Hello [Excel Cell D4224]

On May 3rd, at 3:32PM I got an email from the 12th Man Foundation congratulating me on my impending graduation. They gave me the extraordinary opportunity to join The Foundation as a Young Alumni member at the reasonable price of $50 a year. This email came at just the right time as my wallet was starting to weigh too much since I just finished my tuition payment plan. I normally wouldn’t care about an email like this. I understand the University fundraises and it wouldn’t be as good as it is without them partaking in it. Also, $50 for pictures on Kyle Field is an extremely reasonable fee since it would only be a drop in the bucket for what people are paying for graduation pictures from what I hear. (I touched on the graduation sentimentality tax in another blog post.)

What irked me about this email was not the donation request but the subject line. I was not referred to as Jacob, Mr. Rodriguez, or even future Texas A&M Alumni. The subject line read, “Congrats [University Identification Number]! Celebrate….” A University Identification Number (UIN) is a unique nine-digit number that the University uses to identify each student. An identifier like this is common in all formalized fields of education with one being given to me since I was in elementary school. To clarify, the email had my actual UIN, the brackets and text are a substitute for giving out my unique identifier. I also took the liberty of blurring it out in the photo.

As I wrote this article, May 3, at 5:19PM, I got a second email apologizing for the “Subject Line Email Error.” Obviously, some people took offense to the mistake, or The Foundation caught it before somebody had the chance to say something. Most likely, this error was a result of an incorrect reference to whatever database they got the graduating students' emails from. Luckily it doesn’t look like anybody's personal data was sent to strangers which would have been a much graver mistake with consequences more dire than making some people feel slightly annoyed.

Becoming a Number

Queue the Orwell references and tired cliches on how big tech has led to the dehumanization of people. 

In the age of data and cookies, most things on a personal screen are customized to the user to some degree. Apparently, customers feel special when Barnes & Noble puts their name on the banner of their webpage so anyone who’s anyone uses this kind of practice. (See your name on this website? No? That’s because I’m not anyone.) All online activity is tracked and cataloged. Seemingly useless information like the length of a webpage a user scrolls down before moving on to the next one is used to modify site structure and lead to revenue growth. Most people don’t care about this. What they do care about is how all logged actions are attached to users. It’s not enough to know what button you clicked but also who you are, where you were sitting, and what device you were using. Being able to know these factors allows companies to create personalized experiences.

The Foundation wasn’t trying to give an extremely personal experience with their email. If AT&T texted me my social security number to imply a very close relationship with the company, I would be off put. The Foundation was trying to make its message delivery a little personal. Fill-in-the-blank promotional email templates like the one The Foundation used are necessary for a lot of companies’ funnels, especially larger ones. People, even me, have become very tolerant of them cluttering their inboxes. Unfortunately, as is the case with most mass marketing, the wrong message has the chance to reach the wrong person the more personal something is. This can give a potential/existing customer negative brand sentiment. Coincidentally, I got an email from Max, formally HBO Max, the same day as these Foundation emails at 5:41PM asking me to resubscribe because they missed me. ☹ They even included my name in the email. The problem is that I am an active subscriber of Max and use their platform regularly. So now I am not only upset at the fact that they do not have Crisis on Infinite Earths Part 2 but that they put me on the wrong mailing list.

These mistakes remind people that they are an Excel row, a prospect, a source of revenue. Whatever sincerity has been generated so far is completely eliminated by this reminder.

Big Data => Big Personalization

As someone who considers themselves a people person and is going into sales, I highly value sincere personalization. When someone tells me something unique to them, like that they have a cat, bringing up that fact later gives a sense of familiarity and genuine thoughtfulness. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Best Buy, or even the local gas station I frequent don’t have the manpower or time to take notes on each customer and craft a personalized message for each customer.

Putting a customer’s name or general interests in communication helps personalize a message to the point where it’s noticeable but not creepy. If Amazon sent me an email saying, “You looked at this product page 12 times yesterday for 14 minutes and 31.11 seconds, ready to buy?” I would be very uncomfortable.

Writing is one of the, if not the most, common use cases for generative AI right now. Soon hyper-personalized messages will be possible through generative AI. This goes beyond text too. Anything on a screen will have content, icons, layout, font, you name it customized to a user with the power of AI. It would not surprise me to find that customized text created by generative AI is being used to communicate with customers is already being tested on a small level with human supervision. As this method becomes reliable, it is important to find the sweet spot between personal and creepy. “Hey Maria, why don’t you watch this soccer game with your son since he’s been playing it so often? The final game is filmed on a field that looks like the one near your house!”

A factor that hopefully doesn’t become relevant is the ethicality of using hyper-personalization. Assuming people have free will, there is always an unlimited number of actions that can yield an infinite number of possibilities. If AI becomes inhumanly good at communicating, being able to force any target to commit an action with a high degree of certainty, free will would no longer exist. People would live under machine rule. I hope this is just the effect of reading too much science fiction and not a real possibility.

Managing Dehumanization

Returning to the problem that inspired these ramblings, making a person feel like a number. Small mistakes or an over-displaying of collected data remind users that they are a data point. Making users feel like valued customers to an organization is hard, so it’s important to not erase that work by accidentally selecting the wrong column in Excel. Hyper-personalization with AI has the potential to stop errors that make people feel like a number. It will make it harder for companies to stand out when everyone is tailoring everything. With AI and personal data security under such scrutiny right now, people may become cautious of these practices and reject them. Companies must find the right balance.

In summation, I will not be becoming a Young Alumni member.