Summary
Digital advertising fuels the digital economy, but is it all based on smoke and mirrors?
Ed Butler investigates what some claim is a massive collective deception - a trillion dollar marketing pitch that simply does not deliver value to any of those paying for it. He asks, do online ads actually work, or could it be that some of the biggest names in global tech are founded on a false prospectus?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, |
| 0:33.1 | find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.2 | From the New York Times, February 16, 2012, |
| 0:41.6 | how companies learn your secrets. |
| 0:45.0 | I remember when I read that story and feeling fascinated, |
| 0:51.0 | but second feeling quite disturbed. |
| 0:55.0 | Now I'd like you to listen to this carefully, if you don't mind, |
| 0:58.0 | because the tale you're about to hear helps to explain much of what we know or think we know about the modern digital economy. |
| 1:07.0 | This is the writer and technology researcher Stephanie Hare recalling one newspaper story written about a decade ago. |
| 1:14.2 | So the story that was in the New York Times was about the |
| 1:17.3 | store Target, which is a sort of big American grocery store and so much more. |
| 1:22.2 | What Target did was it got very big on data analytics |
| 1:26.0 | and it started profiling its customers |
| 1:28.0 | based on their purchasing habits. |
| 1:30.0 | And the story was that they started using their pregnancy prediction score mechanism |
| 1:37.9 | where they could based on your purchasing choices, figure out if you were pregnant |
... |
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