Thursday, April 19, 2012

Digital Behavior vs. Digital Identity

What do we see when we only have bits?

Due to the nature of technology, identifying actual people based on their digital footprints is extremely difficult.  In fact it often presents a fleeting, alternative reality. 

Cookies, IP addresses and other technical devices are at best a proxy for a real person; at worst they are an inaccurate puzzle with missing pieces.   To make matters worse these methods are limited in terms of both time and device.   Just try to identify me across four screens and six months.   Add to the mix the response time that digital marketing allows and we must focus on the here and now.

The result is that we have to balance our focus of what a person does over time with what is the behavior being exhibited on a device right now.   The rise of retargeting technology seems to be a good example of this new duality.

1 comment:

LiquidHeaven said...

Retargeting tends to be performance based, which people like.

My question is, is our digital footprint an accurate picture of who we are in real life and vice versa?