“Almost every company”

You mean like 5-10 major companies?

There are thousands of smaller companies buying ad space and access to consumer data.

And “buying data” isn’t what it sounds like for the most part. Few companies are out there buying and selling raw data tied to individuals. For the most part it is a company buying heavily targeted ads from someone like Google that has ALL of your data. They know, with surgical precision, how to target ads at you. Company B just tells Google “ we want to target a 35 year old, white, dad of three that is lacking in his masculinity and wants to feel rugged, while not making him feel emasculated”.

The you get a Dr Squatch ad.

Consumer buying patterns and browsing behaviors are constantly changing in the aggregate. It's not about an individual, it's about "trends".

And of course, a lot of it is also complete bullshit, as you suspected. People with MBAs in marketing are pretty good at justifying their parasitic existence to gullible executives.

It's not that all of the data is useless. Every business needs some information to compete. But, these data miners have gone deep into the rabbit hole of "business intelligence" and are often hoarding information its own sake and to look good to the boss.

Effectively, as an advertiser, you can pay for some info on someone you have the option to show an ad to.

They'll tell you things like "they are in their 40s and love anime and shopped at target recently"

The worst part is that typically, when you get hyper-specific enough, you can make unidentified info identifiable.

"Male, muslim, just got married, works as a plumber, late 20s, lives in this part of this city, has this device" and then paired with "has this IP" (narrows down to the block or house)

Also the US government buys the same info via shell companies.

At this stage it’s bots collecting data to be parsed by bots to be interpreted by bots. Using assumption based connections to loosely tie IDs together and packaged like it’s the gospel.

Garbage orgs buying garbage info to sell garbage.

🙌

Companies like BlueKai collect and aggregate these to form ...err aggregates, or groupings.

If one company wanted to sell their ads to "lonely", "adult", "men", "needing hot milfs" and in "their area", they'll batch some groupings and sell it to that company to target.

People move all the time and so the hottest, most recent info pays the highest.

Advertising agencies mostly. Probably a few government offices, too. Google uses theirs in-house.

all have the same information

Thousands of "bits" of new info are being generated every second

There isn't really a universal answer. Different companies have different objectives. Some of them sell it to third parties, some of them use it for a variety of business purposes. Some of them collect and store it without any idea what they are going to do with it.

I actually worked for a company that did this. They're a commercial and industrial vehicle OEM. A lot of their hardware interfaces with the vehicle CAN bus (the computer network on all modern vehicles). They would vacuum up every message broadcast on the CAN bus and dump it into a data lake while having absolutely no idea what they were going to do with it.

So let's say you use your credit card to buy drinks at the bar every single night. This data gets to the health insurance company and they might raise your rates. I remember 15+ years ago talking about credit data with people who were involved. This is before facebook was anywhere as big as it is now (to give context). I worked for a company that developed software for POS terminals and no one ever heard of the company I worked for except this girl I met from American express. They wanted so badly to get data from us.

Just ballpark, how many companies do you think there are in the USA?

It depends if you do new things tomorrow means new data to collect. This business is mainly a market forecast not only on your past details but especially on what you do today and you will do tomorrow. If tomorrow, for example, you arrange a wedding, by knowing I can arrange it to make my own profit for example by selling you white roses.

It's purpose is to make marketing or influencing as quantifiable as possible