Mike

Targeted Ads and Data Collection

In our current digital age, marketers have been increasingly depending on what’s “invisible” to propagate their agendas. They have depended on targeted ads through algorithms and embedded advertisements to both target ads specifically towards you and make ads appear as news stories instead of mere advertisements. Therefore, what appears as pure coincidence in your online browsing, might be a tailored response determined by your browsing history. With this in mind, each and every single time one is on the Internet, their browsing history as a collective is pulled and used for the profit of others. There is a reason why ads are consistently showing up on websites that one is visiting. For example, if someone is on their Facebook and sees a pair of shoes that they were looking at earlier in the day, it is evident that their history has been pulled and in turn, catered to. “Sixty-five percent of respondents report: “It’s a bad thing if a search engine collected information about your searches and then used it to rank your future search results.” (Flory 1) That is a huge amount of individuals who are not keen on search engines collecting data. Google is the top search engine in the world and is worth billions of dollars. Many wonders why Google is worth so much money. The reality of the situation is Google is nothing short of a marketing powerhouse. The founders centered Google’s profits around the monetizing of other’s time. Google is capable of placing advertisements all on the Internet and has created a plethora of platforms that enable others to take advantage too. These platforms, such as Google Adwords are designed for marketers and individuals alike who would like to take their advertising to the next level. Marketing is a huge business and one that is doing nothing but continuing to grow. Companies such as Google, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and more all rely on advertising to net billions of dollars in profit on a year to year basis. When one ventures onto their Facebook, there are always advertisements that flood their timeline. The same is the case for Instagram and Google. It seems like now a day, a majority of the population that uses these platforms are used to viewing advertisements. When an advertisement is viewed by a potential consumer, it leads to a higher chance that the viewer of the ad will purchase the item; it is a mental marketing tactic that seasoned marketers do not take granted of, but instead rely on. The bottom-line being, marketing is a sector that is flourishing and will continue to do so until the end of time as with marketing comes advertising. The algorithmic “unseen” underbelly of the Internet is embedded in common sites like Google, Youtube, and Facebook and these sites are regularly data-mining, and selling your data, on the market or using them to tailor their ads towards what they predict you will like.

For starters, advertising remains one of the most important aspects of marketing and selling a product. Advertisements have run the world of business for decades now. This will be the case for years to come. Without advertising, it would be hard for individuals to get their products out into the open market. Even more, think about how people would hear about products without advertisements. In the early 1900s and even prior, businesses all around the world had signs outside of their place of business. In addition to signs, flyers were massive and played a pivotal role when it came to how successful companies ended up being in the long run. Even today, flyers and alike marketing materials still play a significant role in regards to how successful business is. Likewise, it is also one of the principal costs of any marketing operation. The challenge for marketers has always been, since the beginnings of mass consumerism, ensuring that the “right people” get your message. Therefore, targeted ads have always been the prime area of interest for marketers. The methods have changed over the years and have gone through many internal revolutions in how data is processed and applied to consumers to tailor ads. However, these strategies have existed long before our digital age. Edward Bernays was a noted specialist in public relations and propaganda, but mainly dealt with media firms, and helped them to embed product placement in unnoticeable moments to sell the product. He based some of his methodology on Sigmund Freud’s writing and outlined much of his line of thinking in his book Propaganda. In one such famous example during the 1920s, Bernays was instructed by an advertising firm to increase their sale of cigarettes. Take into account, during this time it was considered taboo/bad for women to smoke. However, the tobacco companies realized that they were missing out on a significant market share and, irrespective of social taboos, their bottom line was ultimately profit. Bernays was contacted by one such firm and concocted a plan to embed his advertisement as a form of political protest. He contacted a female friend, and she agreed to speak to a group of women who were set to march in New York City Easter Day Parade as part of the women’s movement, and she convinced them to smoke a cigarette in defiance of the taboo. “He then told the press to expect that women suffragists would light up ‘torches of freedom’ during the parade to show they were equal to men” (Christensen, Sociological Images). The event, an advertisement disguised as a form of political protest, was put on every front cover news story in the United States, and women’s cigarette sales went up by hundreds upon hundreds times over. The story is remarkable because it demonstrates exactly how far back, and how elaborate, embedded, and targeted advertisements were even during the early years of consumerism way back in the 1920s. This is just a single example as to how advertising works and why it is such an important element of business. As noted prior, advertising was colossal in the early 1900s and has ballooned to a modern day behemoth. Today, many top companies that generate billions of dollars on a yearly basis are all known to focus on advertising. Again, think about companies such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram. All of the companies as mentioned earlier target individuals and their online browsing histories. When the companies know what their users have been searching, they cater to their interests and start spewing out related ads to what the user has been searching for. This takes place on a daily basis, 24 hours, seven days a week around the clock. When Instagram places an ad, and it targets a particular array of individuals, they get paid when the users of the application view the ads. Now imagine this happening around the clock. This is how many companies around the world generate billions of dollars yearly. Given these points, advertising is one of the most, if not the most important variable that ties in with marketing.

Next, times have accelerated since Bernays’s methods. Now, “due to improvements in the ability to collect and process consumer level information, today organizations have better information on customers, their preferences, and their media habits” (Deshpande, Ahmed, 524). This is coupled with the fact that now there is a broader consumer base to work with and one that is more connected, given the widespread use of smartphones and the Internet. With platforms such as Facebook around, the world can be connected as a collective. Facebook harnesses a database that has billions of users. When a single platform holds together that many users, a lot can be done concerning advertising and general marketing. A new age has come to the forefront, and with technology always evolving, more and more programs are coming out that make it possible for marketers to have an absolute field day. Today, clicks and leads are wildly important in the world of marketing. For every single click that a marketer can snatch, money follows. The same goes for leads and related elements that tie into marketing. Companies pay thousands to millions of dollars for particular ad placements. If Facebook can put a Tide advertisement to Facebook and it reaches millions of individuals, the company that controls Tide is willing to pay an amount that most of us don’t make in a year even 10 years. This has been the case for years now, but as the technology sector continues to grow and evolve, more and more start-ups are being made; all of which companies come with healthy pockets and a budget that is unimaginable. This has granted advertising firms more leeway in what they can accomplish, and their newfound tactics have been dubbed “guerrilla marketing” because of its unorthodox style. However, much of this began with Generation Y and the shifting attitudes towards ads since them. For Gen Y, those born in the mid-1980s, they were bombarded with a high level of messages that in turn made them one of the first generations to be irritated by it as a phenomenon. Therefore, the strategy needed to be changed and advertising firms realized this fact. “Apple is putting together a team of robotics and data-collection experts who will use drones, and “new indoor navigation features,” to bolster and further improve the quality of Apple Maps. The move is said to be positioned as a method to catch up with Google, the longtime leader in the mapping field (via Bloomberg).” (Broussard 1) Apple is taking strides to catch up with their competition by hiring a plethora of data-collection experts. The experts that are being hired will focus on using drones that will set out to collect high-tech data that will, in turn, be used to fix the Maps application that is featured on all iPhone mobile devices. The Maps application has been monetized since the inception of the app. Furthermore, Apple is always trying to find ways to better improve their applications and in the process of doing so, earn more money. Given this point, it is evident that companies in modern day society will stop at nothing when it comes to data-collection. With the industry growing, it is more important now than ever to hop on the advertising train. Companies left and right are joining the sector, and it has been proven to be very profitable in the grand scheme of things. Altogether, the world of advertising is an industry that is constantly innovating and sprouting in size.

The key objective of this type of marketing is to grasp the targeted people for the sale product without letting them know that it is the company’s marketing campaign. Another main reason for the marketer to divert their attention in this kind of marketing that it is very hard to focus on potential customers because of fragmentation, due to which these clients divided into subtle number of groups in the result of ever increasing TV channels, radio stations and publications (Shakeel, Khan, 48).

This is only further complicated by our current Internet age where there are millions of subcultures and websites that further fragment the consumer base.

However, should we be concerned with the help of advertising in our current digital age? Currently, advertising is common when we traverse the internet. In fact, we are always being data-mined for targeted advertising whether we know about it or not. Guerrilla marketing techniques have been redeveloped for the current, Internet age and trending topics on a new product may merely by a conscious ploy by a company to embed their product as a “news story.” There have been uproars about such things in the past, and one such prominent example was when the magazine The Atlantic was paid by the Church of Scientology to write a multi-page glowing story on the religion which was supposed to seem like an “objective” new story but was merely an advertisement paid for by them. The uproar was understandable, but corporations use this tactic all the time to sell their products, and you see their embedded advertising methods present in movies, in pop culture books, and throughout the Internet. They have become so commonplace now that some have discussed the difficulty of knowing an “advertisement” from “news” and vice-versa. In our current media environment, everything gets funneled down to consumption, and it leaves us with little time to reflect on just what we are consuming, be it news or an advertisement. It is becoming harder and harder to distinguish.

The full story of data mining and advertising, though, is much more sinister than “unintentionally” selling a product – some have argued it constitutes a violation of privacy. Now, “although leading social networks such as Facebook have refrained from selling… information to advertisers, they have created systems that enable advertisers to run highly targeted social advertising campaigns” (Korolova, 27). Social networking sites have proven to be ideal for data-mining advertising firms because “it allows participants to unite by generating personal information profiles and inviting friends and colleagues to have access to those profiles” (Paquette, 3). Facebook, in this case, makes much of its revenue from advertising and therefore “collects from advertisers the ad creatives to display and the targeting criteria which the users being shown the ad should satisfy, and delivers the ads to people who fit those criteria” (Korolova, 28). Everything that is updated on your profile can effectively be data-mined and placed in an algorithm to assess whether or not the advertisement would work on you. Your Facebook profile is then mined for content, and certain parameters are used to identify which consumer product would satisfy you must such as “Location (including a city), Sex, Age or Age range (including a “Target people on their birthdays” option), Interested In (all, men, or women), Relationship status (e.g., single or married), Languages, Likes & Interests, Education (including specifying a particular college, high school, and graduation years), and Workplaces” (Korolova, 30). The targeting criteria are thus flexible for the advertising firm and can be made to accommodate whoever they feel will want to buy the product: for example, a 20-something year old man living in San Francisco, who is single, speaks English, likes golf and cars, and goes to a community college. The algorithms can be endlessly mixed and matched to zone in on a very specific demographic based on many different variables. Therefore, although Facebook claims not to sell your personal information to anybody nor share it with anybody, it effectively does; instead of selling your personal data, though, it does it itself. Facebook has its aforementioned criteria for each profile, and an advertising firm can merely pick and choose what they want from Facebook’s already-established data-mining. So yes, Facebook is right in saying they don’t sell it. Instead, they mine this data and then make it readily available for advertisers to find the demographic they want, without telling them anything specific.

Advertisers/Marketers know this method of advertising works, not only does it work but it works very well.  Research by Rebecca Walker Reczek, Christopher Summers, and Robert Smith showed that people want to think of them selves as being sophisticated, this allows marketers to play on peoples emotions by targeting their “sophisticated” products to people that fit the demographic they are marketing to. Which in turn makes the consumer feel sophisticated by being generated a “sophisticated” advertisement:

In one study we conducted with 188 undergraduate students, we found that participants were more interested in buying a Groupon for a restaurant advertised as sophisticated when they thought the ad had been targeted to them based on specific websites they had visited during an earlier task (browsing the web to make a travel itinerary) compared to when they thought the ad was targeted based on demographics (their age and gender) or not targeted at all. This suggested that behavioral targeting specifically—not targeting group level attributes—increased their interest in the product.(Rebecca Walker Reczek, Christopher Summers, Robert Smith, 3)
This psychological effect caused by targeted ads allow them to be a very effective marketing tactic.

In conclusion, this piece has demonstrated that both data mining and embedded, targeted advertising is being widely used to tailor consumer products towards specific groups of people especially on websites like Facebook, YouTube, and Google, and much of it remains “unseen” to the average consumer. Targeted advertising and data mining have been done since the beginnings of consumerism, however, the strategy has adapted to our current digital age, and this poses new problems for advertising that we must reflect on as a society. Guerrilla marketing has embedded itself so deeply in news media that sometimes advertisements may be hard to separate from news stories themselves. This, in itself, is the problem and we are reaching a critical point in the history of consumerism. In many cases, individuals are not even aware they are witnessing an advertisement since they have become so commonplace in the vast landscape of the Internet. Therefore, the public should be informed of the large-scale operations happening behind the scenes, and how a coincidental placement of a product may not be all that coincidental. The Internet poses new questions on the ethics of modern advertising. However, given how embedded advertisements currently are in the media landscape, we might as well not realize what we are truly dealing with until it is too late.

Works Cited

– Smith, R. W. (2016, April 04). Targeted Ads Don’t Just Make You More Likely to Buy – They Can Change How You Think About Yourself. Retrieved March 25, 2017, from https:// hbr.org/2016/04/targeted-ads-dont-just-make-you-more-likely-to-buy-they-can- change-how-you-think-about-yourself

  • Deshpande, Nishad. Ahmed, Shabib. Web Based Targeted Advertising: A Study Based on Patent Information. Procedia Economics and Finance, Volume 11, 2014, pp. 522-535.
  • Shakeel, Mohsin. Khan, Muhammad Mazhar. Impact of Guerilla Marketing on Consumer Perception. Global Journal of Management and Business Research. Volume 11, Issue 7, Version 1.0. 2011, pp. 47 – 52.
  • Korolova, Aleksandra. Privacy Violations Using Microtargeted Ads: A Case Study. Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality, Vol. 3, No. 1. Pp. 27 – 40.
  • Paquette, Holly. Social Media as a Marketing Tool: A Literature Review. University of Rhode Island, Major Papers. PDF. Accessed March 29th 2017. URL: http://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=tmd_major_papers
  • Flory, Mary. “Data Collection and Targeted Ads: The Online Privacy Debate Continues.” American Marketing Association. N.p., n.d. Web. March 29th 2017.
  • Broussard, Mitchel. “Apple Plans to Use Data-Collecting Drones in Order to ‘Catch Up’ With Google Maps.” Mac Rumors. Web. March 29th 2017.
  • McDonald, Heath. “Marketing Intelligence & Planning.” A Comparison of Online and Postal Data Collection Methods in Marketing Research: Marketing Intelligence & Planning: Vol 21, No 2. N.p., 01 Jan. 1983. Web. March 29th 2017.