Consumer Profiling – The New Censorship
20/09/2011

I’m a male of near retiring age, and I will never be invited to buy a skateboard, attend a Foo Fighters concert or shop for a pair of high heeled shoes. And I’m as mad as hell about it!

Not, you understand that I’m in the throes of an identity crisis or suffering from gender confusion. Just that the latest advance in Japanese technology – billboard ads that ‘see’ you and make a presumption about your preferences based on age, sex and general demeanour, will only feed me ads that it deems suitable for my (i.e. old buffers) consumption, with perhaps the odd Coke or burger ad thrown in to leaven the mix.

But what if I’m a recycled teenager, unreconstructed rock fan or a secret shoe fetishist? Am I to be denied my quirks and eccentricities and forced to act my age by advertisers? Or even, as in-depth customer profiling increasingly enables them to do, they pander directly to my penchants and peccadilloes, am I to be confined to a ghetto of my own making, denied access to whole avenues of consumer choice?

The noose, it seems to me, is tightening, and a sci-fi, Vanilla Sky world in which our bodies are preserved in a vat, whilst our brains are hooked up to a tailor-made dream bank, cannot be far off. I begin to feel, to borrow another sci-fi analogy, like a member of George Orwell’s 1984 society, with a vague memory that life was once rich and varied, whilst in reality it’s becoming increasingly bland and circumscribed.

Other symptoms of this general malaise are the standardisation of our high street by a handful of national retailers, who are driving out the small independent retailer and specialist supplier; and the rise of e-publishing, which sounds liberating in theory, but is in fact governed by franchises that limit your book choices to ‘best sellers’ and a back catalogue of ‘classics’, whilst once again driving out the small publisher and specialist bookshops.

Everywhere we are promised greater and greater choice, whilst in reality our options become narrower and narrower. Welcome to the new censorship.