CEDo Week 4 Bill Tancer…Why it matters

This week I was introduced to Bill Tancer and I enjoyed spending time with him and have to that it was enlightening. What I found is that I may actually enjoy interpreting data if I have a better understanding of the data I am looking at. The description of trends in how data is being used and the new methods of some companies are using to collect it was intriguing. Proms dresses in January or at least that’s what the data was showing. I never knew what drove some companies to start their campaign for advertising certain products so much earlier than the actual season.

Bill Tancer described the importance of paying attention to the habits or online activities as a means to forecast the current state of spending or other behaviors of online. He described the many reasons for analyzing data and the “secret” strategy of businesses tracking the viewing or online patterns of their current customers when they viewed websites online. He explained the online of habits of the wealthier investors who chose to take part in more recreational online activities when they began to loose money from their investment portfolios.

As interesting as I found his discussion, I found it equally as disturbing. This adds to my concerns about internet security and how there seems to always be a way for those who want to monitor or “spy” on people via the internet. There was a story in the news a few weeks ago about parents who were concerned about advertisers targeting their children with advertisements with diet products based on the companies tracking their visits to various websites. The parents’ fear is that the advertisers or some other predatory entities will have access to their children, making them targets or enticing them into harmful behaviors.

The bottom line is that we live in a data driven society, this introduction to Bill Tancer let me with thoughts about how we get it and how we use.