Monday I sat in a media review where somebody put up a slide titled Audience Expansion. Nineteen segments on it. Each one had a friendly name, In Market Homeowners, Likely New Parents, Recently Engaged, and a number next to it in the hundreds of thousands. Somebody in the back asked how the segments were built. The answer, delivered without embarrassment, was that they came from the platform.
That was the whole answer. They came from the platform.
Ten days ago the Guardian and the Times published what a contractor had done with roughly fifty million Facebook profiles, harvested through a personality quiz that scraped the friends of everyone who took it. People who never touched the app were in the file. The delete campaign started within hours and has not stopped.
Every marketer I know spent the week talking about brand safety. Almost none of them talked about the actual exposure, which is not where your ad ran. It is where your audience came from.
You have been buying a supply chain for years and you never once audited it, and now the audit is being run for you, in public, by reporters.
We know how to do this. It is the same discipline the industry already applies to physical goods. Brands trace cotton. Brands trace coffee. Patagonia will tell you which mill, and Everlane will show you the factory and the cost breakdown. Nobody argues anymore that a company is innocent of what happens four steps up its own supply chain.
Data got a pass because it arrives clean. It shows up in a dashboard, sorted, deduplicated, with a friendly segment name on it. The provenance is stripped off before you ever see it, and everyone in the chain is relieved about that, including you.
So ask three questions before the next buy. One, where did this segment originate, and if the answer is the platform, ask again. Two, did the people in it know they were in it, in a way a normal person would recognize as knowing. Three, would I be comfortable if a customer read the answers to one and two in a news story next to my logo.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Nobody ever decides to be reckless with this. It happens because the targeting works, the cost per acquisition drops, and asking the question slows down a media plan that is already late.
The provenance is stripped off before you ever see it, and everyone in the chain is relieved about that, including you.
Karaoke Thursday, same sticky floor, same host calling everybody baby. I sang Landslide, poorly, to about nine people who did not consent to hearing it and could see exactly who was doing it to them. Not a bad standard, honestly. Know who you reached and let them know it was you.