I work inside the big data machine that’s tracking us through ads. Most people I work with are optimistic that by tracking us, we’ll be stoked. Massively. Why? There are lots of reasons. One over arches them all: Surprise and delight.
It turns out, that’s what we said we wanted in survey data collected. The data has been fed into advertising robots, which beep-boop-beep, try to guess where and when we’d like our surprise and delight to be served. Think running past a digital billboard with FitBotBit strapped to our arm, the band pairing with the billboard as we pass it, the board triggering a delightful message: SUPERSTAR RUNNER! YOU ROCK!!!!… and an ad for $6 bucks off our next pair of trainers showing up on our phones.
That’s surprise and delight.
(Please respond to your nearest data robot how you feel about this logic by estimating your degree of stoked: Stoked. STOKED! Stoked?)
