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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript
Morning everybody. How are you doing today? On this episode of the show? We're gonna talk about retargeting. Now, what got this idea spinning in my head was an article that dropped on CBC news yesterday talking about how uh federal members of parliament here in Canada um had a variety of tracking cookies and technologies on their personal websites.
Now, that's an important story and I actually covered it really well. It went through to understand what the technology was, um how it could be potentially track you. It's a great article um as you can see here and I'll obviously put the link in the description, but I wanted to cover this a little more specifically.
And the reason why this was news this week is because today it is highly expected that a federal election will be called so that Canadians will be heading to the polls on October 21st. Yes, October 21st this year. That's how fast Canadian elections happen. But it's also highly expected that digital will play a critical role moving forward in this election.
And one of those things is this technique, this technology set called retargeting. Now, first things first it's no reason to be alarmed at the CBC piece about the individual MP S uh new or sites and how they're tracking you because that's how digital tracking works across the web.
So you don't need to be politically alarmed. You just need to be alarmed overall. In fact, I was actually surprised at how poorly the politicians are actually using this technology because digital marketers, marketers know that retargeting is an extremely powerful thing and if you use it correctly, um that can really promote your business.
Now, that being said it's really invasive and I don't agree with it personally, I think there are privacy implications and in the context of politics, especially within Canada, where we have strong privacy legislation, we have the privacy commissioners. I think there needs to be clear guidelines around it, but let's get into what it is.
Exactly. The concept is pretty straightforward. What it is is when you visit a website, you're unlikely to convert the first time, which means if you go to a website to buy a new widget, it's unlikely that you're going to buy that widget the first time.
What retargeting does is puts a cookie onto your browser. So some little unique individual identifier and whether that's directly from the website or through an ad network, and what that does is now identifies that mark went to widget site. And now when I to other places that gives the ability for an ad network to show me ads for that widget.
So I've been retargeted. So I was originally targeted, uh, with an ad that drew me to the, uh, to the property to see about widgets. Um, I didn't buy but they cooked me. So now in the way that cookie works is it's to the network not to the site.
So it doesn't pop up any security warnings when I go to other places and now I'm going to see ads for that widget everywhere I go. So you know that whole rumor about like, hey, my phone's listening to me. Yeah, most of the time that's retargeting at work.
And the spooky fact of like, hey, my phone listened to a conversation and that's why I'm getting these ads. That's the gut feeling that you should have. When you hear the word retargeting, the idea from a marketing perspective is pretty straightforward. You showed some level of interest, you came to the widget site and you looked but you didn't buy.
So if I can hit you with some other messages about how great those widgets are, maybe you're gonna come back and buy shift gears. Think about the political context. And this is why I said originally in the opening, I was disappointed to see how the ineffectively they were using it because it doesn't bode well about the dangers and the challenges and the possibilities of digital technology when it comes to elections.
At least here in Canada. If a member's site has this type of digital ad technology on it, right? It's a very, very commonplace. So if you're using Google Analytics, you can leverage it. If you're using any number of technologies for tracking what's going on on your website, you can use retargeting.
If I was an MP, if I was a member of parliament, what I would be doing is if anyone went to personal site um or my campaign site retargeting them is a great way to raise awareness around issues. So there's a positive aspect of this if you visit mark the MP S site.
And now I have um an issue that I want to get your attention on saying like, hey, do we really care about um this redistricting or do we care about this new piece of legislation? I could use a digital ad campaign to raise awareness to my constituents because I could target that ad and say only show this ad to people who have that cookie because they went to my site.
So retargeting lets you narrow down that focus to something very, very specific and that's really, really powerful in a positive context using that example, in a negative context. What it means is you can start to leverage the same kind of techniques we see on social media, on Facebook and on Twitter because they have behavioral profiles, it's basically a retargeting environment by default.
And we saw that um you see that in the great hack or the big hack on Netflix was a good example, Brexit on HBO was a good sort of movie examples of why um this kind of technology is really, really dangerous. So we saw that um with the whole leave eu camp paying for Brexit, we saw it with Cambridge Analytica because essentially what you can do in a malicious perspective is say, hey, I know uh you showed interest in uh uh a left leaning message, I'm gonna show you stuff that's gonna bring you to the right or I show I saw you showed interest in something that's traditionally viewed as right?
And I'm gonna start showing you messages that bring you to the left. Now on Facebook and social media, what ended up happening there was that, that was done. It was a really fast feedback loop so that it was pulling you ever so slightly more and more and more constantly over the course of days and weeks.
So that fact that you had a radically different opinion when the campaign started now that is retargeting. Taking to the example. Should we have regulation around this? Absolutely. Can you do something to protect yourself? Absolutely. Install an ad blocker. Turn on all the things that stop tracking.
So Ghost Street is a good one. I'm using one block I think on my macs and on my ios devices, there is the ability for you to stop what's happening on your devices. You can't stop what's happening out on the sites. But you can prevent these tracking technologies from working by enabling privacy enhancing software on your browsers by using ad blockers.
Almost every ad blocker out there has an anti tracking feature or anti tracking set of controls. Now before war, some things do break when you turn this kind of thing on. So for me, I use a social media sharing application called buffer. Basically. What it does is give me a little button in my browser where I can say like, hey click because I want to share this on social media, whatever I'm looking at right now.
If I turn off this type of, uh if I turn on this anti tracking that kind of thing breaks because they're using the same kind of cross domain cookie to keep me logged in. Now that being said, I just switch to my mobile device. And on here, I use the sharing widget which is set up by default to allow that type of activity without tracking me.
So there are differences again, I'll put links to everything down below but that in a nutshell is retargeting. Um It's used every day in an ad context. Um Companies are doing this to try to focus their digital advertising to be far more specific to get you to buy that widget in the political context.
I think people are just waking up to it here in Canada. I think things are far more mature in the States and obviously in Brexit and that whole campaign, things were taken to a very big extreme. But I think these types of technologies have a very dangerous impact when you're unaware of them.
Uh What do you think? Let me know, hit me up online at Mark NC A in the comments down below. And as always by email me at Mark N dot C A here in Canada, it's gonna be an interesting uh next uh 30 plus days as we ramp up to yet another federal election, I'm going to be looking closely to see how social media and digital tools are used.
So if you have any questions along that line, let me know um and stay tuned for more around this topic. Have a great day and we'll see you on the next episode of the show.
