手把手带你读《纽约客》：数据达人与广告狂人的较量

第一部分 中，作者介绍了科技巨头公司是如何占据大数据的风口，收集信息投放广告来获取巨额利润，再加上它们独占信息资源，对利益相关者有所保留，传统广告公司的地位就这么被挤下去了。而大数据收集信息的方法如同远程监控，用户在社交媒体、购物网站的一举一动都在被运营商偷偷记录着。

来看看文章第1部分精选句子吧：

Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. Yet Math Men are beleaguered, as Mark Zuckerberg demonstrated when he humbled himself before Congress, in April. Math Men’s adoration of data—coupled with their truculence and an arrogant conviction that their “science” is nearly flawless—has aroused government anger, much as Microsoft did two decades ago. 曾经，广告狂人统治了广告行业。然而，它们的风头正在渐渐被数据达人所占据。正当这些科技公司的大佬们暗自得意的时候，天有不测风云，他们对数据的狂热和好斗自负的性格激怒了政府——大家还记得年初Facebook “数据门”事件吗？（新闻实验室曾发表过 对此事件的分析 ）

The power of Math Men is awesome. Google and Facebook each has a market value exceeding the combined value of the six largest advertising and marketing holding companies. Together, they claim six out of every ten dollars spent on digital advertising, and nine out of ten new digital ad dollars. They have become more dominant in what is estimated to be an up to two-trillion-dollar annual global advertising and marketing business. Facebook alone generates more ad dollars than all of America’s newspapers, and Google has twice the ad revenues of Facebook. 数据达人的力量是极其强大的。作为科技公司，Google 和Facebook 的市值都已经分别超过了美国六大广告和营销公司的总和。光是Facebook一家公司，从广告获取的利益已经超越了所有美国报纸行业从刊登广告所获取的全部，Google的广告收入还是Facebook的两倍。

In the advertising world, Big Data is the Holy Grail, because it enables marketers to target messages to individuals rather than general groups, creating what’s called addressable advertising. And only the digital giants possess state-of-the-art Big Data. “The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising,” Shoshana Zuboff, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, wrote on faz.net, in 2016. “The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life—your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit.” Success at this “game” flows to those with the “ability to predict the future—specifically the future of behavior,” Zuboff writes. She dubs this “surveillance capitalism.” 这些科技巨头是靠什么可以冲击传统媒体广告行业，获得如此丰厚的广告利润？没错，就是大数据。通过用户的浏览习惯，大数据可以帮忙建立用户的数据库，来达到准确定位广告投放的效果，这被称作“定址广告”（Addressable Advertising）。 通常，只有科技巨头掌握精准投放广告的核心科技，不仅是投到你的准确地址，更针对你日常生活中的各种行为进行精准定位，哈佛商学院教授Shoshana Zuboff 把企业抓取用户数据的行为称作 “监控资本主义”（Surveillance Capitalism） 。

Holy Grail 圣杯，最早出自中世纪传说，后来有些人认为这个杯子因为这个特殊的场合而具有某种神奇的能力。

However, to thrash just Facebook and Google is to miss the larger truth: everyone in advertising strives to eliminate risk by perfecting targeting data. Protecting privacy is not foremost among the concerns of marketers; protecting and expanding their business is. The business model adopted by ad agencies and their clients parallels Facebook and Google’s. Each aims to massage data to better identify potential customers. Each aims to influence consumer behavior. To appreciate how alike their aims are, sit in an agency or client marketing meeting and you will hear wails about Facebook and Google’s “walled garden,” their unwillingness to share data on their users. When Facebook or Google counter that they must protect “the privacy” of their users, advertisers cry foul: You’re using the data to target ads we paid for—why won’t you share it, so that we can use it in other ad campaigns? 大数据如此风靡，其实基本的模式和传统广告公司没什么不一样：广告公司从来都是在追求精准投放。所以你会听见传统广告公司抱怨：Google 和Facebook 这样的科技巨头并不愿意分享他们的数据，就好像建立起一座有围墙的花园。当科技公司声称他们这么做是为了“保护隐私”的时候，广告商会高呼不公：我们付钱投广告让你精准定位，你为什么不能跟我们共享数据，以便我们用于下一次的广告投放呢？

Walled Garden 字面意思是有围墙的花园，现在越来越多用来比喻互联网上的信息孤岛。

This preoccupation with Big Data is also revealed by the trend in the advertising-agency business to have the media agency, not the creative Mad Men team, occupy the prime seat in pitches to clients, because it’s the media agency that harvests the data to help advertising clients better aim at potential consumers. Agencies compete to proclaim their own Big Data horde. W.P.P.’s GroupM, the largest media agency, has quietly assembled what it calls its “secret sauce,” a collection of forty thousand personally identifiable attributes it plans to retain on two hundred million adult Americans. Unlike Facebook or Google, GroupM can’t track most of what we do online. To parade their sensitivity to privacy, agencies reassuringly boast that they don’t know the names of people in their data bank. But they do have your I.P. address, which yields abundant information, including where you live. For marketers, the advantage of being able to track online behavior, the former senior GroupM executive Brian Lesser said—a bit hyperbolically, one hopes—is that “we know what you want even before you know you want it.” 大数据的风口也促使一些大型广告公司内部发生变化： 做创意的“广告狂人”不再占据中心地位，而是受众掌握数据的媒介部门成为中心。 广告公司的核心竞争力正是数据库的大小。全球最大的广告集团WPP旗下的群邑集团（Group M）拥有涵盖2亿美国人资料的数据库。为了显示他们对用户隐私的足够重视，它声称不像Facebook和Google一样知道用户的姓名，知道用户在互联网上的一举一动。这样真的安全吗？其实，只要拥有你的IP地址，这类公司就能掌握你足够的信息，不需要特地知道姓名。而记录用户的信息目的是什么呢？群邑集团前高级执行官Brian Lesser 曾经夸张地说，他们未来想实现“ 能提前比用户知道用户想要什么 ”的目标。

Worried that Brian Lesser’s dream will become a nightmare, ProPublica has ferociously chewed on the Big Data privacy menace like a dog with a bone: in its series “Breaking the Black Box,” it wrote, “Facebook has a particularly comprehensive set of dossiers on its more than two billion members. Every time a Facebook member likes a post, tags a photo, updates their favorite movies in their profile, posts a comment about a politician, or changes their relationship status, Facebook logs it . . . When they use Instagram or WhatsApp on their phone, which are both owned by Facebook, they contribute more data to Facebook’s dossier.” Facebook offers advertisers more than thirteen hundred categories for ad targeting, according to ProPublica. 这些公司如何通过追寻用户的习惯，来构建数据库里的你？美国非营利性的调查新闻网站ProPublica（拉丁语意思为“为了人民”）曾经写过有关大数据对人们威胁的系列文章，文中举了个例子：Facebook 用户的每一次点赞，标签，标榜他们近期最爱的电影，评论一位政治家，或者更新一次个人情感生活状态的时候，Facebook 就会记录下这些信息。久而久之，就可以建立非常饱满的用户形象了。