Consumer Profiling Quotes

Private companies can make a personal profile, direct you to things - they will say - that you would be interested in, but that's their choice not your choice.

The whole notion that I don't appeal to the demographic - all my fans are young men. Someone asked me the other day, "So are your shows just full of 40-year-old single women?" I'm like, "I would be rich if that were true."

When you know who your customers are, that can give you an edge on the competition.

The desire to collect information on customers is not new for Target or any other large retailer, of course. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores.

You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences.

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

We use nearly 5 thousand different data points about you to craft and target a message. The data points are not just a representative model of you. The data points are about you, specifically.

Advertisers don't want to be ignored, and they are drunk on our data, which is what Google and other large networks are really selling. The ads are almost a by-product; what companies really want to know is what antiperspirant a woman of 25-34 is most likely to purchase after watching 'House of Cards.'

There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial, every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave footprints.

Companies are accumulating vast amounts of information about your likes and dislikes. But they are doing this not only because you're interesting. The more they know, the more money they can make.

Banks and credit agencies learn continuously about the purchases we make. This is convenient and diminishes the risk of theft. It also means that banks can know more about our lifestyle than our close relatives.

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

The ads that podcasts manage to sell tell you a lot about who they think is listening. They include services that promise to make your investment portfolio ethical, deliver exotic, ready meals to your home, or guarantee better sleep thanks to luxury bed linen.

The truth is I don't really like the world of plastic money: the great chip-and-pin double act of modern payment. I prefer cash. I don't like the idea of some distant clerk nodding each time I make a card purchase and quietly adding to my 'consumer profile.' I'm anti all cards.

In America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience.

In the Internet economy, information is everything: The more a company knows about a consumer, the more carefully it can tailor its advertising to that customer, and the more revenue it can generate in return.