"It was the first online ad-privacy scandal.
In 1999, DoubleClick bought catalog-data firm Abacus for $1.7 billion. Privacy advocates flipped. They petitioned the Federal Trade Commission and scared DoubleClick into announcing it would not connect personal information from Abacus with online-browsing data.
If the deal happened today, the story would be different. It's not uncommon for offline data -- retail transactions, CRM data, loyalty-card data and more -- to be connected to digital data to enhance online targeting."...
Josh Leichtung's insight:
Direct marketers have been working with "big data", albeit on a smaller scale, for decades. It should be interesting how this newsletter develops.
Josh