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

Posted by samzenpus on from the I-don't-even-know-you-anymore dept.

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."

3 of 277 comments (clear)

  1. I'm not falling for that! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:I'm not falling for that! by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. Doesn't matter by Intropy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.