I recently received email from a reader who was extremely concerned about giving marketers too much personal data. The reader wondered why they were getting personalized coupons mailed to them from a certain retailer, and he recognized that the coupons reflected his own purchase history. He’d avoided using the store’s e-coupons because he didn’t want the store to track his shopping habits, but what he didn’t realize is that stores have other ways of tracking us – such as paying for purchases with the same credit card each week.
Tracking shoppers with “big data” is big business, and it’s extremely difficult to opt out or hide one’s personal data. Marketers use all kinds of data to identify us and determine what we might purchase or need to purchase in the future.
Over a decade ago, I noticed that when I bought a box of hair color, I’d start receiving Catalina coupons in the checkout lane for more hair color about four weeks later – just about the time I might consider re-dyeing my hair again. Yes, it’s convenient to receive offers like these, but somewhere in a database, there’s certainly a record of what kind of hair color I use and how often I purchase it.
That kind of marketing didn’t seem terribly creepy to me, but sometimes companies tip their hands and show just how much data they actually know about us. Imagine this: A popular family theme park and resort destination sends a poster in the mail. When you unfold it, it’s a calendar showing all of the days your children are off school and available to travel to the resort.
I don’t have to imagine it, as it happened to me. The poster read “Cataldo Family School Breaks,” and each day off aligned to the public school district’s calendar where we live. Imagine the work these marketers did to create this mailer – they know we are a family with children in the target demographic, and they compared our home address to the school district in which we reside. Then, they created a custom mailer showing every day our children had off school for the year ahead, encouraging us to hang it in our home and plan future vacations.
As much as I love travel, even this seemed a little too invasive to me – and this incident took place five years ago. Big Data has even more marketing tricks up their sleeves these days.
Last month, I was looking online at a copper ring in a style that I liked. I ordered the ring from a jewelry site, and after it arrived, my son showed me something interesting. He has a computer tablet that is almost always connected to the Internet via our home’s wireless network. Even though he has never searched for copper rings, many of the advertisements on the web pages he was browsing were showing copper rings – and some were showing the exact copper ring I’d purchased and the jewelry retailer I purchased it from!
When my son mentioned this, my other son and my husband also showed me that their phones’ web browsers were also displaying ads for copper rings! As none of them had ever searched for this particular item before, we then knew that a marketer was serving ads for copper rings to every device attached to our home’s Wi-Fi network. It took about a week for these marketers to realize no one else was interested in purchasing a ring like mine, and for those advertisements to be replaced by others.
This incident opened our eyes to the fact that everyone in the house could potentially be alerted to what other family members are buying, or interested in buying, if we are all being served similar ads. My son said, “Imagine if someone bought something that was supposed to be a surprise gift – the whole family could find out about it from the ads!”
Unfortunately, the more we browse and shop, whether in-store or online, the larger our marketing profile becomes – and the web of connections that data travels to widens as well.