Data Meat: How Your Daily Read Targets You for Data

Aw, c’mon, let’s face it: in today’s all-digital, all the time world we are little more than data meat (I call dibs on coining this phrase).  We are scraped, crawled, […]

Aw, c’mon, let’s face it: in today’s all-digital, all the time world we are little more than data meat (I call dibs on coining this phrase).  We are scraped, crawled, spidered, fingered (!!), analyzed and aggregated.  The digital bread crumbs of our lives that we leave behind like latter-day Hansel and Gretal‘s each time we click from one site to another is plundered beyond belief.

In the Wall St. Journal‘s (should have been Pulitzer Prize winning) series “What They Know,” it notes:

The widening ability to associate people’s real-life identities with their browsing habits marks a privacy milestone, further blurring the already unclear border between our public and private lives. In pursuit of ever more precise and valuable information about potential customers, tracking companies are redefining what it means to be anonymous.

Well… the amount of data being squeezed from you by advertisers is fast becoming the jealous realm of the publishing world:

After years of allowing third parties to plunder precious publisher data, publishers are now starting to take control of their data.

It’s always best to own, not rent, your audience. Same is true with data. Publishers are realizing they should be in the driver’s seat. That can mean everything from installing data-management platforms, putting in place strict controls on what types of data advertisers can collect and coming up with their own data-centric ad products.

These moves, while far from universal, hold out hope that the data-driven ad world doesn’t have to function as a race to the bottom for publishers. And there’s little choice, as the desire from clients to efficiently reach specific audiences isn’t going away anytime soon. Having their own data allows publishers to go to market to sell the same story marketers are selling.

‘Publishers are a lot more, what I call, data aware,’ said Brian Fitzgerald, co-founder of Evolve Media. ‘They never were before. They’re trying to figure out what type of meaningful first-party data they have and are able to collect, and answering that question first.’

I’m not at all convinced that having another “player” out there ready to Bogart my data is a “really good thing.”  What say you?

About brock

Brock is currently the Executive Editor at Atlantic Media Strategies and former Chief Washington Correspondent for MSNBC; he is the founder/creator/editor of CyberWire Dispatch, the Net's pioneering online journalistic news service. Previously he was the Director of Communications for the Center for Democracy & Technology, a non-profit, Washington, D.C.-based public interest group working to keep the Internet open, innovative and free. The views expressed here are his alone and do not reflect the opinions, attitudes or policy positions of his employer(s) past or present.