Big data in the body: Marketers can use consumer DNA information for marketing

Businesses advertise and sell products based on your shopping preferences, age, income, and social networking activities. But in the future, they may advertise according to your DNA information.

Does your genetic information reveal that you may be suffering from lactose intolerance? Businesses based on this information to provide you with "Shu milk" coupons. Your genetic information reveals that you may be bald in your middle age? Business advertisements may display promotional information about toiletries. A US start-up company, Miinome, is planning to build the world's first "human gene membership market", in other words to sell users ' DNA information to marketers.

The information explosion of our time, the DNA data is no exception. It is predicted that around 250,000 people worldwide will spend huge sums of money on their DNA in full/partial sequencing in 2013. Although 250,000 people do not look much, the number will soon increase to millions in the next few years.

Miinome plans to adopt a membership system, the use of electronic data to store members of the DNA data information, and then the user to determine the fate of their own data and usage. "Our members can use this data for charitable and academic purposes, helping welfare agencies and research institutions to conduct scientific research and reduce the cost of scientific research." ”

The idea is good, the reality is brutal

However, large-scale marketing based on genetic data has so far not been desirable, but it does not rule out the possibility of a new marketing area in the future. One of the reasons for blocking gene marketing is that DNA decoding costs are too high, but the current price of gene sequencing is getting lower and higher, and the future may be widespread. According to Miinome's plan, if users are willing to use their DNA data for marketing, they can perform a genetic sequencing exercise free of charge.

At the same time, the network advertising model also needs to be synchronized update, perhaps the network advertising companies need to provide a new advertising model to analyze the user's information and achieve absolute precision positioning. Miinome's data experts say consumer-class internet companies like Amazon and Twitter will become their main customers because they have the resources of strong server computing power, software technology support, data mining and algorithms.

In addition to the above problems, DNA data analysis is not easy, and expensive, according to the current technology, many of the collection of DNA information still need manual completion. Further, while researchers have long wanted to establish a direct link between disease and genetic defects, studies have shown that diseases such as diabetes have many causes, including the environment in which users live. The user's environment cannot be obtained by DNA sequencing. "Unless we fully understand all of the DNA data, the marketing campaign will be very difficult until then," Miinome's researchers said. ”

"If we only get a little bit of accurate DNA data, that's not very useful," says senior management at Invitae, a genetic sequencing company in San Francisco. ”

From the point of view of scientific research, it is very difficult to use genetic data for marketing, but in the eyes of advertising companies, it is very feasible to use genetic data for marketing. "It's an advertising agency that can use genetic data to pinpoint a user to a store or restaurant." ”

(Responsible editor: Fumingli)