Comment by skywhopper
15 days ago
It is entirely related, because AI marketing is an amped up version of traditional dark-pattern marketing. And since every tech company is on the AI hype train, then they all fall into the same willingness to justify the worst behavior because of their desperate need to get on the forefront of what they’ve convinced themselves is the only path to growth. But as consumers, since we are confronted with all tech companies all following the same dark patterns, we feel the impact suddenly much stronger than with past one-at-a-time panicky company over-marketing efforts.
AI marketing is not different at all from performance marketing of other solutions. This is really just ordinary consent management and privacy problem. I have participated in large scale email marketing implementations too, and know how it looks from the inside. As a tech partner you may even have a good peer on the business side who cares about customers and compliance, but institutional resistance is still hard to overcome. Sometimes it is just as dumb as an old spreadsheet with contacts being uploaded again and again into your mass mail system, without any consent tracking and ignoring any opt-outs that came after the spreadsheet was created.