Will Big Data Marketing Practices Change After The Office Max Incident?

By Kara Murphy, contributing writer, Integrated Solutions For Retailers

Office supply retailer’s mailer addressed to “Mike Seay, Daughter Killed in Car Crash” is the latest black eye for big data collection

A mailer with an address reading “Mike Seay, Daughter Killed in Car Crash” is the latest blow to big data marketing in the past month. Last year, Seay’s 17-year-old daughter died in a car wreck in Illinois.

Office Max says the address on the ad was generated by a marketing firm the retailer employs. But, Office Max isn’t the only company trying to overcome obstacles associated with big data. Retailers Neiman Marcus and Target are also dealing with the repercussions of big data gathering, albeit in a much different way. Millions of customers had their private information compromised after the two retailers’ computer systems were attacked by hackers during the holiday season.

The high profile problems are angering consumers, privacy experts told Marketing Daily. But is it enough to incite customer pushback against retailer data collection? “The bigger issue is how consumer concerns about privacy are changing, and brands need to be incredibly aware of how they are handling data,” says Trevor Hughes, president and CEO of International Association of Privacy Professionals, the world’s largest privacy organization. “Marketers need to pay attention to death of a thousand cuts. Making mistakes on privacy is going to damage your brand every time.”

Read how the Department of Homeland Security is helping the retail environment

The Office Max mailing to Mike Seay “exemplifies all the troubling things about data-driven marketing,” Ryan Calo, assistant professor of law at the University of Washington and faculty director of its Tech Policy Lab, tells Marketing Daily. “Why does an office supply store have information about someone’s dead kid? And in such granularity — not just that the child is dead, but even her gender and precisely how she died? It just goes to show how promiscuous this ecosystem is.”

Calo theorizes that the publicity about the Seay letter could be the tipping point for consumers and government officials already concerned about how retailers collect and treat private data. The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Senate have already launched inquiries into the Target and Neiman Marcus attacks.

In a statement to Chicago’s NBC affiliate, Office Max spokeswoman Nicole Miller apologized to Seay and his family and also said the mailing was the result of a list rented through a third-party provider. “We have reached out to the third-party mailing list provider to research what happened. Based on a preliminary investigation today we believe this to be an inadvertent error; and we are continuing the investigation,” Miller says.

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