Only The Paranoid Survive

Every breath you take and every move you make,
Every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you. - "Every Breath You Take" by The Police

CNBC's afternoon program "Power Lunch" recently featured an interview with Frank O’Brien, CEO and founder of Five Tier, an integrated marketing and media platform. At first blush, I thought the conversation was informative. After thinking about it for awhile, I considered it disturbing in a 1984 sort of way. Think about walking through Times Square with the multi-storied "cult of personality" electronic billboards engulfing the concrete canyons. Broadway stars, best selling beverages, Victoria's Secret models, and a flotsam and jetsam of pop culture loom five stories high. Subliminal seduction at its finest. I used to believe the images were selected based on traditional advertising placement. I was wrong. Industrial innovators persuade us to purchase goods or services based on real-time information extracted from our smartphones. It's called Surveillance Capitalism.

We all have a digital footprint, a data trail we leave while using the Internet: email communications, social media interactions, the works. Once you get in proximity to the electronic billboards, machines behind the screens snatch data from your cellphone. This could be an ID number, GPS information, salary, interests, age, race and gender. Anything that's stored on your smartphone, or in the applications on that communications device. There's nothing new about this in marketing. It's the "womb to tomb" information advertising agencies previously accumulated based on public persona such as your zip code. They can infer a lot about you knowing just where you live. It was big in direct marketing, but with the slow erosion of snail mail, the practice has become space-age. Much more precise. It's a form of geofencing, a location-based service that advertisers utilize to send messages to smartphones that enter a pre-defined geographic area.

Five Tier isn't the only company involved with this business trend, Lamar, JCDecaux and Adomni all have similar platforms. There's a terrific article in Consumer Reports by Thomas Germain: "Digital Billboards Are Tracking You. And They Really, Really Want You to See Their Ads.". To paraphrase, the article states that "these companies emphasize they don't learn identifying details such as the names, email addresses, or phone numbers of the people whose data is being targeted...Most of the information is aggregated - they want to know how many people of a certain target audience are present at a particular time, not who each individual is". This is so they can project an advertisement to the dominant demographic in any predetermined area near the billboard.

Sounds harmless enough, but the corporations always sugarcoat things. What they're saying now, and, what may be said next year are two entirely different subjects. If this goes on unregulated, they will bend the rules when the technology advances. These companies are creating information empires. Just look at the pinpoint accuracy facial recognition software has ascended to. Pro-democratic demonstrators in Hong Kong are wearing surgical masks in order not to be identified and imprisoned. They throw the book at you. In Hong Kong it's the communist government, here it's the corporations. It's only a matter of time before these advertising firms compile personal dossiers on us, too. Like Five Tier's CEO Frank O'Brien says about what you can do to protect your individual information: "I don't think there's anything you can do about it."

To be fair to Mr. O'Brien, he states that the "Out-of-Home" advertising industry should be regulated. That's a tough task in a free market presidential administration. In my opinion, until regulation occurs, if it ever occurs, he will remain loyal to his backers, and take the data harvesting and extraction to the limits. If he doesn't, his competitors will crush him. That's the nature of the beast. Unless Uncle Sam intervenes, Five Tier will continue to mine more and more particulars because the CEO has lofty aspirations for his brainchild. Going back to January of this year, Bruce Rogers of Forbes, interviewed O'Brien, and the founder talks about going from the sideshow to the big-top:

"Raymond Kurzweil writes about the point of “Singularity”, when humans and robots become one. Someone's going to be at the center of that. Some company is going to come in and really bring that to fruition. There has to be someone that's sitting in the middle connecting all the dots. That's where I see our platform."

Somebody's got to do it. Technology augmented human life, anybody?