Personalized Content – The Advertiser's Dream is a Consumer Nightmare

Everywhere we look, experts are touting the potential benefits of collecting big amounts of personal data so businesses and advertisers can deliver content relevant to the individual. From a business and advertiser's perspective, there is plenty of data supporting the business value of having lots of personal information about their current and prospective customers. If your goal is to influence the sale of your product or service, how could you argue against the benefits of leveraging personal information to do so? You simply can’t.

You are in business to sell. With the right information in hand, a savvy marketer could use the most basic of sales skills to influence just about any decision in their favor.

True personalization is different from the old methods of marketing where a message would be created to attract a specific audience, then disseminated where it would have the most impact demographically. You see these methods deployed in standard advertising such as television, radio, print, and billboards. To a large degree, this is also how banner ads and Google’s Adwords campaigns are designed.

True personalization delivers personalized content dynamically designed specifically for the person viewing it, and it takes place at the most opportune times. By applying technology available today and using the right techniques, a business can deliver a message that says we understand you, we understand the difficulties you face and we have a solution to your problems. This all takes place in a split second without actually saying the words.

When you consider the fact that most of us have spent our entire lives being bombarded with offers that we could not and would not have an interest in taking advantage of, the average consumer’s acceptance of receiving personalized content is understandable. In a world where the average person experiences 75 or more ads every day, a business isn’t just competing within their own industry, they are also competing for your limited dollars against every other advertising business out there.

As the competition increases, so does the investment leading to what is described in Wikipedia as Ad Creep. As stated in the Ad Creep article, “There are ads in schools, airport lounges, doctor’s offices, movie theaters, hospitals, gas stations, elevators, convenience stores, on the Internet, on fruit, on ATMs, on garbage cans and countless other places. There are ads on beach sand and restroom walls.”^[5] “One of the ironies of advertising in our times is that as commercialism increases, it makes it that much more difficult for any particular advertiser to succeed, hence pushing the advertiser to even greater efforts.”^[6]  The same article identifies this as a "relentless battle to claim every waking moment, and what one executive called, with chilling candor, mind share." ^[4] A New York Times article is referred to which notes that "consumers’ viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn." And, the article suggests that ad agencies believe that as long as ads are entertaining, people may not mind the saturation.^[5] Of course, the greatest proof that the entertainment concept works would be the commercials leading to, and during, the half time of the Super Bowl and the now-legendary Oreo Tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout.

So how long will it be before the love affair with personalization becomes a nightmare? Well, my guess is it won’t be long at all before Ad Creep becomes just plain creepy. Further, for many of us, it will become annoying to the extreme. In the McKinsey Quarterly article, “The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing,” a scenario is described where a person sees headphones that she is curious about and taps her phone against them to get some info. As a result, ten scenes and a few weeks later, she gets an alert on her phone while she is at the gym and is given the “opportunity” to buy and download an exercise program. You could only imagine what would happen if she decided to buy that exercise program.

The nightmare isn’t the actual use of our personal information. It could be cool if it was actually done right. What concerns me is its misuse. Imagine walking into a public restroom, having your image scanned as you walk through the door and, after spending an unusually long period of time sitting on the toilet, receiving a text message offering you an antacid or a laxative. Does that sound far-fetched? Of course it does, at least until there is a way to deliver you one in real time. For example, what if that same message was sent to your waiter, letting him know you could use a little help. Wait, that technology exists already. Perhaps he’ll just discreetly offer you some Ocean Spray Prune Juice or, instead of bringing you a mint with the check, there will be a roll of Tums.

OK, let’s say the business has some tact; imagine the same scenario, but instead of telling the waiter about your little problem, you just get a digital message in the mirror as you’re washing your hands. It would inform you that the waiter could bring you something if you asked. That would be simply amazing service, right? Perhaps we would be happy to pay a premium for such service.

But, of course, part of the premium would be that, while you were washing your hands, every company out there that even has a remote chance of helping you with your problem would be sold your information. For the next two weeks, everywhere you turn, you’d be offered relief for a problem that you no longer have. You get the idea. It’s concerning that businesses share our personal information. They sell it to each other and give people access to it that have no real idea what is or isn’t appropriate.

While people are rightly concerned about the recent NSA activity disclosures, we should keep in mind where the information is coming from. This article on the ZDNet website discusses the practices deployed by Facebook in creating “shadow profiles.” Security researchers who looked into Facebook were quoted in the ZDNet article as stated, "The issue itself was not built with malice in mind, it was simply an oversight. The significance of what it unearthed is the real problem that still remains." When I read these comments, it reinforces my concern that we need to enact some accountability and use guidelines while this mass information gathering is still in its infancy stage, rather than react later after the damage is done. 

If that wasn't enough to raise an eyebrow, you may just want to take a look at this article published by The Gazette titled, "The NSA is watching, but so are Google and Facebook"; of course they aren't just watching, they are selling your information to anyone who will buy it. Remember the restroom scenario?