15 Jul 2025
Before surveillance capitalism and surveillance advertising, there was surveillance marketing
Before Surveillance
Capitalism and Surveillance
Advertising there was Surveillance
Marketing. The earliest published use of surveillance
to
describe cross-context behavioral advertising term that I can find is an
article in Marketing Mag
by a marketing company CEO.
A business can collect huge volumes of data, and use advanced analytics and modelling techniques to create customer profiles that allow for highly specific messages to be sent to customers. This is surveillance marketing – the successor to banner ads and other desperate bids for consumer attention. It may create more ‘relevance’, but for the user it can quickly seem like someone is spying on them. That’s because it revolves around personal data and customised messages to make the user feel special – but frequently misses the mark and comes across as creepy.
Any earlier sightings? Please let me know.
Bonus links
This
is the gentle singularity? by Brian Merchant. Now more than ever,
we need to think about “AI” not merely as consumer technology, but as an
idea and a logic that is shaping political economy around the globe.
(Some good news on how people are starting to recognize AI-generated
content as less trustworthy: Suspected
AI Content Halves Reader Trust and Hurts Ad Performance by Trishla
Ostwal. The most surprising takeaway from the survey, according to
Raptive’s svp, data strategy & insights, Anna Blender, was
)disclaimer: I work
for Raptivewhen
people thought something was AI-generated, they rated that content much
worse across metrics like trust and authenticity, regardless of whether
it was really AI generated or not. That also impacted the ads they saw
next to the content, deemed as less trustworthy.
Disable
These Two Settings to Stop T-Mobile From Harvesting Even More of Your
Data by Jake Peterson. But if you’ve previously gone through the
Privacy Center and made sure all settings are to your liking, it’s time
to do it again.
T-Mobile
Adds Two New Privacy Toggles, And They’re On By Default.
‘Johnny
Mnemonic’ predicted our addictive digital future by Mark Sullivan.
But in 2025, Johnny Mnemonic hits me differently. The internet is
30-some years old, and many of Gibson’s most prescient ideas have now
been more fully realized.
Book review of Careless
People by Solarbird. No matter how bad you might think
Facebook/Meta and its leadership might be, it’s almost certainly
worse.