An impulse to exploit: the behavioral turn in data-driven marketing

ABSTRACT

Industry advocates argue that by tailoring services and commercial solicitations to match media users’ personal interests, data-driven marketing benefits both consumers and businesses. This article shows, however, that advertisers and marketers who are taking up ideas and techniques from behavioral economics tell their clients a very different story about the aims and use of digital marketing and consumer surveillance. Listening in on this discourse demonstrates that some digital marketers conceptualize their own practices as forms of social control, appropriating concepts from behavioral economics to identify consumers’ cognitive and affective biases and target their vulnerabilities. Behavioral economics recognizes that economic decisions are not simply dictated by rational self-interest; rather, such choices depend on cognitive heuristics and habits, and can be manipulated through the design of “choice architecture.” This article discusses implications of the behavioral turn in data-driven marketing for critical advertising scholars, public advocates, and regulators.

KEYWORDS:

• Behavioral economics
• digital marketing
• consumer surveillance
• big data
• political economy

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Corrigendum

Notes on contributors

Dr. Anthony Nadler is an assistant professor of Media and Communication Studies. He is the author of Making the News Popular: Mobilizing U.S. News Audiences (University of Illinois Press, 2016).

Lee McGuigan is a PhD student in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Lee is co-editor (with Vincent Manzerolle) of the book The Audience Commodity in a Digital Age: Revisiting a Critical Theory of Commercial Media (Peter Lang, 2014).