Our Lives Made Public

                I know I said I’d address Privacy last week and I intend to keep my promise.  Last week I talked about how new technology is connecting us to the world around us with increasing frequency and substance.  Soon it will be possible to target all advertising directly to a person based upon personal history the way we currently try to target our online advertising.  The fly in the ointment of this new age of connectivity is the very serious issue of personal privacy.  Just because it becomes possible to display advertisements anywhere a person goes does not make it strictly ethical. 

 

As the personalization revolution continues people are finding new means of keeping advertisements out of their lives.  DVRs allow us to skip past commercials on television, and for every new method of internet advertising invented, a new blocker or filter is introduced to remove that advertising from consumer’s screens.  This backlash has been created in response to tactics employed by guerilla marketing firms and unscrupulous scam artists.  There is fear, therefore, that further connection with the digital world will lead to further misuse of that connection to spam customers, scam them, or even steal identities.  

 

There is a dearth of trust in what we see online, and consumers will often pass up legitimate offers on the assumption that the offer is a scam or otherwise has some malicious purpose.  In order to bring marketing into the new era and take advantage of all the wonderful new technology we will be seeing in the near future, it is imperative that a standard for best practices and possibly a form of regulation be put in place in order to regain the trust of the consumer.  We have approached marketing on the internet thus far as a game of numbers.  As such a sort of shotgun approach has been the norm for most firms getting started online.  It has been thought that, like television commercials, the important thing is to get your ad in front of as many people as possible.  This strategy has led to an environment in which we are overloaded with ads on a daily basis.  Further complicating the situation, many of these ads are actually not for legitimate businesses or are delivery systems for viruses. 

 

With this kind of environment dominating the present marketplace, is it any wonder that privacy is such a hot button issue when people think about further connecting their lives to a global information network?  While such a world would provide amazing possibilities for finding niche audiences and for making sure consumers no longer have to sort through tons of information that they don’t find interesting, it also opens great dangers of identity theft and exposure of people’s personal information, even current location, to the world at large.  Reclusiveness is becoming not just a social faux pas, but a nigh impossibility.  As our interconnectivity continues to grow, marketers will need to work extra hard to make sure they respect the privacy and desires of the people receiving their ads, or as ad blocking software evolves, marketers will find more and more doors closed to them.