April 17, 2019

Location based marketing and the cult of celebrity.

Current digital marketing relies on recorded searches and past buying behaviour. It tries to anticipate the needs of the consumer by serving up ads based on all that experience – but it doesn’t take into account context, convenience or purchase priming. As a result, users are bombarded by ads, at all times, in hopes of converting users to customers at incredibly low rates. Ads are still painting customers with too broad a brush, and wasting time, often becoming a nuisance to the end user. That’s why ad-blockers exist.

Can’t we be a little more creative about engagement? Let’s stop flinging our feces at the wall, hoping someone identifies a familiar shape and decides to buy!

What if we spun a narrative to our users to influence their actions for extended periods of time, and draw them deeper into a world entirely of our own making? Cater to them, reassure them, make them believe they’re correct and with friends.

We could get them to do anything!! Mwa ha ha ha!

No, seriously, Donald Trump got elected because of this tactic. Think about it. If you decide to do this kind of thing… make sure you’re on the right side of history. This is too much power in the hands of a few. But once you know how it works, you can see how it influences individual decisions and how it manipulates whole countries.