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How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Hugh Pickens writes "For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Now the NY Times Magazine reports on how companies like Target identify those unique moments in consumers' lives when their shopping habits become particularly flexible and the right advertisement or coupon can cause them to begin spending in new ways. Among life events, none are more important than the arrival of a baby, and new parents are a retailer's holy grail. In 2002, marketers at Target asked statisticians to answer an odd question: 'If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn't want us to know, can you do that?' Specifically, the marketers said they wanted to send specially designed ads to women in their second trimester, which is when most expectant mothers begin buying all sorts of new things, like prenatal vitamins and maternity clothing. 'We knew that if we could identify them in their second trimester, there's a good chance we could capture them for years,' says statistician Andrew Pole. 'As soon as we get them buying diapers from us, they're going to start buying everything else too.' As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a 'pregnancy prediction' score and he soon had a list of tens of thousands of women who were most likely pregnant. About a year after Pole created his pregnancy-prediction model, a man walked into a Target outside Minneapolis and demanded to see the manager. He was clutching coupons that had been sent to his daughter, and he was angry. 'My daughter got this in the mail!' he said. 'She's still in high school, and you're sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?' The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again but the father was somewhat abashed. 'It turns out there's been some activities in my house I haven't been completely aware of. She's due in August. I owe you an apology.'"
You underestimate the power of directed advertising. To give you a hint, that's what makes Facebook worth and estimated $100 billion.
But not terribly surprising.
Given the opportunity, marketers will be more observant of the goings-on in a household than, say, the father of the house.
Hell, I am the father of the house, and most stuff that happens catches me by surprise. So I can sympathize with the father mentioned at the end of TFS.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Back when retailers had a more personal connection to their clients, it was also not uncommon for a shopkeeper to notice that a customer was pregnant and stock something specifically for her. Personalization has always existed; this is a more of a comeback than something completely new.
The flipside is that a shopkeeper also had a personal connection to the mother. Target has no such connection to Customer#9810957065409. This takes the personalization away from 'cozy' toward 'creepy'. It's like the uncanny valley of interactions.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
The anecdote might be fake, but the use of stats? More than you can imagine. The fact is, human behavior is predictable.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Coincidentally, the FBI now lists as suspicious activity making purchases with cash.
Almost all forums have rules against personal attacks. You'd commonly be banned for posting someone else's "IRL" (in real life) information. Yet here we see corporations doing exactly that for nothing more than profit. Data-mining like this is the beginning of an assault on our right to be "secure in our persons" and enjoy privacy.
tomorrow who's gonna fuss
Why do you find it so surprising that they do a good enough job of detecting pregnancy that after the better part of a decade they'll have found a case where the girl's father didn't know yet? Keep in mind that the girl is probably trying a lot harder to keep it a secret from her father than she is the store. Especially if he's the type that gets upset enough over stupid coupons implying potential pregnancy to go yell at a store manager? Yeah, I'm sure he's the first person she would tell.
Honestly, I expect this happens quite a lot, but most people aren't hotheaded enough to go yell at a store manager about coupons. (Who would then have to call the them back a couple days later? That strikes me as more creepy than the preggo-score.)
Have you ever checked your mail? Notice how it's literally full of completely untargeted advertising? If that's profitable, how could this possibly not be?
(Who would then have to call the them back a couple days later? That strikes me as more creepy than the preggo-score.)
Maybe the manager asked for the telephone number when the guy came to complain so that he could call back a couple days later and offer them some kind of conciliatory special deal at the store (like discounts on something). On the other hand, maybe the manager was trying to arrange for the guy's family to no longer get (at the time, presumed faulty) targeted advertising, and was calling back to give them an update on the process (once again having explicitly asked for contact information for just this purpose). I don't know if it was actually creepy. We don't know enough details to come to a conclusion about that, I think.
Unfetter your ideas. Copyfree your mind.
What a wonderful, mature, high-minded reason to bring a child into the world...
I'm guessing you didn't grow up in a family, or in a family where family is actually considered important. Especially one where there's a lot of little brothers or sisters in it.
Ah, so you could not refute what I said, yet you still didn't like the way it sounded, so now here come the thinly-veiled personal attacks concerning how inferior my life or my family must be. How transparent of you.
My answer to you is very simple. I grew up in and remain in a family where family is considered very important. It's so important, in fact, that we don't make petty "me too!" games and contests of "I got first place!" out of important life events, particularly those as life-changing as becoming a parent.
The family? Very important. Who did what first as if it's a competition? So unimportant that it isn't even on the radar.
No here's the part you don't want to face: if two women in your family actually care about who gets pregnant first, to the point that they will try to become pregnant when one or more of them otherwise wouldn't have done so, the importance of family is low on their list. High up on their list is being petty, catty, and soaking up the attention and adoration from everyone else. If pointing that out offends you, or if you're struck by the realization that there are a lot of petty immature people in the world, then maybe you should deal with that on your own terms instead of trying to make a scapegoat of me.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
advertising isn't about getting people to spend then and there; its merely brand recognition, so that when you do go to the store you're not buying something that nobody else will, which consumers seem to care about. its manipulation of our desire for social status; our perceived need for "stuff" that might make us seem cooler to our friends. its pretty scary if you think about it. market research is more psychology.
where it really gets creepy is their study of children in order to manipulate the spending of parents
its funny you mention that, because your girlfriend might get you to go buy tampons for her, and your recognition of the brand you saw in an ad might make you more comfortable selecting that brand over other brands you've never heard of before, and you might not have the money for a $40,000 car now, but someday you may, and exposure to certain brands (usually the ones you see regularly in television advertising) means you will more likely choose a car from a brand you're familiar with, as if you choose something that isn't heavily advertised, none of your friends will be impressed with it when you roll up to work the next day. market research deliberately extends beyond the obvious because nobody wants to buy something that they think they're being tricked into buying, so the task of advertisers is to trick consumers into buying something without them thinking they're being tricked (so they think they are making their own choice).
if you took away all forms of advertising, people would spend much less, and only on things they needed more. we are manipulated into buying stuff we don't need, and that's why there is such big money in advertising (google etc).
Ultimately, it would be easy to get freaked out by all this, but let's remember what this information is used for: to send you coupons you'd actually want to use. That's the whole thing. Dial back the paranoia a bit.
See, that's the thing. Once they've collected all this data and made all these cross-references there isn't anything preventing the data from being used for other reasons. Kind of like the way drivers licenses and social security numbers were not initially inteded to be a form of identification. Yet once they became widespread it was just soo easy to repurpose them.
Same thing with all of these marketing-driven data collection systems - once they've got a ton of data in them it is pretty much inevitable that someone is going trying and use them for something else. It is just too valuable for people to ignore.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.