Don Draper would be really pissed, his world has changed. His brand of advertising is as dated as the Model T.
Instead of having hundreds of creatively driven ad agencies, all competing aggressively for your business, which involved selling you on a creative product then cashing in from media placement commissions, we have a few global corporate agencies driven by accountants, chucking money at Google and Facebook who between them have the GDP of France.
So much for media diversity and creativity.
Marketers have since time began tried to moderate risk and increase the productivity of their investments, by better targeting their ideal customer.
Facebook, Google, and Amazon have an immense data bank to use to target customers. Every time someone likes a Facebook post, tags a photo, expresses an opinion, shares an Instagram photo, or sends a WhatsApp message, Facebook adds it to the dossier they have on you. Google does the same thing, and better yet, Amazon actually knows not just what you looked at, liked, and shared, but what you bought, when, for how much, and where it was delivered.
All this is data, mountains of it, ready to be mined for profit, and to hell with privacy.
We have given our privacy away to the global wholesalers of eyeballs. It makes such a farce of the current ‘debate’ about the privacy of health records happening in Australia. Who cares if your doctor can log into a (relatively) secure database to check if you have an allergy, herpes, or are pregnant, she/he can probably find out by checking in on Facebook!
When I was a kid, we used second hand, historical data to try and target demographic groups of potential customers. Now you can track who they are, where they live, what they browse and buy, what interests them, and what they ignore, and how they engage with others, by mining the data.
The change has happened at breakneck speed, and has a long way to go yet, but it is clear that the data scientists rule, and are consolidating their hold on power.
Question is, do we really want these data nerds, exemplified by the ‘Zuk’ to rule the world?
It certainly has taken some of the fun out of marketing.
You are right. But we better get used to it. E-data is a juggernaut we cannot escape
Mountains of data, so much to ignore, so much to choose from for those who want to use data to make an argument.
Part of the challenge is that those that control the data also control the way it is used, and how selectively they use it themselves.
Facebook has a solid history of selective use of their own data, in pursuit of revenue objectives. Understandable and predictable behaviour, but when you consider the size and scope of their ‘community’ the question of ethics has to come up somewhere.