Social Media Advertising
On my morning commute to the office, I often check the latest news and browse social media. Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat have become pretty common amongst most millennials. Social media has also been in the spotlight recently over numerous data scandals such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
When the news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal first broke, I was not very surprised to be honest. The amount of data and personal information that we share on social media is quite a lot. I mean, between photographs of our dinners or our latest shopping hauls, social media platforms actually know a lot about our preferences and interests.
During my internship, I got to meet the Director of Agency Partnerships and Sales Director from 4C Insights. The company uses social media platforms for advertising and marketing. The Director shared that social media data made it possible for advertisements to be catered to the individual need of the platform user, consequently making the marketing more effective. However, with the data scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, Facebook is going to stop sharing full access to data with third party partners (only access to partial data in the future). Companies like 4C Insights will lose this valuable source of data to precisely cater users, and this might also lower their capacity to run targeted social media campaigns.
What I realized through this is that simple things that occur in our everyday lives do indeed have implications in the business world. Consequently, I have learnt to think more widely about events that are happening around me. Though the impacts of certain events might seem to only impact a section of society, it can have wider implications. Thus, I am learning to think about events from different perspectives so that I can better understand what is happening around me.