How do Ads manage to sneak up on you? : Functionality of Digital Marketing
What are the odds that you have not been subject to a pop-up that asks you to accept, crucial to be insisted, “Cookies”? I bet there’s a hundred to one shot that you have not.
Websites that you surf every day, save cookies onto your browser. Yet have you ever wondered what a cookie is? Apart from what you have in the morning, a cookie is a string of letters and numbers that is assigned to every distinct user by the website he/she is currently on. This helps the site to recognize you and remember you. It is indeed what those pop-ups are about.
Although Cookies help in making our online activities possible, they keep a strong track of everything you do online. Cookies enable different companies to band together and that is why you see a particular ad following you around the internet.
Now, Imagine logging out of Facebook every time you reload the page or going to the start of the video every time you hit pause and play, Hectic right? This in fact was the earlier version of the internet. Netscape decided to take on this problem and introduced cookies in 1994. Now each time you reload your webpage the site recognizes you with the unique ID assigned to you.
Wherewith the help of cookies Amazon remembers what you have in your cart, it also retains crucial information e.g. other clicks you make on the site, the time you spent on a particular page i.e. behavioral reinforcement, and more often than not, your location.
Middlemen websites such as Facebook and Google collaborate with different sites on a massive scale, allowing third-party cookies to come into play and save their own unique elements, this way your information from Amazon is now being transmitted to Facebook, Instagram, and thousands of online applications and marketplaces. This is called “Tracking”.
However, some websites allow users to block third-party cookies. By doing this, the middlemen are unaware that you are the same person who shopped for medicine at one site and looked for mobile phones at the other. Unfortunately, there are loopholes. Billion-dollar companies always find their way into making you accept the terms which include the access of your information to them.
Currently, this model of advertisement is only used for the purpose of personalized ads but it has certainly put at risk billions, if not trillions of dollars, at stake. In an interview with Vox, Lou Montulli, the inventor of cookies, says
“I would say that advertising-only business model has caused products to become less good than they could be”.
The future of online marketing could be categorized as only a war of continuous retaliation if a new and more legislative model of marketing is not introduced.
