Chapter 2: It’s you. It’s yours.
You’re kind of a big deal.
I know this because all I read in the news is about companies doing everything they can to follow you around the Internet. I completely understand. You’re very important.
But what I don’t understand is this: why they don’t just ask you what you think and what you like and what you want and then act upon it?
But let’s go back at the beginning.
The northern light for Profila, the fixed point on the compass, our raison d’être, is the empowerment of human beings. Every single one of you (and including myself and my teammates). We want to have a service like Profila in our lives and can easily imagine our pains and struggles are like everyone else’s. We struggle with that pervasive feeling that we’re being watched and analyzed and put into a little box with a label that just doesn’t feel right to us.
It’s always easier to build something for yourself and do it well enough that other folks want to have it as well. That’s why our product development isn’t primarily focused on revenue creation, but instead on the simple desire to design features that are useful. Really really useful. I can imagine that’s the origin story for many if not most start-ups. It is part of the origin story for Profila (the other part has to do with a radioactive spider, but we’ll set that aside for now).
The promise of Profila is quite straightforward:
- You will be able to create & manage the most accurate, authentic, and valuable information and insights about yourself. This package will be called your Profila.
- You will have complete control, with active consent, transparency, and revocability, over who outside of yourself has access to different parts of your Profila. These arrangements will be on your terms, for your benefit.
That’s it. That’s the secret sauce; a mindset that provides a medium to capture the totality (or as much as you wish to include) of “you” and provides you with the tools and protections to ensure this ‘you’ is only shared based on trust. It’s you. It’s yours.
Take a moment and imagine what this would mean at scale; how the mechanisms of the modern internet would work when human beings are not commodities to be traded, cyber-stalked, and misinterpreted based on the only (often inaccurate and incomplete) data available; what we do online. Think if it in terms of the clutter in your inboxes, the irrelevant ads, the sponsored social media posts that no longer have the same value because there’s simply a better source available.
You have the good stuff. And you control the supply.
So why is this important? Why would you care about capturing more intimate details about yourself? Because it’s the silver bullet aimed at the heart of the current data economy. But we’ll come back to that later.
It’s you.
I have a confession to make (actually, several).
- My search history does not reflect my value as a human being.
- The websites I visit are not a guide to the depths of my most intimate thoughts and desires.
- My social media posts, likes, shares, and comments do not define the totality of my soul.
[exhale] I feel better. Now the healing can begin with those deep, dark secrets off my chest. But seriously, how radical of a statement are those bullet points when, in essence, that is how the world defines me online; it is determining the sponsored ads in my search results, it is defining the banner ads I see on websites, and it is reflected in the additional (meaning - unasked for) content that is put in my feeds on social media channels in the attempt to get me to stay there longer, all in service of “engagement”.
How are we going to fix this?
First, by earning your trust that we are going to do what we say we are going to do, and I’ll be writing about exactly that in the coming weeks. We as Profila are going to be very clear about what we will and won’t do and ask everyone to hold us to account. Thankfully, our business model doesn’t work if we act like a**holes. It’s all about the incentives we build around ourselves.
Let’s assume for a moment that we tackle that hurdle; that when you sign up for Profila you know what you add to your Profila stays private, secure and under your total transparent control. Tackling that hurdle is the key to helping you capture a more accurate portrait of you.
People love taking online quizzes. Here’s 10 questions for you and we’ll tell you what Hogwarts house you match up with best. People (including myself) like taking these quizzes but we also seem content with the crumbs we receive at the end; a score we can compare to our friends, some banal insight into our personality.
But the real winner is whoever created that quiz, because now they have a little bit more data which they can sell to marketing and data firms who then sell it on to marketers who hope that can help them acquire new customers.
Wait, you didn’t realize that Harry Potter quiz was just one more cog in that great machine? You’re adorable.
But what if you knew, deep in your heart, that every time you answer a question about yourself, you knew it made your Profila more valuable, was a building block to self-discovery, and that no one would ever know your answer (or the insights it brings combined with other answers) unless you explicitly allowed that sharing. And that you could use those insights to tell brands to only communicate with you on the topics you care about and stop with all the other crap that clutters up your life every day.
An example of how this would work:
Our travel category has a wealth of quizzes and questions to suss out all of your desires, aspirations, preferences and micro preferences around how you like to travel; the places you have been and the places you want to go, the pace you like when you are on holiday, the activities and events that appeal to you, your preferences around hotels and transportation, etc. etc. etc. Then imagine making those insights available to travel providers you trust with the message: send me offers that you know appeal to me and stop suggesting trips that you now know are not of interest.
All this falls under a new data category called Zero Party Data. It stands in stark contrast to the existing kinds of data and personal information. Basically, Third Party data is the kind companies buy about you from data brokers. Second Party data is the data that companies who have your data share with their partners (you give them this right based on their long and unreadable terms of us statements). And First Party data is information you provide but not necessarily for your own benefit (such as providing your name and birthday to a website for your favorite brand of tequila).
Zero Party Data is the newest entrant on the data economy scene. It means information that you provide to any organization you trust and that is used solely for your benefit. It’s much more of a social contract:
Brands don’t share it with their commercial partners.
Brands don’t aggregate it and sell it for a profit to a data broker.
And brands only use it to serve you better as a customer. It’s the emerging gold standard for data and will be the most valuable to brands going forward. At least that is the promise of zero party data.
We were talking to a senior executive at one of the world’s largest hotel chains recently. He talked about the three pillars of high-quality data for any commercial organization: the source, the type, and the quality.
Do you see where this is going?
We’re going to help you make every other piece of data about you on the internet irrelevant by helping you create something more accurate, more authentic, and more valuable than anything gleaned from your online observed behavior.
Your Profila will be exceptionally high in quality because it’s in your interest to make it so, it will include categories of insights unavailable before, and most importantly, it comes from the greatest source in the world: you. Because you’re kind of a big deal.
It’s yours.
The first part of this article’s headline simply doesn’t work without the second part. You aren’t going to spend the time and energy furnishing your home with all the things that bring you joy, and then leave the front door unlocked when you go on holiday.
Profila will work for each individual when it’s combined with the promise, explicit and enforceable, that the ‘you’ is only accessible by others when you are the gatekeeper, the arbitrator, the judge, the jury, and the executioner. Only then will you feel comfortable and safe.
So how it works is quite simple. Brands subscribe to you.
Wait, what?
No, isn’t it you who are asked to like a brand’s page, sign up for their newsletter, follow them on Instagram, etc. etc. etc.?
But why is that? They are the one’s competing for your attention and dollars. They should be coming to you.
And that’s the Profila model, which will not just benefit you as a consumer but will also be of great benefit to the brands. A brand that is working with us will invite you directly to come and join Profila.
The reason is simple: the world is changing and with that is coming the Zero Party Data revolution which will turn their marketing models on their heads. Cookies are being wiped out of existence by regulation. Consumers are getting smarter about installing ad-blockers and sharing less on their social media channels. And each day brings another news story that will add to the cynicism about how we are tracked online in deeply unethical ways.
A brand that you already like tells you they’d like to have a new kind of relationship with you, one based on trust, transparency, and by shifting the balance in your favor.
They will do this because they know they are going to be able to get to know you better, through your own eyes, via your Profila.
Think of the marketing budget they’ll save by never sending you something irrelevant to you again. And they will be eager to delight you with exclusive content, services, and offers because they want you to be a customer for a long time.
Customer acquisition marketing is sexy.
Customer retention marketing is profitable.
Imagine the value for a company of knowing their customers better, through their own eyes, in a fully compliant environment, full of insights that are always accurate and up to date - because those insights originate from you and are owned by you.
The process goes like this:
A brand sends you a subscription offer. It covers the types of information they wish to have access to for a defined period of time and a defined amount of renumeration (yes, your Profila is valuable, and you will receive money for it, but don’t sign the mortgage on that beach-front Miami villa just yet).
Perhaps they want your name, your gender, your age, and what city and country you live in. And they also want to request access to certain categories of insights (for example, your travel and cuisine categories). You can either accept or deny their offer. And in that acceptance, you will also be able to define exactly how they can contact you (for instance, via the Profila app feed) and even how often.
We’re hard at work on that last feature (code name: Metronome) and are very excited at the granular control we’re going to give you to specify the flow of information and offers from the brands that subscribe to you.
So what’s the end result?
Your Profila is yours. You built it up, and you will have the full, transparent, and granular control on who can access aspects of your Profila, what they can do with it, and how they can market to you in the future.
A final word
There is an old proverb which I’m very fond of that goes like this: if someone has a dirty glass of water, it is best to not tell them they have a dirty glass of water. It is more effective to put your clean glass of water on the table nearby and let them be the one who notices the difference.
That dirty glass of water is the existing data economy built on surveillance, tracking, and a lack of transparency.
And the new and sparklingly clean glass of water will be your Profila. Brands will notice the difference in scope and quality, with what they have now, and they’ll come to you to ask you for permission to access your Profila, on your terms, for your benefit.
Because you’re kind of a big deal.
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