• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 20, 2025

In trying to sell to us effectively, are marketers also inadvertently helping to divide us socially and politically? Could seemingly benign techniques like audience segmentation and profiling, demographic targeting and personalization have unintended consequences for our ability to connect and communicate with one another? Annenberg's Joe Turow has been exploring the rise of direct marketing techniques, from the 19th Century traveling Yankee peddler to the focus on performance and behavioral targeting in the digital age. He raises important questions about the social and ethical implications of letting advertisers define us.

Turow is the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Media Systems & Industries at the Annenberg School for Communication. Since the mid-90s, he has authored a shelf of books about the intersection of media, advertising, society, privacy and data. For may years he helped produce one of the most visible national surveys of popular attitudes towards privacy. 

I know him best as one of the earliest and deepest thinkers about surveillance capitalism, the many ways in which the digital media economy was built by tracking, parsing and potentially weaponizing our own data trails against our best interests and better lights. Just a couple of his recent book titles describe the  general thrust of his critique - The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Emotions, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet - The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power- Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age. There are many more. You can listen to the entire podcast at this link.