The Interwebs; putting dog food ads in front of dog owners
By Matt Rebeiro March 10th, 2008
In Commenting
Yup, these are pretty much the words of David Verklin, chief executive of Carat Americas, an ad agency in the Aegis Group. I’ve just been reading an article over at news.com (yes, yes, Murdoch is evil) which was very interesting. Apparently comScore has this week discovered that between the big 5 of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL, and MySpace they can and do record over 336 billion ‘data tranmission events’ PER MONTH!
Data Transmission event can be anything from clicking on a link to what you searched for and of course what pages you visit. So it is that they have an outrageous amount of data about each and everyone of us. For some, such as Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center this is “scarier than you might suspect” and for others such as Michael Galgon, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist it just means we’re “getting content about things and messaging about things that are spot-on to who you are”.
The question then is this; which side of the debate do you fall? Do you want targeted ads about things you are actually interested in or would you prefer it that Bill Gates doesn’t know you purchase viagra from ‘enormousdong.com’? - I for one figure that i’m gonna get advertised to whether I like it or not so it may as well be for ‘cool stuff I might like’ rather than discounted evening primrose oil at Boots.
1 Dan O'Connor // Mar 10, 2008 at 2:51 pm
My issue is with Galgon’s phrase, “getting content about things and messaging about things that are spot-on to who you are” - by what right does Microsoft, or anyone else, get to decide who I am and what I am interested in?
There is an important difference between actively asking for information about certain products (say by signing up for updates or subscribing to an RSS) and passively having your everyday activities turned into a corporate profile of your personality. It’s pretty basic ethics; targetted advertising is a violation of consumer autonomy.
2 Ben // Mar 11, 2008 at 11:22 am
I’d be happy for a computer to recognise my login ID or my IP address and match my search terms, purchases and so on to a massive database and conclude that I need to see an advert for half-price botox, because that’s what it thinks I like. As long as that process remained one of numbers and equations, of which my online activity was just another string among trillions, I’m encouraged by the idea of algorithms deciding what services to provide me with.
But I can’t trust the people who own the databases to keep all that data anonymous and not to match it against my name. There should be a kind of firewall through which we interact with the internet, behind which we are nothing but numbers. Wait, this is starting to sound like an episode of The Prisoner.
So Matt, in answer to your question: I’d like to support this kind of technology but I can’t, yet.
3 Matt Rebeiro // Mar 11, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Oh, and as followup I saw this today on BBC news - kinda ties in.