Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
You Have Zero Privacy Anway. Get Over It
Probably the most talked about new company ad TED was Blippy. This audacious start-up can be thought of as a Twitter linked to your credit card. The idea is similar to Facebook’s disastrous Beacon feature, where purchases members made were automatically posted.
If this sounds like an invasion of privacy, it is – gloriously so. To join you simply register your credit card with the site and then all of your purchases are automatically posted. Blippy already has agreements with three online retailers (iTunes, Amazon and Zappos) which allow to cross reference other purchases. If you want to purchase something privately, you have to use another credit card.
Founder Philip Kaplan (who you may remember as founder of FuckedCompany ), describes this as “passive sharing”, which is a provactive idea. It reminded me of my favorite quote on privacy, from Scott McNealy of Sun Micosystems: “You have zero privacy anyway, get over it”.
Blippy sits at the intersection of commerce and social networking and is an attempt to exploit Jeff Zuckerberg’s insight that friends are the ultimate source of product recommendation and somewhere, somehow, there must be a way of commercializing that. (Mustn’t there?)
Because it targets some of our most private information, Blippy points to a world of full transparency. It actually provides a much more revealing record of someone’s doings that Twitter. If you track Kaplan’s (Pud’s) own purchases, you see that he is a “loyal” Shell customer, but only a “frequent” purchaser at Slicehost. You can see when and where he saw Crazy Heart and what his friends thought of that movie.
Perhaps more importantly, you can also see what people paid for different purchases. This may inhibit differential pricing strategies, like the one Amazon pursued a few years ago.
And of course, it’s the aggregated data that Blippy collects that is presumably the real money maker. With a big enough base, you could look at spending patterns by region, retailer or any other number of cuts.
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