Have you ever wondered how ads know what you want to purchase before you even thought of it? Well, occasionally this happens to me through website banners and social media advertisements. I’ve recently been wondering if this is actually creepy, convenient, or maybe a little bit of both since it uses my personal information (collected through website cookies and the Internet of Things), checks it against and integrates it into their database, and then uses machine-driven analytics to figure out what products I would be interested in based on other individuals with similar patterns and behaviors.
Companies are also using this collected information to build a customer profile about me! This is done by putting information from various sources together in the same place to get a higher resolution picture of what’s going on.
Is this a breach of privacy, and if it is, should I really care? After all, at the end of the day, it’s all done through computer learning and there are not any humans looking at my personal information.
There are many applications of big data for marketing; however, the biggest challenge is finding an efficient way of sorting and analyzing ridiculous amounts of data.
Steve Offset of MarketBuildr (https://www.marketbuildr.com/blog/segmentation-in-the-age-of-big-data/) states in a post about segments of one that “this data explosion enables the definition of increasingly finer segments. These micro-segments enable ever finer targeting of content, offers, products and services, which can deliver real and substantial returns”. This means that companies are collecting all types of data from social media activity to spending patterns to create a custom-tailored marketing profile that companies can use to optimize advertising for the customer. David Edelman at BCG explains an example where Noxell used this with their Clarion line of cosmetics, which personalized mass-marketed cosmetic products with the keywords users typed in about their skin characteristics
James Paine from inc.com (https://www.inc.com/james-paine/5-ways-big-data-is-changing-marketing.html) explains unusual associations and spurious correlations in an article about marketing with big data by saying “as publishers gather more and more data about their visitors, it’ll enable them to serve up more and more relevant advertising”. This is because it uses the database as a reference to find similar patterns as the customer to predict what that individual may be interested in. The creepiest example is of the case is with the pregnant high school girl and Target, wherefrom her spending patterns it recognized that this girl was pregnant before her own father even figured it out (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/#71cf81d76668). Now, not all correlations may be useful (such as the correlation between ice cream consumption and shark attacks) as there may be other variables unaccounted for; however, the machine learning is getting better and better every day and as more of the big data becomes usable, these issues will eventually be smoothed out.
This is an incredible opportunity that will grow to become more and more relevant in digital marketing as more data becomes available and usable to marketers.
If we think of these concepts enough it becomes a bit disturbing to think that our personal privacy is being violated on a daily basis every time we interact with something that is connected to the web 3.0; however, the fact remains that this is becoming the new norm and we should try and learn to live with these new things and figure out how to best use them to our advantage as marketers.
What do you guys think? Do you think that big data marketing is creepy or convenient?
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