Author Meets Critics— The Aisles Have Eyes

Failed hybrids: The death and life of Bluetooth proximity marketing

“…The acceleration in ad production drove industrial demand for attribution metrics, creating space for third-party measurement and analytics platforms to flourish—if only as a means to “further scrutinize and audit the value of ad impressions” (Smith, 2019a, p. 206). The mass personalization that Statler envisioned therefore held great appeal for marketers, not for improving the customer experience, but for the niche data that it promised brands and advertisers (Carah, 2018; McGuigan & Manzerolle 2015; Nadler & McGuigan, 2018; Turow, 2017).…”

“…Beacons were immediately attractive as a tool for hyper-local retail promotions, and they quickly caught the eye of data-hungry “proximity” marketers, analytics shops, and ad exchanges (Kwet, 2019; Turow, 2017). In theory, marketers know precisely where their beacons are installed and can use that information to track or target users.…”

“…They continue to be used for routing and navigation, customer-loyalty apps, in-store promotions, ride-share check-ins, and other services involving the automatic detection of a device’s presence. Rather, it was beacons’ privileged place in marketing’s “infrastructural imaginary” that collapsed (Parks, 2015)—a vision of beacons enveloping the built environment in a “digital layer” from which marketers could monetize information through analytics, discrimination, and targeting (Gandy, 1993; McGuigan & Manzerolle, 2014; Nadler & McGuigan, 2018; Turow, 2017).…”

Mobilizing Media Studies in an Age of Datafication

“…It is increasingly important for media scholars to hold on to this politicization of datafication, where data politics is not just confined to the data-driven systems themselves but the wider contexts in which they are being implemented and used, in light of the active neutralization of understandings of what is at stake. This is happening in a social condition where the collection and use of data is often presented as an inevitability or what Joseph Turow (2017) has described as a new kind of social imaginary that positions data-centric technologies as common sense. Frequently couched in terms of progress and innovation that has reached new heights in its most recent incarnation as “Artificial Intelligence” (AI), a condition of “surveillance realism” (Dencik 2018) or “AI realism” (McQuillan 2019) is being manifested that posits data-driven technology as not only a natural part of everyday life, but as the only legitimate response to a range of social ills.…”