FAQ — Simple Questions

1. The Big Tech mega-monop­o­lies and the thou­sands of com­pa­nies in the sup­ply chains that offer SBT dom­i­nate the online marketplace
2. Mar­keters had no real viable alternatives
3. As Upton Sin­clair said, “It is dif­fi­cult to get a man to under­stand some­thing when his salary depends on his not under­stand­ing it.” It’s the money — as long as every­one is get­ting paid, no one wants to “rock the boat” by ques­tion­ing the effi­cacy, the fraud (that only hap­pens to oth­ers), or the “unin­tended con­se­quences.” No one wants their bud­gets to be reduced.
4. There are signs that mar­keters are begin­ning to “see the light” about SBT - here.

1. The Pedia Credibility Algo­rithm (PCA) — pro­vides truth­ful infor­ma­tion as a ser­vice to con­sumers, it’s the #1 thing con­sumers want from mar­keters.
2. The PCA auto­mat­i­cally makes all the mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing a mar­keter has ever done — work bet­ter, includ­ing SBT. The PCA cre­ates a Sim­ple Bar­gain where con­sumers engage with mar­keters’ truth­ful infor­ma­tion and mar­keters pro­vide the truth­ful infor­ma­tion con­sumers want. Both sides get what they want and it cre­ates the most pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing plat­forms on the Inter­net con­trolled by con­sumers and mar­keters together — with­out middlemen.

The “Pedia Effect” is cre­ated by the PCA (the terms may be used inter­change­ably). The infor­ma­tion brand, “Pedia” gen­er­ates the most pow­er­ful, authen­tic, and organic per­cep­tion of an “inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity” in con­sumers’ minds, as a result of behav­ioral cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases all work­ing in tan­dem to influ­ence con­sumer per­cep­tion. These cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases are (among oth­ers): the “rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness heuris­tic,” the “avail­abil­ity heuris­tic,” the “fram­ing bias,” and the “con­fir­ma­tion bias.” The first “if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, etc.,” the sec­ond “I’ve seen a lot of ducks,” the third, “It says it’s a duck,” and finally “I knew it was a duck all along.” Just swap “Pedia” for “ducks.” When these four cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases all tell us that some­thing is an “inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity ency­clo­pe­dia” — we believe the per­cep­tion. And if that per­cep­tion is sub­se­quently ful­filled — we become true believ­ers. (Per­cep­tion + Ful­fill­ment = True Believer) — this is the power of the “Pedia Effect.”

These cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases are extremely dif­fi­cult to over­come because they are the result of “Sys­tem 1 think­ing,” stem­ming from the near uni­ver­sal use of the word, “ency­clo­pe­dia” around the world, in every edu­ca­tional sys­tem. The use offline and then online is time-proven, from the thou­sands of “ency­clo­pe­dias” books pub­lished on every sub­ject, up to the most well-known online exam­ple of “Wikipedia” and many others.

Wikipedia is a unique dichotomy, in that it embod­ies two dis­tinct oppos­ing “effects” — the “Pedia Effect” which gen­er­ates the pow­er­ful credibility and the “Wiki Effect” which, although it’s respon­si­ble for the thou­sands of vol­un­teer con­tent provider/editors who cre­ate the con­tent in Wikipedia and cor­rect any errors that are intro­duced, it is also respon­si­ble for the inher­ent “weak­ness” of the Wikipedia model — where that con­tent (from “vol­un­teer” provider/editors) is the rea­son why Wikipedia itself, and edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions do not con­sider the con­tent in Wikipedia to be reli­able. And yet the “Pedia Effect” credibility is so pow­er­ful that peo­ple dis­re­gard the “reli­a­bil­ity con­cerns” and come to Wikipedia in droves — mak­ing it the 6th most vis­ited site in the world - with over 6 BILLION monthly vis­its. (Imag­ine if the infor­ma­tion was con­sid­ered reliable!)

While there will undoubt­edly be some cyn­ics who will view these per­cep­tions of “inde­pen­dent third-party higher author­ity” as an exploitive decep­tion — that would be a fool­ish waste of a rare oppor­tu­nity to gain a sub­stan­tial and sus­tain­able “credibility” advan­tage over the com­pe­ti­tion by sim­ply ful­fill­ing con­sumer perceptions.

1. We pro­vide the PCA for mar­keters to assem­ble their own indi­vid­ual Pedia plat­forms on their com­pany sites.
2. The “pedia” brand and tax­on­omy have been long-proven in the mar­ket­place to organ­i­cally gen­er­ate pow­er­ful per­cep­tions of inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity credibility, and authen­tic­ity in con­sumers’ minds. State­ments made by a per­ceived “inde­pen­dent third party” cer­tainly will increases over­all credibility — but the real last­ing power for the mar­keters is to ful­fill those perceptions.
   
3. As pow­er­ful as mar­keter’s indi­vid­ual Pedia plat­forms may be, mar­keters can add a few lines of code and have their indi­vid­ual Pedia plat­forms aggre­gated into a cen­tral­ized Pedi­aNet­work^® with an actual, real-life “inde­pen­dent third party” to max­i­mize the credibility of their guar­an­teed truth­ful infor­ma­tion and the net­work plat­form. “Truth” is always more cred­i­ble when it comes from some­one that’s NOT you. 
4. With a real-life inde­pen­dent third party, mar­keters have a pos­i­tive increas­ing returns plat­form that only gets more pow­er­ful over time. Democ­ra­tized con­trol of the plat­form by mar­keters and con­sumers together, ensures that it never becomes another exploitive “walled gar­den” media monopoly. 
5. Mar­keters are fac­ing an exis­ten­tial threat from Big Tech’s AI-pow­ered per­sonal assis­tants that choose for con­sumers, cut­ting mar­keters and con­sumers out of the process. (see the next question)

1. Mar­keters face a real and grow­ing exis­ten­tial threat from “voice-acti­vated per­sonal assis­tants” (VAPAs) like Siri, Cor­tana, Alexa, Google, and oth­ers, as well as newer “AI-per­sonal assis­tants” (AI/PA) like Chat­GTP that choose for con­sumers and are NOT con­trolled by mar­keters. These AI/PAs dras­ti­cally reduce or elim­i­nate mar­keters’ influ­ence over the con­sumer choos­ing and buy­ing process. And mar­keter do not have the scale or resources to com­pete head-on in the AI arena with Microsoft, Google, Ama­zon, Face­book, Apple and the like — which means it’s another round of being at the mercy of Big Tech.
2. Mar­keters have every­thing to gain by telling the truth. And Wikipedia has proven that the “Pedia Effec­t’s” credibility is so over­whelm­ingly pow­er­ful that it does­n’t mat­ter if Wikipedia itself says it’s not reli­able, or if every school and uni­ver­sity says the same thing — peo­ple believe the “Pedia Effect.”
3. There isn’t any­thing else in the “busi­ness strat­egy bag” that can do so much for so lit­tle — for­ever. Fun­da­men­tal oppor­tu­ni­ties like this are rare. And the only advan­tage is an “early mover advan­tage” and the only risk? Not doing it soon enough.
4. Bot­tom line — money. Mar­keters make more profit by telling the truth. It’s a truly sus­tain­able com­pet­i­tive advantage.
5. Mar­keters must also con­sider if it’s even pos­si­ble to lie in the 21st cen­tury, and what’s to be gained. Given the evi­dence from com­pa­nies that have tried — every­one even­tu­ally gets caught, and it’s such a waste and so unnec­es­sary, par­tic­u­larly when telling the truth gen­er­ates so much good­will, effi­ciency, effec­tive­ness, and bot­tom-line profit — on an increas­ing returns basis.

1. Because we per­form no crit­i­cal fulfillment.
2. Like a fran­chise, we pro­vide every­thing upfront — the “blue­print” (the PCA and the Pedia brands) — which mar­keters fol­low to cre­ate their own indi­vid­ual Pedia plat­forms with the “Pedia” brand per­cep­tion, the stan­dard (guar­an­teed truth), and the con­sumer-enforce­ment rules.
3. All ful­fill­ment per­for­mance is by the mar­keters — and it’s 2 sim­ple steps: assem­ble truth­ful indi­vid­ual “Pedias,” and respond to con­sumer-enforce­men­t/en­gage­ment of the sim­ple rules.
4. There is no “exe­cu­tion” or “man­age­ment,” as the “Pedias” oper­ate on a sim­ple set of rules in the same way as the Wikipedia “peer-reviewed and curated” net­work – except with “con­sumers” as the qual­i­fied arbiters of “truth in marketing.”
5. A “credibility algo­rithm” is just another way of say­ing “credibility for­mula” or “credibility recipe.” And since it is a for­mula, it’s “deter­min­is­tic” mean­ing it’s self-exe­cut­ing and self-ful­fill­ing, so if you fol­low the for­mula, you get the results. If you have a recipe for choco­late cake and you fol­low the recipe — you get a choco­late cake (of some sort) — not potato salad. We sup­ply the “recipe” and the mar­keters are the “cooks.”
6. Even when mar­keters have their indi­vid­ual Pedia plat­forms aggre­gated into the cen­tral­ized Pedi­aNet­work^®, every­thing remains the same — all ful­fill­ment is by the mar­keters — their con­tent always remains under their con­trol, with only a few lines of code to aggre­gate their “Pedia” into the cen­tral­ized Pedi­aNet­work^®.

1. Con­sumers will inten­tion­ally seek out guar­an­teed truth­ful infor­ma­tion about the prod­ucts and ser­vices they want to buy.
2. Mar­keters will hap­pily pro­vide traf­fic for their com­pany ency­clo­pe­dias for a sim­ple rea­son — mar­keters make more money send­ing con­sumers to infor­ma­tion pub­lished by the “inde­pen­dent third-party” Pedi­aNet­work^® plat­form than the iden­ti­cal infor­ma­tion pub­lished at the cor­po­rate site — “inde­pen­dent third-party” is always more cred­i­ble (and prof­itable) than “first-party.”
3. Mar­keters will always retain access to all of their cus­tomers — no “walled gar­dens” or restricted access ever, as mar­keters and con­sumers together, con­trol the platform.
4. The Pedi­aNet­work^® plat­form con­trolled by mar­keters and con­sumers together, is the best way that mar­keters have to regain the influ­ence they’ve ceded to the mega-monop­o­lies in the past 20 years and to defend against all of the cur­rent and future AI-dri­ven per­sonal assis­tants that choose for con­sumers and cut mar­keters out of the loop. There is no more pow­er­ful strat­egy for mar­keters that does so much — forever.
5. The Pedi­aNet­work^® plat­form pro­vides mar­keters and con­sumers with a solu­tion and suf­fi­cient resources to respond to AI threats now and into the future — there won’t be any sec­ond chances.

1. Con­sumers began push­ing the “ad-blocker” but­ton a long time ago with cable tele­vi­sion, VCRs, and DVRs, and now con­sumers world­wide are “push­ing the online ad-block­ing but­ton.”
2. The major­ity of con­sumers world­wide would­n’t care if up to 94% of brands dis­ap­peared - mar­keters need to find a way to pro­vide mar­ket­ing that con­sumers want and don’t block.
3. And if all of the above was­n’t bad enough, the lure of AI-dri­ven per­sonal assis­tants is per­va­sive and mar­keters des­per­ately need a response since the mega-monop­o­lies are the main spon­sors of the AI-dri­ven per­sonal assistants.

The PCA pro­vides con­sumers and mar­keters with “every­thing every­body wants” and does­n’t try to pro­vide any­thing they DON’T want. That is the PCA def­i­n­i­tion of “100% con­sumer-mar­keter align­ment.”

Adver­tis­ing works because con­sumers need infor­ma­tion about the prod­ucts and ser­vices they want to buy in order to decide which product/service best meets their needs and desires. For most of the post-World War II era, adver­tis­ing was the pri­mary source of infor­ma­tion on the prod­ucts and ser­vices con­sumers wanted to buy. But not any more.

1. It’s always been the inter­rup­tions. All dig­i­tal adver­tis­ing, whether it’s the new “big data AI tar­geted” or just a plain old dis­play ad — if it’s deliv­ered at the con­sumer’s “point-of-inter­rup­tion,” it can­not work very well. You sim­ply can­not beat the math (inter­rup­tion).
   
2. Con­sumers don’t want adver­tis­ing, con­sumers don’t trust adver­tis­ing, and most of all, con­sumers no longer need adver­tis­ing. Con­sumers today can instantly get so much of the infor­ma­tion they need from the Inter­net, when­ever they want, from inde­pen­dent third-party sources includ­ing their friends, fam­ily, experts and users of the prod­uct or ser­vice they want to buy. Con­sumers today sim­ply don’t need adver­tis­ing, which means they have even less rea­son to put up with inter­rup­tions from ads and commercials.
3. Scary ques­tion: If con­sumers could push a but­ton and get rid of all the ads and com­mer­cials on their tele­vi­sions, tablets, com­put­ers, and cell phones — how many would push that but­ton? Scary fact: Lots of con­sumers have already pushed that but­ton. (see pre­vi­ous ques­tion about this)

1. Short answer — habit and mar­keters haven’t been offered mar­ket­ing meth­ods that con­sumers actu­ally want. 
2. Inter­rup­tion-based expo­sures are noto­ri­ously inef­fi­cient and inef­fec­tive with more mid­dle­men in the ad tech food chain, that mar­keters have lit­tle con­trol or vis­i­bil­ity of what exactly is hap­pen­ing to their mar­ket­ing dollars.
3. Long answer — it’s not just the mar­keters — it’s the Big Tech mega-monop­o­lies and all the mid­dle­men in the adver­tis­ing “food chain” that get a pay­check regard­less of how effec­tive, effi­cient, fraud­u­lent or even if the adver­tis­ing exists at all. It’s always in the best inter­est of these mid­dle­men to come up with some “shiny object” that is so com­pli­cated that only the mid­dle­men can explain it — and these mid­dle­men always rec­om­mend the same solu­tion — buy more, buy some­thing new (social), buy some­thing old that we’re call­ing new (native) — but what­ever it is — BUY more. And when it does­n’t work — it’s because you did­n’t buy enough. Such a deal.
   
4. You could say, “mar­keters don’t care,” or “mar­keters are out of touch,” or they are sim­ply sub­scrib­ing to the “Upton Sin­clair” school of thought (see first Ques­tion) — but the fact is, it’s very dif­fi­cult to be in dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing these days and it seems far sim­pler to “pass the buck” until your tenure (very short for CMOs) is up and move on.

1. The 1 thing con­sumers want is HONESTY — TELL THE TRUTH
2. Con­sumers want (and need) Truth­ful high-value infor­ma­tion to help them decide what to buy.
3. Con­sumers want exactly the infor­ma­tion they want — exactly when they want it. (And when they don’t — they don’t.)
4. Con­sumers want credibility — inde­pen­dent third-party infor­ma­tion they can trust and believe.
5. Con­sumers want infor­ma­tion on every prod­uct and ser­vice across all mar­kets in a sin­gle, easy-to-remem­ber loca­tion — convenience.
6. Con­sumers want transparency.
7. Con­sumers want their pri­vacy protected.
8. Con­sumers want more con­trol over their information.

1. His­tor­i­cal obser­va­tion, sim­ple logic and we asked. Con­sumers always want high-value, truth­ful infor­ma­tion vs. low-value “yada yada” about the prod­ucts and ser­vices they buy, and they want exactly the infor­ma­tion they are seek­ing, exactly when they are seek­ing it.
2. And once con­sumers have all the infor­ma­tion they want, they make a pur­chase deci­sion — and at that point, they don’t want any more ads/commercials, no mat­ter what the “(re)targeting” data says.

1. Brand Safety — No Risk
2. To get back the power they con­ceded to the mega-monopolies
   
3. To con­trol the most pow­er­ful trusted con­sumer infor­ma­tion channel
4. Deliver high-value infor­ma­tion at the con­sumer’s point-of-need (PON)
   
5. A pow­er­ful organic inde­pen­dent third-party infor­ma­tion brand
   
6. Con­sumer Alignment
   
7. Full Trans­parency
   
8. Sim­ple Rules
   
9. No Fraud
   
10. NOT cre­at­ing another “preda­tory” media
    
11. NO ad blocking
    
12. To con­trol their own destinies
    

1. His­tor­i­cal obser­va­tion and sim­ple logic. Mar­keters pro­vided the rev­enue to build all of the media empires start­ing with news­pa­pers to mag­a­zines to radio sta­tions to tele­vi­sion net­works, etc., but this time, they funded the cre­ation of global, mega-monop­o­lies that dom­i­nate online adver­tis­ing with “win­ner take all” net­work effects.
2. In pre­vi­ous eras, mar­keters were exploited by the var­i­ous media they funded with higher prices, lower reach, and out­right “bait and switch.” But this time, due to net­work effects, sev­eral mega-monop­o­lies were able to siphon off so much more power and influ­ence from mar­keters over their cus­tomers, that mar­keters may have lost sig­nif­i­cant con­trol of their own des­tinies. As in all busi­nesses, mar­keters would rather have more con­trol of their own des­tinies than less — and the PCA deliv­ers exactly that.
   

1. Absolutely. with the PCA, the credibility of the inde­pen­dent third party is the pri­mary point of differentiation.
   
2. The Pedi­aNet­work^® plat­form is the most pow­er­ful, organic, inde­pen­dent third-party con­sumer infor­ma­tion plat­form that only gets more pow­er­ful over time, so it would be stu­pid, after over 20 years, to even con­sider com­pro­mis­ing such a sus­tain­able com­pet­i­tive advan­tage by not enforc­ing the sim­ple rules.
3. The Pedi­aNet­work^® plat­for­m’s inde­pen­dent third-party high-value infor­ma­tion stan­dard is real and invi­o­late. It would be self-defeat­ing for the Pedi­aNet­work^® plat­form and its mar­keters to com­pro­mise on the inde­pen­dent third-party, high-value infor­ma­tion stan­dards since con­sumers want and need high-value infor­ma­tion and are already drown­ing in every kind of “low-value” inter­rup­tion-based infor­ma­tion as it is.
4. The Pedi­aNet­work^® plat­form posi­tion is that mar­keters ben­e­fit from all types of mar­ket­ing but only inde­pen­dent third-party high-value infor­ma­tion is so pow­er­ful that it can make all other mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing efforts work better.

No. We were first. We cre­ated the first free online ency­clo­pe­dia in 1995, Auto­pe­dia — The Auto­mo­tive Ency­clo­pe­dia, and we for­mally described the “Pedia Effect” in a patent appli­ca­tion on Decem­ber 18, 2000, before the Wikipedia domain was reg­is­tered in 2001.

There are 3 main rev­enue streams: adver­tis­ing (no direct com­pet­i­tive adver­tis­ing); mar­keter licens­ing fees (to use “Pedi­aNet­work” plat­form brands); and trans­ac­tion fees on all trans­ac­tions generated.

1. From the begin­ning, mar­keters were hooked on the logic of the whole “big data, AI, tech­nol­ogy” promise of “right per­son, right mes­sage, and right time” and they would run with the new “bright shiny objects” they were being offered for an extended period (the Upton Sin­clair model) — until mar­keters finally reach an inflec­tion point where they real­ize that every­thing was­n’t what it was hyped up to be, they did­n’t hold the power they paid for, and they really need an alter­na­tive — where they do have the power.
   
2. And some­times it takes time to rec­og­nize the old ways just aren’t work­ing as well as they used to. It took until the 1980s before auto deal­ers would be will­ing to pro­vide truth­ful invoice price infor­ma­tion to con­sumers and give con­sumers more con­fi­dence by nego­ti­at­ing from invoice up instead of sticker price down. Some­times it’s hard to break old habits.
3. Sim­ple is hard.

You only search for some­thing if you don’t know where it is. If you know where to get the most truth­ful infor­ma­tion about the prod­ucts and ser­vices you want to buy — you go there.