Intrusion Marketing

The next development in marketing is barreling toward us, and it’s going to be an experience.

Until now, the mantra has been, “Content is King,” but from now on it’s “We Know Where You Live.” “Content” is still getting lip service, but what’s going to be moving things from here on is DATA: all the information they’ve been accumulating about you, eavesdropping on your Internet inquiries, conversations, comments, and purchases, cross-linked to your gender, age, Zip Code, family status, and the location of your tattoos.  
  

Marketing through mass media has been declared dead. By the data people. Literally. The head of a marketing automation company is quoted as saying exactly that, and that we're entering the age of automated data-driven marketing (see a possible agenda there?) He calls it "engagement" and "personalization.” Marketers must now “personalize” their marketing messages. But if you think you know what that means, think again. Here’s how that industry insider sees it.

"This hyper-connected world could even see marketers putting personalized messages on a pill bottle for a particular consumer just as easily as sending an email today."

Won’t Ms Consumer be thrilled to find that some marketer knows she’s taking erythromycin for her chlamydia trachomatis? What would the marketer offer her, with what message, in this terrific new medium? An Internet dating service, maybe? And this is the industry that likes to call traditional advertising intrusive.

Like many other technologies, this one is going to be pushed beyond its reasonable boundaries, because we can do it!  Forget the NSA; this is where your privacy is really being trashed. Those pitches for vegetable choppers and grout cleaner that kept interrupting your late-night TV movie? You’re gonna look back at them nostalgically when this hits.