No, Your Phone Isn't Listening: BIGSOUND's Paige X Cho Lifts The Veil On Digital Marketing

As the Senior Music Strategist for digital agency Bolster, Paige X Cho is well aware of the dystopic level with which we are being targeted by advertisers online. It’s a massive problem affecting the entire online experience, but there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye.

“It’s less of an argument with what I’m talking about at BIGSOUND, and more of just explaining it,” Cho says of her upcoming panel, I'm Being Targeted With Ads!, at the annual festival and conference. “When I explain to people that I work in marketing strategy, specifically digital, some people will say things like, ‘Oh! I feel like my phone is listening to me,’ or, ‘I just googled this thing and now all these ads have come up.’

“There are definitely cases where advertisers aren’t doing it correctly and are just hammering their ads to people, and that in and of itself isn’t effective as an advertising strategy. A very short-sighted advertiser will just see the notion of ‘effective’ as a conversion of sales. For instance, if you were advertising a music festival, you’d be very short-sighted to go, ‘The only thing I care about is selling a ticket.’ There are so many other things that need to be factored in, even if ticket sales are that North Star metric that we may be looking at. There’s brand awareness, increasing awareness, reaching audiences, brand sentiment, a huge number of things beyond just trying to sell a ticket.”

Cho states that while the problems with targeted advertising may seem endless, the issues are rooted in two very specific locations. “The first is with the ad platforms, and making sure the Facebooks and Instagrams of the world aren’t doing things that are unethical in an attempt to make more money,” she says. “I think new government policies rolling in and new inquiries are really helping with that. The other side of it is with the advertiser, and recognising what the advertiser should and shouldn’t do. Targeting vulnerable people to exploit them, lying and using data outside of its intended use, stuff like that is what we need to be on the lookout for.

"Say, for example, a music festival gets data from its patrons and passes that info on to another festival to target them with ads and mailing lists and stuff like that, that would be really unethical. Another thing is pretending to be a different business. A really good example of this is Viagogo, who frequently pretend to be official ticketing companies for festivals and trick consumers into either purchasing completely fake tickets, or exorbitantly priced second-hand tickets, often against event terms and conditions. So, in terms of advertisers trying to remain ethical, these are the types of things they should avoid.”

The strategist also believes that online advertising technology can be used in a positive and ethical way, but the biggest blights with the system are causing some serious hesitation from the general public. “There’s definitely a sort of PR issue there. I think the whole thing with Cambridge Analytica and Facebook was a nightmare because that really reduced trust in the system. More recently Instagram kicked out Hyp3r, a third-party ad partner that scraped data from millions of Instagram user stories, not just pulling out info like their location, bio and interests, but [it] also used image recognition technology to determine what they were posting in their stories. That’s like a literal nightmare.

"I think, generally, people aren’t across what the technology is doing, and I think the platforms have really done a lot in regards to this,” Cho continues. “After the Cambridge Analytica saga last year, [Facebook] started rolling out a lot more options and features to start putting the power back into the user’s hands. Now, any Facebook user can log in and see exactly what businesses have uploaded an email list to the platform to advertise directly to that user. If you go into your settings, you can do things like remove data that the platforms may already have on you. If you sign into an app through Facebook, previously it would’ve just stayed connected forever, but now if you don’t use the app for three months they revoke the access that was given.”

While Cho implores users to research and be aware of the options afforded to them, she also believes that modern advertising is not necessarily a thing to fear. “I know a lot of people really hate the idea that platforms are serving them bespoke targeted ads, as opposed to the more random thing of, like, seeing a poster on the side of a bus. It seems more invasive and creepy, and I think a lot of people feel like that is the case for all advertising across all digital platforms. The thing to remember is that there’s a reason these places give us targeted ads. It’s not just for them to make money, but they’re trying to give users a better experience. The ads, as well as the content you see organically, [are] tailored for the optimum user experience.”