The future of marketing is way too personal

I remember in the movie Minority Report there was a scene where Tom Cruise was walking through the mall of the future. As he walked, devices scanned his irises and based on information obtained, generated advertisements that were geared specifically to the dashing protagonist. These advertisements took on the form of human looking avatars that "spoke" to him, telling him to buy XYZ product.

If iris scanning sounds too Orwellian to you to exist or if you think the technology is too advanced then check this out

Seems pretty fantastical right? Imagine marketers of the future having a database of information about you such as your dating history, the places you hang out, and a list of the most popular words you use to update your "future-version of Facebook" status.

I can hear you say, "how would they get this information?" Many people make all of this information readily available on their public social networking site. Most users of Facebook and Myspace do not ever edit their privacy settings so things such as relationship status, places people "check in", and the various wall posts on a person's profile page are readily available to whoever wishes to look.

Twitter adds another source for futurist marketers to mine data on their potential customers. People tend to talk about what they are interested in. What they are interested in most likely has an entire support industry of products and services behind it. When people update their Twitter page with what they are doing and where they are, over time that information can be tracked to find the words that are used the most. These most-used words become keywords that marketers can then use on various search engines to make their websites linked to the products they sell show up on the front page of Google, for example.

Using this readily provided information by individuals in a specific niche market the savvy futurist marketer can choose which way to tailor his or her marketing campaign to better leverage this personal information. The more relevant the advertising the better chance it has at producing a sale.

There is a point where market research begins to infringe upon privacy and become downright creepy. Iris scanning = creepy. Mining Facebook and other social networking sites for market data = creepy.

With the advances in technology allowing marketers to gain access to personal information and leverage that information for their campaigns it becomes more and more necessary for individuals to protect their privacy.