Mall advertisements in the movie Minority Report were able to identify and target consumers after an instant iris scan. While the world is nowhere near iris scan targeting, we do have tracking cookies which have provided a granular targeting tool. No one has figured out how to close the gap between offline purchases and online advertising, until recently.
Visa and MasterCard are working on separate plans to sell consumer purchase data to advertisers. The idea is simple while the implementation will be complicated for many reasons.
The Idea
Based on purchases made by a consumer, each consumer will be split up into groups by the credit card companies. If you purchase diet products, you would be put into the “Healthy Consumer Group.” If you purchase Fast Food you’ll be put in a different group.
As an advertiser, if you run a national health club, you may want to target consumers who show a higher propensity to purchase products or services related to health, based on their purchase history.
The Implementation
No one really knows what they have up their sleeves to pull this off. It will involve tying a consumers’ credit card numbers to their IP addresses. There is a good chance this will be done through account portals hosted on bank and other credit card providers’ websites. If a user were to go to their credit card’s website to check or pay their balance, they would be cookied and tracked from that point on.
The Privacy
The credit card companies are aware of the privacy issues this could raise. They are adamant on letting everyone know, your name and address are not tied to your purchases.
How they’re making your private data, not so private.
1. The credit card companies will only look at your credit card number and your purchase history. They will not be looking at names or addresses.
2. They will then assign your IP address to a consumer profile, which will belong to several groups based on your purchase history.
3. The credit card companies will then sell these group lists, which advertisers will use for their targeted campaigns.
Advertisers will not see exact purchases you have made, they will only target based on which consumer group you have been put into. Similar groups exist for consumers already; they are based off of other factors not related to offline purchases.
Final Thoughts
Some people may find this a bit creepy, but we can’t wait until this is live and available. Consumers win because they see ads that are relevant to them based on their lifestyle offline. Advertisers will win because their ads will be shown to consumers who have a higher chance of converting based on their offline purchases.
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