Holy Grail of Targeting is Fuel for Privacy Battle

Learmonth, Michael. "Holy Grail of Targeting is Fuel for Privacy Battle." Advertising Age 81, no. 12 (March 2010): 1-21.

This article discusses the newest trend in marketing whereby marketers are taking off-line information from individuals and merging it with their online information to more specifically target them. Aperture, a division of Datran Media, is able to obtain information on individuals from such companies as Experian and Nielsen and combine that information with Datran’s e-mail database of individuals. Although the personally identifiable information is removed, the information that remains paints a very detailed and accurate profile of an individual, allowing marketers to target to specific interests and attributes.

The Federal Trade Commission is having hearings about how much information should be allowed to be used for targeting, yet all of this seems to be up in the air because it is already happening and people are willingly volunteering more information online.

This article is mainly an informative news piece about the latest in marketing trends from an advertising journal. It explains the subject matter in a broad brush manner, so it would be beneficial to get more detailed and specific information on this subject with research to support it.

Although it isn’t a research article, it is somewhat helpful to my research topic, as it is important to know what is possible relative to practices involving online privacy and what kinds of privacy concerns exist right now.