George Orwell’s Big Brother became an adult in these days, turning his eye from politics to marketing.
Internet companies (not only Google) like BlueKai and eXelate Media now can track all of us down and sell the acquired information about our Internet behavior to advertisers, media buyers and companies, enabling them to translate such golden info into customized advertising placement posted even when, unaware of that, we’re visiting a website not necessarily related to our targeted interests.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re actually visiting a website about your passion for fashion design shoes or for high tech products. In that case, we all know that visiting a website immediately recalls similar products advertisement. Now that these marketing companies track and store your previous website visits, an advertising about your favorite shoes brand or high tech device will magically appear even when you’re simply reading an on-line newspaper.
The magic word for that is “cookie”. How many moms could track down our movements within the house, in every room, by literally following the crumbs we would leave around? Lots of husbands still do and in both cases it is not exactly an action worth of reward, but rather of yelling and punishments. For marketing companies and advertisers instead the so called “Internet cookies”, the digital trace we leave behind every time we visit a website, turned out to be most certainly as yummy as rewarding.
The sales of Internet cookies by marketing companies, grouped by consumer behavior, whether about cars, or food, represent for advertisers, constantly and compulsively craving info about consumer behavior, the opportunity to access the Sacred Graal of information, guaranteeing, if not eternal life, at least an improvement for the company’s marketing life.
Even if, to legitimately protect your privacy, you’re one of those refusing to be on Facebook, the Temple all advertisers have been trying to penetrate in order to access the Sacred Graal of consumer behavior information (kindly provided by all of us in our Facebook info section, as well as in our chats or posts), you would still most likely be tracked down by such marketing companies since belonging to any of those demographics that all together, according to the latest Nielsen study, made computer and internet as the second most used medium, after TV, in the US.
The latest Nielsen Company study, conducted by the Ball State University’s Center for Media Design, shows that if for consumption and advertising TV is still the number one medium, computer and its related use of internet is the second largest one for activity, surpassing radio and print, ranked in fourth place (Literally at this point ranked as the “Fourth Power”, as the Italian translation of the 1941 Orson Wells movie “Citizen Kane”, about the rise and fall of a print mogul).
In case one still hopes to escape from the new Big Brother’s eye, the study, as reported by the New York Times, shows that the age group 8 to 54 (divided by 4 age segments, according to the different time and usage of internet), corresponds to the demographics that uses Internet the most, which, imagine that, is also the most wanted commercial target by companies, I believe somewhere from age 8 to 49. Side note for the new Twitter addicted (the new social web where to read about your friends and your favorite people and write with a 140 character limitation, halfway between a text message and a blog): age group 8-24, apparently is the age segment using text messaging the most and therefore the most familiar with such form of communication, in case you want to use the new trend for a marketing campaign.
If former President Bush’s Patriot Act, practically confirmed by President Obama, authorizes government agencies to track all of us down in the name of security, which paradoxically and ultimately guarantee our freedom, now, this further version of web marketing “Patriot Consumer Act” can track all of us down in the name of our proud market economy, which we’ve been trying so hard to patriotically defend, stimulate and keep alive these days.
George Orwell’s Big Brother grew up and he’s now kindly picking up the Oreo cookies crumbs we left last night in front of the web…He’s watching, so you might wanna be more polite and try not to leave any crumbs around.
But maybe it would be unpatriotic.
