Paranoia and newspaper media content targeting

I’m sure all of us are aware that we are being watched more closely than at any time in human history. Everything we do is being videoed, analysed and indexed. Your road tax disc, your average speed, your drunken stagger on a Saturday night in a city centre, all recorded to disk and filed away. Your friends, your comments, your images and your likes – all cached, indexed, cross referenced and stored for ever on a server somewhere on a cloud.

Online advertisers have been watching us for a while – gathering bucket loads of information on what we like to do, where we like to do it and how long we like to do it for. It’s becoming more and more obvious on more and more shopping sites that “they” really do know that I like Airfix kits and that one day I want to own an outdoor model steam railway. The power of indexed and catalogued information.

While I now accept this situation online (indeed we’ve just added an AI based content  management system to our pension advice site Now Retirement) I was rather alarmed to see it has also made it to the world of printed news. Don’t believe me? Well how do you explain this…

A few Saturdays back the “Smart Money” section of the Scotsman had four stories specifically chosen for me: Student Loans; Pension inertia; The Bank of Mum and Dad; Car Insurance. Each one perfectly timed to hit my hot spots… the off-sprung is away spending his government loan on partying at Uni; my pension statements were piling up in the corner needing attention; me and Mrs O are funding the off-sprungs need for a roof while at Uni; and the car insurance is due and just gone up. Call that a coincidence?

I thought about this – why should so many stories on one page be of interest to me. And then the penny dropped…

Turns out you don’t need an AI content engine or cookies or data mining techniques after all, all you need is an editor who knows that his readership are probably in their 40’s, will have kids heading to or already at Uni, will be worried about their pension and probably bought their car at the August plate point so their insurance will be due.

Obvious really! Though it does rather point out the problem with printed media – it is rather fixed in focus toward a specific demographic, which is fine as long as it’s similar to mine.

Young Company Finance – Digital Entertainment sector

I went along to the YCF Conference on Digitial Entertainment wearing my University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh Research and Innovation) hat. The quality of YCF events is normally high and this one was no different. A range of speakers that you don’t get the chance to hear from made for an interesting afternoon.

The Audience was an interesting collection of those involved in mobile and new media in Scotland. Particularly interesting (given my declared interest in UoE) was the turn out from both the Edinburgh academics as well as the clutch of young Edinburgh businesses that are incubated under EPIS or ETTC (thats Edinburgh Pre Incubator Scheme and Edinburgh Technology Transfer Centre both at Kings Buildings). Good to see business and academia swapping notes on the rapidly changing world of media.  

Over the years I’ve got to know a good many of the EPIS companies offerring free mentoring support under my software developer Objective Associates hat and the event today was a good fit with those businesses - maybe it was just a coincidence but there does seem to be a gravitational pull in Scotland to things digital and new media.  

The WPP weather vane

Good news from WPP the marketing and advertising business. Business is good for them!

Why should we care? Well the advertising market tends to see what is coming around the corner sooner than the rest of us. They were the first to see the pain of the IT recession a few years back and it looks like they are among the first to benefit from the maturing of the googlenet. Long may their success continue.