By
Alice Lam
Big
Data is the buzzword for everything now.
Given your stats and your purchasing patterns, Target can guess if a
woman is pregnant even before the father knows. Some data was even
aggregated during the Obama elections, to help concentrate on the key issues of
the swing states. The data you now put out
there is used against you. On one hand,
it may make your life more efficient because the things you care about will be
efficiently dialed back to you. On the other
hand, technology likens itself to be Big Brother, watching and policing you as
the ads follow you everywhere.
So
when is enough enough? My boyfriend, the tech saavy engineer now uses
DuckDuckGo.com to search because he doesn’t want cookies. “All my work friends use it,” he says, “the
searches are less skewed by Google products.”
If he and his Vitamin D deficient programming cohorts share the same
sentiment, there is a sub-population believes that enough is enough. I definitely believe that job searches that
are saved can save you time but there must be an agreement on the part of the
internet user that he wants the search saved.
Cookies should not be allowed to follow you everywhere. Just because I saw a dress at Bloomingdales
does not mean that the dress needs to follow me around the internet. It frankly borders on stalkerish.
In the NYTimes, “In Modern Marketing, a Big Dose
of Data in the Creative Juices,” the creative seems to be giving way to the
Moneyball kid crunching numbers in the back.
Yes, maybe Budweiser should run an ad about monkeys if the stats show
there is an overwhelming correlation between beer drinking and monkeys, but it
really takes a lot of human element away from these ads. The reason I watch Superbowl is for the
commercials. Pure creativity. It will be interesting how advertising will
marry the two in the coming decade. I surmise that big data will win out.
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