Advertising and Consumer Society: Data Mining
requirement of the analysis:
You are encouraged to use this as an opportunity to dig into texts that you might want to use as resources in your final paper. Your analysis of these readings should be substantive; while you will want to illustrate comprehension of the readings, the goal is not description, but analysis.
Topic of the reading:
Data Mining
* Arguably the most significant development in advertising in the last 20 years is the utilization of large amounts of data to better “understand,” or better “target” consumers. What questions should we be asking about 1) the collection of data, 2) the sale, distribution, or management of data (monopolies of information), 3) privacy, and 4) the social effects of data’s economic dominance? How are our relationships redrawn by the profitability of data? How do targeted ads reshape our relationship to advertising and consumption? Is there a difference between predicting and reacting to consumer desires? Is there a cost to losing the kind of democratic access to information older forms of consumption (department store, e.g.) had? Is advertising as an industry making the best use of the power of data, or is James Williams right when he argues this is a valuable moment during which we could redefine what our relationship to advertising is?
Advertising and consumer society: Data Mining
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Advertising and consumer society: Data Mining
For over the years, significant forms of data have been one of the best ways and practices that businesses use today to understand better and target their customers. The customers knowingly and unknowingly provide their data through their various daily activities, which data is collected and managed and then sold to the businesses that need it for surveillance of their customers. The companies that tend to collect and sell this data are third-party companies specializing in creating highly sophisticated and detailed consumer raw data (Manzerolle and Smeltzer, 2011). This paper focuses on asking them several questions that are related to the data collected, managed privacy, or the social effects of data economic dominance.
As identified earlier, the data is collected following the consumers’ daily activities who knowingly and unknowingly provide their data to the third-party company that then sells it to the marketing company or the business. Some of the questions that should be asked about data collection include the use of the data collected? Why is the data collected? What purpose is the data going to serve? The marketing businesses collect the data to influence or come up with the adverts that encourage the consumers to purchase more products (Manzerolle and Smeltzer, 2011). The collected data is then sold pr distributed to the various marketing agencies and businesses that use it to influence customers. The questions that should be asked about the sale, distribution, or management of data include, is the data sold to the right people? Is the data distributed through the right paths? And how can the data be managed such that it does not get into the wrong hands? On the other hand, in most cases, the consumers are aware that the different companies are collecting their information. Instead, they are not aware of how their collected data is used. People get worried about how and what the companies that get their information tend to use, especially those that collect and sell their data. They become the target...