The always wonderful Artur Bergman pointed me to this great Guardian article on the credit industry in the UK. About halfway through they talk about the geodemographic analysis that marketing companies pay for, so that they can go from your postcode to probable facts about your life. We did some of this for MAKE magazine–not to spam, but to be able to give potential advertisers some idea of who they’d be reaching (it didn’t surprise us to learn that many MAKE subscribers are educated people with disposable income and time on their hands who like to build things).
The Guardian article talks about the horrible confluence of aggressive competition between banks to offer credit, geodemographic databases helping the banks target consumers, and an aggressive industry built on improving direct marketing. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for direct marketing–in my mind there’s little difference between paper spam and email spam, and the cop-out “there’s no such thing as a bad ad, just the wrong recipient” doesn’t help. If I need credit, I’ll seek it out. If I need a penis enlarger, my wife will seek it out. :-)
One of my predictions for Where 2.0 is that we’ll see more of these geodemographic systems reaching the wider Internet in the next year. There’s already freedemographics.com, which has no web services API. Instead you can only automate use of it by using an HTTP client library to do clunky CSV upload/download via HTTP POST and login. I think there’s an opportunity here for a demographics web service that can be integrated into other systems.
The more these things are out in the open, the better I feel about them. One of the main themes of the Guardian article is “holy cow, look what people can find out about you!”. The more easily this information is available, the more obvious it will be that it’s being used, and the more alert consumers will be to it.