Amber Bethune

I like the idea of offering craft tours. The sites you talk about a great for one destination round trips. However, once you start getting into multiple locations, they have a harder time. If travel agencies offered land cruises. I would be very interested. You can not use the travel sites to know what the best hotels, restaurants, and sites to see. If travel agencies took your advice and offered longer stay multi location trips, they maybe able to distinguish themselves.

The travel agency has changed so much over the past couple of years and I like that I can now customize my trips based on my preferences and budget. Whenever I plan a trip I like to compare prices for many different parts of the trip like airfare, hotel by myself because sometimes those travel agencies don’t always show the best prices or it becomes difficult when I try to look at multiple locations. Now that travel has paused or at least slowed down because of the global pandemic, I wonder how travel agencies will respond. As they may be looking to remarket themselves, will they include innovations that respond to our current climate?

You hit on the most intrusive part of data collection, cookies. I feel that a company should be able to collect your data from its site. If it wants to sell that data, it should have to randomize it so it can not be traced back to individual users. Cookies, on the other hand, should be outlawed. Companies should not be able to monitor me across the whole internet. I would call it online stocking, but it is far more intrusive, and given advances in programing much easier and cheaper than ever before.

You picked a great topic to discuss in this post. I always hear people say, “How does my phone know I want a new pair of Nike’s?” Well the answer is above! I thought it was so funny when people were deleting Tik Tok because it was supposedly taking our information, but what app isn’t? You just don’t know it because it is not all over the news. The social dilemma relates exactly to what you are talking about. It shows exactly how these big media apps are collecting your data and how much they really know about you. It is kind of scary but it also made me intrigued because I am the one inside the phone collecting the data sometimes. People do not realize just how often they come in contact with AI. It is the reason for all of this advertising. Someone is not sitting on the other end watching you scroll through Facebook. An algorithm is reading your facial expressions and see what you like and dislike. Kind of scary but it is going to get even more intense as AI evolves!

Great opening discussion Amber! Certainly we’ve all dealt with our phone’s “listening” to us. And it’s not even limited to just phones…I could just simply google search some sort of product on my Google Chrome browser on my laptop, to then find an advertisement for this product on my mobile Instagram feed. Each of these devices are culprits to the “we’re listening!” cookie data transfer. I more so believe our internet usage is tracking us rather than listening. From a marketing perspective, I can understand why there’s a need to track our internet logs, our searches, etc. to gain a better perspective on our consumer behavior.

I really loved your post and funny enough I had a conversation with my younger sister on the topic of “cookies” and what exactly it means when you see the notification on the bottom of your web screen when opening a new site. Long story short, she was not pleased with the answer and as you mentioned, most people aren’t. I still find it weird whenever I see an ad for a product I might have said in passing. I think there should be more regulation on how companies track and use our data. As Claire said in another comment if we completely removed cookies, what does that mean for marketers, it would definitely make our job harder but is that necessarily a bad thing when you think of the whole picture.

See I always thought phones and other electronics were listening to us, and who knows maybe they are. But from one of the topic discussions for our MKTG 5604 class posts, it was based on the security of data. From those posts and research I did, I learned thattt when you google anything or access a website by accepting their cookies it basically will connect to your social media hat you have logged into. Hence seeing ads on facebook and Instagram of something you may have looked at earlier.