Commentary

Track Me, Stalk Me, Serve Me

“Your thingie didn’t go off,” my wife remarks as we start walking through the mall. A husband can take this phrasing a number of different ways, but with my wife I already know that “thingie” refers almost always to a gadget, any gadget. If I do a quick contextualization of her comment, I get that what she really meant to say was that my usual geo-fenced apps did not give me their customary "ka-ching!" sound as we entered the mall.

I have an array of apps and phone functions that get triggered by time and location so that I am being forever pinged as I move about the local haunts. My to-do list is keyed to the local Ship-Rite, so it reminds me of my latest shopping list as we pass by. My Walgreens loyalty card is fenced to offer up my saved coupons when we're near a local outlet. And my RetailMeNot coupon app gets triggered to show the latest Barnes & Noble coupons as we enter the mall.

The point of this tale is that even my tech-averse wife (who continues to refer to gadgetry as thingies) has become accustomed, even reliant on, the rudimentary location tracking already available on smartphones. On some basic level we are becoming accustomed to the idea that our physical behaviors are acting as flags to which a set of services respond.

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There is nothing entirely new about this idea. It has pre-digital forms. Making eye contact with a waiter in a restaurant is a public signal of wanting to be served. Hold a finger up at curbside in Manhattan and eventually a cab will respond. In much the same way, I think we are coming to expect that a set of digital and even physical behaviors made in public are flags inviting the ecosystem to serve us. A search query is just the most explicit hand-waving.

But I think we are starting to expect the digital targeting and tracking machine to show some smarts. As autocomplete forms start leveraging our search histories, as recommendation engines start pulling the most relevant articles for us at a site, small bits of the big targeting machines are responding to us in ways we recognize and even expect in shortorder.

And this becomes clearest when the simple response mechanisms fail. To wit, my wife and I decided to order takeout the other night but were fumbling in our efforts to find a local Chinese restaurant that had an online menu, that delivered, and would do it all with a credit card. Here I was sitting in front of a desktop Web browser, with an iPhone in hand, and between the two “thingies” we couldn’t get what we needed. I couldn’t recall any of the takeout apps  I had covered in my years of mobile media writing. I even searched “takeout” in my own online writings. Our standard app Yelp wasn’t giving us what we needed, and a simple local Google search was rendering loads of outlets but with little detail, no menus, etc.

I was starting to get frustrated with the machine itself. I was expecting all of these “thingies” to start recognizing from all of my search terms and activities what I was after and start feeding me better answers.

No luck. We resorted to thoroughly retro technology. My wife grabbed the last Chinese menu that was stuck on the refrigerator and we ordered from that.

Perhaps I am a bit ahead of the curve in my multiplatform media use and expectations of digital. But I think we are all going to bring to digital experiences a growing expectation that the companies collecting our data put it to better use in making their machines more intelligent -- not just about serving ads, but about serving us.
1 comment about "Track Me, Stalk Me, Serve Me".
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  1. Jean Borgman from J Borgman & Associates, November 6, 2013 at 12:21 p.m.

    Hey Steve, I couldn't agree with you more. And importantly, in the real world we expect an immediate response when we wave or make a phone call to place an order. Real-time marketing across channels will provide a personal, in-context customer experience that enables companies to engage, educate and convince consumers to convert again and again. Here are 3 reasons to consider real-time messaging in your next website redesign: http://bit.ly/1bJPhCk

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