How Consumer Profiling Has Become More Invasive
In my last blog post, I covered the phenomenon of drop culture and how it has changed with social media marketing. As a quick recap, drop culture is a marketing tactic that relies on psychological aspects of hype, scarcity, exclusivity, and participation to entice consumers into shopping new products immediately upon release. Let’s pretend that I neatly wrapped up that post with a poignant observation about how the fear of missing out via social media marketing creates a need to constantly be on the search or lookout for “the next best thing.” This week, I aim to expand on how these habits drive consumer profiling, how companies track our browsing data to personalize our ads, and why that isn’t necessarily a good thing.
At the heart of my previous post was the use of psychological tactics by marketers to target audiences with their products. This is, of course, nothing new. Ad agencies have been using consumer market data for decades to determine the best target audience for their products, and constructing emotional ploys in their advertisements to make those products stick in our minds. I mean, every time I think of Tile, I think of the lost teddy bear commercial and I just immediately start tearing up.
However, what I find concerning is the sheer amount of consumer data available now to marketers, particularly in thanks to our social media browsing habits. Data points used to be limited to traditional demographics such as age, gender, and general geographic location. Now everything from the IP addresses, devices used, media interactions, purchase histories, specific location data, and even medical conditions are up for purchase by businesses. These data points come from your every day technology interactions. Just take a look at how Google has profiled you, and this is only what they’ll show you.
So what’s the big deal? Don’t these data points just result in more personalized ad experiences, so you see things you’re actually interested instead of a bunch of junk you’d just ignore? Well, yeah, that’s the point. It used to be that advertisers bought ad space on websites with specific markets, such as ads for purses on a women’s clothing website. Now, marketers have their ads stalk consumers around the Web in order to maintain the product’s presence in your mind until you eventually give in to buying it.
It’s worth mentioning the scarier implications of the way digital media has changed targeted marketing. True story: Once I was in a Wal-Mart going down the rice aisle and I picked up a packet of Knorr Rice Sides to consider for dinner. I decided against it and put it back. As I was scrolling my Facebook feed later, what should I see but sponsored advertisements for Knorr Rice Sides? In the digital age, targeted marketing is based on algorithms that use compiled data about you to determine what is the most effective message to keep your attention. The more information about you that can be gathered, the better the algorithms work. Unfortunately, the algorithms have gotten so good that we no longer understand how they work. In her 2017 TEDTalk, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci presented an example of how an algorithmic system had been able to recognize the onset of mania in a bipolar person from their social media posts and determined that it would be easier to sell that person tickets to Las Vegas. The problem was that the researcher heading this experiment could not tell for himself exactly what the machine was picking up on to make this determination — but it was right.
So what do we do about this? To be sure, I’m not eschewing digital or social media outright. I recognize that they serve a very valuable purpose to society. However, I think a conversation needs to be had about transparency regarding how our data is accumulated and used. Further, and what I’ll explore in my final presentation, in a digital world where our attention is currency, I believe that we should be paid for the data we generate through our online activity. To allow big tech companies and marketing agencies use our private data to target us with advertisements in ways we can’t fully understand is incredibly invasive and perverse. Even if you’re the type to just ignore the ads, data is still being collected on you.
My questions for you this week is: Have you ever had an online ad experience that felt eerily intrusive? What did you think about it? How did it affect your thoughts about the product? How do you think this ad came to be targeted at you?
