the Matomo Campaign Tracking since June 23rd, 2022:
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If you look at an example of our UTM links:
puri.sm/posts/example/?mtm_campaign=status_update&mtm_source=organic&mtm_medium=forum&mtm_content=f-example
You’ll notice it is not individualized and acts as a referral field. I encourage you to read the section on Anonymous Referrals on this forum’s linked post. In other words, our UTM links do not relate to a specific user, so they don’t affect users’ privacy.
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And how connect users to your service? Correct, via IPs. That you don’t match those data together doesn’t mean you can’t. In a world where nearly everyone is tracking us it makes a really bad feeling seeing some kind of tracking (even anonymous data) on a privacy orientated company.
Or in other words: it’s like having a phone without HKS - you know it shouldn’t harm, but you can’t know it and always have the feeling that it may watches you.
At the end 2/3 of people who get from forums to your article won’t be tracked anyway, because they use clean links (or clean themselves). So it does not even help you much to see how many people came from forums (you would not even see me on “link clicked counter on forum itself”). At the end you just damage your reputation without winning anything.
You can stay with your campaign tracking etc, but the drama will repeat on every link over and over again.
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Heh. I have been forced to use a gmail account for first contact with any vendor and once I have vetted them in some preliminary way I email them from my real email address.
My gmail account is a nuclear wasteland of spam from companies I would normally want to talk to and learn about their offerings but are now just ignored.
I agree with everything you posted, however there is an unspoken topic on our side of the conversation, and it is this:
- Customers are callous, cold, miserable, demanding, ungrateful gits that only respond / by through underhanded, devious and manipulative tactics. They want the world and to pay nothing for it.
Anyone that has been in business and had to sell anything knows what I am talking about. If you are lucky enough to shake out of the detritus of leeches out there a set of good quality clients, you are lucky. It doesn’t mean that the rest of the potential clients aren’t good people, but it really is a cold hard truth about human nature.
Basically, to sell anything, you need to engineer an understanding of your demographic and then figure out how they work at a base level and target your sales efforts towards that. There is a reason boiler room telephone sales works.
I am not sure there is a middle ground here to be had. I think the best thing that can be hoped for is, if you can afford it act ethical, otherwise decide if you want to survive or not.
A few observations though:
- users shouldn’t have to notice!
- subtle changes to the surveillance part of the URL might go unnoticed
- even within the exact names and values in the example given (?n1=v1&n2=v2&n3=v3&n4=v4), by reordering the names it would be possible to encode 4-point-something bits of information.
I totally accept that the person making a post can choose whether to include the surveillance part of the URL and that you will continue to do so (and that other users will continue to strip it out - which really should be configurable standard browser behaviour).
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I am getting confused…
“privacy friendly tracking”? “anonymous referrals”?
So, let’s maybe get down to basics: what is this matomo campaign for? What is its purpose and what do you expect from it? Did you weight up the possible gains for the company versus the reputational damage (at least on this forum)?
Please explain. I would like to understand. Maybe it is acceptable, after all - but to what purpose?
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