05 Aug 2023 Search

Read the whole thing: The emerging marketing economist by Eric Seufert. The good news here is that technical and regulatory changes to how privacy work are already affecting investment decisions by companies. Mobile Dev Memo is a valuable source for understanding the surveillance marketing scene on its own terms, and is a good thing for privacy people to read. It’s not all about mobile. In the days of Peak Surveillance Marketing (2006-2018) marketers could basically put existing customer info, plus money, in to a big platform company, and watch sales leads come out. But that’s less and less of a thing. Marketers are having to do more math to connect cause and effect.

The output of probabilistic measurement models requires interpretation: weaving a plausible story of how marketing spend generated conversions through an analytical framework.

That’s one side of the game, the marketing side. Now think of it from the privacy side. Some of that marketing spend pays for things that you don’t want to happen. The biggest impact of a privacy habit, tool, or regulation is to interfere with the surveillance marketing cycle and make it harder for the marketing decision-maker to connect an actual sale back to their earlier decision to spend money on a harmful practice.

the surveillance marketing cycle

This is an oversimplified version of the cycle and I’m open to suggestions for improving it. But it’s a way to start thinking about the most effective use of your limited time. You probably don’t have enough time to adequately secure your own personal privacy and still participate in the modern economy. But it is possible, if you focus on breaking the cycle for the most harmful practices, to help that marketing decision-maker reallocate their money away from surveillance and toward marketing projects that are win-win for vendor and customer. Advertisers in the USA spend about $1100 per person on advertising. Privacy habits, tools, and politics are how you can have an impact on how your $1100 gets spent.

If you invest in protecting your personal privacy, but marketers can still see that surveillance pays, then they have the resources and incentives to invest in technical workarounds and lobbying to undo your investment. This is one more reason why privacy can’t be personal, it’s a cooperative project. Lower the payoffs from surveillance practices, and ambitious corporate people will move to where the money is. If you’re on a customer journey toward spending money with them, they’re on a marketer journey towards spending money in a way that benefits (or at least doesn’t do too much harm to) you.

first positive step: YouTube

For most readers of this blog, getting YouTube into a safe state is probably priority one. Those video links come up in enough contexts that unless you break the link between YouTube viewing and shopping, it’s easy for a marketing decision-maker to connect send money to YouTube with sell stuff. Some options:

  1. Independently developed client (not a browser or the official YouTube app)

  2. Open YouTube in a separate browser not used for other Google services, and use LeechBlock in your regular browser to block YouTube there.

  3. my approach, which is convenient day to day but harder to set up: Firefox container + the “Enhancer for YouTube” extension

More on how users and legit brands will be better off