What Marketers Think They Know About You and What They Really Do

mattydread23 writes "Data broker Acxiom did something a little unusual this week. It launched a service that lets you see the data they've collected on you. CITEworld writer Ron Miller checked it out, and found it to be mostly laughably inaccurate. Among the things they got wrong included his religion, his interests, and the number of kids he has. But worst? It pegged him as a Windows user."

Comments

I'm not falling for that!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought I'd look at my own data, but when they started asking for the last 4 digits of my SSN I decided I didn't care so much about what they knew about me...

Re:I'm not falling for that!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It will only be a matter of time until they find clustering algorithms that can separate your "interests".

Basically it is like you have three clouds of points. One cloud is your interests. One cloud is for your wife, and one cloud is for your child. For a human, it is easy to tell these clouds apart. For a computer, it will soon be easy too.

I was told by a retired jeweler in my neighborhood that being able to separate customers' "interests" has been a particularly acute problem in that sector for some time: Obviously, as with any business(especially one built on unnecessary luxury goods) they want to cultivate and flatter their good customers; but they ran into the persistent problem that some of their good customers had wives who did open marketing mail addressed to a household; but had not been the recipients of some or all of the jewelry purchased... That is, of course, awkward for all involved.

Doesn't matter

[Intropy]

They're not _really_ trying to figure out data about who you are because they don't really care. What they care about are what ads are most likely to affect you. That's a clustering problem not an identification problem. And if those clusters happen to have similarities to a well-defined, named demographic category that just helps humans talk about them.

Pitty the site appears to be US-only

[jonwil]

Might be interesting to see what this data mob has on me and how accurate it is...

Re:Pegged as a Windows user!?

[clemdoc]

What's your problem with atheism?

Marketers Nowadays think they know everything

[adstopshop]

Interesting article though. Nowadays, marketers think they know everything about everything but that's not true as this article proves it. I am a marketer as well and I realize that the more I read about the marketing as discipline, the more I realize I don't know almost anything about it.

Great, another useless "field of study"

[50000BTU_barbecue]

Could it be these "data miners" are just snake oil voodoo salesmen that are selling a comforting vision to companies? Has anyone ever done any double-blind studies to determine if companies that use this data actually benefit from it? Or is it just part of the modern cult of corporate "wisdom" that must never be questioned?

Or is one wrong data point in what is essentially demographic data irrelevant? Sort of like one athlete with an "obese" BMI doesn't invalidate the concept of BMI on the whole?

Garbage in, garbage out

[plopez]

Once a data stream becomes polluted, it is almost impossible to clean up. False information continually circulates between sources and companies often reinfecting data that were scrubbed. All the users of "big data" and "analytics" do not seem to grasp that concept, blindly trusting what they find, a group of entities which includes security agencies.

This is why database engines which produce "eventual consistency", such as MongoDB, enrage me. They are almost guaranteeing a polluted data stream. Or maybe I just do not get it.