Liam Neeson’s Marketers’ Guide to Mobile Targeting and Conquest

Shane Faria

Nov 30, 2020

“Who is the target? Where do they live and work? How old are they? What are their interests? We capture anyone within a 500 yard radius. We will then find them no matter where they go.”

Marketing tactics sure have a funny way of sounding just like dialogue from the next Taken movie, don’tcha think?

“What I have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that will allow for me to send you ads to the Build-A-Bear Workshop.”

It is hard for me not to joke about this despite how intrusive it actually is, but it seems as if certain marketers and advertisers don’t even bother hiding the fact their practices out of context sound like training someone to carry out a hit on the son of your rival mob boss, or a basic run-down of the behavior or a private investigator, or spy.

The reason is simple: there is definitely some carry-over on the Venn diagram when it comes to marketers and advertisers and hired guns and spies. At least, that’s the conclusion I came to after reading about “mobile conquesting.” Conquesting? Really? To locate, track, capture, and conquer. Classy.

Mike sent me over this link and the amount of enthusiasm this individual has for mobile conquesting is noteworthy to put it lightly. Let me just run this down quickly so you get the gist of it:

Mobile conquesting allows for marketers to “advertise to customers on their mobile devices within apps and mobile websites by utilizing accurate location, demographic, behavioral and visit data.”

Now we already went over the Bidstream and how your phone’s geolocation data is bought, sold, and tracked over time. Mobile conquesting is a bit different, but equally, if not more, creepy.

First, you have to identify your target. Yep. You’re called a “target” for a reason. They’ve got to find out where you live, what you like, how old you are. You know, all that fun stuff you want strangers on the Internet to know about you. Then, if everything adds up on their end, the mobile ads come flowing in.

“But wait, there’s more!” (It’s not me going full Billy Mays here, I am pulling from the article).

If you call in the next twenty minutes, along with your Conquest-o-Matic we will include the Geo-Fence, a digital fence drawn tightly around the geographic area of your choice. Heck yeah! Anyone who sets foot inside or within a 500 foot radius of the Geo-Fence will also be captured in your advertising stream. No need for targets! With Geo-Fence you can conquer without discrimination.

“The real magic with Geo-Fencing is being able to talk to devices after they leave a Geo-Fence. This is called Geo-Retargeting.” Perfect. After your prey leaves your net of predation, it is uniquely marked to ensure you can locate it anywhere in the wilderness. Like a zebra splotched with red paint, there truly is no escape from future identification.

Magical.

“If you are adopting a strategy of birds of a feather flock together, then Geo-Retargeting Lookalike can be utilized.” Simply put, now that you’ve entered their web of advertising entanglement, they can advertise shit to your friends and family too. Nice.

Targets, demographics, devices, uhm…birds? These are all things we’ve been referred to as in this article, and that’s without the labels we may infer would be cast upon us as potential subjects of their “conquests.”

So when I say this sounds like a really bad sequel to Taken, you can see I’m not far off. The purpose of Mobile Conquesting is to look for you, find you, and kill, I mean, advertise to you. And your friends and family and people stored into your digital advertising ID that you might not even know in real life. But we’ll get to that last bit some other time.

“Who is the target? Where do they live and work? How old are they? What are their interests? We capture anyone within a 500 yard radius. We will then find them no matter where they go.”