Category Archives: Business & Marketing

GM secretly gathered data on radio listening habits

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Every minute for three months, GM secretly gathered data on 90,000 drivers’ radio-listening habits and locations. (BoingBoing)

On September 12th, GM’s director of global digital transformation Saejin Park gave a presentation to the Association of National Advertisers in which he described how the company had secretly gathered data on the radio-listening habits of 90,000 GM owners in LA and Chicago for three months in 2017, tracking what stations they listened to and for how long, and where they were at the time; this data was covertly exfiltrated from the cars by means of their built-in wifi.

The company says it never sold this data, but the presentation to the advertising execs was clearly designed to elicit bids for it. Toyota has promised not to gather and sell telematics data, but GM seems poised to create a market in data gathered by your car, which can listen to you, follow you, take pictures of you and your surroundings, and even gather data on which passengers are in the car at different times by tracking Bluetooth beacons from mobile devices.

GM looked at station selection, volume and ZIP codes of vehicle owners. No radio in The Truck. Too noisy to listen if there were.

Yellow Pages

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A friend of mine — a local small businessman — called me yesterday saying he was “taking a poll.”

FRIEND: When was the last time you looked up a phone number in the Yellow Pages?
ME: Uh, at least ten years ago. Everybody uses Google, don’t they? Why are you asking?
FRIEND: I got a call from a sales rep for the Yellow Pages asking me to renew my ad. I told him I didn’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. I was wrong. I’ve been paying a thousand bucks a year for the last ten years. When I asked my wife she said, “We’d always had an ad so…”

A few years ago I was in the front yard when a guy pulled up and tossed a plastic bag on my lawn. It contained copy of the Yellow Pages. I picked it up and took it over to the guy saying I didn’t want it and always just throw them in the trash.

“Yeah, that’s what everybody tells me but I get paid to toss ’em. I can’t take it back so just pitch it,” he explained. I’d love to know how many people with ads in the YP are like my friend.

During my radio days (1970’s) I noticed one of our advertisers had been running the same ad for over a year. I started nagging our sales rep to go see the client and get some fresh copy. We’d produce a new spot, no charge.

“I think we just just let well enough alone. He’d tell us if he wanted to change copy,” whined the sales rep.

I kept after him and one day he stormed into my office. “I hope you’re happy! He cancelled his advertising!” And stormed out. I called the client to ask why.

“We had no idea we were still running that spot — and paying for it. My bookkeeper just wrote the check every month. It slipped through the cracks.”

I’ll bet the Yellow Pages folks have reams of data “proving” who uses the book and how often.

The Amazon Brand

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Overheard a woman talking to a friend this morning say something like “I bought it from Amazon.” I’m pretty sure whatever she purchased wasn’t manufactured by Amazon. But the Amazon brand has pretty much gobbled up the branding value from all the stuff they sell. I get as much value from Amazon as from the company that made the whatever. More? Has any company ever owned so much mind-space? Maybe Sears back in the mail order catalog days?

Chaos Monkeys

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In a recent Rolling Stone piece Matt Taibbi described Antonio Garcia Martinez as “the most interesting and damaging defector to have ever left the ranks of Facebook. An iconoclastic combination of Travis McGee and Michael Lewis, he is a former physics Ph.D. candidate from Berkeley who worked at Goldman Sachs before his two years at Facebook.”

The Travis McGee reference intrigued me so I bought Martinez’ book (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley). Only halfway through but can safely say it is one of the best books I’ve read about Silicon Valley. Martinez’s writing style reminds me of Taibbi and he makes the world of tech start-ups read like a thriller. I’m at the part of the book where he’s just gone to work for Facebook:

“Facebook is full of true believers who really, really, really are not doing it for the money, and really, really will not stop until every man, woman, and child on earth is staring into a blue-framed window with a Facebook logo. Which, if you think about it, is much scarier than simple greed. The greedy man can always be bought at some price or another, and his behavior is predictable. But the true zealot? He can’t be had at any price, and there’s no telling what his mad visions will have him and his followers do. That’s what we’re talking about with Mark Elliot Zuckerberg and the company he created.”

If The Social Network is how Facebook started, Chaos Monkeys is what it became. Nobody knows what it will become.

Car dealerships are doomed

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Long-time auto exec Bob Lutz thinks car dealerships are doomed. They have 20 to 25 years left. Autonomous vehicles will completely disrupt the industry.

”Are they going to be fun? Absolutely not,” he said. “There will be no joy in sitting in an autonomous vehicle …. But it’s going to be enormously efficient.”

He suggested that parents will be willing to place their children in autonomous cars to take them to day care, soccer practice or school. He said they would be able to give their children limited access to a vehicle subscription service that would let them call cars to take them to preapproved locations, and that access could be expanded as they get older.

”When you send them off to college, you won’t send them with a car, you’ll send them with a subscription to a driverless vehicle service that they can use at their leisure,” he said.

I think it’s been a long time since cars were cool (not that I was ever a car guy). They’re all look like gray blobs of molded plastic. Lutz says the car of the future will just be a “module.”

He likened the modules to subway cars: Passengers don’t know who makes them, only that they get the riders to their destinations.

If I can drive my (mythical) Land Rover for five or ten years — and it’s as much fun as I hope it is — I’ll count myself lucky.

iHeartMedia files for bankruptcy

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iHeartMedia, the country’s largest radio broadcaster with around 850 stations and a leading outdoor advertising company, is filing for bankruptcy after spending years trying to manage its $20 billion in outstanding indebtedness. (NPR)

During the 80’s I had a front-row seat as Clear Channel Communications (the name before the cutesy “iHeartMedia”) gobbled up radio stations and gutted them of everything that made them local. Most of the bad guys got rich and got out long ago but I have no illusions about “hometown radio” returning.

A world without jobs

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This article is way too long for anyone with a job to read. So here are a few nuggets:

“Work is … how we give our lives meaning when religion, party politics and community fall away.”

Whether you look at a screen all day, or sell other underpaid people goods they can’t afford, more and more work feels pointless or even socially damaging – what the American anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs”

“I do think there is a fear of freedom – a fear among the powerful that people might find something better to do than create profits for capitalism.”

As all such articles do, this one mentioned UBI (Universal Basic Income). I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not. But I can almost imagine a world in which — for whatever reasons — there are just a whole bunch of people without jobs. And I can only see two options for dealing with them: Let them starve or provide them with food and shelter. Some way, somehow. I’m counting on smarter people to come up with more options.

Zelle

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UPDATE: While it was easy enough on my end (sender), it was a pain in the ass for one of the people I attempted to send money to. His bank was not one of the Zelle banks so he had to download an app and blah, blah, blah. Too much trouble. Use Apple Pay.

I’ve never used Venmo but I did send a few bucks with Apple Pay Cash a couple of weeks ago. But that only works if they recipient is using Apple Pay. I had never heard of Zelle until I read this article.

Zelle is currently offered by over 30 banks, including Chase, Bank of America, and Capital One. It can also be downloaded as a standalone app, like Venmo. To use Zelle, you will need to have a US bank account. […] Transferring money with Zelle goes straight from your bank to the recipients’ bank, unlike sending money with Venmo, which is processed through the third-party app.

I opened the Ally app on my phone and, sure enough, Ally supports Zelle. Took about 10 seconds to send $20 to Barb’s account. Zelle already reaches over 85 million users, thanks to its integration with major banks.