The Guardian has an excellent piece on online advertising and profiling that details the granularity of contemporary mining programmes. For example, consider the position of Mr Smith, living in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The article tells us he is: (a) slightly overweight; he tried numerous diets and pills, bought home training equipment, and visits weight-loss forums – anonymously he thinks; (b) he has little debt, but he is in a precarious jobs situation; he often visits jobs post sites; he works in the heavy machinery sector, one that is listed as fragile; (c) he lives alone (Smith is tagged as divorced, with grown-ups kids); (d) then he tends to booze and smoke a bit (all of this known thanks to a look at his daily purchases, courtesy of XYZStore where he's an identified coupon-redeemer), etc, etc.
While the aforementioned is fictional, the attention to lifestyle, behaviour, experience and segmentation by deep level profilers is not. Full article here.
This blog is maintained primarily for my students at Bangor University. However, if you've stumbled upon these pages and want to contribute, that's just fine too. They are intended as a resource for those interested in digital advertising and wider digital media culture. To search for a particular topic use the search bar on the top left hand side. If you are interested in Ph.D supervision or consultancy services please scroll down to the bottom for contact details.
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- Andrew McStay
- I am director of the Media and Persuasive Communication (MPC) network at Bangor University where I also lecture on political-economy of the media. I am currently working on a book provisionally titled Deconstructing Privacy for Peter Lang and leading two empirical projects in connection with privacy perception and the use of new media for smoking cessation. I am author of Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process (Routledge, 2013); The Mood of Information: A Critique of Behavioural Advertising (Continuum, 2011); and Digital Advertising (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009). Please contact me at mcstay@bangor.ac.uk if you are interested in Ph.D supervision or consultancy services.
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