Programmatic Brainwashing is Coming Your Way

Programmatic brain­wash­ing — this is why GDPR is needed.

Okay, so this should give you the creeps:

The Spinner has launched a ser­vice that allows for pro­gram­mat­ic micro-targeting. 

Where will we go from here?

Media Attention

No one is too happy about The Spinner’s launch; the ser­vice is, to put it mildly, questionable. 

But per­haps these types of pro­gram­mat­ic tech­no­lo­gies hint at the future of online advert­ising. Targetting tiny audi­ences can be done using Facebook:

“Facebook also allows advert­isers to tar­get groups as small as 20 users. Max said an advert­iser could, in the­ory, tar­get a single per­son by filling the group with 19 fake accounts. The only real account in the group would be the tar­geted one. […] For example, this how-to guide from December 2017 explains how to get around the 20-per­son min­im­um group size for tar­geted ads.”
Source: abc​.net.

While already a creepy tech­no­logy, it could also get scary.

Many have seen Inception, Christopher Nolan’s block­buster movie star­ring Leonardo DiCaprio. A team of agents breaks into sleep­ing people’s heads to plant ideas with­in their dreams. ¹ I’d sug­gest not put­ting this incep­tion tech­no­logy in the hands of David Lynch.

Perhaps Inception Marketing will become a thing?
Or maybe Facebook Sniper Marketing?

As expec­ted, the com­pany is get­ting media atten­tion due to its con­tro­ver­sial nature. 

How about tar­get­ing loved ones to:

The media seems focused on men trick­ing women into sexu­al rela­tion­ships (or set­tling out of court) — a sexu­al “Cambridge Analytica”. Forbes calls it online manip­u­la­tion, and ABC calls it brain­wash­ing.

“For all its quirk­i­ness, The Spinner high­lights how easy it can be in the age of fake news and social media to manip­u­late people on the Web. Cambridge Analytica did it. Advertisers and politi­cians do it. “Why not give this abil­ity to the com­mon man?” says Shefler, who wears loose-fit­ting jeans and refused to have his face shown in a photo.”
Source: Forbes.

Programmatic Brainwashing

The pur­pose is to bom­bard a single indi­vidu­al (rather than a group of people) with tailored-to-fit mes­sages. And it could work.

Famous men­tal­ists like Derren Brown have made it their busi­ness to show that sug­gest­ive tech­niques can have effects — mak­ing tar­gets believe that planted ideas are their own.

Traditional mar­ket­ing has always been clear about what products or ser­vices are advert­ised. Still, maybe now we’ll begin to see tri­als in sug­gest­ive tar­get­ing based on the psy­cho­lo­gic­al makeup of individuals.

If the level of detail is too much for most organ­isa­tions, micro-tar­get­ing by match­ing mes­sages with indi­vidu­al psy­cho­lo­gies could instead be a ven­ue for future AI technologies.

Perhaps polit­ic­al cam­paign­ing and pub­lic affairs will be amongst the first to exper­i­ment with micro-targeting.

An Expensive Market

Still, I think that there’s a chance that the mar­ket might pro­tect itself. Honestly, I’d be flattered if a com­pany would decide to pay good money to expose me as an indi­vidu­al with exclus­ive messages.

Micro-tar­get­ing might prove to be an expens­ive space. The pro­gram­mat­ic part could be auto­mated fur­ther, but cre­at­ing con­tent for indi­vidu­als is likely a costly ven­ture — even for enter­prise-level B2B com­pan­ies with few­er poten­tial clients.

There’s a mar­ket for B2B sales, where a sales­per­son, before and after a meet­ing with a poten­tial cli­ent, could run auto­mated cam­paigns to rein­force their pitch. However, this is where we enter GDPR ter­rit­ory; using per­son­al inform­a­tion this way will likely be stopped at an early stage. ²Update: In 2020, BBC repor­ted that The Spinner was banned from Facebook.

The Spinner’s web ser­vice is likely to be writ­ten off as an uneth­ic­al concept, and rightly so. Still, it’s safe to assume that this might be the start­ing point of many solu­tions for indi­vidu­al “Pre-Suasion.” ³For more on Pre-Suasion, I recom­mend Robert Cialdini’s latest book, Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, or my blog art­icle, How To Be Persuasive.

Controversy as a PR Strategy

While The Spinner is some­what scan­dal­ous, pur­posely mar­ket­ing itself to stir up con­flict, the tech­no­logy is far from advanced; cook­ie-based pro­gram­mat­ic tar­get­ing is already in wide­spread main­stream use. 

The main takeaway is that con­tro­versy almost always works for punch­ing pub­li­city well above your weight.

But con­tro­versy as a PR strategy is also a thin line between suc­cess and over­step­ping into the we-will-nev­er-recov­er badlands.

PR Resource: The Anatomy of Attention

“There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
— Oscar Wilde

Spin Academy | Online PR Courses

The Anatomy of Attention

Attention is an essen­tial com­pon­ent of pub­lic relations:

• An organ­isa­tion, starved of atten­tion, trust, and loy­alty, is com­pelled to wage a per­petu­al struggle for its con­tin­ued existence.

And it’s not just organ­isa­tions. We all seem to crave atten­tion in some form or another:

“People want to be loved; fail­ing that admired; fail­ing that feared; fail­ing that hated and des­pised. They want to evoke some sort of sen­ti­ment. The soul shud­ders before obli­vi­on and seeks con­nec­tion at any price.”
— Hjalmar Söderberg (1869−1941), Swedish author

It’s fear of social isol­a­tion— and atten­tion star­va­tion.

But what con­sti­tutes ‘atten­tion’?

“Attention is a com­plex, real neur­al archi­tec­ture (‘RNA’) mod­el that integ­rates vari­ous cog­nit­ive mod­els and brain cen­ters to per­form tasks like visu­al search.”
Source: Trends in cog­nit­ive sci­ences ⁴Shipp, S. (2004). The brain cir­cuitry of atten­tion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 223 – 230. https://​doi​.org/​1​0​.​1​0​1​6​/​j​.​t​i​c​s​.​2​0​0​4​.​0​3​.​004

Each of the below terms refers to a spe­cif­ic aspect or type of atten­tion (“men­tal band­width”), a com­plex cog­nit­ive pro­cess. ⁵Schweizer, K., Moosbrugger, H., & Goldhammer, F. (2005). The struc­ture of the rela­tion­ship between atten­tion and intel­li­gence. Intelligence, 33(6), 589 – 611. … Continue read­ing

Let’s explore dif­fer­ent types of attention:

• Alertness. This is the state of being watch­ful and ready to respond. It’s the most basic form of atten­tion, rep­res­ent­ing our read­i­ness to per­ceive and pro­cess inform­a­tion from the environment.
• Sustained atten­tion. This involves focus­ing on a spe­cif­ic task or stim­u­lus over a pro­longed peri­od. It’s cru­cial for tasks that require ongo­ing con­cen­tra­tion, like read­ing or driving.
• Focused atten­tion. This refers to the abil­ity to con­cen­trate on one par­tic­u­lar stim­u­lus or task while ignor­ing oth­ers. It’s the abil­ity to focus nar­rowly on a single thing.
• Attentional switch­ing. Also known as task switch­ing or cog­nit­ive flex­ib­il­ity, this involves shift­ing focus from one task to anoth­er. It’s crit­ic­al for mul­ti­task­ing and adapt­ing to chan­ging demands or priorities.
• Divided atten­tion. This is the abil­ity to pro­cess two or more responses or react to mul­tiple tasks sim­ul­tan­eously. It’s often tested by ask­ing people to per­form two tasks sim­ul­tan­eously, like listen­ing to a con­ver­sa­tion while writing.
• Attention accord­ing to the super­vis­ory atten­tion­al sys­tem. This concept, derived from cog­nit­ive psy­cho­logy, refers to a high­er-level con­trol sys­tem that reg­u­lates the alloc­a­tion of atten­tion, par­tic­u­larly in situ­ations requir­ing plan­ning or decision-making.
• Attention as inhib­i­tion. This aspect of atten­tion involves sup­press­ing irrel­ev­ant or dis­tract­ing stim­uli. It’s a cru­cial com­pon­ent of focused atten­tion and self-regulation.
• Spatial atten­tion. This type of atten­tion focuses on a spe­cif­ic area with­in the visu­al field. It’s like a spot­light that enhances inform­a­tion pro­cessing in a par­tic­u­lar location.
• Attention as plan­ning. This per­spect­ive views atten­tion as a resource that needs to be alloc­ated effi­ciently, espe­cially in com­plex tasks requir­ing stra­tegic plan­ning and organization.
• Interference. In the con­text of atten­tion, inter­fer­ence refers to the pro­cess by which irrel­ev­ant inform­a­tion or dis­trac­tions impede the effi­ciency of cog­nit­ive processing.
• Attention as arous­al. This con­siders atten­tion in the con­text of the gen­er­al level of alert­ness or arous­al. It’s about the read­i­ness of the brain to engage with stim­uli or tasks.
• Attention accord­ing to the assess­ment tra­di­tion. This refers to meas­ur­ing and eval­u­at­ing atten­tion­al pro­cesses, often in clin­ic­al or edu­ca­tion­al set­tings, to identi­fy atten­tion defi­cits or disorders.

Each type of atten­tion plays a cru­cial role in how we inter­act with and pro­cess inform­a­tion from our envir­on­ment, and under­stand­ing these dif­fer­ent aspects is key in fields like psy­cho­logy, neur­os­cience, and education.

Learn more: The Anatomy of Attention

💡 Subscribe and get a free ebook on how to get bet­ter PR ideas.