While I flew to Barcelona last week to speak at a conference, my iPad was at breakfast at a restaurant in Cambridge. That, at least, is what I deduced from the device’s location, transmitted to me after I activated the Find My iPhone app on my mobile phone.
最近，当我飞往巴塞罗那出席一个会议并发言的时候，我的iPad正在剑桥的一家餐厅里用早餐。至少，这是我根据手机上“查找我的iPhone”应用传给我的设备位置信息推断出来的。
I was relieved: the tablet was neither lost nor stolen; it had been accidentally picked up by the organisers of a meeting I had attended the previous day. If, however, another app had found me at the airport and started to badger me with offers, based on my movements, prior purchases and reputation as a loyal or fickle customer, I might have felt a little uneasy.
令我宽慰的是：我的平板电脑既没丢也没被偷；我前一天参加的会议的主办方偶然捡到了它。但是，如果另一款手机应用发现我在机场，并根据我的移动路线、之前的消费记录以及客户忠诚度高低等信息频频向我推销，我可能会觉得有些不舒服。

Here is a question companies increasingly need to answer: what is the creepiness quotient of your product, or marketing campaign, and how would you know? The problem is no secret. Public examples abound. They include embarrassing personalised marketing gaffes — encapsulated in the popular, but possibly apocryphal, tale of the retailer Target, which outed a pregnant teenager to her parents by pitching certain products to her — and the more recent suspension of sales of Google Glass, amid queasiness about the device’s potential misuse. “Problem” may even be a misnomer. While Julia Angwin’s recent book Dragnet Nation describes the dark side of surveillance by companies and governments, a new book by Michael Fertik, founder of Reputation.com, which offers ways of enhancing online reputations, sees it as a simple fact of modern life, which we can exploit for advantage.
如今有个问题越来越需要企业来回答：你们的产品或者营销有多令人恐惧不安？你们又如何知道？这个问题已经不再是秘密。公开的例子比比皆是，包括令人难堪的个性化营销失误——一个广为流传但可能不足为信的故事把这一点体现得淋漓尽致：零售商Target由于给未成年少女推销相关产品，向其父母暴露了她怀孕的事实；还有最近暂停销售的谷歌眼镜(Google Glass)，人们担忧该设备可能遭到滥用。用“问题”这个词甚至都可能不恰当。朱莉娅•安格温(Julia Angwin)的新书《天罗地网》(Dragnet Nation)描写了企业和政府的监视活动的黑暗面。告诉客户如何提高网络信誉的Reputation.com，其创始人迈克尔•费蒂克(Michael Fertik)的新书更提出，监视是现代生活中的一个基本事实，我们可以加以利用。
In The Reputation Economy, he and co-author David Thompson lay out plenty of examples that I find creepy. They include Facedeals, which aimed to combine facial recognition and your Facebook profile to push special offers to you when you arrive at a shop. Another is Moven, a mobile payment app, which originally set out to score customers’ social media credibility alongside traditional credit measures.
在《信誉经济学》(The Reputation Economy)一书中，费蒂克与合著者戴维•汤普森(David Thompson)阐述了许多在我看来令人毛骨悚然的案例。比如Facedeals，旨在将面部识别和Facebook上的个人资料结合起来，这样当你去商店的时候，可以向你推送特别优惠活动。再如手机支付应用Moven，该应用最初打算给用户的社交媒体可信度评分，与传统信用衡量标准一同作为参考。
“Future legal cases will have to decide at what point digital stalking gets just too creepy,” Mr Fertik and Mr Thompson write. They recommend, instead, that you publicise recent job promotions on social networks, tweet about your forthcoming purchases (“Looking for new SUV, considering @BMWUSA or @MBUSA, any experiences?”), and reconcile with bitter ex-partners who have badmouthed you online — all in the interests of making algorithms think you are a successful, luxury-car-loving, perfect date.
“将来的法律诉讼案将不得不断定，数字化追踪在什么程度上会变得过于可怕，”费蒂克和汤普森在书中写道。然而，他俩仍推荐人们在社交网络上公开自己最近的工作晋升，为你想购买的东西发条tweet（“想买辆新SUV，正犹豫是买@BMWUSA还是@MBUSA，有什么建议么？”），与在网上说你坏话、与你怨恨颇深的前任和解——这一切都是为了让算法认定你是一个事业有成、热爱豪车的完美约会对象。
Research used to show personalised marketing was persuasive and well received. But Lisa Barnard, who once worked in advertising and is now assistant professor at Ithaca College, ran some experiments aimed at identifying the creepiness quotient (she calls it the “creepiness factor”) in ad campaigns. Tailoring online advertising to individual behaviour still works, she found, but “perceived creepiness” makes customers 5 per cent less likely to make the purchase. That is 5 per cent of the budget that could be spent elsewhere, if a campaign’s CQ could be cut to zero.
过去的研究常常认为，个性化营销既有说服力又容易被接受。但是曾在广告界任职，现任伊萨卡学院(Ithaca College)副教授的莉萨•巴纳德(Lisa Barnard)进行了几项试验，旨在确定广告宣传的可怕程度（她称之为“可怕因子”）。她发现根据个人行为进行定制的网络广告依然有效，但是“觉得可怕”会让顾客购买的几率降低5%。这意味着，如果广告的可怕程度可以降低到零，就可以将消费者可能花到别处的5%消费预算赚回来。
Even pioneers recognise personalisation has its limits. Facedeals has become Taonii, an app which still offers tailored deals, without face recognition. “Consumers were just not quite ready,” a spokeswoman said via email. “They wanted the benefits but in a slightly friendlier [way].”
甚至那些最先试水的商家也意识到个性化营销的局限性。Facedeals现在变成了Taonii，该应用依然提供定制推送服务，但是去除了面部识别功能。“消费者还没怎么准备好，”一位女发言人在电子邮件中说，“他们想要优惠，但是要以一种更友好的（方式）。”
Keith Weed, chief marketing officer of Unilever, the consumer products company, says digital personalised marketing is “a bit like when you to go to your local shop and they know you and perhaps even have what you want waiting for you”. But cosy as that sounds, he concedes that getting the online and mobile version right is “a fine balance”. For now, giving customers an easy opt-out and ensuring they know what will be shared, where and with whom, are the keys to not creeping them out, he says.
消费品企业联合利华(Unilever)的首席营销官基思•威德(Keith Weed)说，数字化个性营销“有点像你到当地的商店买东西，店家认识你并且可能还准备好了你要买的东西”。虽然那听起来很暖心，但他也承认，在网络和移动端做好这一点，是很难把握的“微妙平衡”。他说，就目前而言，让顾客可以方便地退出，并确保他们了解哪些信息将被共享、将在何处共享以及和谁共享，才是不把顾客吓跑的关键。
Going back to William Lever, Unilever’s founder and early adopter of persuasive advertising, marketing has a history of constant experimentation, in which you and I are the guinea-pigs. Rapid evolution is inevitable, because the line between creepy and friendly is always shifting. A user may willingly give up information for one purpose, only to react with disgust when it is used for another. But companies owe it to their customers to come up with a better way of defining their creepiness quotient. Otherwise, deciding where “cool” becomes “eeugh” will continue to be a matter of trial and uncomfortable error.
回溯到威廉•利弗(William Lever)——联合利华的创始人和劝说性广告的早期采用者，营销的历史就是持续不断的试验，而你我就是其中的小白鼠。迅猛的转变是不可避免的，因为可怕和可爱之间的界线总是摇摆不定。用户可能情愿为了某个目的共享信息，而在信息被挪作他用时却满心厌恶。但是，企业要想找出一种更好的办法来确定广告的“可怕程度”，还需要求助于它们的客户。否则，确定“爽”何时变成“不爽”依然将是一个不断试验和令人难堪的错误反复出现的过程。