Technology leading to more invasive marketing
Monday, February 8th, 2010Sure, flying cars may not be zooming near the windows of our 40th-floor lofts and robots with aprons aren’t cooking our meals, but the future is getting here. Unfortunately, it’s starting to look like something between “Minority Report” and “1984″ – at least when it comes to marketing.
Advertisers and retailers are increasingly using technologies to mine for consumers’ demographical information, create super-personalized ads and zero in on people’s shopping habits.
Proponents say new technologies are getting products that consumers want into their hands faster and eliminating ads that don’t speak to them. But privacy advocates are concerned no one’s asking people if they want targeted ads or if they agree to be studied as they shop.
Last September, a Castrol oil campaign in London used cameras along roads to capture license plates of passing vehicles, then cross-referenced them with vehicle registration records, and displayed in a digital billboard a few feet away a targeted ad suggesting which type of oil the drivers should use.
The campaign, however, lasted only four days. Shortly after it started, British transportation authorities launched an investigation of the oil firm’s access to vehicle registration records.
Meanwhile, a handful of Whole Foods grocery stores in Chicago and Canada installed cameras last year that use facial recognition software to analyze passing shoppers and cater ads to them.
According to an Intel video showcasing the anonymous video analytics detection software powering the digital ads, the program helps marketers “understand how many people watch their displays, how long they look, what content is viewed, as well as audience demographics.”
And for almost a decade, a few retailers have studied the way costumers navigate through their stores using radio frequency devices attached to shopping carts and baskets that track their path through the aisles. When the data of thousands of shoppers are processed, marketers can produce what looks like a heat signature map that reveals the most and least visited spots in the store.
“Retailers have a very poor understanding of what shoppers do in a store,” said Herb Sorensen, scientific adviser for TNS Global and the creator of the radio-frequency identification device PathTracker. “What we’re doing is finding a way to help the shopper get what they want much faster. The faster we can sell to them, the happier they will be.”
In a report released in late January, the World Privacy Forum said retailers aren’t doing enough to inform consumers about how they are being recorded, how their information is being used or even allow them to consent to the practice.
“While most consumers understand a need for security cameras, few expect that the video screen they are watching, the kiosk they are typing on, or the game billboard they are interacting with is watching them while gathering copious images and behavioral and demographic information,” the report said.
In particular, the forum expressed concern about the lack of rules regarding how images of minors are used and the possibility of price discrimination based on consumers’ age, gender and ethnicity.
“Just because the companies have decided that the lack of storage or recording of the data is equivalent to privacy does not mean that consumers should be left in the dark about such technologies,” the report said.
Sorensen argued that in a public space people don’t have any presumption of privacy.
“People’s lives are becoming more transparent. Everything that can be done will be done.
“Everybody can be tracked, everybody will be tracked,” he said.
–Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera
