Future of marketing & Social networking

The ability to target a tightly knit group, such as a circle of friends or a family, has been of particular interest to marketers. Irwin Gotlieb, the CEO of GroupM, the largest advertising agency in the world, relates one example to Auletta: “Take disposable diapers. Should you just market to pregnant women? I would argue that maybe the grandmother has significant influence.” Thus if a daughter-in-law becomes pregnant and searches on Google for baby blogs, or looks at strollers on Amazon, the grandmother-to-be—whose relationship to her daughter-in-law could be discovered through Facebook, or perhaps through the social networking service Google is reported to be working on—may begin to notice a remarkable increase in diaper ads not only on the websites she visits but also, as more and more devices become tied together through wireless connections, over her radio, on her television, possibly on her toaster, and certainly on her cell phone, which, following another of Gotlieb’s suggestions, might start flashing with coupons for diapers when, through the phone’s location features, a marketer is made aware that she has walked into a supermarket or drugstore. It’s not hard to imagine a future in which an ill-informed grandmother-to-be might suspect that there will be a new addition to the family, simply by observing changes among the ads she’s served up hour by hour and day by day.