March 07, 2010
The Band Plays On
February 28, 2010
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.
February 26, 2010
Opening a New World
When I read our blog topic for this week I had to chuckle a little bit. This is a subject I have already talked at length about on my Facebook blog and it is a question that I have no hesitation in answering. I can say with absolute certainty that reading the novel The Amber Spyglass, the third in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy defined my philosophical beliefs in several areas. I originally began the series with The Golden Compass, Which is a well known and beloved children’s fantasy novel. The first book is very light and entertaining, and I enjoyed reading it immensely. I greedily grabbed the second when I finished it. While the first book was light and presented a fun fantasy world dealing with the concept of multiple realities and the concept of identity being granted by a substance called “dust.” The second novel began to explore more complex ideas, as the Author shifted focus to our world and presented directly the idea that the world as it is could reasonably have turned out in any number of different ways. Things as simple as the English language could have evolved wholly differently based upon small decisions made in history. Simple things like the word anbaric replacing the word electric (The word electric is derived from the Greek for amber, because it was noted that rubbing two pieces of amber together produced a static electric spark. Anbaric uses the Arabic root word anbar, instead of the Greek electrum) word serve to shape Pullman’s idea of a world that is not dominated by absolute concepts. He constantly sets the church as his opponent, but he is really railing against any institution that would seek to define reality in concrete and fatalistic terms. In the end what really inspired me about the book was his message about coming of age in general. He shows how many people in the world equate the ideal of innocence with purity and goodness but how this is a mistaken concept. Rather, he states that we should be unashamed of growing up and that innocence is meant to give way to wisdom. It is the opposite of the Genisis story which equates wisdom to sin. It was thanks to Pullman’s story that I was able to reconcile my own beliefs on the nature of our existence as human beings. I feel like it is because of this worship of innocence that many of our hatreds have been fostered. The idea that experiencing new things or forming relationships with new people somehow taints our being is a concept driven by this idea that we should be striving to stay as close to our childhood identities as possible. The idea that being good and pure is being as childlike as possible is absolutely anathema to my values, and it was a great boon to find a novel that could present this concept as eloquently as Pullman has in his trilogy.
February 21, 2010
The Age of Infinite Interconnectivity
February 20, 2010
Sex, Lies, and E-mail
I have a confession to make. I have never once purchased any products in response to an email advertisement. I know, as a young person living in this digital world this seems like a shocking announcement. My reasons for this are mostly based upon paranoia about opting in to just about anything. I worked as a fraud investigator for eBay.com for nearly a year in 2003. During that time I saw more phishing schemes perpetuated through email opt-in lists than anyone could believe. Not only that, I saw that many of these schemes were very cleverly put together and, if one is not careful, need very little from you to ruin your day. In fact the most successful scheme I came across involved posting links to inflammatory or inappropriate content on public sites like eBay, and then adding a very official looking complaint button at the bottom of the page. Clicking the button brought you to a prompt requesting your user name and password in order to lodge a complaint. Of course this lead to the poster gaining access to your account, after which they could use your account to run their more malicious schemes. So you can see why I would generally beware any opt in buttons that may lead to my personal information being available for someone to view. Furthermore, I have seen many reputable companies fall prey to having their email lists leaked or stolen, leading to floods of spam that can be very hard to escape from. Due to my habit of not ever opting in to any email marketing, I have thus had little reason to trust any ads I have received, as I know they were sent without my consent.
In order to make email marketing live up to its full potential, I believe it is necessary for a company to provide redundant opt-in and a legal disclaimer with customer acknowledgment that the customer’s email cannot be sold or given to other marketing agents. By redundant opt-in, I mean that I should be first given the option to click on a box stating that I want to receive ads, after which an email should be sent to me requesting confirmation of my opt-in. This insures that I don’t get signed up for something accidentally, which will poorly color my opinion of the company and their ads from that point onward. As far as the legal disclaimer goes, the clause stating that my information will remain private should be presented in a summarized form with a check box next to it to ensure that I understand that signing up for the ad program is safe.