(via H&M Bikini Posters Get Nicely Adbusted By Street Artist)

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks”

Jeff Hammerbacher, quoted in This Tech Bubble is Different by Ashlee Vance, Business Week.14 April 2011.

I’m Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web
Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic, 29 Feb 2012.

1. Using Mozilla’s tool Collusion to find out how many companies are tracking him online (105).

2. How the online advertising ecosystem is structured - basically:

• Helping advertisers buying adspace, e.g. media planning & buying (green, on left)
• Helping sellers of adspace, mostly to deliver particular types of people (blue, on right)
• Delivering more data or faster service or better measurement (orange)

3. A detailed look at three of these companies & what they actually do:

All three companies want to know as much about me and what’s on my screen as they possibly can, although they have different reasons for their interest. None of them seem like evil companies, nor are they singular companies. Like much of this industry, they seem to believe in what they’re doing. They deliver more relevant advertising to consumers and that makes more money for companies. They are simply tools to improve the grip strength of the invisible hand.

4. You can’t stop data collection. Opt-out tools stop you from receiving targeted ads - they don’t stop data being collected.

5. Why data is still collected - mostly for advertising performance management:

But the NAI code also recognizes that companies sometimes need to continue to collect data for operational reasons that are separate from ad targeting based on a user’s online behavior. For example, online advertising companies may need to gather data to prove to advertisers that an ad has been delivered and should be paid for; to limit the number of times a user sees the same ad; or to prevent fraud. Gathering this operational data may involve the use of cookies separate from those used to enable interest-based ad targeting, or to maintain a consumer’s opt out preference.

Chuck Curran, then-Network Advertising Initiative chief, in Moving the Goal Posts Without Changing the Rule Book, 14 July 2011

6. But opting out from being tracked is exactly what web-users want (and think they’re getting.

7. The bigger questions: should the ability to opt-out of tracking be a right? And why?

Companies’ ability to track people online has significantly outpaced the cultural norms and expectations of privacy. This is not because online companies are worse than their offline counterparts, but rather because what they can do is so, so different. We don’t have a language for talking about how these companies function or how our society should deal with them.

The word you hear over and over and over is that targeted ads can be “creepy.” It even crops up in the academic literature, despite its vague meaning in this context. My intuition is that we use the word “creepy” precisely because it is an indeterminate word. It connotes that tingling-back-of-the-neck feeling, but not necessarily more than that. The creepy feeling is a sign to pay attention to a possibly harmful phenomenon. But we can’t sort our feelings into categories — dangerous or harmless — because we don’t actually know what’s going to happen with all the data that’s being collected.

8. Two slightly unclear points:

• Online searches are tracked by cookies, which serve as identity-markers but aren’t connected to your actual identity through your name or other real-world markers of identity (passport, social security number). That’s a good thing. However this can & will change.
• A machine watching what you do is more “private” than a human being watching it. So at the moment that’s ok - but as machine learning develops, that privacy will be lost.

9. Conclusions - it’s difficult:

• Tech solutions will be developed, but only small elites will use them. Most internet users will continue to give away vast amounts of information.
• However targeted advertising is how websites make money - and it’s hard enough [for magazines & news media] to do that online as it is.
• Advertising-supported free media is better than paywalled closed media.

10. Optimistic coda:

Perhaps there are natural limits to what data targeting can do for advertisers and when we look back in 10 years at why data collection practices changed, it will not be because of regulation or self-regulation or a user uprising. No, it will be because the best ads could not be targeted. It will be because the whole idea did not work

*

C O M M E N T

A lot of interesting and important points raised. Very useful to see how the online advertising ecosystem is actually structured - a hell of a lot of companies - and it’s good to see reasons for tracking explained too. What’s important to acknowledge is that these companies aren’t actively malicious or trying to build a dystopia of total surveillance - that’s really the unintended side effect of trying to work out how to sell you a pair of shoes you looked at in a store two days ago. The motivations are very prosaic and not in themselves evil - the “creepy” that Madrigal outlines so well is an emergent property of the system.

Second useful thing was learning that “do not track” options don’t actually deliver not-tracking. It will be incredibly difficult to do this effectively:

• The industry will resist any regulation.
• Market research is claiming an exemption from do not track settings and I would bet that much of the tracking Madrigal describes (from the orange ‘support’ services) might claim to be market research measurement.
• Companies will claim ignorance about the rules, and not follow them
• Companies will claim exemption by being based in parts of the world where these laws don’t reach.
• Clients (brands buying advertising) will not exercise any oversight - let alone due diligence - on the ad services they’re buying. There’ll be a lot of “don’t ask, don’t tell” to continue delivering illegal or illegit tracking.

Third useful thing: we’ve got to think about how websites can make money. Advertising is the business model enabling the free-at-the-point-of-use web. Subscription is not only a bad idea (a more closed web), it can’t work - I read far too many different news sites to be able to subscribe to them all. Voluntary micropayments? Possibly, though it’d be fascinating to see how those would be distributed - likely to very rapidly shake up what’s a viable web news site.

Fourth point to remember: maybe targeted advertising won’t deliver what brands (ad buyers) need. Definitely some mileage in this argument. Niche targeting can’t deliver that watercooler moment where everyone’s talking about a new ad because they’ve all seen it - and how well can it predict who best to serve ads designed to build brand awareness, not direct purchases? It also undersells strong creative, which can appeal to people beyond the targeted niche. Essentially I can see the prestigious campaigns with the biggest ad spends choosing not to buy targeted space (which is after all more expensive) - and also perhaps premium press choosing not to sell it. (However that still leaves ambulance-chasing lawyers on DailyStar.co.uk, so not a total panacea.)

Consumers are uninformed, and consequently paranoid, about data collection and privacy standards. They presume marketers are peering into their personal lives and equate web analysts to identity thieves. What they fail to understand are the hidden costs to cracking down on privacy, for the capitalist and consumer in us all. Privacy restrictions will result in decreased sales, lost jobs, poor content, irrelevant advertising and shitty consumer experiences. It will set digital technology back a decade. One could argue this pro-privacy is almost rooted in anti-capitalism.

As marketers and advertisers, we only stand to lose. Advancements in neuromarketing and analytics are making great strides to give those very same consumers truly personalized digital experience across all mediums. We envision experiences that put their needs before those of brands and actually improve lives.

If there was ever a time to fight ignorance, it’s now. Join us for a heated debate over this brewing topic

What a vile SXSWi panel….

The “OMG reds under the bed!!!!” comment can stand for itself. Neuromarketing has also never (AFAIK) produced any results of any robustness or significance, but we’ll also let that stand for the moment.

My particular objection is that this panel destroys itself by its own logic:

• 1. It’s logically inconsistent
  he appeal to allow marketers to track everything is putatively to get “experiences” that “put [consumers’] needs above those of brands”. But the complaint is exactly that consumers are putting their feelings of concern above thinking of the poor ickle advertisers & sacrificing their privacy For The Sake Of Capitalism.
• 2. It’s bad marketing
  Proposing the consumer as “ignorant” and proposing to “fight” them, what bellicose nonsense! Assuming that your customers are idiots who need to be “educated” (-slash-brainwashed) gets you nowhere, as you’re refusing to understand why they’re resisting. If you don’t understand your customer’s needs, you’ve little likelihood of being able to sell them something they want.

Pew Study Finds News Sites Fail to Aim Ads at Users
Tazina Vega, New York Times, 13 Feb 2012.

A new study released Monday by the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at 22 news Web sites and more than 5,300 digital ads. It found that many of the sites had not attracted the same advertisers online as they did on other platforms.

In part, these sites were failing to attract online ads because they were not using technology that would customize ads based on their users’ online behavior.

[…] Of the news sites surveyed, those that used the most user-focused technology were Yahoo, The New York Times and CNN. The rest of the sites, which included Fox News, The Washington Post, The Economist, Time, The Los Angeles Times, ABC News and The Atlantic, used very low levels of the technology.

“Not currently” is only a mild and no doubt temporary reprieve - but nonetheless worthy of some note. The society of control is unevenly distributed.

1. A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click
Joseph Turow, The Atlantic, 7 Feb 2012
An excerpt from his new book, The Daily You.

2. How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Charles Duhigg, New York Times, 16 Feb 2012
The Target / pregnant teenager case-study you’ve already read.

3. Predictive Analytics and Information Camouflage
Rob Horning, the New Inquiry, 17 Feb 2012.

Says Horning:

As with political scandal, what’s so bothersome about this less the targeting itself — though that is bad for reasons Turow details, more on that below — but the cover-up. Retailers don’t want transparency in their attempts to manipulate your behavior; they want to control how your habits evolve. They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be. And they try to justify themselves with the idea that they know better than us what we really want and their marketing techniques allow us to get out of our way to indulge ourselves how we really want and become who we really want to be.
Thus Duhigg concludes with this quote from Target’s targeting guru: “Just wait. We’ll be sending you coupons for things you want before you even know you want them.” We’re supposed to think that is a good thing. We’re not supposed to think that the company is using the data it has collected on us to shape the possibilities of what we can become, to control the context in which we make our lives and understand ourselves.

This is the crux of the objection: now advertising might really be successful at controlling us.

It implies, perhaps, a belief that advertising is not yet doing so. This is a view not universally shared: for example, in Baudrillard’s conception of the consumer.

In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard writes of the consumer as not fully formed, without predetermined desires guiding their consumption choices (as per the classic economic model) – need is instead “the product of the system of production” (1998:74). [Whether companies/brands can be said to have more agency in generating needs than consumers, however, is as far as I recall unclear. Need is generated by the system, not by specific producers per se.]

The consumer cannot even choose to choose: consumption is institutionally enforced behaviour. There is an ideology of freedom, but this simply serves to conceal how consumption acts as social control in the industrial system (1998: 80-1,84).

Although “there is no-one there – no person” (1998: 88), self-actualisation is nonetheless possible, even the goal of the consumer: in the absence of the self as an absolute whole, we must re-form ourselves within the system of differences, creating anonymous ‘synthetic individuality’. The consumer seeks out personalised goods in search of that “difference which will make us ourselves.” (1998: 87) The sign-value of each object bought will refer to a whole set of related signs, so consumers effectively buy into ready made lifestyles in the search for identity (Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity 1997: 191). In some ways this is not really self-actualisation, as the consumer has no agency to make significant decisions – they are wholly controlled by the code which they do not create. No resistance is possible.

Baudrillard would, no doubt, be amused by these developments in digital advertising - he is a theorist who does not offer much hope, just a wry shrug and an “I told you so.” From reading Baudrillard, we are offered no solution.

Is one needed? How radical and how alarming, actually, are these developments in digital advertising?

From Duhigg’s article we learn that Target can potentially know a hell of a lot about us. However, it leverages this by… sending people discount coupons.

What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

This is a little underwhelming - first, what percentage of discount coupons get used? Given the relatively high friction of bringing them with you / actually completing a purchase online, I imagine the answer’s not high - perhaps 10%. This skews people’s shopping baskets slightly, but it’s not total control.

What would be more concerning was if the recommendations start to make the purchase for you - e.g. they pre-fill your grocery basket when you come to online shop, so you have to actively remove them. Tesco actually offer a ‘predictive shop’ option as a perk to encourage you to start shopping online - “Enter your Clubcard number when you register to see what you regularly buy in store” as a “fantastic reason to shop with us”. Building in Clubcard promotions to this wouldn’t be hard. There is however the risk that any consumer backlash - any dis-ease - immediately and visibily hits the bottom line, in the form of more ‘abandoned carts’ as people see the prediction, freak out, and log off. Given this, there may be some wariness to introduce.

Another chance for liberty (after a sort) is suggested by Horning’s comment: “They understand that the more you know about their techniques, the less effective they will be.” According to a discussion on Quora, 2% of Firefox viewers - but perhaps 14% of active website visits - are made by people with Ad Blocker installed in their browser - making targeted online advertising a moot point.

From Quora [anonymouse]:

There’s been a lot of disparaging remarks regarding ad blocking software here on Quora. In your own echo chambers, you can tell each other that ad blocking software is insignificant, wrong, anti-social, non-viral, immoral, geeky and no one really uses it because it threatens your business. Keep thinking that way. Like the local defunct hardware stores, your day will come and you’ll never understand why

Coupons, online advertising… Digital marketing may be gaining a lot more knowledge about the consumer, but I’m skeptical as to whether this is actually a step-change in how effective it is in driving action.

This may be because there’s still space left for free choice and action… Or it may because systemically (a la Baudrillard) we have no means left of relating to the world except through the consumption of signs. Depending on the weather, my view changes.

Maintaining Olympic advertisers’ expensively-purchased monopolies of signification is a legal requirement for host cities. This means new laws:

Section 19: Advertising Regulations.

(4)The regulations may apply in respect of advertising of any kind including, in particular—
(a)advertising of a non-commercial nature, and
(b)announcements or notices of any kind.

(5)The regulations may apply in respect of advertising in any form including, in particular—
(a)the distribution or provision of documents or articles,
(b)the display or projection of words, images, lights or sounds, and
(c)things done with or in relation to material which has or may have purposes or uses other than as an advertisement.

Yay democracy.

Found via @DSG_DSG, 10 Growth Markets for Crisis

Old advertising posters left in stasis at Aldwych London Underground station…

…which was only closed in 1994, yet these appear clearly older.

Perhaps they are not signs of “history” and “abandonment” and “decay” at all, but rather manually distressed simlulacra put up by film crews using the station as a set (as happens regularly).

This is interesting re. the motivations of urban explorers (and online voyeurs) - we are jonesing for authenticity:

The station’s ticket hall, well, for me was disappointing. It was beautiful don’t get me wrong, but all signs of decay, damage and disuse you would expect from an abandoned station had been prevented due to its infrequent use as a museum / movie location.

Weird. Think Bradley Garrett (@goblinmerchant) may be covering this in his PhD thesis, which I hear is nearly ready. Will have to give it a read…

Jason Goodman is taking his ad agency from Silicon Roundabout to Silicon Valley – but where can he find the geeks he says he needs to get ahead?

The advertising industry’s next generation will look more like Bill Gates than Don Draper, the slick creative genius who leads the fictional ad agency in Mad Men. That’s the view of Jason Goodman, co-founder of London agency Albion – and he’s already fretting about how he’s going to hire a new breed of creative geeks.

When Goodman heard Basem Nayfeh, an American technology and marketing entrepreneur, claim that “advertising is becoming an engineering discipline” it struck a chord. “The third person I ever hired was an advertising planner who had a double first in maths from Cambridge. Most ad guys are well presented, they know how to dress, they’re a bit Don Draper-like. This guy was a mess. But he was in the business for four years and made an amazing contribution. Now I’m constantly look for people in his image.”

The 41 year-old, himself a history graduate, believes the days of the advertising industry being dominated by arts and humanities graduates are numbered. “The next generation [of marketers] won’t look like it used to, aesthetically, or in terms of their CVs. Everyone in my business should know how to write [programming] code, in the same way as 50 years ago they all knew how to draw. Mashing up all forms of data gives you the insights which enable you to develop much bolder creative propositions. The craft skills to do that are those of mathematicians.”

All you really need to know about this agency is written in the formulas on the board. That’s the Taylor series expansion of the exponential function; Pythagoras’ theorem; a couple of trigonometric identities.

A-level maths.

This guy seems to be mistaking “numerate” for fluent Java or PHP.

I am all for tech-creative synergies, but this one seems particularly sketchily thought out. No-one in advertising has ever been able to draw, that’s just been the art department. So is he actually just saying he wants a techier creative execution team? Great, but that’s been done.

Or, he’s actually saying that data analysis produces insights. Great! But advertising isn’t really in the business of identifying insights - that’s the job of research. And there are already econometric marketing agencies out there.

What do you reckon?

Comment by thrawnpop on Guardian article, Is this the start of the second dotcom bubble? by Dominic Rushe, 20 Feb 2011.

This.

Everyone’s like, OMG, Facebook means we know so much more about our consumers - that’s got to be worth sofuckingmuch.

They seem to be forgetting that “consumers” - aka people - don’t have limitless money to suddenly start buying loads more stuff. Better targeting may make more people buy the socially-marketed product, but only at the expense of not buying stuff they currently purchase.

It’s essentially zero sum.

In the UK and America, salaries are flat and inflation is over 5%. In real terms people are getting a bit poorer every year. What’s different is that this time, we know it - after a decade’s economic growth funded by consumer borrowing (funded by debt, not wealth), individuals - and lenders - have cottoned on that that gravy train has halted. With little in the way of savings and nervous in mood, now we spend what we earn. Which is decreasing.

Facebook marketing could be magic mind control juice, but all consumers could do would be to want more stuff, not buy it.

The only way Facebook can justify these valuations is if it manages to take essentially all advertising budgets for everything everywhere.

Size of the global advertising market: estimated to reach $500bn in 2012
Google: valued at $189bn
Facebook: $50bn

1. There is a New New Thing that trancends the Old Economics, and you cannot value It the Old Way. This Time It will Be Different

That’s from the now-famous article, 10 steps to see if you’re in a bubble.

Magazines need to stop treating people like they are stupid. We can look at these covers and recognize that these are all women who have something to promote. You are so deeply in the pockets of PR people that you let them choose who you put in your most important cover of the year. These women have no fashion story to tell, hell even lifestyle stories are nonexistent after you’ve given identical interviews for the last 5 movies you promoted by being on the cover of a magazine. This is NOT how you save a dying industry.

(KDS310 on NYMag - The Cut - September Fashion Magazines Earn Praise for Skewing Older This Year)

Magazine circulations are actually doing ok, I understand, but this comment is nonetheless bang on. None of these women means anything in fashion terms - very few celebs do (e.g. Tilda Swinton, Chloe Sevigny, Gaga cos she wears catwalk McQueen in videos). Halle Berry on US Vogue is a lousy fashion choice too, even if it is sadly still important to see a black woman on the cover. And yet these magazines have chosen these slebs for the covers of their September issues, i.e. the biggest most important fashion issue of the whole year.

I understand US fashion mags don’t have quite the same brand images as their UK equivalents do - e.g. UK Bazaar is higher fashion that its US equivalent, but US Glamour is a bit classier than the UK version. Still, US Bazaar and Elle are both supposed to mean something in fashion terms, yet with these covers they diminish themselves to populist celebrity-enthralled pap. There is sure enough a market for that, and perhaps that’s all that matters. But what a massive, massive brand dilution.

It’d be really interesting to see how far this has affected the advertising they carry. In the UK, Vogue, Bazaar and Elle carry adverts for the designer mainline collections, e.g. four pages of Chanel showing the unwearable furry things they put on the catwalk. Cosmopolitan and Glamour, by contrast, only get ads for Chanel perfume, sunglasses and cosmetics, as it’s presumed their readership is unable to afford the clothes and perhaps a bit less interested in high fashion too.

Let’s see if I’m a big enough nerd to buy the US mags and do a page-count…

Take a look at the cover of this week’s New Scientist magazine [the central one of three]. Notice anything unusual? Thought not, but behind the scenes your brain is working overtime, focusing your attention on the words and images and cranking up your emotions and memory. How do we know? Because we tested it with a brain scanner.

In what we suspect is a world first, this week’s cover was created with the help of a technique called neuromarketing, a marriage of market research and neuroscience that uses brain-imaging technology to peek into people’s heads and discover what they really want.

• ‘New Scientist’ is in red, which grabs the attention (and is more likely to appeal to a male audience) better than primrose yellow
• It’s the only cover that features the main article listing on the top left below the title, a position well known the sweet spot for shoppers’ attention. This is also much easier to read than the dread centre-justify the others use.
• The main article is listed in bigger, capital letters that are again more eye-catching
• It’s the only cover advertising some kind of freebie in a little blue pull-out.

An international cosmetics firm tested two subtly different versions of an advert using a traditional focus group. They found that one was much preferred over the other, even though volunteers failed to notice any difference between them. This was hardly surprising as they only differed in one 4-second scene in which a female model either looked passively at the camera or touched her cheek with the back of her hand. To find out why this made such an impact, the company hired a group of neuroscientists led by Rafal Ohme of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Using EEG imaging of 45 women aged between 25 and 35, they found that the gesture produced a brief but powerful emotional uplift during the crucial scene.

(Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics, vol 2, p 21).

In the late ’60s or early ’70s there was a great craze for testing ads, packages, slogans etc. by measuring how eye movements scanned the field and by observing the extent of iris dilation - windows to the soul? The rhetoric was almost identical. But even before that, just after WWII I dimly recollect attempts to use ‘lie detectors’ to test the sincerity of participants responses to questions about brand names, pack designs and ads. There was also a test store in Baker Street equipped with hidden cameras that watched how customers scanned supermarket shelves. Again, almost supernatural powers were claimed and many advertisers were persuaded to invest in this kind of research. If I were your advertising agent, I would caution you against spending too much on this kind of thing although it does bring the same kind of comfort to advertisers that placebos bring to hypochondriacs.

People have talked about the conflicting messages from Dove and Vaseline Fair & Lovely as being perfectly reasonable branding – Unilever tailoring its brands’ advertising so it addresses different beauty trends in two different markets.

It’s still a problem for Unilever, however, because those marketing campaigns haven’t stayed safely confined to their own markets – instead, Vaseline Fair & Lovely is getting a lot of coverage on the Anglo-American parts of the internet. A bunch of Westerners not liking the ads doesn’t just mean they’re not going to buy the Fair & Lovely product – obviously enough we were unlikely to do that anyway. Rather it does two things:

1. Make Unilever look pretty nasty for preying on the caste-driven pressures on young people in India, where skintone can affect employability and marriage options;
2. Makes the ‘niceness’ of Dove really, really visible as a BRAND, as nothing more than a branding trick.

It’s this latter that’s the main problem for Unilever. While anyone seeing the Dove adverts should be aware that, simply enough, they are adverts and therefore they’re trying to sell you something, the ads were good enough and played well enough off an anti-size-zero zeitgeist that they felt quite sincere. They did a really good job of making people like the brand and seeing it as something that’d make them feel good about themselves.

Awareness of what Unilever are doing in other markets, however, makes their brands in this one – i.e. Dove – look very hollow. The success of the Dove campaign was predicated on a kind of cognitive dissonance: consumers could only swallow what it was saying about ‘real women’ and self-acceptance if they didn’t think too hard about it being an advert designed to sell stuff. The Fair & Lovely marketing, though, shows the depths of manipulativeness that Unilever will sink to in order to sell their beauty products, and as such I would argue it’s damaging to other brands in the portfolio.

Maybe that’s the problem with individual product branding… In February my then-colleague Sue Burden said in Marketing Week that, “With the Individual product brand model, the benefits are mainly an absence of possible negatives - no great fear of negative news about a parent or sibling brand affecting them.”

This only works, though, if consumers don’t ‘join the the dots’ between individual brands (Dove; Vaseline Fair & Lovely) and the parent company (Unilever). As this episode would indicate, that can be quite an easy thing for consumers or the media to do – and as such it’s not a very strong advantage.

1. Companies are mining the social web to build dossiers on you. Anything you post to blogs, Facebook, Twitter or other websites will be stored in a cross-referenced database of your online activities, to be sold to marketers - and, frankly, whoever the hell wants it, for whatever the hell purpose - to track you down as an individual.

Jules Polonetsky, director and co-chair of the Future of Privacy Forum, said online users have no clue that a comment they made on a blog is being added to a database for some unknown use.

“I don’t think users expect that,” he said, and if consumers think idle chatter and casual conversation can be used against them by institutions, it’s almost certain to create a backlash, according to Polonetsky. He said the Federal Trade Commission is right now re-examining the current privacy structure in the U.S.

But at the same time, he said consumers are always very comfortable with Amazon using data to recommend books they might like. “When users are in control of it, it’s a win-win — if they feel empowered.”

Do marketers realise that what they’re doing is sinister? The article linked above (on Mashable) discusses how credit card companies are looking at people’s social connections to sell them new products. So-so. But what about a US health insurer using this information to deny coverage to people who they can classify as ‘high risk’ because they live in areas or communities with poor health? Or anti-abortion terrorists using this information to harass women who’ve been asking questions about abortion? “I know who you are and I know where you live” - the dark side of personalisation is a flat-out threat.

What marketers behind this - e.g. Rapleaf.com with some 389 million people tracked - don’t want to acknowledge is consent. I’ve given Amazon lots of information about the books I’ve bought and the books I like, so not only have I opted into its recommendations process but it’s also quite transparent. The exact algorithm might remain a mystery, but I know the data-points it’s feeding into that sum, and I know what it’s going to try & do with that data, viz, recommend me books in the hope I might buy them.

But no-one’s opted-in to having their online social lives (Twitter, FB, blogs & the rest) mined for information like this. While web users are aware that what they say in these forums is public, I’d argue that we’re used to thinking about a human-scale definition of public which is now dangerously obsolete.

This human-scale public is what we’re used to walking down a city street. Sure, anyone might see us, but there are two crucial points: (i) whoever can see me, I can also see them, and (ii) in a crowd of strangers I am both in public and anonymous. I would argue that this is the kind of “public-ness” people instinctively imagine they have online.

E.g. if I make some comments on a message board of course I know that anyone else on that site (=city street) will be able to read it, but it’s unlikely anyone I know from elsewhere will come wandering by and see what I’ve been up to. Perhaps I’ve posted under a handle or pseudonym, so surely that’s anonymous vis-a-vis my real name. This, I argue, is how most people instinctively think about public comments they make on the internet: an effective anonymity by dint of scale.

But these aggregating and connecting web trackers aren’t human-scale. This is a new techno-scale public in which everything publicly visible will be seen (collected, aggregated, linked) rather than simply can. The balance of possibility has shifted, such that actually the online public isn’t anonymous any more - the internet’s still too big for a human acquaintance to happen across everything you’ve said elsewhere, but it’s easy for a crawler to grab it all.

As mentioned below, you don’t need to leave a comment with your name on it for a website to trace your identity. That question you had about redundancy? Assume your bank can find out. Sexual health? Your health insurer wants to know. This is the surveillance public, the online equivalent of urban CCTV with face recognition and car numberplate tracking. You’re still free to do anything… As long as you’re happy for anyone to know about it.

2. Introducing ubercookies, a technique for websites to uncover the exact identities of visitors by using Flash to probe their browser histories for identifiable patterns. This is made even easier by the social web.

3. What can I find out about you if I know your email address? Answer: a lot, including full name and location allowing for telephone number look-ups.

4. My hacker boyfriend close friend the security researcher recommends Mozilla add-on BetterPrivacy for blocking Flash cookies, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation / Tor add-on HTTPS everywhere which encrypts your communications with major websites.

“The label thinks Cadbury’s ad for its Flake bar, in which a woman floats in a yellow dress, is suspiciously similar to the Kate Moss hologram projected at its fashion show in 2006, when the model was mired in a drug scandal. The director of the Flake ad also did the Moss hologram. Cadbury said they weren’t intending to copy the hologram, “but the director has a particular house style.”

I saw this advert for the first time a couple of days ago and loved it - the sinuous tentacular dress, the simplicity and apparent ‘uncommercial’ content. “What is this for?” I wondered. Shampoo, if the dress is blonde and moves like hair? Perfume - the colour and class would be fitting for Chanel’s Beige, perhaps, even if the ruffles are more Valentino. When for a second the model’s face is revealed, who was she - a gap-toothed Lara Stone? - I felt sure she must be a name. Why was it so brilliantly not trying to sell me something - a strategy which of course piqued my attention and achieved its ends so elegantly?

I loved the ad because it seemed so uncompromisingly capital-F Fashion, a rare commercial claiming a place in the world of design. And now I find out that it is indeed a rip-off of proper fashion, of one of the most artistic designers in the industry, Alexander McQueen. Why did I not recognise this parallel myself?!

And does this ad actually work? My reaction, on discovering it was a commercial for Flake, was disappointment. Flake to me is still a slightly downmarket brand of chocolate-with-air-in-it aimed at women who’re a bit scared of the 255 calories in a bar of Dairy Milk. The advert is beautiful but so distant from a 50p chocolate bar that I don’t really believe it able to elevate perception of the actual product involved.

Whatever the boost to brand awareness, is it possible for an ad like this to actually remind customers of the gulf between brand values and reality?