Today I received an email from a *website* we all use, stating: *We removed reference to Programmatic Advertising in our Privacy Policy as we no longer support it on our site.*
What is **programmatic** advertising?
In: Technology
Programmatic advertising is when a company uses the information it knows about you to target you with ads it thinks you’ll want.
For example, companies are able to gather and analyze the tons of data you produce every day. Without knowing specifically *who you are* (that data is largely protected) they can infer that you are X years old, male, work in Y industry, have such and such education background, living in this town, make Z dollars per year etc.
They can take this data and compare it to their predictions that people that match your profile frequently buy burritos, they can sell this analysis to Fuzzy Nuggets brand Burritos (which you haven’t heard of yet) and suddenly you get a coupon in your inbox for a Fuzzy Nugget Nuggetler X-treme Meat Bomb, and statistically you’re very likely to go out and X-perience the BOMB^(tm)
There are obvious privacy concerns with this type of targeting marketing. A famous case was nearly 15 years ago when two Target employees got to talking around a water cooler. One of the most profitable categories of sales are first time mothers. A first time mother will typically drop thousands of dollars on baby stuff and be extremely brand loyal, no one suddenly changes formula or diaper brands mid-stream. If you ever have a child you’ll notice the hospital sends you home with a box of “free samples” and suddenly your mailbox gets blown up with coupons and free offers. This is because there is a very small window for companies to capture First Time Mother brand loyalty. So there is a HUGE incentive for companies to be first-to-reach first time mothers, even just being an hour quicker with your coupons could be the different between nothing and thousands of dollars in sales.
Anywho, these two Target employees were at the water cooler and one dared the other to see if it was possible to cull the through the frequent-shopper card data to determine if they could predict if a woman is pregnant *before she knew it.* Turns out it worked. They started sending out diapers and formula coupons and they got a nasty-gram from a father who’s 13 year old child received discounted pampers. Oh how dare you, my daughter is angel, I’m getting lawyers etc. Of course, she misses her next period and programmatic advertising is enshrined as the gold standard moving forward.
Keep in mind, this was 15 years ago, before the unimaginable proliferation of cell phone and social network data we have today.
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