Snippings

Marco Polo reached the Mongol imperial capital of Khanbaliq (modern Beijing) around the year 1275,

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Sharp’s first law is that brands can’t get bigger on the back of loyal customers. Applying a statistical analysis to sales data, he demonstrates that the majority of any successful brand’s sales comes from “light buyers”: people who buy it relatively infrequently. Coca-Cola’s business is not built on a hardcore of Coke lovers who drink it daily, but on the millions of people who buy it once or twice a year. You, for instance, may not think of yourself as a Coke buyer, but if you’ve bought it once in the last 12 months, you’re actually a typical Coke consumer. This pattern recurs across brands, categories, countries and time. Whether it’s toothpaste or computers, French cars or Australian banks, brands depend on large numbers of people — that’s to say, the masses — who buy them only occasionally, leave long gaps between purchases and buy competing brands in between.

If you work for a brand owner, the implications are profound. First, you will never increase your brand’s market share by targeting existing users — the task that digital media performs so efficiently. The effort and expense marketers put into targeting their own customers with emails and web banners is largely wasted; loyalty programmes, says Sharp, “do practically nothing to drive growth”. What seems like a prudent use of funds — focusing on people who have already proved they like the brand — is actually just spinning wheels.

Second, and paradoxically, a successful brand needs to find a way of reaching people who are not in its target market, in the sense of people who are predisposed to buy it. The brand’s advertising must somehow gain the attention of people who are not interested in it, have never bought it, or who bought it so long ago they can’t remember — so that when they are ready to buy, it automatically springs to mind. In the wastage is the value.

Advertising, says Sharp, works best when it doesn’t try and persuade, but merely makes us remember the brand at the point of purchase.

From: How the Mad Men Lost the Plot Again – by Ian Leslie.

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First, you will never increase your brand’s market share by targeting existing users — the task that digital media performs so efficiently. The effort and expense marketers put into targeting their own customers with emails and web banners is largely wasted; loyalty programmes, says Sharp, “do practically nothing to drive growth”. What seems like a prudent use of funds — focusing on people who have already proved they like the brand — is actually just spinning wheels.

Second, and paradoxically, a successful brand needs to find a way of reaching people who are not in its target market, in the sense of people who are predisposed to buy it. The brand’s advertising must somehow gain the attention of people who are not interested in it, have never bought it, or who bought it so long ago they can’t remember — so that when they are ready to buy, it automatically springs to mind. In the wastage is the value.

Advertising, says Sharp, works best when it doesn’t try and persuade, but merely makes us remember the brand at the point of purchase.

From: How the Mad Men Lost the Plot Again – by Ian Leslie.

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Collectors are using documents produced by artificial intelligence to “prove” artworks’ authenticity and ownership when obtaining valuations or making insurance claims, according to industry figures.

“Chatbots and LLMs [large language models] are helping fraudsters convincingly forge sales invoices, valuations, provenance documents and certificates of authenticity,” said Olivia Eccleston, a fine art insurance broker at Marsh

From: Fraudsters use AI to fake artwork authenticity and ownership.

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The Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard, developed in collaboration with Allium Labs, uses the first approach. Their method applies filtering to provide less noisy information about general stablecoin activity. They show that after filtering the raw data, the total monthly stablecoin volume reduces from around $5 trillion (Total Transaction Volume) to $1 trillion (Adjusted Transaction Volume). When only considering Retail Transaction Volume (transactions less than $250), the volume is only $6 billion. We use a similar filtering approach to the Visa Onchain Analytics Dashboard but provide methods more focused on labeling transactions specifically as payments.

From: Artemis.

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Coinbase is taking three US states to court in a bid to lock in federal protection for its planned prediction markets, opening a new front in the battle over whether event contracts are finance or gambling.

The exchange has sued regulators in Connecticut, Illinois, and Michigan, asking federal judges to declare that prediction markets listed on a US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)-regulated platform fall under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and the CFTC’s claimed exclusive jurisdiction, not 50 separate state gambling codes.

From: Coinbase Sues 3 States Over Prediction Market Laws.

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When further labeling payment transactions into P2P, B2B, P2B, B2P, and Internal B transactions using Artemis labeling data in section 3.2, we find that P2P payments represent only a 23.7% (11.3%) share of total payments (all raw data). Previous studies have pointed out that stablecoin payments contribute around 25% for P2P payments, and we obtain similar results. Finally, in section 3.3 we observed that in terms of volume, the majority of stablecoin transactions is centralized by the top 1,000 wallets. This opens an interesting question: is stablecoin usage developing as a vehicle for payments run by intermediaries and big firms, or as a P2P transaction settlement, which time will tell.

From: Artemis.

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The new version of the app also includes an encrypted messaging feature, support for third-party apps and Tinder integration.

From: World super app gets more crypto payment features.

Smart

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And that’s why the AARP tells fibs about gift cards: we have, with largely positive intentions and for good reasons, exposed them to less regulation than most formal payment systems in the United States received. That decision has a cost. Grandma sometimes pays it.

From: The gift card accountability sink.

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And so if you are a regional or national retailer who wants to offer gift cards, you have a choice. You can dedicate a team of internal lawyers and operations specialists to understanding both what the laws of the several states require with respect to gift cards, which are a tiny portion of your total operations, not merely today but as a result of the next legislative session in Honolulu, because you absolutely must order the software written to calculate the payment to remit accurately several quarters in advance of the legal requirement becoming effective. Or you can make the much more common choice, and outsource this to a specialist.

That specialist, the gift card program manager, will sell you a Solution™ which integrates across all the surfaces you need: your point-of-sale systems, your website, your accounting software, the 1-800 number and website for customers to check balances, ongoing escheatment calculation and remittance, cash flow management, carefully titrated amounts of attention to other legal obligations like AML compliance, etc. Two representative examples: Blackhawk Network and InComm Payments. You’ve likely never heard of them, even if you have their product on your person right now. Their real customer has the title Director of Payments at e.g. a Fortune 500 company.

From: The gift card accountability sink.

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