Click through to the good bits.

00:00 Catch up.

06:13 What’s in the marketing news?

09:08 YouTube taking it to TikTok.

18:18 Optus data breach.

36:32 Twitter losing advertisers over child exploitation.

49:18 ACCC targeting greenwashing.

Catch Up

Martin Henley: [00:00:26] Hello there. My name is Martin Henley this is the Effective Marketing content extravaganza and if you’ve spent a second here, you will know that I’m on a mission to give you everything you need to be successful in your business. Providing, of course, what you need to be successful in your business is to know more about, and implement more effectively some sales and marketing, which is of course, what you need if you’re going to be more successful in your business. What we do here is we bring in anyone we can find with knowledge to share on you being more successful with your sales and marketing. We look at the very best and the very worst of marketing content on the Internet and every other week Melanie Farmer, Concierge of Co-creation at Crazy Might Work comes along and we talk about the news and we speculate wildly about what this might mean for anyone who’s engaged in Effective Marketing. Good afternoon, Melanie Farmer. [00:01:17][50.5]

Melanie Farmer: [00:01:18] At your service. Good afternoon. MARTIN And Reese. [00:01:22][3.6]

Martin Henley: [00:01:23] You’re an absolute star. You know, this is the 18th episode of the marketing news. I think we must have done ten or twelve together already because Ionut was involved before. He might get involved again, we might do this every week. That’s quite cool, isn’t it? Consistent, if nothing else, through COVID, through spring’s, winters, summers, fires, floods. We’re here bringing them the news. Them, those people who might be watching you. [00:01:49][26.5]

Melanie Farmer: [00:01:52] We’re brilliant. Fantastic. Excellent, good. [00:01:54][2.7]

Martin Henley: [00:01:55] Good. So we start typically with a little boast. Do you have a little boast? [00:01:58][2.8]

Melanie Farmer: [00:02:00] Yeah. We submitted our stage three application for the National Telstra Awards for Innovation and Health, we were nominated for two categories. So it’s a long journey to be a winner. [00:02:14][13.9]

Martin Henley: [00:02:15] Okay, Telstra, are they a telco in Australia? [00:02:18][2.4]

Melanie Farmer: [00:02:19] They are, yeah. So they sort of like British Telecom or what would it be in the US, not sure, but yes, big. Okay. The original and biggest national telecommunications agency. [00:02:32][12.5]

Martin Henley: [00:02:33] Fantastic. So you are through to the third round. Is that where you are. [00:02:37][3.7]

Melanie Farmer: [00:02:38] We are, stage four is a panel pitch so much smaller cohorts. I think they originally had 20,000 at stage one and then we’ve gone narrow, narrow, narrow. So we now then will be down to the final sort of 50 at the next point where they interview you. I will say the value of for us is in answering the questions because as you grow as a business, the questions that you get asked in an awards category make you think, gosh, I should have an answer to that. What is my answer? So it’s been very useful for us, shout out to Telstra, to help us think about what we actually need to be doing to be doing. [00:03:22][44.7]

Martin Henley: [00:03:23] 100% you need to be thinking about what you’re doing. You need to be interrogating your business all the time. I think that’s the key to being in business and being successful and. Yeah, excellent. That’s really good news. Well done. Did I post about having a new microphone last time we spoke? [00:03:40][16.5]

Melanie Farmer: [00:03:41] I think so. I think we I think. [00:03:44][2.4]

Martin Henley: [00:03:44] Did we talk about the fact that Paul sounded better than I do so I had to go out and buy a new microphone. [00:03:48][3.7]

Melanie Farmer: [00:03:49] That’s the one you’ve got. [00:03:50][0.6]

Martin Henley: [00:03:51] Oh, then I’ve achieved nothing in the last two weeks. [00:03:53][2.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:03:53] For lighting, I would say, though. [00:03:55][1.3]

Martin Henley: [00:03:55] Oh, my lighting has improved. Yeah. There’s a little orange light there on the surf pictures behind me now, so I’m quite pleased with that. That’s all I’ve achieved then in the last two weeks. It’s okay. I’ll keep on keeping on. Actually, what we’ve achieved is we’ve slowed down on the content that we’re producing. We’ve decided that we need to make the most of every piece of content that we produce. So now everything we do is getting transcribed to give us an opportunity for search engine optimisation, all those kinds of things. So I’m feeling really happy about that actually, that we really are making the most of the content that we’re producing and slowing down and getting ready to do it better. That’s kind of that’s the boast, that’s the decision we’ve made. That’s what we’ve done. We’ve done less work, I think, is what I’m saying. I’m really bad at this boasting business. [00:04:41][45.1]

Melanie Farmer: [00:04:41] We’ve just completed a module in disability awareness. It’s a good thing to boast about, it really speaks to what you’ve just said about slowing down. One of the things that we learned from from doing this module is, if you think about it, a good chunk of the world wear reading glasses. If they didn’t, then technically they’d really be having a disability. How could they engage with the world without their reading glasses? It just changes the way you think about inclusivity. I quite liked that, if I do this, I now really have a disability where I can’t see what is happening. [00:05:21][39.9]

Martin Henley: [00:05:22] So yes. [00:05:23][0.5]

Melanie Farmer: [00:05:24] I actually need to have those to read. I have a medical device, you could say, to help me, in the same way somebody might have a wheelchair if they need it. It just changes your thinking about what inclusivity means and why it’s important. [00:05:41][17.4]

Martin Henley: [00:05:42] Yes and how many people actually need to be included. Yeah. And how many people are benefiting from, like you say, medical devices? That’s a good way you’ve come up with ready to two really good boasts and I’m still struggling with one. Slowing down is important, slowing down, I think is important and good. It’s kind of been the theme for a little while, maybe for a month or so that slowing down might be good. So that’s good. Okay, cool. But we’re here not to boast. We’re here to talk about the marketing news. [00:06:12][29.3]

What’s in the marketing news.

Martin Henley: [00:06:13] So what has caught your attention in the last couple of weeks in the way of marketing news? [00:06:18][5.4]

Melanie Farmer: [00:06:20] Well, two stories. One is about the ACCC, which is the one that they call the Australian Consumers Association, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. All right. ACCC in Australia, they have been doing a sweep of organisations around fake reviews and greenwashing and all of these sorts of things. So that that’s happening right now. [00:06:55][34.9]

Martin Henley: [00:06:56] Okay. [00:06:56][0.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:06:57] That’s just interesting in terms of what’s happening with Australian companies and online reviews and how they’re trying to game the system. The second story, which is probably bigger, is the Optus data breach, which has now cascaded into a Telstra data breach. Optus of course owned by SingTel in Singapore, Singapore telecommunications have been impacted in terms of the story as well and the data breach because Optus, this is Optus, Australia. Yeah. So cyber security issues and what, how organisations respond when that happens. [00:07:38][41.0]

Martin Henley: [00:07:40] Fantastic. Okay, cool. Two very good stories. I’ve got three, but I think one’s going to be quite short because we seem to be talking about it all the time. My three – number one is YouTube looking to provide direct monetisation for shorts, a big shift in the short form content battle. So this is YouTube now actually gearing up to go to war with TikTok. Maybe it’s a bit late. I think that’s interesting. This is the one that I think might be quite short – Google facing 25.4 billion damages claims in UK over ad tech, UK and Holland Dutch courts over. Okay. In UK and Dutch courts. This is the issue when people write on the Internet, they don’t really understand grammar. So UK comma, Dutch courts. Why isn’t it UK and Dutch courts? Why isn’t it British and Dutch? Okay. That’s the that’s the story. Google facing a $25 billion plus campaign. What’s that? [00:08:43][62.9]

Melanie Farmer: [00:08:44] We may not have time to unpack the grammar side of that. [00:08:47][2.5]

Martin Henley: [00:08:48] No. Well, I think we already have. They don’t know what they’re doing in terms of grammar, but that’s the issue. Then the third one is Twitter. Twitter ads suspended by top brands because of child exploitation. So those are my three stories. Because I’ve got three, it makes sense that we sandwich yours. So one of my. One of yours. One of my. One of yours. One of mine. Does that make sense? Which do we think is the biggest story? I think probably this YouTube thing. YouTube looking to provide direct competition now to TikTok through Shorts. What they’re saying is it’s been a bit of a mess because the way YouTube. Sorry, I’ve just decided we’re going with this story. Is that cool? [00:09:32][44.0]

YouTube taking it to TikTok.

Martin Henley: [00:09:17] YouTube looking to provide direct competition now to TikTok through Shorts. What they’re saying is it’s been a bit of a mess because the way YouTube. Sorry, I’ve just decided we’re going with this story. Is that cool? [00:09:32][15.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:09:33] Right. [00:09:33][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:09:34] Right. It’s been a bit of a mess because nobody really, really understands how the YouTube algorithm works other than obviously it’s designed to generate as much revenue for YouTube as possible. The sense or the logical thing is that they decide which videos to promote and therefore which videos are going to perform best in terms of monetisation by the watch time and, the click throughs the watch times and the engagement, but largely the watch time. So whenever YouTube bought out Shorts, it kind of made a mess of everything because now people are getting lots of no, duration, that’s the thing. So duration and watch time are the things. So people are getting lots of duration. People were watching much larger percentages of the video because they were much shorter, but they weren’t getting the watch time, which is the number of minutes, hours, weeks, whatever people spend looking at the things. So what happened is that these Shorts cannibalised, a lot of big content producers were complaining that Shorts, they were doing shorts that were getting lots of views, they’re getting lots of duration, but their watch time was going off a cliff and so they were losing actual money. The thing is that the Shorts weren’t monetized at all. [00:10:56][82.4]

Martin Henley: [00:10:57] What YouTube are saying now is that they will pay 45% of ad revenue to producers of shorts. It might be the same story always. What the big content producers are saying is that this will be much more money than you actually get from TikTok. So what it will do is it will bring back content producers to YouTube. It will be much more lucrative than actually putting the content on Tik Tok. I don’t really understand how it works. If you’re a content producer, don’t you just put the content everywhere? I don’t really know. You know, it’s the same questions that we ask every time this sort of stuff happens. Is it too late? Does anybody care? Doesn’t everyone just put all of their content everywhere anyway? How do you feel about the whole Shorts, YouTube, Insta Reels kind of situation? You started producing content, but you’re not looking to generate money from your content are you? [00:12:05][67.7]

Melanie Farmer: [00:12:07] Yeah. I mean, I think I don’t remember but in the last week I did see a story. I don’t remember where, where people would were migrating away from YouTube. YouTube were struggling to have people make content full stop. Perhaps that is because they are heading off to make more money elsewhere and prioritising, making content for others. And this could be a response to that, to entice content producers back. Perhaps that’s what’s happening. I’m trying to remember where this story was, only in the last week. It doesn’t make sense to me. Why would you not just post your content on YouTube as well regardless? [00:12:56][48.9]

Martin Henley: [00:12:57] Yeah. So the opportunity, is it rumble? Twitch? YouTube. There are other places. I don’t know if they are doing so well. If content producers are doing so well, like Twitch is very much a gamers kind of platform and I think they’re starting to bring in maybe sports fans, fight fans, football fans. What’s interesting about this is I don’t know if I’ve actually told you this, but YouTube is kind of my pension plan. This is why I’m busy producing all this content because I want to help people to be more successful and also I want this corporation to pay for my retirment. Our revenue per thousand views has gone from something like $25 per thousand back at the beginning of the year to something like, I’m trying to open the documentary one open for me now, but it’s something like $25 to something like $0.62. So what is that that’s fallen like that’s more than nine to I don’t my percentages aren’t great but that’s gone off a cliff now I don’t know if it’s because we’re pushing too hard. I don’t know if it’s because we’re doing things that they don’t like. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if advertisers, because the world’s going into a global recession, are just stopping advertising. I don’t really know what it is. I’ve spoken to YouTube and they told me I’m not being penalised, but it is a fact. It’s literally gone from $25 per thousand views to $0.60 or something, which is insane because that’s like a 99% reduction. Is it? A 97% reduction? [00:14:42][104.6]

Melanie Farmer: [00:14:45] There’s a digital marketing trend that I read about as well, which was one of the stories I was going to put forward today about brands changing how they measure success because they were measuring by views and so forth, and that they are not. So it could be a bit of a symbiotic relationship where where you’re not actually brands are standing up to that and saying, we’re not this is not monetised, not for us. We’re not going to pay for views or we’re only paying when there’s X or Z engagement which means something different to what it meant in the past that brands are starting to push back. [00:15:30][45.1]

Martin Henley: [00:15:32] I think that maybe it. You know, I kind of think I think these platforms aren’t really delivering amazing value is what I think. So it wouldn’t surprise me if people are pulling it now because things are getting tight. The other aspect to this that people need to be aware of is obviously advertising on short form videos needs to be very different. So apparently they’ve been trialing like these five second long ads. I was talking to a guy yesterday who’s runs an agency in the UK as part of Talk Marketing. He runs an agency of 70 people all they do is digital advertising. He was just raving about TikTok. TikTok is winning for everybody, you know. So a lot of their energy, they provide all the platforms, they’ve provided Google for 15 years, Facebook for 12 years. So you know all of them. TikTok is the winner. So I don’t know. Does it does it address the issue? It seems like why has it taken them so long? Like Shorts have been around for a year, I’m sure. Like, why only now? It just makes my point. And I think. [00:16:43][71.3]

Melanie Farmer: [00:16:44] They’re scaling now. They they’ve probably been maybe testing this stuff for some time in a different countries and small jurisdictions and then it would just be like, to our mind, it suddenly happened and it’s too late. In truth, it’s highly likely that it’s scaled and gone platform wide now, I would imagine that’s generally what you’re doing, testing and seeing what is actually going to what try it in the market, that market and then boom. So I reckon I mean, I don’t know, but I reckon that’s probably what’s actually happened that it’s just now gone platform wide, global. [00:17:25][41.1]

Martin Henley: [00:17:29] I am so much more cynical than you on all these things. You give them much more credit than I do. I think they’re just panicking. I think TikTok is taking over the world and they’re coming up late to see what they can do about it. Okay, so that’s interesting. That’s cool. That’s my first story. [00:17:42][13.2]

Martin Henley: [00:17:46] The conclusion is, are we going to know shortly because we finally got to the point where we are starting to clip up all of our videos. We’re going to have hundreds of clips, there’s going to be tsunamis of content going now out to Shorts and Reels and TikTok. So we’ll know soon. We’ll know kind of what the effect of all those things are, which is quite exciting. Good. So that brings us to one of your stories. You think the Optus story is the biggest story? Is that what you think? [00:18:16][30.3]

[519.7]

Optus data breach.

Melanie Farmer: [00:18:18] I think so. Is it a marketing story, Optus being probably the second largest telecommunications company in Australia owned by Singapore Telecom, SingTel. They had all of their customer data crashed. What is interesting is crime. Sorry. Stolen. [00:18:43][25.6]

Martin Henley: [00:18:46] Hacked. Yes. [00:18:48][1.9]

Melanie Farmer: [00:18:49] Cyberattack. [00:18:49][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:18:54] This this article that you’ve sent is very serious, technical looking. [00:18:59][5.3]

Melanie Farmer: [00:19:01] Yeah. The thing that’s kind of slightly alarming is that there’s a lot of data that they got. They got people’s names, date of birth, phone numbers, e-mail addresses. For some customers, they also got their driver’s license and their passport numbers. So what they didn’t get was payment details and account passwords important about the payment details. But you know this there’s someone out there who’s got my passport number and my driver’s license, and my date of birth. That’s a lot of data. So the CEO came on and made the statement that they are devastated by this attack on behalf of customers and that they froze everything, you know, don’t worry, this sort of thing. It was it was really a huge set of their customers. Since then, which only happened I think about half an hour ago or something like that, 6 hours ago. 6 hours ago Optus handed their data over to government and then it was the Telstra. Telstra staff attack. Cyber attack happened then again like some time today we said it is only staff data, not customer data. I wonder if that’s true, how would they? [00:20:33][91.8]

Melanie Farmer: [00:20:33] What is interesting is how they are trying to manage this news and protect their brands. So you can imagine a big exodus of customers from Optus to Telstra just switching because they’re switching suppliers overnight and then of course in the middle of all of that, switching Telstra, who they probably switched to, experienced a massive cyberattack themselves and they claimed that it was only affecting staff, not customers. I’m just interested, this is the time of cyber attacks. It’s not like it’s new. It’s been going on for probably a decade and increasing levels. Last year, in fact, it was one of the biggest cyber attacks we’ve had as a country. And it hit it compromised some government data. It’s not not really happy days. [00:21:43][69.1]

Melanie Farmer: [00:21:43] I’ll tell you what I think is quite interesting and diverting to the mind is that something like 95% of hackers are male. So there is a school of thought that if you have women coders looking at hacking as a as a profession in terms of like being defendable to hackers, if they got women in to create code it is harder for a male, a man, to hack something that’s been coded by a woman. Because although they might arrive at the same destination in terms of that code, the way they go about coding is just different. So if you think two men in a bar have a conversation, two women in a bar having a conversation, they might both be talking about football, but the way they arrive at their conclusion and concluding remarks is very different and probably reasonably identifiable that the minimum do this that women could do. Now, this is to suggest that there’s no nuance, which is unfair. But what happens is in if they have women in code, it’s at least harder for men to hack it and vice versa. So this is what is being looked at now which is quite interesting. For the most part its now male coding and male hackers hacking the codes. So it actually increases the risk. It’s just a quite interesting thing is just starting to happen in the world of security, realizing how effective it can be to just the diversity, how important diversity is. [00:23:31][107.5]

Martin Henley: [00:23:32] Yes, I think that’s a little bit tenuous. I know a little bit about this because I interviewed a guy which will go up next Tuesday for the Talk Marketing thing who had quoted Optus with a service that would have prevented this breach and they didn’t do anything about it. What he’s saying is, his is an email solution, it’s all about domain spoofing and all those things. It’s huge. The fraud that’s perpetrated is, is huge. He was saying that I think this is marketing not only in the way that they respond, which is they might be devastated, but I bet the CEO isn’t worried about someone now selling his Australian passport to somebody in a foreign country. You know, I mean, he’s I’m sure his data wasn’t breached, so he might be devastated, but he’s not actually going to suffer. So I think it’s the responsibility, I think this might become a theme of this of the remainder of this conversation is … [00:24:43][71.1]

Melanie Farmer: [00:24:44] Accountability. [00:24:44][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:24:44] Accountability and responsibility. Why are they demanding people copies of people’s driving licenses and passports if they are not taking the proper steps to safeguard those things? And where it’s really about marketing, we are being told, asked, told, forced, to give up more and more and more personal data. From this conversation for an hour and a half on Friday, what I know is that for most of these corporations, they’re there is a solution. There are solutions to these breaches. It’s not that they’re impenetrable. There are solutions, but there’s no will to actually affect those solutions. So this is the issue. This is why it’s marketing, because it’s a pitch. Give us your most important documents and now give us your medical history and your criminal history, and, and, and, and. And nobody, literally nobody – it might be health institutions, it might be telecoms companies, might be I.T. companies. Nobody is is putting in place the safeguards to actually protect that data. Identity theft is the issue, I don’t know if it’s still the case, but somebody told me that in Africa you could get £5,000 for a British passport. Well, these people, if this is to be believed, now have 9.8 million Australian passports. So that’s a lot of money. [00:26:22][97.6]

Melanie Farmer: [00:26:28] Wasn’t everybody had a passport. So there’s a subset of the clients of Optus. Some of the clients had passports, passport data. It is a pattern as well. What’s alarming for meit’s been going on and on and it’s a it’s a business. What you do is you hack an organisation, you take their data, freeze it. You offer a ransom price. The organization pays the ransom. You give them the data back and you promise never to do it again right? So this happened with Cadbury two years ago and last year of a multitude of companies in Australia last year. Cadbury paid the hackers to get their data back I’m pretty sure that is what ended up happening. In this case you would have to believe that Optus paid something out of court to stop the situation escalating because the initial response was, we’re not paying, an organisation that’s hacked us to go away. Then within hours it suddenly went away. How did that actually happen? You know, it’s safe again. Why? I’m pretty sure you must’ve paid somebody something to make this go away. Yeah, and of course, you would not want to say that because it’s saying we pay terrorists, we pay hackers. That’s what we do. Feel free to hack us any time, because, you know, we’re good to pay for you to be quiet and go away. [00:28:02][94.1]

Martin Henley: [00:28:03] But you, the customer, are actually paying because you’re paying inflated prices for the product because they have to pay these people. [00:28:11][8.8]

Melanie Farmer: [00:28:12] Yeah, you would be happy, but you would hope that we wouldn’t have that be where they spend their money. You want them to spend their money on doing that before the attack. So the attack doesn’t happen, it’s unsuccessful. [00:28:24][12.3]

Martin Henley: [00:28:25] Yeah. This solution from this guy has been mandated by Lloyd’s of London. So Lloyd’s of London or data insurers because it’s an industry and people who pay out for these breaches are now mandating them to use this solution. It’s interesting because we think it’s about identity, like it might be in this instance. We think it’s about ransomware, but there are dozens of different ways that this works. So there is a flavour of this called invoice fraud, I think they call it, where literally they will spoof the CEO of a corporation’s email address and send an email to accounts saying, look, pay these emails, these invoices need to be cleared immediately, I’ve cleared them. That could be millions of dollars because they could be four or five invoices worth 600,000 each. The cost of this is huge. [00:29:22][56.3]

Martin Henley: [00:29:24] I’m not technical enough to know if the solution actually does solve the issue, Lloyd’s of London, insurers have decided that it does and they’re mandating it. If you start thinking about it, there’s lots of ways to address these issues. It’s kind of like the conversation we’re having two weeks ago where these these businesses, these big technical businesses aren’t very good at listening. They’re not interested in listening. They know it all. And the other thing that really strikes me about this is this data grab that’s going on. Actually, a telephone company has no business having your driving license and your passport at all. I mean, that’s the end of it. You know, why would they possibly have that? They have it because they do credit scores, whatever that might be. But if they can’t do a credit score without that, without that data, then they shouldn’t be offering services to those people. Do you know? I mean, they need to find other ways of doing this without constantly having people’s data. It’s the same story with Google and Google Analytics. Nobody uses more than 4% of the data that’s available through Google Analytics, so why don’t they just collect the 4%? It’s some kind of megalomania that goes on some so grasping that they just want everything from everyone. [00:30:46][81.3]

Melanie Farmer: [00:30:48] Estonia does this, so I just if you’ve come across e-Estonia, which is a case study, but how Estonia, citizens of Estonia and you don’t have to be from Estonia to become a citizen of Estonia. [00:31:01][13.4]

Martin Henley: [00:31:02] And you don’t even have to be there. You don’t have to go there. [00:31:04][2.5]

Melanie Farmer: [00:31:05] Yes, but Estonian citizens have 100% control and and visibility of all of their data so they can see if the police have checked their data or a school has checked their data, they can see who has checked it and when, who that was exactly when, who. And they can also say when somebody tries to check their data and they can say, no, you can’t see this, they can control who is allowed to see what. They have a very robust transparency whereas I wouldn’t know who’s checking my data half the time. I’ve given permission and I don’t remember. If anyone checked my data, first of all, it is in one place, I can go in there and see who’s checking what and see how many times my passport is seen. So it’s a very different system. So I think it’s an interesting time for, you know, for a country like Estonia to go, well, this is a non-issue where we are because we’ve got this system where our whole world is online. It is ten times beyond in terms of security. Because of that, they are far more invested in the security of their data, but also far more transparent to the individual in terms of controlling their own data. For example, in this situation you would imagine that Telstra would have to go into your environment and have permission to go and look at X, Y or Z and then and then be satisfied and leave. Then you are happily not sharing with them on their server your data. Yeah, they can go away. [00:32:51][106.4]

Martin Henley: [00:32:52] Yes. So they can have temporary access to it, but they don’t get to have it. That’s the thing. And the thing is about Estonia. I mean, arguably, it’s a double edged sword. Now, all of your data is in one place, you know. [00:33:05][12.9]

Melanie Farmer: [00:33:05] So is that the digital twins multiple? So even if they blew up Estonia, it’s they have three other countries or something like that where their data is. Yes. [00:33:16][10.9]

Martin Henley: [00:33:17] So but what I’m saying is it is it more at risk from hackers because it’s all in one basket, is what I’m saying. So there is that issue. But what they’ve got mainly is a different attitude to that. So the citizens, I mean, which is you aren’t here to be raped by corporations, you are sovereign beings and you deserve to be treated with respect and you’ll be okay. [00:33:38][21.6]

Melanie Farmer: [00:33:39] Yes they do. [00:33:39][0.1]

Martin Henley: [00:33:41] Yes, exactly. So, I mean, that’s a huge. [00:33:44][3.2]

Melanie Farmer: [00:33:45] Right? [00:33:45][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:33:45] Yeah. So that’s what I think. I just think it’s disgusting that this attitude prevails, that these businesses are entitled to all of this data and they’re not even behaving responsibly. I mean, it would be ugly enough if they were taking it and protecting it. But the fact that they’re taking it and then not putting it in place, every safeguard that’s available. This guy, Dave, that I spoke to on Friday, if he turned up and said this will help, they should have just done it. You know, I mean, because that should be their responsibility is to protect that data if they’ve taken it. [00:34:19][33.6]

Melanie Farmer: [00:34:21] It’s their first and biggest responsibility, I think. But huge cost to them for this event and you can see there’s hundreds of stories about, Optus responding and so forth. The Government saying that they’ve had to wait 18 days for them to hand over the breached data to government. Why that’s happening, it’s another question, to examine the extent of the damage and so forth. It feels like there are strange protocols that we’re not aware of that are suddenly being activated. So the communication around this and that is marketing, right. How how is it that the government is demanding all of this data so they can analyse it? Is that okay? So the answer to a breach is to put the data in more people’s hands. Yeah. So it’s kind of weird and not good for either Optus or SingTel who own them in Singapore. [00:35:33][72.3]

Martin Henley: [00:35:35] Or marketing, or marketing, which is 70% of all advertising now happens on digital platforms. It’s not good for digital. How much of marketers money goes into building trust, which has now just been undermined because this one corporation didn’t do enough to safeguard the data that they were holding. Good story. Interesting. 100% marketing. [00:35:58][23.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:35:59] Yeah, yeah. Telstra was doing a lot better until they admitted the staff breach of data. So that was something like 30,000 people and all staff. So they were saying no customers. [00:36:12][13.2]

Martin Henley: [00:36:16] Yeah, 100%. The thing is, like where do the customers go? They could leave, but they’re contracted and is the next place any better or not. I just don’t think there’s enough choice. I think these corporations aren’t being held to account enough. [00:36:31][14.4]

Twitter losing advertisers over child exploitation.

Martin Henley: [00:36:32] Which probably brings me to my story. Number two. You want to hear about story number two. Twitter ads suspended by, I can show you this, Twitter ad suspended by top brands because of child exploitation. At least 30 major advertisers have dropped advertising on Twitter after it was revealed that their ads were displayed alongside tweets soliciting illegal child abuse content. For example, a promoted tweet by a Scottish right children’s hospital in Texas was shown alongside toxic tweets related to child sexual abuse. Advertisers revoked. 30 large brands have stopped their accounts. Twitter spokesman was quoted as saying that the research and conclusions by the cybersecurity firm, which studied tweets in accounts during the first 20 days of September, was not representative of Twitter’s efforts to combat illicit activities. The article by Reuters quoted multiple big brand advertisers who were notified that their ads appeared next to the toxic tweets. This is how I feel about it. If you are profiting from child abuse, you shouldn’t be in business. Simple. They shouldn’t be in business. If they if they aren’t in a position to prevent this from happening. Forget the advertisers, forget whatever. If your business is enabling child abuse, you shouldn’t be allowed to be in business. [00:38:15][103.6]

Melanie Farmer: [00:38:17] Sickening. You would. I mean, that’s just. just on so many levels suffering is going to be happening as a result of this. [00:38:28][11.2]

Martin Henley: [00:38:29] Yeah. [00:38:29][0.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:38:31] You know, back when you talked about trust, it’s like the ultimate breach of trust. It’s the opposite of what you’re trying to do. Yeah. I can’t even imagine how you how you deal with that story, how you deal with that situation, how it happened. There was a story last year, last year maybe before where Westpac, one of the biggest banks in Australia, was found that one of their investment funds, was investing in something which turned out to be a paedophile ring. Can you imagine? And so, you know, of course, so many people were fired and an independent inquiry and how could this happen and so forth. These sorts of things, you think, how can this actually happen? I don’t understand how these things can come to to be. [00:39:33][61.9]

Martin Henley: [00:39:36] Well, I think it’s the same thing again. I mean, it’s here. We’re horrified, David Maddox, brand president at Cole Haan, told Reuters after being notified that the company’s ads appeared alongside such tweets. Either Twitter is going to fix this or we’ll fix it by any means we can, which includes not buying Twitter ads. So it feels to me like the issue is not that Twitter is enabling the distribution of child abuse. That’s not the issue. The issue is that there ads appeared there. So even the brands that were advertising there, I’m not going to say, I don’t know but that doesn’t seem to be their primary concern, that this service is enabling child abuse, or the promotion of child abuse, or the distribution of child abuse, or whatever it might be. The issue is that they showed our ads next to them. You know what I mean? It’s like if fixing it meant Twitter never enables the distribution of this kind of content. [00:40:46][69.5]

Melanie Farmer: [00:40:47] How is this organisation allowing such an ad to be anywhere at all on its platform in the first place? We’re never using Twitter again. [00:40:57][10.0]

Martin Henley: [00:40:58] Yes. That would be like if you’re a brand, that would have to be we’re not advertising anywhere where they are. So this goes along, apparently. Yeah. Twitter had plans for an Only Fans type service that they were going to produce at some point. [00:41:18][19.3]

Melanie Farmer: [00:41:19] How are they in business, I mean, Twitter is just kind of it’s like a who’s who of what not to do in ten easy lessons. [00:41:29][9.6]

Martin Henley: [00:41:30] It seems like it doesn’t. [00:41:31][0.8]

Melanie Farmer: [00:41:32] First of all, we’re going to lie about our revenue. Then we’re going to use those lies to secure. An investment under false pretenses. Then we’re going to put we’re going to engage with with promoting child abuse. Happy about that? And what’s more, we’re going to randomly stick the ads of our clients who are clearly against that stuff, alongside those. There you go. What else can we do? What could we do next? What are they going to do next? I mean. [00:42:05][33.0]

Martin Henley: [00:42:06] Yeah. [00:42:06][0.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:42:09] Twitter board are peadophiles, is that what’s going to happen next? Twitter board, too. I don’t know what they could do now. Worse than this. How do they recover? [00:42:19][9.9]

Martin Henley: [00:42:21] I don’t know. The thing is, I think the reason that they’re still in business is because we all have some weird respect, whatever the word is, subordination, maybe that’s the word, for these stupidly big corporations. It’s like, Oh, okay. Oh, you gave away my passport and my driving license and all my data. Well, you know. Did you have images of child abuse? Oh, well, do you know? I mean, it’s like. So this might be the worse. Let’s not forget that Instagram three weeks ago were fined $400 million by the Irish for giving away the contact details of children. There’s just no responsibility going on. If you can’t safeguard people’s data, you shouldn’t have it. If you can’t if you can’t prevent the distribution of these kinds of images on your platform, you shouldn’t be in business. If you can’t safeguard the data of children, the contact details of children, you shouldn’t have that data. It’s insane. It really is insane that we’ve got to this position. [00:43:32][71.4]

Melanie Farmer: [00:43:34] The conversation that we should be having isn’t happening, we’re having a different conversation about fixing it as opposed to understanding what fix it means. Fix it means that what have you is happened in the first place and reverse that so it never happens again. That’s certainly what Westpac did. They, they did a full in, they paid and funded for this independent inquiry. They had this thing happen and so it never happens again and shut it down immediately. So their response was actually very good I thought, because it was the usual things about horrified etc, but they did immediately say, how did this happen? And we need to make sure that we avoid this ever happening again. [00:44:19][45.3]

Martin Henley: [00:44:19] Yeah. Yeah. [00:44:21][1.1]

Melanie Farmer: [00:44:22] Twitter, from what I’m hearing from what you’re saying. [00:44:25][3.1]

Martin Henley: [00:44:27] That’s you know, I’m showing you the articles here. Nobody’s saying this is disgusting. We are not going to give money to an organization that profits from this literally profit profits because those corporations were paying them to run ads alongside this content. So they are literally profiting, that’s it. You know, it’s not even like a hop, skip and a jump a way, it’s here is the abusive content, here is the advert, here is the money. Thank you very much. You know, it’s profiting from. [00:44:56][29.4]

Melanie Farmer: [00:44:57] Not so long ago, we had a chat about Twitter being our moral compass, about who they will allow to tweet. [00:45:03][5.4]

Martin Henley: [00:45:05] Yeah. [00:45:05][0.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:45:05] So if they are our moral compass, where does that leave us? I do feel like I need to delete my Twitter account now because I don’t really want to be supporting a platform that has allowed this to happen I’ve got no trust. These are just things we’re finding out about what are they allowing to happen that we don’t know about. [00:45:25][19.2]

Martin Henley: [00:45:26] So what we’re talking about here now is a organization that has the moral responsibility to ban the democratically elected president of the United States, but doesn’t have the moral responsibility to prevent images of child abuse appearing on their platform. That’s that’s where we are. It’s actually insane. It’s actually insane. Okay, good. [00:45:53][27.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:45:53] Well, let’s bury then my other story very quickly, which is Google facing this $25.4 billion damages claims. This is just really boring. It’s like every week they’re paying out millions. The only thing that I want to say about this is I can show this to you. At last, the governments at least seem to be waking up to the fact that, like the last one last year was too high, or last year it was €220 million at least finally, governments seem to be waking up to the fact that it has to be tens of billions of dollars that they’re fined. I mean, $25 billion is something like 10% of their turnover. So if they get hit with two or three or four of these a year and they actually end up paying them, then actually finally, maybe these corporations might start to take some responsibility for what they’re doing. That’s all I really want to say about that story. I’m glad Google getting done for 25.4 billion. [00:46:54][60.4]

Melanie Farmer: [00:46:55] It sounds like, linking to the accountability theme of today, one way or another, you’re going to feel consequences. And it’s nice to see that happening. [00:47:04][8.9]

Martin Henley: [00:47:05] Really. And the consequences are finally appropriate to the obscene amounts of money that these businesses are making. I mean, if they like 220 million isn’t 1% of their turnover. You know, it’s like they’ll budget to pay those those fines. [00:47:23][17.7]

Martin Henley: [00:47:24] That’s cool. Okay, Gert, let’s go to your last story, which is this a c, c, c commences fresh sweeps for greenwashing, misleading online reviews. What’s this about Melanie Farmer? [00:47:40][15.6]

Melanie Farmer: [00:47:41] Yeah, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. So in Australia they have been sweeping through organizations online to discover and hunt down deceptive advertising and marketing practices. They are the industry regulation watchdog, if you like, on compliance and enforcement. They’re looking at greenwashing so that those that are claiming to be green when they’re not, online reviews, which are not real. They’re always actively monitoring these things but they’re just recently looking at reviews on Facebook pages, third party review platforms, and so they’re looking at about 100 businesses at any given time. I quite like that they’re doing this and that this is news, if you like, right now and again it’s about accountability. It is two ways. So it’s fake reviews where someone’s giving a negative review, but actually they never consumed that service and so they might just be out to get somebody so misleading and harmful reviews are just as bad as a as an organization putting misleading and positive reviews and so pretty hard to police. I love that there’s an organisation and that’s what they live for; just wanting to make sure that things are accurate; so they’re not incentivised where people are getting paid to post good reviews or paid to post bad reviews. [00:49:17][96.5]

Martin Henley: [00:49:18] Yes, 100%. [00:49:20][1.3]

ACCC targeting greenwashing.

Melanie Farmer: [00:49:21] Yeah. Good for them. I’m glad that this organisation exists. This is a story from today, 4th of October. I’ll be interested to see what actually happens from it. They’re just sweeping through so that what they’re saying is the last two Internet sweeps they cancassed 200 sites, but it’s across all sectors clothing, footwear, retail, vehicles, household products, appliances and protecting the consumer, I guess and obviouslyy the whole science around relying on customer testimonials for the decisions that one makes and they’ll be significantly fined for misleading information, which includes false reviews. [00:50:11][50.1]

Martin Henley: [00:50:13] Good. Yeah. I also think good, the thing is, I really think good, but it’s just like, who can you trust now? Do you know what I mean? It’s like. It’s like in the post-truth world. Like, I don’t know. It’s like every organization has an agenda. Is the agenda really to protect the consumer? Or is it more about protecting the rights of the bigger corporations against the smaller corporations? You know, it’s just a minefield of what actually is environmentally good practice and what isn’t and, you know, institution narratives versus rebel narratives. [00:50:57][43.3]

Melanie Farmer: [00:50:59] I sort of think, oh, always think like what if it didn’t exist? If they didn’t exist, then effectively they’re like the police right? Then I’m wondering who’s policing the police? So is there any internal affairs who are policing the police and so forth? At least there’s someone who that is their job and they have the ability to interrogate and investigate these things and in a kind of an audited way. I take your point, who are these auditors? [00:51:38][38.1]

Martin Henley: [00:51:39] Yes. Yes. [00:51:39][0.4]

Melanie Farmer: [00:51:40] And why do we think they should be trusted? But I would probably trust this group more than I perhaps might trust some brands. And yeah. [00:51:57][17.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:52:00] Not for, for what I buy. Yeah. And I think. Yeah. [00:52:04][3.9]

Martin Henley: [00:52:05] Yeah. I think like mis-advertising, we have the Advertising Complaints Commission in the UK. I don’t. I think if it were more actively tracking down and putting people in prison who are committing actual fraud rather than greenwashing. I don’t know if greenwashing is the number one priority in society right now when we know that dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands, millions of people are being defrauded through the Internet all of the time. You know, I don’t know if it’s the number one issue. I don’t want to be cynical about it. [00:52:44][38.6]

[00:52:46] Here’s the realisation I came to when I was talking to Dave about the cybersecurity and the data breaches and all those things. 92% of these breaches come from email, because whatever percentage of all emails are fraud, it kind of paints us as digital marketers, it puts us all in one category. So there’s spam for me and then there’s fraud. Okay. So they might be committing fraud through the spam, but that doesn’t mean that that digital marketers are criminals. There should be something like if your intent is to commit fraud, that’s different from sending out shitty emails because you’re a shitty email marketer. Because they all get bunched into these same categories, it’s like digital and email marketers are as bad as Nigerian princes. It just seems to me to be disproportionate. So I applaud this. I want there to be truth on the Internet. I just don’t know any more who’s actually qualified to provide that truth.[00:53:54][67.6]

Melanie Farmer: [00:53:55] I think I personally think I’m pretty good at spotting fake reviews. It’s going to be a young site often in retail that has got four good reviews and one bad and the bad review is not sufficiently bad to turn you off. That’s going to be often where you see, really obvious, you know, when they’re sort of saying this pill changed my life, I was really skeptical and then I achieved off the scale happiness in 2 minutes. We all know, but we don’t, we don’t all know that that’s fake. It’s so obvious to me, so obvious, that it’s fake. I acknowledge that I don’t enjoy having that rubbish being spouted as actual truth and people making decisions with their money based on something that isn’t actually real. So I like that somebody is shutting that down and saying this is not even a drug and no, it hasn’t been clinically tested, and no, these people didn’t take the drug. In fact, no-one posted this review, it was posted by the company themselves fraudulently, to lie about something where you think you’re going to get cure of cancer and your not. That is deeply unfortunate and for the privileged few who understand that it’s not real just remember so many people don’t know that. There’s a level of fighting the corner for those who haven’t got the fortune to be exposed enough to understand that what they looking at isn’t real. So because someone’s shutting that stuff down as much as they can, that is a good system. [00:55:44][108.8]

Martin Henley: [00:55:45] Yes, 100%. 100%. I think that’s what I’m saying is, like, it doesn’t seem to me like greenwashing is the biggest issue we’re facing. People are being defrauded every day on the Internet. So I would hope that there’s an initiative comparable to this that’s actually tackling that. My point about the email was like, if you get an email you can put it in your junk file or your spam folder or whatever it is but there should be another category of – there should be spam or junk, i.e. this is shitty email marketing that I didn’t ask for, and I don’t like, and I don’t want and then there should be actual fraud, go round these people’s houses and put them in prison. That distinction isn’t being made. If all of the hatred in the world that was going towards spam actually went to imprisoning those people who commit fraud that should be priority number one, I think. And all I’m saying here is that, you know, I hope that there are similar initiatives that are going on to stop people getting defrauded. [00:56:43][58.5]

Melanie Farmer: [00:56:45] Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, this whole other conditions dealing with with corruption and so forth on that scale. Just something in marketing terms because it really is a pet peeve of mine like this changed my life off scale happiness overnight and I’m like, God, if there’s less of those, I’d be happy. That’s that’s a good start. [00:57:04][19.2]

Martin Henley: [00:57:06] Yeah, yeah. Well, mis advertising is a problem and has always been a problem, you know? I mean, it’s like. But it doesn’t feel today after this conversation. Like, the world’s getting better to me. It’s annoying. [00:57:16][10.3]

Melanie Farmer: [00:57:16] Well, it does feel like there’s accountability. I mean, there’s a lot of Optus customers who are no longer Optu customers that have left and said, that’s it, I’ve done this. I suspect a bit of a backlash with Twitter I’m about to close my account with them. That’s what I’m thinking, I feel like I should and, you know, thre’s sweeps going through companies to say you’ve got to be accountable. So it’s it you know, I think it’s important and it’s not pleasant, but it’s it’s something that’s happening. [00:57:45][29.0]

Martin Henley: [00:57:47] Yes. Well, now I’m conflicted. Should I, after everything I’ve said, should I close my Twitter account? I get so little benefit from it. It’s like, why even have it? If they are profiting from child abuse, which they are, they are running ads alongside images of child abuse that’s profiting from child abuse. I think I’m going to do it. [00:58:10][23.5]

Melanie Farmer: [00:58:13] Yeah. [00:58:13][0.0]

Martin Henley: [00:58:14] Good. Well. [00:58:14][0.4]

Melanie Farmer: [00:58:15] On that happy note. [00:58:16][0.7]

Martin Henley: [00:58:18] It’s been an impactful conversation. [00:58:20][1.9]

Melanie Farmer: [00:58:22] A journey we have been on of accountabilities and authorities and responsibilities. [00:58:26][3.8]

Martin Henley: [00:58:27] Yeah, 100%. And the thing is, I think we’re occupying I got in to trouble with somebody because I look at, react to content and I reacted to a thing it was Nestlé, the most evil company in the world. Someone was saying, come on, give them a chance, maybe they’re trying to get better. The thing is that business is 156 years old. That business has been responsible for the death of children because they, you know, convinced mothers in sub-Saharan Africa to add their powder to river water and feed it to their children. That company has done really bad things but I feel like there’s this weirdb like even now I’m doing it now, do I really want to close my Twitter account? I mean, it’s like, come on, give them a chance. It’s like, how many chances is enough chance? I think there’s a weird kind of apathy that goes on that has to change. People like you and I have to start saying, actually, that’s unacceptable and I’m not going to do it anymore. [00:59:31][64.0]

Melanie Farmer: [00:59:32] Check me out. Yeah, yeah. [00:59:34][1.7]

Martin Henley: [00:59:35] Yeah, I’m doing it. I’m going to close my Twitter account. I don’t care. I’m doing it and I’m going to post on LinkedIn. [00:59:40][4.3]

Melanie Farmer: [00:59:41] I don’t feel any sense of loss if I’ll be honest that’s nothing not much apart from the inevitable demise before too long they may not be a company anymore anyway. At this rate they are the, you know, the Golden Rule book of ten things not to do in ten weeks. So yeah. Interesting. [01:00:01][19.9]

Martin Henley: [01:00:02] Crazy. It’s insane. Maybe they will get $44 billion out of Elon Musk, too. [01:00:07][5.4]

Melanie Farmer: [01:00:11] What’s he going to make of this, too? [01:00:12][1.1]

Martin Henley: [01:00:15] Something. I hope something because. Yeah. [01:00:19][4.0]

Melanie Farmer: [01:00:20] It’s all. [01:00:22][2.3]

Martin Henley: [01:00:22] Right. Good. I feel like we’re tapering away. We should draw a line on with that. [01:00:26][3.8]

Melanie Farmer: [01:00:27] Get on with our lives. Open a new chapter next week. [01:00:32][5.0]

Martin Henley: [01:00:33] Excellent. Two weeks. I’ll see you. [01:00:34][1.2]

Melanie Farmer: [01:00:35] So it’s. [01:00:35][0.2]

Martin Henley: [01:00:36] All right. Super cool. I know. We might see each other before. [01:00:38][2.1]

Melanie Farmer: [01:00:40] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. [01:00:42][1.7]

Martin Henley: [01:00:43] Great. You’re an absolute legend for being here. Thank you. Melanie Farmer, I will see you. We will see you in a couple of weeks. You’re an absolute legend. Thank you. [01:00:50][7.3]

Melanie Farmer: [01:00:51] See ya. [01:00:51][0.0]

WHAT DO YOU THINK?