When Digital Personalization Becomes Impersonal

Don’t allow targeted messaging to cause this reaction.

Targeted digital ads and personalized online prompts have become an expected part of our everyday lives. Amazon suggests items to add to our cart based on our previous purchases. Netflix offers a “top picks for you” list based on what we’ve already watched. And while scrolling through Instagram, sponsored posts related to the pages we follow and the demographic we fall into are guaranteed to appear.

But I think we can all agree that generally speaking, these personalized messages, which are intended to tell us what we really want and need, are still in their infancy in terms of accuracy. Searching for an item on a clothing website and not purchasing it, for instance, means I decided against the item, and a follow-up email from the website asking me to buy it will not change my mind. Just because I work for a financial publication and conduct related research online does not mean I’m shopping for a low-rate credit card, as the targeted ads on MSN.com seem to believe. And Netflix’s top pick for me the other day, “Doomsday Preppers,” likely due to my interest in social documentaries, really sucked.