The collection of personal and behavioral data online is not a new story, especially from where we sit here in Global Insights, but there are always new angles and stories being told that shed more light on this facet of the Information Age. In the New York Times Magazine, law professor and The New Republic
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If consumers have decided that “Cyber Monday” is little more than a starting pistol for online Christmas shopping—your agent concluded in a recent blog post that it was time to retire the “Cyber Monday” wheeze – then merchants can’t be far behind. Amazon now says Cyber Monday lasts seven days. “Cyber Monday Deals Week”? OK,
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The great essayist Joseph Epstein, casting a backward glance, once wrote that in his Chicago home growing up in the forties and fifties, every day was what you might want to call Father’s Day. So enough about Cyber Monday, ok? The strength of the numbers coming back from “the traditional start of the e-commerce holiday
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If you have a Facebook, you’ve seen it in the last few days: an explosion of status updates all claiming copyright on personal details and consent for external use. These nervous proclamations were ignited by recent changes to Facebook’s privacy policy, which suggested the social network is going to use the data it has collected
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Are all those crowds on the news enjoying (and misbehaving on) Black Friday dancing on the edge of a volcano, or, rather, a cliff? Not that there’s anything to complain about in the numbers coming back from Black Friday; though, as MasterCard’s Michael McNamara points out, the hype around “Cyber Monday” as a date is
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I often get the opportunity with financial institutions to discuss consumer trends and how these impact our industry. One of the key findings of the trends research we analyze is that the youth and the affluent tend to be the leading segments – and then everyone else eventually follows suit. These discussions naturally drift toward
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Early November has started to demonstrate a new kind of frenzy for U.S. consumers – and lucky for those of us on the east coast, it’s not one that falls from the sky. The holiday season is here again, with U.S. consumers armed for gift-giving with greater spending intentions, spirit and screens. So far, the
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