Whenever we find ourselves killing time by playing around with the apps on our phone, browsing the shops or even doing both simultaneously, most of us are likely to come across an advertisement or two.
As most of us will have already noticed, these advertisements seem increasingly geared to and focused on our own personal interests. But very few of us understand how corporations are able to target our interests so specifically and where, in fact, they get this data.
Enter AdNear. Founded in 2012, AdNear is a ‘location intelligence platform’, headquartered in Singapore. In layman’s terms, it is a company that conducts market research based on the location data provided by mobile phones.
By operating through proprietary technology, it means they do not require GPS positioning to identify the location and context of a particular device.
Image credit: DragonImages/iStock
Using this information, AdNear’s analysts can identify where we consumers are, how engaged we are on our mobile devices and roughly which demographic category we most likely belong to and in turn, what sorts of product advertising would most likely appeal to us.
The data is collected through their entire and intimidating 262,000 strong mobile app base and provides data on a network of over 530 million consumers in Asia Pacific alone.
Identifying which demographic categories that are most active in particular geographical areas can help brands more effectively choose when and where they want to market their products. This lets them optimise the benefits of targeted advertising in a cost-effective way. Brands that use AdNear’s research include very familiar names such as Audi, Unilever, Hyatt, McDonalds and even Toblerone and Oreo.
The methods through which the marketing research is conducted are sophisticated. As a consumer, it is difficult to argue that we would not prefer seeing products geared more accurately towards our individual interests being advertised to us. We would arguably find them at least less irritating than being bombarded by mountains of irrelevant ad content..
However, most of us are unaware of the processes through which advertising agencies are able to achieve this level of targeting precision and what data needs to be collected for it to succeed.
It is important to note that AdNear’s research does not use personally identifiable information, meaning that to an extent, we are still anonymous. Though, while that data is not used currently, what would it take for it to become accessible and what protections do we have from such an intrusion?
You can opt out of their targeted advertising by clicking Ad Preferences, which gives you control on what exact information you consent to sharing. Yet, perhaps there is a slight contradiction in their ‘Terms and Conditions’ as while AdNear boldly states “We give users complete control of what they are willing to share” on their website, they soon follow with “many publishers may not allow users to opt-out of all the information collected”.
Do we have “complete” control or not?
AdNear argues that for the sake of “effective ad delivery”, some publishers would reserve the benefit of opting out of advertising for those who choose to pay for a premium version of the app.Perhaps consenting to providing this information is outlined in the ‘Terms and Conditions’ that a majority of us admit to never actually having read, being content just to click’ Agree’.
Nevertheless, one must wonder why we were not given the right to positively and consciously opt into this kind of scheme, rather than simply giving us ‘the right’ to opt out. It seems to work on the principle that an absence of protestation signifies our consent, which is ethically dubious.
The trade off is simple. Would we rather sacrifice a degree of our privacy so that product companies are better able to show us what they think we may want? Or would we rather they not know anything at all and we receive relatively ‘random’ advertisements?
