Data Is The New Black

Those shoes you briefly browsed that are now stalking you all over the internet?Its the tip of an algorithm iceberg thats reshaping how and what we shop.ALYX GORMAN charts the intersection of fashion and machine learning.

- Alyx Gorman

THE DAY Mark Zuckerberg answered questions before the United States congress, I decided to see what he had on me. Like millions of others, I wondered if my data had been harvested for some nefarious purpose. So I downloaded it all. What I got back — beyond party-planning group chats and friends of friends I’d quietly unfollowed — looked less like my psyche laid bare and more like the deepest, darkest regions of my credit card statements.

It was all there. Every online store I’d ever shopped from — and plenty I’d never heard of. Net-a-Porter, Matchesfashion.com, Moda Operandi and Farfetch all had my contact information. They’d all reached out with advertising, and it was working — I was clicking on them. Psychographic targeting, remarketing (aka retargeting) and ‘lookalike audiences’ aren’t just the domain of shadowy political operatives. Your friendly neighbourhood luxury brands are doing it too.

“I think the average consumer is highly aware of retargeting ... they notice when they visit a website and then see ads for that site over and over ...” says Rebecca Walker Reczek, a professor of marketing at Ohio State University. “What they may not be as aware of is when they get an ad for a website they haven’t necessarily visited in the past but that is being shown to them based on their pattern of behaviour online. This is the type of behavioural targeting that might slip under the consumer’s radar; they are being shown an ad based on an inference of who an algorithm thinks they are.”