We’re the product: It’s time we understood the terms 

A shoe advert follows you across devices. Your playlist mirrors your mood. You search for something once and watch it trail you for days.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s martech — marketing technology — and it’s quietly reshaping the entire consumer landscape.

Martech rarely gets top billing. It doesn’t provoke headlines like AI or cybersecurity. But it operates beneath the surface of almost every digital experience, combining behavioural data, identity resolution, and predictive logic to build detailed portraits of who we are — and who we might become.

In the right hands, it is a powerful commercial engine. In the wrong ones, it erodes autonomy and trust.

Data matching sits at the heart of this ecosystem. It links email engagement with website activity, ties geolocation to transaction history, and infers emotional state from scrolling patterns. It connects disparate signals across platforms and devices, creating a composite of the individual that often knows them better than they know themselves.

From a regulatory standpoint, it’s largely permissible — consent banners are clicked, policies are published, and the compliance boxes are checked. But the real question is less about legality and more about dignity.

The average consumer does not fully grasp how deep the data profiling goes. A mother in Lagos clicks on a baby product and her entire digital environment shifts. A student in Brussels researches mental health, and within hours, he’s categorised, segmented, and retargeted — his vulnerability packaged as an opportunity.

This is not necessarily unethical. But it is unexamined. And that’s the risk.

We have become so accustomed to convenience that we no longer ask what it costs. When personalisation becomes indistinguishable from manipulation, the line between serving the customer and shaping the customer begins to blur.

What’s needed now is not outrage, but awareness. Regulation, while necessary, is only part of the answer. The cultural element — how we think about data, how we respect privacy, how we design digital experiences — is just as critical.

Organisations must move beyond minimal compliance and embrace data ethics as a strategic differentiator. That means transparency over opacity, explanation over fine print, and informed choice over engineered consent. It also means interrogating assumptions: Do we really need this much behavioural data to drive results? Are we offering value in exchange — or merely extracting it?

The next generation of market leaders will be those who treat their customers not as targets, but as partners. They will recognise that trust, once broken, is hard to recover — and that trust, once earned, compounds faster than ad spend ever could.

This conversation belongs in the boardroom as much as in the legal department. It affects customer experience, brand equity, and long-term growth. And as martech becomes more embedded and predictive, so too must our ethical foresight.

Recently, a client in Europe asked me a question that stopped me mid-sentence: “Why do we need to tell customers about this level of tracking? Won’t it just scare them?” I looked across the table and said, “If it scares them, perhaps we need to ask ourselves why we’re doing it.” The room went silent.

That silence, I believe, is where the real work begins.

Martech isn’t going away. In fact, it’s becoming more central to digital strategy. But we have a choice in how it evolves. We can design systems that empower or systems that extract. We can serve relevance with respect, or with intrusion.

These, obviously, are evolving-new times. The world where our data knows us better than we know ourselves, the real question is no longer what we can do with it — but what we should.

That’s not a philosophical debate. It’s a strategic one. The businesses that win in the next decade won’t just be the ones with the most data. They’ll be the ones with the most discipline; the most transparency; the most humanity.

That’s the new competitive edge.

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