The Silver Lining to Our Lack of Privacy

Recently, I was talking to a friend who works at Google about Big Data and the impact it is making on the advertising experience. We live in a time when personal information is a commodity and many people (with good reason) are becoming increasingly wary about how little privacy we really have anymore. I recently read that there are data brokers who are ranking consumers for everything from how likely they are to keep a job to how likely they are to switch wireless carriers. It is amazing, and creepy, how companies and advertisers are able to learn so much about consumers and use it to their advantage.

While this can be an unsettling thought, it can also mean advertising is being used to the consumer’s advantage. Despite the fact that I help advertise to other people every day, I personally do not like being advertised to. I rarely click on display ads, I hate it when videos pop up while I’m trying to read an article, and generally I considered myself “incapable of being marketed to.” But as advertising has become more and more targeted to my tastes, habits, and interests, I’ve noticed that I’m less perturbed by the ads I’m served online. Maybe it isn’t being advertised to that bothers me, but rather, being misadvertised to. My online experience is improving and I realize it is largely because advertisers know who I am now. They know where I go on the Internet, they categorize me, and that data is used to serve me an ad I can relate to. While I’m sure we’d all prefer to read our blogs and do our online shopping uninterrupted, digital advertising is a fact of life. It funds all of those wonderful time-sucking websites that we can’t live without.

So, if I’m going to be served ads at every turn, they can at least try to sell me something I’m actually interested in. No, I do not need a set of tires or car insurance (as I do not own a car), but please tell me more about that Bluetooth speaker or a sale at Kate Spade. At Delucchi Plus, we utilize every targeting and data collecting method at our disposal to provide the best online advertising experience we can – for the benefit of both our clients and consumers.