Digital Trail

A Cheryl Cole video bundle, Father Ted Christmas special, Duran Duran EP, Fishing Kings game, Life of Pi novel, Michael Buble EP, Charlie Chaplin movie and fiiiiiiiiiive more unexciting things.

If you are an iPhone or iPod Touch user then you will be familiar with the aforementioned list as you may have downloaded the ‘12 Days of Christmas’ application and received a daily text revealing the latest free offering from iTunes. I’m not staring down the molar barrel of a gift horse here, the Father Ted episode was great but if there is one thing that iTunes means to me, is the personalised experience that I create within it. Like it or not, (and long before the socialification of iTunes via Ping) you have a relationship with iTunes, you put in the content you like and download the stuff that you find appealing to your tastes, be this books, apps, films or games. The ‘i’ in ‘iTunes’ might as well stand for idiosyncratic.  No two iTunes libraries will be the same.

What does this mean? It means that the profile and persona you create is a valuable pool of data for Apple themselves. They already have the Genius feature that runs a recommendation algorithm based on your tastes and so we know they work with what you have got to enhance your media collection. If you want the science behind it all, I suggest you read this excellent post on TechnologyReview.com

So why get uptight about the 12 Days of Christmas offerings? Well, if the thinly veiled intention is to get you accustomed to the range of media available and the ease with which it can be downloaded and enjoyed on a device, would it not be of more benefit to both parties if content was supplied that tallied with a user’s existing media choices within their iTunes library? Of course you will be hard pushed to please everyone all the time but even if iTunes segmented customers into four categories across each line of media (video, podcast, music, games, books) it would undoubtedly yield a higher rate of customers making future purchases.                

I like podcasts, iTunes knows this, why not use that information to suggest a new podcast for me to enjoy based on the existing knowledge of podcasts I have downloaded? You know that I have a preferred style of music that I enjoy so why offer me Cheryl Cole?

iTunes didn’t even have to work hard to collect such data, it was freely volunteered, why not use it better and keenly target their offering. Let me know if you experienced similar poorly aimed marketing campaigns. Is this wasted budget?