EN: We love to answer this marketing survey every day
We’ve all filled out this survey, and we loved it so much that we keep coming back for more.
There’s this survey about what we like. It has tons of pictures: pictures of the beach, pictures of people clubbing, pictures of hobbies we love, sports we practice, famous people we admire. Singers, athletes, politicians and activists.
When we find something we like, we mark it as ‘I like this’.
We fill this survey out every day, and get such a kick out of it. We don’t get excited or anything, but it gives us a buzz. It’s a feeling good enough that we go fill out the survey especially when we’re bored.
The enticing part is, our friends submit the questions. When they submit questions we like, we want to mark 'I like this' even more. And that makes us want to submit some questions ourselves: do you like this song? How about this music festival? How about my face?
When a ton of people says 'yeah, I love this!', even when they’re complete strangers, that’s when we get excited. (Particularly when the picture is of our face)
It never ends. It was designed not to have an end. Anyway, we enjoy it and it’s free, so we keep doing it.
But what is this survey for?
Knowing what we love is a very good way to know what we would pay money for.
But people would never sit down and voluntarily answer an advertising survey like this. So the authors put together two deal-making details: pretty pictures and the promise of getting complimented when we post them.
And one billion of us have it installed on our phones: a pink square right on the home screen, with the word “Instagram” underneath it. We tap it open and start:
I love these sneakers *tap tap* ❤️
I love this city *tap tap* ❤️
I love this artist *tap tap* ❤️
And we get a small continuous buzz of nice neurochemicals in our brain, in exchange for our information: sneakers we’d love to buy, cities we’d love to visit, artists we’d love to see in concert.
And then, that information we gave helps choose the ads we see in between the questions of the survey.
I think it’s a bit creepy.
And there’s really nothing we can do: this is the way Instagram works. And Facebook. And Google.
(Not the way Apple works though; they make money off of hardware and services like iCloud and Apple Music, but have a whole focus on privacy).
While we use these services, we provide them with our data.
But we can look for alternatives that don’t leverage our personal data, like replacing Google with DuckDuckGo, Gmail with iCloud email, and others.
If you’d like to reach out about this post, drop me an email ☺️