The Problem With Targeted Marketing?

Do we need to fine-tune targeted marketing before it fine-tunes us?

You know what it’s like: you just want to see how much a winter flight to Thailand might cost, just in case there’s something cheap, and you’re haunted by popup and banner ads for flights for weeks afterwards.
And that’s an example of an occasion when targeted advertising might actually work, as you could potentially be swayed to spend the money if faced with enough beach temptations on icy winter nights.
Alternatively, if you were searching for something like books, clothes or bedding, it could be useful to have the ads do some of the work of searching and showing you relevant things. When looking for a new place to live, or people to meet on a dating site, it could even be an asset if some clever piece of software could get to know us well enough to really understand what we were looking for, as we sift through a sea of options.
While OkCupid claims to have made great strides in perfecting its match algorithm, the problem with targeted advertising and other personalisation of the online experience is this: it doesn’t really know enough about us to get it quite right. Even in cases where the profiling software works pretty well, such as on eBay and Amazon, a single search for a present for someone else can be enough to completely throw off the suggestions for months. In a hilarious account on ‘The Awl’, Esther Werdiger found this to be the case, after she had to replace a stranger’s watch after accidentally breaking it. A few years on, Werdiger might have otherwise forgot about the awkward incident, but no: “I’m still slightly haunted by ‘Suggested Posts’ of that watch on Facebook.”
Being reminded of an awkward incident for months afterwards may be one negative effect of the personalisation of the online experience. Another is when the recommendations by your online video streaming service force you to realise that you’re actually more into superheroes than you’d like to admit. But there’s a more worrying point to this trend of increasingly mirroring ourselves back to us: if Google only shows hits based on what we’ve looked at in the past, how will we ever learn anything new? What happened to the Internet as an engine of exploration?
This is the concern of Eli Pariser, co-founder of Upworthy and author of ‘The Filter Bubble’. He explained the concept in his TED talk: “If you take all of these [online] filters together, you take all these algorithms, you get what I call a filter bubble. Your filter bubble is your own personal, unique universe of information that you live in online. What’s in your filter bubble depends on who you are, and it depends on what you do.”
The effects of this bubble aren’t just visible in search results, which can vary drastically from person to person, but also on the front pages of news outlets like The Huffington Post. Taken to the extreme, this personalised bubble means we risk each being stuck in an echo chamber where nothing new gets in: no new opinions in the newspaper, nothing different to watch on Netflix.
It’s early days for the personalisation of the online experience, so it’s likely that some of these wrinkles may be ironed out. Still, Pariser argues we need to go one step further and make sure the personalisation algorithms have a sense of what he calls “public life”, so a certain amount of varied information gets through to everyone. Concluded Pariser: “We really need the Internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being. We need it to introduce us to new ideas and new people and different perspectives. And it’s not going to do that if it leaves us all isolated in a web of one.”