AD International / Ethics And Accountability

Targeting that knows more about a person than they realise

Precision arrived faster than any shared understanding of what precision is for.

For most of its history, advertising addressed rough groups and knew it. The message went out to a broad audience, most of whom were not relevant, and everyone understood the arrangement. What has changed is that messages can now be directed with a specificity that would have seemed implausible not long ago, based on information a person supplied for other purposes or did not knowingly supply at all. The craft questions are largely unchanged. The ethical questions are not, because the relationship between the sender and the recipient has changed without the recipient necessarily noticing.

The problem is not precision itself. Being shown something relevant rather than something irrelevant is, in isolation, a small improvement for everyone. The problem is the gap between what a person believes is known about them and what is actually known, and the fact that the gap is invisible from their side. A person cannot evaluate a message properly if they do not know why they received it. That is a straightforward informational asymmetry, and it does not become acceptable because the resulting advertisement is more useful than a random one would have been.

This magazine takes no view on what the law should require, and the applicable privacy regulators and codes are the authority on what it does require. The craft position is narrower and can be stated without reference to law. If the reason a person received a message could not be explained to them without embarrassment, that is information about the practice rather than about the person's sensitivity. Discomfort at explaining the method is the most reliable signal available that the method needs revisiting.