How Your Data Are Being Deeply Mined

The Obama campaign’s tactics illuminate something that is often missed in our discussions of data-mining and marketing—the fact that governments and politicians are major clients of marketing agencies and data brokers.

.. The first is data discrimination. Once customers are sliced and diced into segmented demographic categories, they can be sorted. An Acxiom presentation to the Consumer Marketing Organization in 2013 placed customers into “customer value segments” and noted that while the top 30 percent of customers add 500 percent of value, the bottom 20 percent actually cost 400 percent of value. In other words, it behooves companies to shower their top customers with attention, while ignoring the bottom 20 percent, who may spend “too much” time on customer service calls, and may cost companies in returns or coupons, or otherwise cost more than they provide.

These “low-value targets” are known in industry parlance as “waste.” Joseph Turow, a University of Pennsylvania professor in communications who studies niche marketing, asks what happens to those people who fall into the categories of “waste,” entirely without their knowledge or any notification.