Identifying them, I believe, is relatively easy if you spend the time to get to know the audience.

Using your example, the maven-esque Lisa’s List will tell you most of what you need to know about the nightclub scene in Milwaukee…with and without music. Readers of *info would be your connectors.

I’m fairly confident that it would be easy to find examples like these in almost every US metro if one were to do some earnest investigating.

Thus, like most audiences that form a meaningful market, there are many marketers already capitalizing on them.

The challenge then is to either see that audience in a different way (which these new technologies help us do) OR/AND make messages more attractive than those that have beaten us to the punch-line.

If that’s what an agency is providing its customers, and in turn their customers, then there should generally be little or no cause for pause.

As for tattoos on eyelids…that’s creative.

Sometimes when I’m trying to put something in perspective, I’ll imagine what a marketer would have done 100 years ago. For instance, did the owner of a general store in a small town in the year 1906 behave in a similar way as we do now, and was this merchant eventually driven out of town for those same marketing practices?

Example: When Judy came in for her annual bolt of gingham, and Sam the grocer gave her an extra length of a new fabric for free, because she’s a “good customer” but also not coincidentally because she is part of an active sewing circle and could steer more business to the store, was anyone harmed or upset? I see the idea I described above as being no different. It’s just that with the mass of people we sell to in 2006, automation has to notice the best customers and figure out the few who can influence the many.

Am I off base with this opinion?

I suspect most people would be concerned if they learned that a merchant was harvesting their data, but it still happens all the time, usually in exchange for something of value. For instance, we allow a grocery store to associate our food buying habits to our name and address, all in exchange for discounts.

If a nightclub was to use ID information to offer free things to those whom they consider prime users, I think the same transaction is taking place. But the consent would have to be more explicit than simply handing over an ID to show you’re old enough to drink alcohol. There should be a sign posted, and perhaps a sample of mailed offers that select patrons receive.

As for information available, I believe that the DMV doesn’t place SS#s anywhere on driver’s licenses, so that info isn’t encoded on the back of the card either. Still: Height, weigh, AGE — hot stuff! Assuming the data is accurate (dubious), that’s a lot to hand over to a bored bouncer. Point well taken, MJ.

P.S. Thanks for the link!

http://www.instructables.com/id/E0DU1K3WR8ET9K5QQJ/

I’m too old for clubbing, but if I found out a club–or a liquor store, or a grocery store where I bought liquor– was storing and using my data (does WI include SS# in its license bar codes?) without my OK, I’d be unhappy. Handing my license over to prove my age does not, in my mind, give the reader my permission to permanently harvest the information.