It has become a familiar sight for those browsing Facebook or watching videos on
YouTube to see ads for VPNs. Sometimes they come in the form of a 30 second video that
plays when you scroll past, other times it’s included as a paid promotion in a video about
cooking, makeup, or gaming. If you take a moment to listen to these ads, you will hear about
how hackers are trying to steal your data, and how a VPN will make this more difficult for them.
Even if that does not concern you as a potential customer the ad will tell you about how a VPN
has more uses beyond just cybersecurity. These ads are so omnipresent that they have
become memes all over the internet, something the marketing team behind these campaigns
were no doubt thrilled to see happen.
A VPN is a smart product for anyone to have access to, but for years the technology was
niche and unpopular. VPNs were only being used by the tech savvy and those with additional
incentives for protecting their security. Through this successful marketing plan, and
improvements to the affordability and ease of use of the technology, using a VPN is quickly
becoming a standard of personal cybersecurity.
Compliance recording applications could be in a spot like pre-marketing campaign
VPNs. Compliance recording systems are often seen as an unnecessary precaution, or difficult
to use with limited utility. This has led to a perception of the technology as a niche service.
The way VPNs seem to have solved this problem is by showing their product has utility
for most users even if they do not care about cybersecurity. The main example every ad use is
to show how using a VPN you can access Netflix from different countries so you can watch
shows that you may otherwise not have access to. Consuming media through Netflix is such a
big part of many of our lives, even if the ad has not convinced you to buy, the viewer will
immediately understand how the product could be valuable beyond its main function.
Is there a way for compliance recording systems to provide value to people that
developers are not recognizing? Is there a way to market compliance recording solutions as
valuable beyond their intuitively recognizable qualities? There is a possibility that much like how
VPNs were a niche service with unrealized potential, a creative mind could repurpose the
powerful tools are compliance recording solutions into some new form of end user value.
