(2023-06-08) From Heavy Purchasers Of Pregnancy Tests To The Depression-prone, We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You

From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You – The Markup. If you spend any time online, you probably have some idea that the digital advertising industry is constantly collecting data about you, including a lot of personal information, and sorting you into specialized categories so you’re more likely to buy the things they advertise to you. But in a rare look at just how deep—and weird—the rabbit hole of targeted advertising gets, The Markup has analyzed a database of 650,000 of these audience segments, newly unearthed on the website of Microsoft’s ad platform Xandr.

651,464 audience segments...

The file metadata says that it was created in May 2021, meaning that the ad segments it contains may not be in use today.

show a surprising amount of specialization

Demographics (Ex: “Life Events > Newly Engaged”)

Grocery (Ex: “Intent > Heavy Purchaser - Meat Pies - Refrigeration“)

Financial (Ex: “Highest Risk > Poorer Unemployed Neighbourhoods”)

The Markup found thousands of rows in the file that indicate sensitive audience groupings.

Medical and Health Related

Diagnosis for

Propensity for

Likely symptoms of

Health relevance for

Reproductive health

Race/Ethnicity

Political

Psychological Profiles

Tattoo Addicts

Hipsters

Pensions & Ports Khakis & Credit Leveraged Life McMansions & Merriment

Personality

Neuroticism - Stress Reactors

Financial

Some of the most colorfully described audience segments came from consumer credit agencies Equifax and Experian. Segments are branded with alliterative names like “Silver Sophisticates”

like “Struggling Elders”

Military

Location and Geofencing

Brand Protection

Xandr is an online advertising platform that Microsoft purchased from AT&T in 2021.

Advertisers use Xandr to place their ads across various digital advertising channels, targeting audience segments as they hear ads in streaming audio and view them on the web, in video, and on connected televisions

*Markup reader Paul Bowers said “it was jarring to see” himself referred to as part of a financial audience segment listed as “Tough Times” in materials handed over to him by the grocery chain Food Lion after Bower requested a copy of his data from the company.

In a 32-page PDF file provided by Food Lion, “Tough Times” was listed as Bowers’ “Mosaic Household Description.” In a 2014 Experian marketing document, the Tough Times segment was described as a collection of “Older, lower income and ethnically-diverse singles typically concentrated in inner-city apartments.”*

To see what segments you’ve been included in, you can submit a request to review your data from large data brokers like Oracle, Axciom or Experian

Facebook and Instagram users can see the ad topics that Meta has generated based on their online and offline behavior, and users have the ability to remove unwanted or inaccurate topics.

How Accurate Are These Segments?

Tim Hwang is a researcher and author of “Subprime Attention Crisis,” a book that examines what he sees as the digital ad industry’s structural flaws. He questions whether advertising technology is really as effective at targeting as it claims to be.