Invasion of Privacy! Big Brother and the Company Hackers

"Invest Wisely" not only commemorated the end of the Internet boom, it also marked the end of a creative boom on Madison Avenue! The pendulum in the battle over creativity versus research swung once again, but this time there was a new ingredient ”technology!

Madison Avenue has been doing market research since time immemorial. By the time animatics rolled around when I was producing commercials, research was a burgeoning industry. But there were still ways to get around research creatively. The trick was to produce a down-and-dirty spot for the approximate cost of producing an animatic and conducting the focus groups. When I worked in ad agencies, the copywriters, art directors, and creative directors constantly badgered me to devise ways to beat the account executives to the punch! That generally entailed convincing a rising director or photographer to do a test spot for cost, with the promise of landing the fullblown job if the concept tested well. Half the time, test spots obviated the need for research because the powers that be ( clients and agency heads) knew viscerally whether or not a concept worked.

Suppose the bubble never burst. Suppose delivery on demand arrived on schedule and the Internet sector thrived. I believe research would have still overshadowed creativity in advertising today because technology and information are such a combustible combination! Technology transformed information into a commodity worth big bucks. The same companies that gave us those great commercials in the late 1990s ”tech companies and ad agencies ”were developing technology that spies on us now! Banks and credit card companies are repositories of financial information, insurance companies are repositories of medical information, and Madison Avenue is a repository of our consumer information.

Laws provide a modicum of privacy when it comes to medical and financial records and our terrorist quotient as assigned by the Department of Homeland Security. But no such law prevents the sale of personal data collected by Madison Avenue. Clients are clamoring to buy consumer information harvested by technology and filtered through Madison Avenue. That's what market research has become ”the buying, selling, and trading of personal information unwittingly provided by us!