2003.12.18
More Marketing Hell
Great googly goo! Marketers are once again trying their damnedest to make an otherwise almost sane world and screw it as hard as they can. If you’ve seen Minority Report where you walk into a store and are greeted by name and given “suggestions” for what you might like to buy based on your last purchase, then you have their goal. What is frightening is that they are close to having all the technology in place.
The article is scary in its enthusiasm, though it ends with this slightly redeeming note:
Another common problem is that the technologies that excite marketers commonly repel the people they’re trying to target. Oftentimes, consumers find ultra-targeted marketing frustrating, a reaction exacerbated by the fact that there’s not much they can do to make it go away.
As Underhill puts it, “One of the poignancies of our era is that our technology has moved at lightning speeds past what our privacy laws are.
“One of the realities of our lives is that we have a consumer base out there that is reacting very badly to some of the ways technology and marketing have met,” he says.
I, for one, agree that marketing needs to stay away from technology. In fact, marketing needs to simply be made illegal.
Categorized: thoughts
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