We are all just Guinea Pigs in the Ultimate Marketing Lab ever created!

Like it or not, we've been reduced to a bunch of test rodents in the marketing labs of the major corporations.

In the old days (1950s to 1970s), advertising was mostly a simple process of presenting a product, with a well-produced 30 or 60 second commercial.

The commercial showed the use of the product and spoke about it's qualities and wholesomeness. And, most of the time, the products were "NEW and IMPROVED!"

As advertisers and marketeers became more sophisticated, they would refine their targeting by placing ads in specific magazines, and used images to appeal to certain audiences, such as using Joe Camel to promote Camel cigarettes to the young and cool crowd.

Brands were developed to give the consumer a certain positive perception, in order to influence the shopper to select their brand. For example, Tide laundry detergent might give you the sense of the clean ocean tide. Joy dish washing soap might give the buyer the sense of making the dish washing task easy. However, I don't think of dish washing to be Joyful. But the name is kind of nice. And, for a toaster pastry, maybe Pop Tarts is a catchier name than something like Sugary Planks.

As the Internet evolved from the mid 1990s, it was becoming clear that your personal information would be very helpful, and valuable, in the quest to develop the greatest marketing and advertising machine of all time.

Everyone was "invited" to sign up for for free services, offers, information, online e-mail, free websites, social media, business listings, etc.

I remember many of the sites said something like, "You can trust us with your personal information, it won't be sold, and we're your pals, etc." Even though, they may have had the best intent, a lot of that confidentiality went out the window, and even if they did keep your info private, you had hackers, scammers and criminals out to sponge up as much personal info as possible.

You couldn't even trust putting your e-mail address on a website without fear of it being picked up and packaged into millions of e-mail addresses and then sold to spammers. So you had to display your e-mail address, something like this: "bobsmith (at) whatevermail.com." And hopefully using " (at) " in place of "@" would throw off the e-mail harvesters.

Now, it's assumed, information that you provide to a lot of the websites is fair game - to be sold or used to directly target YOU, with a new barrage of promotions, rewards and offers.

You are being monitored, as best as possible, by people, companies, corporations and bots, to find out what types of things interest you. They want your age, sex, family status, political affiliation, educational background, job status, salary, and anything else that will help them tailor their marketing campaigns directly at you.

They want every possible advantage, and every and any method to get their product presented to you, in a format that best appeals to you, to give them the greatest opportunity to close the sale with you, for whatever gadget or shampoo they're selling. Of course, you can't blame them. They're in business to make money, whether you think what they're doing is ethical or not.

For their pursuit of profit, we've given up our privacy, willingly or not.

Welcome to the Ultimate Marketing Lab ever created!