Online marketing: We need your data to serve you (02:22)

Online marketing: We need your data to serve you

[wcm_restrict plans=”admin”]

Welcome to the second topic of lesson 2. Why online marketing needs your data to serve you. Because of having a background in online marketing, I know exactly how the online marketing world works. I won’t bore you with the details, but the internet is basically a data-marketplace right now. Whenever your use an online product for free, you can be sure that your data is being sold – so basically you are the product.

This is basically how the advertising system works in Google: you enter a search term and press enter, in 100 miliseconds there will be an auction specifically for your search term. The highest bid, combined with relevance to your search term, will win the auction and be shown on top of the page. Your data has just been sold. This works exactly the same for placements like retargeting. You know those shoes you once watched that are coming back all over the place on every website you visit. The store wants you to come back to buy the product and so it buys inventory from the Google Display Network.

This is a plain example, but a lot of data is involved in the this tiny scenario: Where are you? What device are you using? Which websites did you visit before? How do you fit in the target audience that the online marketeers have created? And also: did the advertiser show you an ad before and when was it?

The incentive is: whenever we have more of your data we can serve you better. We can show you better ads and make sure the ads fit better to your needs.

So now you know: the black box you are always carrying with you is not just a very useful device to communicate with the rest of the world. But when you look under the hood, you can see that it collects userdata and sells it to the one with the highest bid. Out of the box, your smartphone is a blackbox surveillance-device. In the next topic we will dive further into Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook and why, from their point of view, they couldn’t care less about user privacy. See you in the next lesson.

[/wcm_restrict]