....To dig deeper into my new identities, I visited the Web site of BlueKai,
one of the leading online data aggregators. The company’s software
enables its customers to sort consumers into 30,000 market segments like
“light spenders” and “safety-net seniors,” and this fine-grained
categorization helps make real-time bidding possible. According to
BlueKai, Republican Jeff is someone who makes between $60,000 and
$74,999 a year, lives in Portland, Me., is interested in luxury cars,
celebrities and TV, may have bought a cruise ticket, is an ideal
candidate to take out a mortgage and a “midscale thrift spender.”
Democratic Jeff is someone who lives in Los Angeles, Long Beach or Santa
Ana, runs a large company with more than 5,001 employees and cares
about advertising and marketing. Neither of these profiles is accurate.
Nevertheless, the pigeonholing of Republican Jeff and Democratic Jeff
represents our digital future.
Google and Facebook have each been expanding their use of real-time
bidding. In June, Facebook announced that it would introduce a new
service called Facebook Exchange, which will enable advertisers to send
promotions for Spanish hotels, say, to Facebook users who have searched
for trips to Spain.
Should we worry about ads aimed specifically at us everywhere we go on
the Web and, increasingly, on our mobile devices too? Yes, and not just
because the ads can be invasive and annoying. Real-time bidding also
makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field, allowing
companies to send loyalty points or discounts — or price increases — to
individuals based on their perceived spending power. The travel site
Orbitz, after learning that Mac users spend 30 percent more on hotel
rooms than P.C. users, has started to send Mac users ads for hotels that
are 11 percent more expensive than the ones that P.C. users are seeing,
according to a recent Wall Street Journal article.....
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