I can see your house.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about data. My marketing career has been buried in data.
I’ve trawled through data sets to find the answers to questions like:
- Who really is our customer?
- When do they actually buy?
- Where did they find us?
- What characteristics do they have?
I’ve joyfully responded to clients with a “yes, we can!” who’ve jokingly asked if we can use social media to specifically target communications at gay male couples who may want to buy a house. These wonderful unicorns being the modern equivalent of the traditional DINKs (Double Income, No Kids) except, because they are male, their incomes are probably bigger than the average DINK. Bigger house prices, you see.
I’ve got access to so much data I could literally swim in it. There’d certainly be enough to fill the average swimming pool.
So what? Data’s data. Got to use it to do the job, I hear you say.
At what point is there too much data? Too little privacy?
Privacy laws are still lagging far behind the reaches of technology. George Orwell’s 1984 is already an historical work of fiction, digitally speaking.
The fact is, I can see your house. And if you work in marketing, that very thought should strike you with fear at the sheer scale of intrusion we can access.
As a marketer, I have sufficient data to map your postcode to an “on street” view using Google Maps, and go for a wee on screen jaunt around your neighbourhood.
I can see your kids toys in your garden. The cars in your drive. I can cross check how much you paid for your house. That data is publicly available. I can see if your fence needs painting. Or if your double glazing is old.
Then, if I combine that data with other publicly available information (like your social media accounts), I can tell what political leanings uou have, your sexual preferences, even your very inner thoughts.
This has become so normal to me as a marketer that I no longer think it’s unusual.
At a data level I can stand in front of your home and analyse everything I can see.
Isn’t that intrusive?
The only thing that’s private any more are the thoughts in your head. And even those we have published freely on social media platforms and used to train grotesque AI modes that will, allegedly, take our jobs.
If you think these data access claims are outlandish, that people are being that nosy, please let me reassure you. I can. And I have.
As I write, America is up in arms about TikTok’s privacy policy changes. Following its transfer into American ownership, it’s now going to be collecting data about your immigration status, your sexual orientation, and a few other questionable insights. Orwell clearly lacked imagination when he predicted how the future would unfold.
Meta has also been asking me to opt in to its free ad supported service this week, the bonus for choosing it for free is presumably more adverts than the 94% of feed count that I totted up the last time I checked. The idea that I would pay to get access to such a woefully bad service is actually laughable now. Maybe in 2010, but in 2026? Nah. I actually don’t mind adverts. I do mind how much of my data they have and how 6they are now using it.
I’ve spent some of this month deleting data I had willingly (read: stupidly) submitted to Facebook over more than a decade. It’s been an eye opening activity. In a momentously stupid quest to find out what Greek God I would be, I have surrendered access to my personal data for the last 15 years. To an organisation I’ve never heard of, for a purpose I know nothing about.
My carelessness is astounding.
For years I’ve had the attitude that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve nothing to fear.
Now it’s flagging loud and clear to me that these platforms are no longer just harmless good fun.
They are scaled global data harvesting tools which are grossly under-regulated, and woefully under-estimated by legislators in every single country they are active in. Except China, perhaps. Maybe they understood the capabilities of TikTok as a data harvesting tool, and that’s what’s got the Americans spooked.
Marketers, as far as I can see, have been complicit in their power grab and spread.
We’ve embraced their free marketing tools. We’ve brandished their logos on our livery, our adverts and our websites giving them a level of credence and third party endorsement that we willingly offered and that they have never earned. We helped them build so many powerful backlinks to their domain, that they would inevitably become some of the most powerful websites in the world. Go us.
They made it look cool to be claiming we could be found on Facebook, or that we have our very own YouTube Channel. We thought we were ahead of the game, when really we were part of the game.
They gave us access to meta data tools that blew our tiny little marketer minds. Marketing meth. We astounded ourselves at the level of insight we could get. Clever, little marketers that we are. And in some ways we are now hooked on their shiny data dashboards.
We wowed our boards with cost reductions, and highly targeted campaigns. We focused on funnels and conversions. We could finally prove marketing worked with actual maths and pretty graphs. It was refreshingly reassuring after years of standing up and trying to convince the accountants in the room that consumer choice is based on warm and fuzzy things they really can’t see, and they definitely can’t track, but that you need to spend significant amounts on advertising for to make the magic happen.
We got cross and grumpy when new laws like GDPR encouraged us to be a bit more mindful of the privacy of those pesky customers. But we reluctantly complied. We’re not monsters, we’re marketers.
Where has it got us?
There’s now a whole generation of marketers who only understands marketing tactics within the context of these specific channels and not much beyond them.
We have a solid online following that makes us feel warm and cosy but which we’ve paid royally to build, and now we have to pay to communicate with because the algorithms no longer perform to our advantage.
We have encouraged our customers to engage with us on their platforms, rather than on our platforms or in real life, and unwittingly opened up our hard won customer bases to our direct competitors.
We have exposed our entire marketing strategy to those very competitors too, the entire history of our advertising accessible at the click of a button. Competitive advantage is clearly now part of the playbook of marketers past.
We can plainly see how the monstrosities that we have helped to build are impacting the world. Social unrest. Mental health issues. The spread of misinformation. The impact of disinformation.
Marketers have helped to stack this bonfire of vanities. And now many of our strategies and structures are shackled to it while it burns.
It’s time for marketers to wake up. If we built it, if we’re helping to pay for it, we also have the power to shrink it down to size.
These are private businesses, not public services. They rely on income. Advertising income in particular. We are the source of their income.
They are increasingly not the source of our incomes. When I look at conversion rates, and ROI, most of these channels are through the floor. Google Ads outperforms them all, but search based ads only work if someone is looking for what you sell. For those clients who are investing in “above the line” advertising – remember that?! Those clients are growing.
Let me repeat that: growing.
That’s what we’re here to do, marketing gang. Grow businesses.
Not fuck about all day on TikTok, not share our innermost thoughts on Facebook. As joyful as it might be. Grow.
To my mind they are not helping us do that. They are now getting in the way.
Together we can take them down by refocusing our ad budgets on what actually works. Just like we pulled back on advertising in local newspapers, and national newspapers, before.
Let’s do it.
Are you in?
There’s more where this came from. I share more of my thinking on Cunningly Good Marketer on Substack. Subscribe to get my opinions, experience and real-world lessons straight to your inbox.
