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What is Truth-based Service (TBS)?

A Sim­ple Bargain 
“Truth-based ser­vice” (TBS) is a direct result of the “Pedia Credibility Algo­rithm” (PCA), and it’s exactly what it says — pro­vid­ing truth­ful infor­ma­tion as a ser­vice to con­sumers, by cre­at­ing a truth­ful “Pedia” of every­thing con­sumers want to know about the com­pany, prod­ucts, ser­vices, mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing. It’s the #1 thing con­sumers want from mar­keters and the “final evo­lu­tion of marketing.”

The Pedia Credibility Algo­rithm cre­ates TBS “Pedias” to auto­mat­i­cally increase a mar­keter’s credibility,
mul­ti­ply mar­ket­ing “voice and tone,” unlock increased returns from all mar­ket­ing a mar­keter has ever done,
and cre­ate a con­sumer “point-of-need” (PON ) mar­ket­ing plat­form more powerful
than any pre­vi­ous “point-of-inter­rup­tion” (POI ) ad-based platform.

Mar­keters have always dreamed of cre­at­ing mar­ket­ing that con­sumers inten­tion­ally engaged with at their PON, just before a pur­chase action and the PCA ful­fills that dream. Mar­keters pro­vide the truth­ful infor­ma­tion con­sumers want and con­sumer inten­tion­ally engage with that truth­ful infor­ma­tion. Both stake­hold­ers get what they want and it cre­ates the most pow­er­ful PON online mar­ket­ing, by con­sumers and mar­keters together — with­out preda­tory middlemen. 

To get “every­thing they want,” all mar­keters have do is cre­ate their own truth­ful “ency­clo­Pe­dias” about their com­pany, prod­ucts, ser­vices, mar­ket­ing, etc., includ­ing the abil­ity for con­sumers to engage with the com­pany at any time. Think, a “com­mer­cial Wikipedia” on the com­pany web­site. The com­pany TBS “Pedia” should be as com­pre­hen­sive as pos­si­ble and designed to pro­vide con­sumers with “every­thing they want to know about every­thing they want to buy.”

After 20 years of buy­ing mil­lions to bil­lions of “(e)xpo­sures” to inter­rupt mil­lions of mov­ing con­sumer tar­gets, the TBS “Pedia” auto­mat­i­cally increases “(C)red­i­bil­ity” and unlocks increased returns from all those past (e)xposures.

The Mar­ket­ing Equa­tion (M=eC) reveals the cru­cial impor­tance of increas­ing “(C)red­i­bil­ity” to max­i­mize ROI of all mar­ket­ing and adver­tis­ing (e)xpo­sures par­tic­u­larly since the adver­tis­ing pro­fes­sion, as a whole has ignored credibility for so long that in 2021, it was at the very bot­tom in believability/credibility — below politicians.

The TBS “Pedia” ampli­fies all expo­sure-based adver­tis­ing a mar­keter has ever done (includ­ing SBT, pro­gram­matic, and all other inter­rup­tion ads), and it’s the par­a­digm shift that realigns the finan­cial incen­tives from mon­e­tiz­ing sur­veil­lance, lying, and manip­u­la­tion at the “point of inter­rup­tion” (POI), to mon­e­tiz­ing truth, pri­vacy, and ser­vice at the “point of need” (PON).

Struc­turally, TBS is the polar oppo­site of SBT (a “semord­ni­lap”) that results when you replace the com­plex, extrac­tive, and destruc­tive com­po­nents of SBT deliv­ered at the con­sumer’s POI with sim­ple, con­sumer and mar­keter-aligned com­po­nents that give both sides what they want, at their PON. This cre­ates a TBS “Pedia” plat­form that pro­vides con­sumers with exactly the truth­ful infor­ma­tion they want, exactly when they want it, from a per­ceived inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity con­sumers believe and remem­ber. And it pro­vides mar­keters with con­sumers inten­tion­ally engag­ing with mar­ket­ing at the con­sumer’s PON, instead of con­sumers inten­tion­ally block­ing mar­keter’s ads. 

Mar­keters know they were not spared from the lying, cheat­ing, and fraud of SBT and pro­gram­matic ads. But now what’s worse is that mark­ers face an exis­ten­tial threat from AI-dri­ven per­sonal assis­tants that choose for con­sumers, cut­ting mar­keters out of the choos­ing and buy­ing process.

The Premise of TBS — Give ’em what they want
Con­sumers will always want (and need) truth­ful infor­ma­tion about the prod­ucts and ser­vices they want to buy, and con­sumers will always hate being inter­rupted, spied on, and manip­u­lated. In today’s inter­con­nected world of 24/7/365 com­mu­ni­ca­tion, com­pa­nies need to ask them­selves if it’s even pos­si­ble to hide any­thing from con­sumers. And if it isn’t, then why try?

Par­tic­u­larly when the truth is more pow­er­ful, more prof­itable, and more sus­tain­able than any­thing else a mar­keter can do. And the most pow­er­ful truth is from a per­ceived “inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity” (ITPHA). 

Mar­keters sim­ply need to pro­vide the truth­ful infor­ma­tion con­sumers want, with­out the spy­ing, inter­rup­tions, and manip­u­la­tion con­sumers don’t want, and con­sumers will inten­tion­ally seek out that truth­ful infor­ma­tion at their PON. But mar­keters are quickly run­ning out of time as AI-pow­ered per­sonal assis­tants (AI-PAs) become more preva­lent every day.

The pace of tech­nol­ogy is increas­ing faster than ever before with AI-dri­ven per­sonal assis­tant chat­bots (AI-PAs) going from zero to “warp” speed in a mat­ter of months, threat­en­ing to leave mar­keters behind and removed from the choos­ing and buy­ing process altogether.

The Promise of TBS — a Par­a­digm Shift to the 5th Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion (5IR)
While lit­er­ally every­thing in the past 20+ years, from ride shar­ing to food deliv­ery to phar­macy and gro­cery apps, has moved towards a con­sumer-first “on-demand, instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion” at the con­sumer’s PON, online mar­ket­ing has been stuck in the “bait and switch” past of “pro­vid­ing content/service (that con­sumers want) + “and now a word from our spon­sors” (inter­rup­tion-based ads con­sumers don’t want).”

The TBS “Pedia” plat­form is con­sumer-aligned mar­ket­ing that pro­vides con­sumers with exactly the infor­ma­tion they want, exactly when they want it, from an inde­pen­dent third-party con­sumers believe and remem­ber. This increases mar­keter credibility, which makes all other mar­ket­ing past, present, and future — work bet­ter. Where mar­ket­ing is the mes­sage and the media.

The TBS Pedia Plat­form “fla­vors”
The TBS “Pedia” plat­form comes it two dis­tinct “fla­vors” — “Indi­vid­ual” and  “net­work” — with the inher­ent advan­tages of each type. Mar­keter are free to cre­ate as many indi­vid­ual TBS “Pedia” plat­forms on their web­sites as they desire. Mar­keters may also par­tic­i­pate in the “net­work” edi­tion at any time with the sim­ple addi­tion of a few lines of code to project an exact copy of their local indi­vid­ual TBS “Pedia” plat­form to the TBS Pedi­aNet­work® Plat­form — while still remain­ing under com­plete con­trol of the mar­keter. This cre­ates a net­worked mega-resource that max­i­mizes credibility, mar­ket­ing “voice and tone” and every aspect of the mar­keters’ indi­vid­ual “(encyclo)Pedias” with the added “net­work effects” of thou­sands of inter­con­nected ency­clo­pe­dias to cre­ate a truly sus­tain­able com­pet­i­tive advan­tage that can­not be duplicated.

“Mar­ket­ing isn’t about sell­ing peo­ple some­thing whether they want it or not.
Mar­ket­ing is find­ing out what peo­ple actu­ally want.
Then find­ing a way to match what they want with what we have to sell.”
Dave Trott, June 11, 2015.

  • All ben­e­fits from the “Pedi­aNet­work®“plat­form are aligned with con­sumer demands, val­ues and interests.

  • The “Pedi­aNet­work®“plat­form is 100% trans­par­ent across all busi­ness operations.

  • The “Pedi­aNet­work®” plat­form is con­structed from Sim­ple Rules and Sim­ple Com­po­nents that are easy to understand.

    Mar­keters are bound by a sin­gle sim­ple rule — tell the truth.

  • The “Pedi­aNet­work®” plat­form con­tains no fraud, kick­backs, viewa­bil­ity prob­lems, or any­thing else. Sim­ple Hon­esty.

  • The “Pedi­aNet­work®” plat­form enables mar­keters to build the most pow­er­ful high-value con­sumer infor­ma­tion mar­ket­ing chan­nel and with democ­ra­tized con­trol of the plat­form, com­plete con­fi­dence that present and future ben­e­fits will always be in their own hands.

    It is crit­i­cally impor­tant for mar­keters to have a “pow­er­ful, online, high-value, point-of-need, con­sumer infor­ma­tion chan­nel” as an alter­na­tive to the mega-monop­o­lies “point-of-inter­rup­tion” channels.

  • Unlike any other new mar­ket­ing plat­form, the “Pedia” Plat­form does not involve any mar­keter brand risk whatsoever.

  • Cre­at­ing and con­trol­ling the most pow­er­ful high-value con­sumer infor­ma­tion chan­nel to pro­vide con­sumers with EXACTLY the infor­ma­tion they want, EXACTLY when they want it, from an inde­pen­dent third-party that con­sumers believe and remem­ber, gen­er­ates unprece­dented ben­e­fits and secu­rity for mar­keters and con­sumers together — instead of cre­at­ing yet another monop­oly and being exploited by that monopoly.

    The “Pedi­aNet­work®” plat­form allows mar­keters to con­trol the plat­form and pre­vent any pos­si­ble future “bait and switch” or “walled gar­dens.” Mar­keters will always have unfet­tered access to their organic users enabling mar­keters to remain mas­ters of their own des­tinies and defend against the pro­lif­er­a­tion of AI-dri­ven per­sonal assis­tants that choose for con­sumers and cut mar­keters out of the loop.

  • The most pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing is high-value infor­ma­tion deliv­ered at the con­sumer’s point-of-need.

    The Atlantic, June 13, 2014 - “Think about how much you can learn about prod­ucts today before see­ing an ad. Com­ments, user reviews, friends’ opin­ions, price-com­par­i­son tools: These things aren’t adver­tis­ing (although they’re just as ubiq­ui­tous). In fact, they’re much more pow­er­ful than adver­tis­ing because we con­sider them infor­ma­tion rather than mar­ket­ing. The dif­fer­ence is enor­mous: We seek infor­ma­tion, so we’re more likely to trust it; mar­ket­ing seeks us, so we’re more likely to dis­trust it.”

  • “Ency­clo­pe­dia” is the most pow­er­ful and proven con­sumer infor­ma­tion brand to organ­i­cally gen­er­ate the per­cep­tion of “inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity credibility” in con­sumers’ minds, e.g. Wikipedia, Investo­pe­dia, Soft­pe­dia, energy-pedia, Future­pe­dia, Sumo­pe­dia, Webo­pe­dia and over 60,000 ency­clo­pe­dias at Ama­zon.

    Obvi­ously own­ers of the var­i­ous “pedias” were inten­tion­ally using the credibility asso­ci­ated with an “ency­clo­pe­dia.” And the over­whelm­ing num­bers of “ency­clo­pe­dias” tes­tify to the suc­cess of the “pedia” brand in ful­fill­ing the expec­ta­tions of both the own­ers and their cus­tomers. How­ever most do not give much thought to the “why it works” and the rela­tion to “behav­ioral cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases.”

    In gen­er­at­ing the “inde­pen­dent third-party, higher author­ity” per­cep­tion in con­sumers’ minds, the “pedia” infor­ma­tion brand trig­gers 4 behav­ioral cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases that work together — the “rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness heuris­tic,” the “avail­abil­ity heuris­tic,” the “fram­ing bias” and the “con­fir­ma­tion bias.”

    The “rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness heuris­tic” is the “looks like a duck, walks like a duck, flies like a duck — so it must be a duck,” the “avail­abil­ity heuris­tic” is “I’ve seen ducks at the park,” the “fram­ing bias” is “It says it’s a duck,” and then the “con­fir­ma­tion bias” kicks in with “I knew it was a duck all along.” (“pedia” is the “duck”)

    Indi­vid­u­ally these cog­ni­tive heuris­tics and biases are per­sua­sive — but together they are extremely pow­er­ful and very dif­fi­cult to over­come, because they are all exam­ples of “Sys­tem 1” vs “Sys­tem 2” thinking.

  • High-value infor­ma­tion deliv­ered at the con­sumer’s point of need is not blocked.

  • Con­sumers don’t like to be inter­rupted so they spend bil­lions on cable TV, satel­lite TV/radio, Tivo, DVRs, iPods, and more Inter­net ad-block­ers than ever — just to avoid interruptions.

  • Track­ing con­sumers with ads is creepy. Retar­get­ing is creepy. 24/7/365 online and offline sur­veil­lance is off the charts creepy. This is why con­sumers are block­ing ads more than ever.

    Imag­ine sur­veil­lance-based track­ing (SBT) taken to its ulti­mate AI incar­na­tion — you wake up one day and you don’t know why, but you sud­denly want a spe­cific kind of motor­cy­cle. And just as you get in your car, your cell goes off with a text mes­sage — and low an behold there’s an ad for exactly that same motor­cy­cle on your screen, and it’s even in your favorite color. SBT has implanted a delayed heuris­tic-based cog­ni­tive manip­u­la­tion in your mind, trig­gered by the text mes­sage, all with­out your knowl­edge or permission.

    What hap­pens when every com­pany can manip­u­late con­sumers to do what­ever they want (the stated goal of SBT)?

    Actu­ally reach­ing such a goal would destroy con­sumer choice, which in turn would destroy free mar­kets and marketers.

  • Con­sumers want adver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers to be hon­est. Con­sumers actu­ally pre­fer ban­ner ads instead of native ads. Adver­tis­ers and pub­lish­ers are risk­ing hard-earned con­sumer credibility with native ads.

  • Online mar­ket­ing today bears a strik­ing resem­blance to the sub-prime mort­gage mar­ket prior to 2008. A quote from Dr. Michael Burry from the book and movie, The Big Short, Inside the Dooms­day Machine, by Michael Lewis — about the sub-prime mort­gage and hous­ing col­lapse of 2008:

    “It is ludi­crous to believe that asset bub­bles can only be rec­og­nized in hind­sight,” he wrote. “There are spe­cific iden­ti­fiers that are entirely rec­og­niz­able dur­ing the bubble’s infla­tion. One hall­mark of mania is the rapid rise in the inci­dence and com­plex­ity of fraud.… The FBI reports mort­gage-related fraud is up five­fold since 2000.” Bad behav­ior was no longer on the fringes of an oth­er­wise sound econ­omy; it was its cen­tral fea­ture. “The salient point about the mod­ern vin­tage of hous­ing-related fraud is its inte­gral place within our nation’s insti­tu­tions,” he added.

    Here are the 5 stages of a Bub­ble from Investo­pe­dia, March 11, 2021 — Dis­place­ment, Boom, Eupho­ria, Profit Tak­ing, Panic.

    Other experts con­firm the same “iden­ti­fiers” in online adver­tis­ing — Adver­tis­ing Age, April 5, 2016; CNBC, June 17, 2016; Medi­a­Post, April 17, 2016; Ad Exchanger, July 15, 2014; The Sub­prime Atten­tion Cri­sis: Adver­tis­ing and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Inter­net, by Tim Whang, pub­lished Novem­ber 1, 2020.

  • Truth-based Ser­vice (TBS) is sim­ple and 100% consumer-aligned.

    It’s giv­ing con­sumers what they ACTUALLY want, when they actu­ally want it — instead of using sur­veil­lance and behav­ioral manip­u­la­tion to guess what con­sumers MIGHT want and inter­rupt­ing them with your guess.

  • Con­sumer-Aligned Mar­ket­ing (CAM) embraces the goals and prin­ci­ples of Project VRM (Ven­dor Rela­tion­ship Management)

    VRM Principles

    • Cus­tomers must enter rela­tion­ships with ven­dors as inde­pen­dent actors.
    • Cus­tomers must be the points of inte­gra­tion for their own data.
    • Cus­tomers must have con­trol of data they gen­er­ate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selec­tively and voluntarily.
    • Cus­tomers must be able to assert their own terms of engage­ment.
    • Cus­tomers must be free to express their demands and inten­tions out­side of any one com­pa­ny’s con­trol.

  • Here’s what P&G’s chief brand offi­cer, Marc Pritchard, said at IAB’s Annual Lead­er­ship Meet­ing on Jan­u­ary 29, 2017:

    “We have an anti­quated media buy­ing and sell­ing sys­tem that was clearly not built for this tech­nol­ogy rev­o­lu­tion. We serve ads to con­sumers through a non-trans­par­ent media sup­ply chain with spotty com­pli­ance to com­mon stan­dards, unre­li­able mea­sure­ment, hid­den rebates and new inven­tions like bot and meth­bot fraud.”

    He adds, “I con­fess that P&G believed the myth that we could be a ‘first mover’ on all of the lat­est shiny objects, despite the lack of stan­dards and mea­sure­ments and ver­i­fi­ca­tion. We accepted mul­ti­ple viewa­bil­ity met­rics, pub­lisher self-report­ing with no ver­i­fi­ca­tion, out­dated agency con­tracts, and fraud threats – with the some­what delu­sional thought that dig­i­tal is dif­fer­ent and that we were get­ting ahead of the dig­i­tal curve.”

    P&G says it has now “come to its senses”, by real­is­ing there is no sus­tain­able advan­tage in a “com­pli­cated, non-trans­par­ent, inef­fi­cient and fraud­u­lent media sup­ply chain.”

    As Pritchard con­cluded: “P&G is tak­ing action because it’s good for con­sumers, good for our busi­ness, and respon­si­ble for the indus­try. Don’t be fooled by the myths. Don’t accept the excuses. Don’t wait for some­one else to move. Don’t be daunted by the task. Take one step at a time. There is tremen­dous power in the col­lec­tive force of our industry.”

    And here’s what Marc Pritchard had to say in 2018.

  • “But inter­rup­tion only works if con­sumers spend time doing inter­rupt­ible things on inter­rup­tion-friendly devices. Once they can get what they want with­out leav­ing them­selves open to inter­rup­tions — whether through voice inter­faces or AI-dri­ven back­ground ser­vices — they will feel even more hos­tile to ad inter­rup­tions than they claim to today. That means the 38% of US online adult users already trend­ing toward com­puter-based ad block­ing and ad avoid­ance will con­tinue to expand — not out of hos­tile con­sumer intent, but out of casual indif­fer­ence to adver­tiser interests.

    You don’t need to think hard to envi­sion a world in which Alexa answers most of the ques­tions you search Google for today, or a world just a few years beyond that where your per­sis­tent per­sonal assis­tant (PPA) scrapes all the best bits from your Face­book feed and shows it to you stripped of unnec­es­sary things — includ­ing the top 10 con­certs you don’t care that your friends went to as well as the adver­tis­ing you are not inter­ested in.”

    James McQuivey, For­rester Research, May 15, 2017

  • In an Infor­ma­tion Civ­i­liza­tion — truth is the sin­gle most pow­er­ful asset.

    Three things can­not long be hid­den: the sun, the moon, and the truth. – Confucius

     

  • Noth­ing is more pow­er­ful than the TRUTH.

    Telling the truth cre­ates a “vir­tu­ous feed­back loop” — the more you do » the bet­ter it works » the more pow­er­ful it becomes » the bet­ter it works » ad infinitum

  • “Just as indus­trial civ­i­liza­tion flour­ished at the expense of nature and now threat­ens to cost us the Earth, an infor­ma­tion civ­i­liza­tion shaped by sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism and its new instru­men­tar­ian power will thrive at the expense of human nature and will threaten to cost us our human­ity.”

    Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Sur­veil­lance Cap­i­tal­ism.”

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    At 21:11 of movie The Social Dilemma, Jaron Lanier says:

    “We’ve cre­ated a world in which online con­nec­tion has become pri­mary, espe­cially for younger gen­er­a­tions, and yet in that world, any­time two peo­ple con­nect the only way it’s financed is through a sneaky third per­son whose pay­ing to manip­u­late those two peo­ple. So we’ve cre­ated an entire global gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who are raised within a con­text, where the very mean­ing of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the very mean­ing of cul­ture in manip­u­la­tion. We’ve put deceit and sneak­i­ness at the absolute cen­ter of every­thing we do.” 

     

     

     

  • Mon­e­tiz­ing lying, cheat­ing, steal­ing, and manip­u­la­tion were not lim­ited to consumers. 

    2023 — Google Lied to Adver­tis­ers — Google Search
    2022 — Face­book Lied to Adver­tis­ers — Google Search
    2021 — Face­book Knew for Years — Ad Reach Esti­mates Based on Wrong Data
    2020 — Face­book’s His­tory of Lying to Adver­tis­ers and Media Buyers
    2020 — Face­book’s 27 Out­rages of 2020
    2019 — Face­book to Pay $40 Mil­lion to Set­tle Claims in Inflated Video Viewing
    2019 — Face­book Admits to U.S. Sen­a­tor — We Lied About Our Teenage Spy App
    2018 — Did Face­book’s Faulty Data Push News Pub­lish­ers to Make Ter­ri­ble Deci­sions on Video
    2018 — Face­book Flat Out Lies About How Many Peo­ple Can See Its Ads
    2017 — Should Adver­tis­ers be Wor­ried About Face­book’s False Audi­ence Figures

     

  • The Fifth Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion incor­po­rates con­cepts such as “sus­tain­abil­ity,” “human-cen­tered­ness,” and “con­cern for the envi­ron­ment” in addi­tion to trans­for­ma­tion of the indus­trial struc­ture through the uti­liza­tion of AI, IoT, big data, etc., which was debated in the Fourth Indus­trial Revolution.

    The Fifth Indus­trial Rev­o­lu­tion, or 5IR, encom­passes the notion of har­mo­nious human–machine col­lab­o­ra­tions, with a spe­cific focus on the well-being of the mul­ti­ple stake­hold­ers (i.e., soci­ety, com­pa­nies, employ­ees, cus­tomers). Sci­enceDi­rect, June 2022, Pages 199–208