Surfing the web I decided to click an ad to see what it's about.
The ad promised free stuff of course but the proposition was a bit different than what I'm used to. You get money to spend on shopping at a retail store of your choice and then provide feedback about the store. And you keep what you shopped for. When I went to the page I found they were offering a 1000 dollars for you to shop when you sign up. As if that was not extravagant enough, they are carrying a special offer that gives you a Sony Vaio laptop too. So around $2000 worth of stuff all in all.
Of course nothing really is for free, except parental love maybe. I decided to read the license agreement (the long text in the too-tiny-scroll-your-a$$-ad-infinitum) box at the bottom. I knew they had to be getting something in return. I'm "adapting" the important parts here.
We store and use the information you give us in accordance with the terms of this Policy.
Fair enough.
Our registration form requests that you provide certain contact and profile information (like your name, e-mail address, postal address, and phone number)
That's the definition of your information, you'll see how this info is treated now.
We use all of this information in the following ways:
to provide you with personalized marketing information via electronic delivery and/or direct mail
to send you targeted advertising via electronic delivery and/or direct mail;
So they will market stuff to you..
to contact you for feedback and surveys via electronic delivery and/or direct mail;
Market research too..
to provide your contact information to CRC marketing partners to allow them to send you special offers via electronic delivery and direct mail.
And then they'll sell your information to "partners" who will basically do the same.
to deliver products to you for the purpose of review and testing
I'm just praying these are not "beta" medical products.
Those are basically the snippets that I found to explain how the thing works. I now have 2 questions:
1. How come a person's information is worth all that much from the firm's point of view? $2000 to be exact...
2. How many people think they would go for something like this? Do you think your information and convenience is worth $2000? More? Less? It's said that everything has a price, can you put one on your info?
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1 comment:
This is very interesting, I’ve always wondered about this too! Is it really worth all that money?
I’d say the part where you provide feed back about the products you buy or the store is kind of like mystery shopping. Where they assign you certain retail stores or restaurants to evaluate for customer service, cleanness, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
They pay you back whatever you spend (but akeed there are guidelines and restrictions to the task, you can't just spend or buy whatever you want).
As for the rest of the info you put down, there’s probably more to it than what they write in the License agreement regarding the money amount and the free gifts.
I guess we'll never really understand marketing or how it works. (Unless of course that's what you do for a living!)
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