How online marketing took over direct marketing

Online technology picks up where direct marketing left off

Direct marketers who buy wholesale or custom-made databases from credit card companies and other sources use the information to develop more product marketing and targeting strategies. You know those telemarketing calls that keep your home phone ringing off the hook? Guess how they got your name, number, and buying habits? Right. Read on.

There is one big difference between traditional direct mail and the Internet. Internet target marketing starts where direct mail ends. Online technology enables almost anyone to access information contained in one or more databases and combine them in a nanosecond. This allows the marketers and their clients to zero in on your specific interests.

In fact, some of the largest commercial sites on the Internet have agreed to feed information about their customers' reading, shopping and entertainment habits into a system developed by Engage Technologies of Massachusetts. Engage is already tracking the moves of more than thirty million Internet users, recording where they go and what they read - often without the user's knowledge.

How much is too much, and when?

Some companies advertise their ability to obtain the past and current addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, driving records, bankruptcy history and other information on just about anyone in the United States.

It is access to these kinds of records that let people make important "public safety" connections between databases - things like exposing drunk-driving schoolbus drivers and pinpointing where the unsafe bridges and roads in your community are.

You could be a customer. You could also be a target. You could be both at the same time without knowing it. That's because the Internet relays information from one computer to the next until it reaches its destination computer. Anyone who can view your data can grab it, copy it and keep it. They can do anything they want with it: alter it, sell it, pass it off as someone else's personal history - you name it.

Most people do not realize that what you thought was a private email between you and a friend could actually be seen by others along the route. At every step along the way your information footprint passes across the screens of numerous online handlers whose staff (permanent, temporary, subcontracted, ex-convicts, whomever) can read your data - information that you never intended for unauthorized viewing.

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