The Emmy® Awards, New York Chapter National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences 1375 Broadway Suite 2103 New York, NY 10018 Ph 212-459-3630 Fx 212-459-9772
Alethea Hokum sat quietly, barely breathing. Her glazed eyes showed
a faint reflection of the video monitor that had lulled her into
semi-consciousness. Startled and just a bit confused, she reached down
to silence her vibrating PDA. But something caught her eye. It was a
text message offering her an additional 15 percent off if she would
like her carpets cleaned this week. Of course the text message was just
a few seconds out of sync with the sponsorship message she had just
seen, but Alethea knew the offer was especially for her. It was an
offer she couldn’t refuse.
She hit the pause button on her television, answered the text
message with a simple "y" and pressed send. Two clicks on her remote to
get back to the part of the show she missed and less than a minute
later, Alethea Hokum returned to her blissful world of personalized,
highly relevant media.
Across town, Verity Bunker, a stay-at-home mother of two, was taking
a much-needed retail therapy break. As she approached a digital sign at
the mall, the message changed to show a woman, with a physique quite
similar to her own, in a remarkably familiar setting. Verity could not
put her finger on it, but she knew that she had to visit this
particular store on this particular trip — what was it about that sign?
Welcome to Gootopia — a place where everything you do, everything
you interact with, every behavior you exhibit is analyzed, synthesized
and optimized to reflect a world that is most relevant to you. In this
targeted society, advertisers and marketers know absolutely everything
they could ever want to know about everyone. What they like, whom they
like, where they like to go and even more importantly, what everyone
doesn’t like. Gootopia may sound like a marketer’s paradise, but it is
perdition for almost everyone else.
Would you like to see one of the landmarks you must pass on the road
to Gootopia? Visit http://www.google.com/history where you can view and
manage your web activity, get the search results most relevant to you
and follow interesting trends in your web activity.
What?? Yes, you read it right. Just let Google completely analyze
your time online and they will reward you with some personal management
tools. What else will they do with the information?
I’m not Dr. Phil, but this sounds like a "how to" manual for
destroying even the best of relationships. "Hi honey, here’s a complete
log of every website I’ve visited in the last 30 days and how much time
I’ve spent on them… let me see yours." Do you know a couple anywhere on
this planet whose relationship could survive that information exchange?
Forgetting the privacy issues (formidable as they are), let’s ask a
few business questions about the value of hyper-targeted media. Is it
really valuable? Certainly not on an individual basis.
Statisticians will tell you that, with the appropriate sample size
and mathematical tools, it is relatively easy to predict what a
population will do. However, it is absolutely impossible to predict
what any individual will do. As you well know, when it comes to your
personal decisions, past performance is rarely an indicator of future
performance. So, we can predict that tonight in Manhattan, 5,437
dinners will be served at restaurants that feature Mexican food, but we
can’t predict who will eat them.
Even if you could predict, with a reasonable margin of accuracy, who
would frequent these culinary establishments this evening, would it
help you market to them? What would you do differently? Would your
advanced knowledge of this particular behavior enable you to extract a
greater share of wallet from this hyper-targeted audience? Probably not.
It is pretty reasonable to assume that people who walk into Mexican
restaurants are looking forward to eating Mexican food. Knowing who is
on their way won’t change much about the experience they have inside.
Now, is there some information we could aggregate and analyze that
would allow us to put an idea into someone’s head that today would be a
great day to have a Mexican dinner? Couldn’t hyper-targeted marketing
help us do that?
Absolutely! Right up until the target’s social network helps them decide otherwise. It happens all the time.
Later that day, Alethea and Verity meet-up with two of their friends
at the Tennis Club. Verity says, "… you know, I’ve been thinking about
Mexican food all day. Anyone want to join me?" Three of the four women
agree but Alethea says, "That sounds fine, but you know what? The best
Chinese restaurant in town is just a block away from here. Why don’t we
go there?"
So much for all of the day’s hyper-targeted Mexican food marketing
dollars, or — was it the fact that the Chinese food trade federation
outspent them and got Alethea, the thought leader, to influence the
group. Wow! Gootopia is going to be a strange place to live.
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