I always feel like somebody’s watching me. Who’s playing tricks on me?
Do you ever get the feeling that you are being watched? That someone somewhere is eavesdropping into your most intimate conversations? Too many so called “coincidences” start to form a pattern, and that uneasy feeling starts to turn into paranoia. “In paranoid schizophrenia, the most common presentation is for there to be a delusion that someone is following you around or watching you, perhaps with the intention to do you harm, and for them to be speaking to you (though no one is around to do the speaking), or somehow controlling your thoughts and actions.” The truth is, you are not alone in feeling this way. The age of bid data and A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) is here “big brother is watching you”, and only time will tell if these new technologies will better society or end life as we know it.
So what is big data and A.I and why is it important for marketers? “The definition of big data is data that contains greater variety, arriving in increasing volumes and with more velocity. Put simply, big data is larger, more complex data sets, especially from new data sources.” Combine that with A.I, which “is the bridge to convert that data into business value.” and what you have is the ability to process and interpret millions and millions of customer data to hopefully better understand them and tailor to their needs.
One example of the generation of huge amounts of data is Amazon’s Alexa who is always listening, and it really freaks me out sometimes to see her little blue light blinking all the time. This means that she is listening to us and learning about our habits. To be honest it has gotten to the point that I have on multiple occasions unplugged my device from the wall socket just because I have had enough of the eavesdropping and snooping from Amazon. To better make you understand my skepticism about the whole conversation of phones and apps listening to us, I always remember this story that happened about 8 months ago when I first moved to NYC. I had seen some interesting and cool people I know wearing Alo Yoga products and I started bringing up in a few conversations that I needed new workout clothes and would maybe give Alo a shot. But me being a die hard Nike fan, I knew that this would not happen overnight. Couple of days go by, and I remember walking in front of the Alo Yoga store on 5th Avenue and saying out loud I really should come by and check out the store because they seem to have some really cool stuff. Long story short, almost overnight I started getting all these targeted ads on social media and of course I ended up buying a bunch of their stuff. It was convenient in a way getting all those Instagram ads? Yes, but did it freak me out a little bit as well? Also YES.
Not all is bad news. A.I and Big Data not only give us more information to make better decisions, but it also helps us in the design to further improve and ultimately make better products. Here are some examples of the advantages that this two big technologies can bring:
- A.I as a marketing tool:
Callaway Golf was the first big golf retailer to use a super computer or A.I to manufacture and design its golf equipment. Not only did the A.I help hundreds of engineers design better golf clubs, but it became a great marketing tool that helped propel the company into the number one golf brand in the world.
- A.I for companies:
Let’s us make better use of our resources and budgets to directly reach that target market you are seeking. With Big Data and complex data crunching made with A.I companies like Google, Amazon and Meta are selling advertising solutions to millions of companies around the world through more efficient products.
- Big Data and A.I for productivity:
Super computers have made each and every one of us more productive. While they are in charge of crunching the numbers and looking for patterns, we are left with the responsibility of making better decisions with the information at hand. Big Data and A.I do the heavy lifting at places like IBM, so its customers can focus on what they are really good at.
Lucky for some of us, at least in Europe for know some countries are writing and enforcing laws on privacy like the “Cookie Law”. “France recently fined Alphabet Inc’s Google $169 million and Meta Platform’s Facebook $67 million on grounds that the companies violated the EU e-Privacy directive (aka the EU “Cookie Law”) by requiring too many “clicks” for users to reject cookies.” For those of you who may not know, Cookies are those annoying little pixels that track your every movement through the internet. Imagine cookies as the internet version of a stalker or private investigator following you around knowing your every move and what you do about your day.
So when is it enough? When do we say that a company has crossed a line? At what point does spontaneity and mere chance go out the window to let predictability and patterns take over? I for one like a little chaos and surprises in my life, I don’t like to be told what I like or what I should buy all the time. Sure it is convenient, but at the end of the day it feels a whole of a lot better if something you bought today was or at least felt like “fate” which is defined as: “the development of events beyond a person’s control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power” and I don’t want that supernatural power to be wielded by the Jeff Bezos’ and Mark Zuckerberg’s of this world. How will we discover and experience new things? The machines know what we currently like, but how will they let us experience new and exciting things?
“Creativity begins to die when we fail to celebrate curiosity”— Adam Grant
RH
