Consumer and Voter Control is this just a Marketing Myth or a Hidden Reality?
As a digital consumer, we are constantly being asked to give our preferences. To accept terms, conditions and cookies all under the guise of improving our experience. Of delivering a more personalised web service and it works. To a point. If we set our preferences and start allowing cookies to monitor our every move and by engaging with some content more than others or filtering out what we don’t like we start to get a more and more of what we like, prefer and want rather than the bombardment of what we don’t.
Of course, it doesn’t always work out that way and often the “targeted” advertising and media experience could be no further away from the truth of “what you might like” than Elvis Costello is from walking on the moon. But of course, putting Elvis aside, you can sort this out with a few simple clicks, anti pokes and dislikes.
We are told more and more that we are in control. We have a vast array of choice and a multiplicity of devices and platforms to engage with digital marketers fall foul of us at their peril. No more are we the captive audiences once swooned, beguiled and fornicated with by those barmey men and women of Madison Avenue. At least that is what we are told.
Switching back to my digital marketeer persona for a minute. I take and engage with endless marketing courses that spout the same truth. Courses that yearn for the enclosed areas of yesteryear where the customer was less informed, sat passively by as they were force-fed and garbage truck full of advertising junk food at every available opportunity.
These courses talk about consumer digital overload, being spoilt and bombarded with choice, so much so that more and more the discerning consumers are switching off and filtering out what they don’t want and deciding what they do.
Putting aside the arguments of this causing segmented silos in political and social debates, and being the cause of the most recent shock elections and votes in the UK and USA, as well as elsewhere in the globe for a minute. Yes, that is right I did just put aside it is one of the major contributing factors to the potential destabilisation of the western world.
Putting this aside, we are sold the concept of Consumer Control. Not only is the customer now just the king or queen but they are the judge, jury and executioner of the digital marketing campaigns of so many businesses and organisations.
So much so that as digital peddlers of spin we are told that we now need to be in the entertainment business and so we see so many of the desperate attempts to get peoples attention and make “digital noise”
People who were once shy retiring office marketing nerds (yes I mean me) are forced in front of a camera, or to the end of a microphone in the vain hope they might say something ever so slightly engaging.
But does Consumer Control really exist. Or is it just another more clever marketing spin to take peoples to focus away from the fact that they are really the product being sold to the biggest marketer.
If we take into consideration the power of big data, marketing analytics, psychometric profiling used in behavioural economics and persuasion marketing. If we add in the ability to target consumers in real time with programmatic advertising based on not only what they are currently looking for but, with machine learning and AI insight, the ability to market something to you moments before you even know you need it based on hundreds if not thousands of bits of data, crunched, analysed and profiled by clever algorithms in code.
Putting aside every AI based disaster movie where every man, woman and child is depending on Will Smith of Vin Deisel to kick a metal tin can ass. Yes putting this aside too, for now.
If we take on the fact that digital businesses have social media war rooms (yes they are engaging in battle to take your hard earned cash and waste your time) that contain data scientists, analysts, Don Draiperesque creatures, psychologists, behavioural and social scientist, anthropologists (in the most diverse) and occasionally the office window cleaner, then how much control do we really have.
If we are more analysed than Freud's misogynistic addiction edifice would be inside Crackers smoke fused whiskey spitting secret interrogation cell at the heart of the FBI behavioural science unit. If then this analysis is poured into the beautiful minds of the big data teams and the creatives department to fuse together perfectly timed engaging advertising and marketing, what chance do we have?
In the 15 plus years, I have been involved with marketing I have seen it go from the creative art or advertising and marketing to the realm of scientist, mathematician and metrologist. For me, this has been an intriguing and enjoyable journey as I have always been both very creative and analytical. But when we consider those that are leaps ahead of the game. People like the Cambridge Analyticas that are using these techniques to sway elections we have to ask ourselves where do we draw the line.
Whilst the premise of consumer or voter control may be an overstatement it is surely an area as both digital behavioural marketers and consumers and voters in our own right, that we need to ask some questions.
The worry is that these technologies and industries become over-regulated by government laws and bureaucracies. The same government that set up Behavioural Insights teams as us to believe they don’t use this knowledge acquired in any form of propaganda or social engineering.
Over-regulating of the technologies or the platforms will just drive the problem underground. The dark web is already an area that is attracting more attention. But putting aside the dark web. The tactics used by some will never be fair but being made aware of them and highlighting them does more to equip and protect the public than banning them and sending them underground.
The very technologies that were designed to free us have been our tombs. The digital technologies industry needs to rethink the role of technology in the lives of its users and instead of just putting up firewalls we should innovate to improve the lives and free the technologically enslaved masses.
Is it really such a big deal?
You might think it is not such a big deal. What am I wittering on about? But you only have to look around the world today and you see being glued to their screens walking down the street, driving their car, on the train.
No one is interacting but if that weren’t bad enough the new generations just grow up to know this as reality. They don’t get to see what the world is like and how people can really interact.
They grow up in a segmented profiled bubble where they are fed one worldview which only reinforces their own biases and can be steered in any direction by the manipulations of the behavioural marketer.
Because of the neuroplasticity of the brain this segregated digital reality becomes their reality and this, in turn, affects their physiology, psychology, feelings and emotions that can become manipulated through the triggering of chemical reactions produced by what they see, hear and read. We are effectively letting strangers into our homes to market and influence ourselves and our families. Strangers that might not have good intentions. At best they want us to spend our hard earned money at worst they want a lot more than that.
Watch the below videos of the now disgraced Cambridge Analytica and ask yourself do you want these people influencing your children? This company might now be gone but their are many others like them.
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