Big Brother v. little sis

Two decades ago, as a rookie journalist working for a UK marketing magazine, I drew the short straw and found myself with the slightly indecent-sounding job title of "below-the-line editor". Above the line is where you wanted to be. It meant you were privvy to the glamorous, overpaid world of advertising. Below was all the detritus: low-status stuff like direct marketing ("Don't call it junk mail !"), sales promotion and PR.

Desperate to inject some passion into my tedious task, I tried to focus on the "database revolution". Time and again I was assured by the "DM" fraternity that computers were turning marketing on its head: soon - very soon - the first would be last and the last would be ... having the last laugh.

There were all sorts of gurus - mainly American apart from the strangely named, home-grown Drayton Bird - to prove that customer "personalisation", "relationship marketing", "one-to-one marketing" (Trademarked !) and so on would be the saviour of direct marketers everywhere - and the downfall of dinosaur Mad Men with their "scattergun" technique.

In this new world order, marketers would shun billboards and TV commercials in favour of computer-generated, customised communications: tailored to the individual likes and preferences of each and every consumer. Computers in the early '90s were blinding us with science and for below-the-liners there was nothing more white-light blinding than the potential to "drill-down" into the data.

I won't bore you any further with this hugely dreary subject, suffice to say that it all came to nought. Well, almost nought. And certainly nothing even vaguely approaching the megalomaniacal dreams of the times. Did we consumers start being treated like the BFF of companies flogging financial services, TVs or toilet paper ? Did they start whispering sweet nothings into our eager ears, making oh-so-personalised offers that we just couldn't refuse ?

Even with the advent of dot-com mania a few years later, personalised marketing still remained in the realms of fantasy. The irony of these dodgy dot-coms blowing all their seed capital on good old-fashioned above the line advertising was not lost on this jaded observer.

Actual real-world examples of companies "personalising" their marketing seemed to amount to about ... er, one company: Amazon. And what sophisticated strategies did the book giant employ ? "Welcome (back) Robert" and "Other people who purchased this title also bought ..." That was the customised genius of Amazon.

Around the time that the dot-com bubble was bursting in 2000, I went on a press trip to Israel, sponsored by two local companies hoping to cash in on the personalised gold rush. What was really interesting was not so much our hosts' offerings (both companies pretty much died in the years following) as the reaction of the assembled journalists, gathered from various European countries.

Overwhelmingly, they were suspicious of the motives behind the services being offered. It was "Big Brother" they cried, spying on innocent individuals ! Having by now seen how useless companies were at exploiting all this "personal" data, I thought the complete opposite of my continental cousins. For me it was more a case of: "Bring it on ! Please, somebody finally do something to make me feel like a name rather than a number."

I got talking to a couple of the journos - from Germany and France I think - and remember their telling me how any country that had been the victim of authoritarian, dictatorial rule would feel very nervous at the idea of citizens giving up some of their hard-won privacy. I realised then it was a deep-rooted mindset which no amount of counter-argument was about to change.

Today, twelve years later, I still see few signs either of this personalised marketing utopia or of the evil Big Brother state constantly prying into every aspect of our lives.

What I do see are companies that have outsourced almost everything and thus are even more incompetent - the right hand hasn't a clue what the left is doing; they claim to record every phone conversation "for training purposes" but obviously never, ever listen to those recordings so they might start to rectify their endless cock-ups.

In fact, the only Big Brother I see is in the form of lots of "little brothers", which is to say, we-the-people. All of us private citizens of the world. It is we who are watching each other; it is we who give a damn what the rest of us are up to.

And I have the perfect, most up-to-the-minute example to prove this. About an hour ago my very own little sister popped up on Google Talk to say "Enjoying Abba are we ?" What the ??!! I thought, how did she know that P had just been blaring out the likes of Mamma Mia and The Name of the Game on our iPhone ? Well, although it felt weirdly telepathic, the truth was far more prosaic.

Apparently, in one of many unmemorable online moments, I had put the Spotify app on my Facebook page and agreed to let it tell the world what I was listening to. Of course, it wasn't actually me who was accessing my Spotify account at this time, but let that pass.

The bigger point is that Spotify is unlikely to do anything useful with this information - it will go into a forgotten black hole like all the other dead data. Yet within moments of seeing that "personal" info, my sister across the sea had actually done something with it. Not something greatly consequential, perhaps, but at least something rather than nothing.

This "little brother" (or "little sister") society we now live in is why Facebook has become such a titan: it worked out that spying itself should be outsourced - to us - and that the only "customer relationship" worth promoting is between the customers themselves. After all, hasn't this blog post really been just one big subliminal ad for Apple, Amazon, Abba, Spotify, Google and Facebook ?

Update: Big Spouse.