Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age

A provocative look at how the technologies of the Internet are being used as a testbed for the next generation of marketing messages, migrating away from the mass market model toward a model of market segmentation and discrimination. Building upon research that he and others have been conducting at UPenn's Annenberg Center, Turow describes how advertising has turned from mass promotion toward the strategies of direct marketing, product placement and public relations, enabled by new media and information technologies and justified by the industry's sense that these technologies have overly empowered the consumer to avoid their conventional messages. In the face of DVRs, remote controls, etc., marketers have decided that the tying of direct marketing messages to increasingly intrusive data collecting and mining methods is the wave of the future. Moreover, this is not an Internet-only problem. Turow points out that these technique are only being tested on the Internet; they are migrating to (digital) television and conventional retail outlets. Turow suggests that all this really will lead to is a kind of deception death spiral --- consumers will lie about their personal information to gain access to marketing offers that they would otherwise not get (frequent flier programs, for example) while marketers will become increasingly intrusive as they seek the "truth" about their customers. The book's weaknesses emerge in the closing chapter, where Turow tries to outline a set of policy objectives to remedy this problem. Unfortunately, his primary instruments are those of consumer education and media labeling; good ideas, but probably unworkable in this environment. The resolution of this problem lies deeper than just refining the mechanisms and instruments of marketing. We have to confront some of the fundamental inconsistencies in our notions of the role of media and information, and in our economic models for sustaining them. Despite the weaknesses of his remedies, overall this is a vitally important look at what's going on "behind the curtain" of our evolving retail and media environments, and I highly recommend it.