This book sounds an alarm and calls for action. It analyzes the media, marketing, retailing, and advertising industries in relation to the American consumer. It supplies information of, knowledge of, and reactions to what these entities have done over the last 200 years. The primary focus is on what is currently being done and what will probably continue with regard to the embedding of fast-paced digital technology. The book is organized into eight chapters: “A Major Transformation,” “Confronting New Worries,” “Drawing on the Past,” “The Internet as Test Bed,” “Rethinking Television,” “The Customized Store,” “Issues of Trust,” and “Envy, Suspicion, and the Public Sphere.” The book concludes with a notes section that consists of annotations from the text of the chapters (mostly bibliographic notations with occasional additional comments) and a useful index.

A historical perspective is adopted in order to set the context. Traditionally, marketing and media consisted of product display and haggling to reach a sale. This gave way to mass advertising, goods display, and uniform pricing, which resulted in an egalitarian and transparent marketplace with visible products and prices. This goal was reached with the help of the Federal Trade Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Today, a different scenario has emerged. The author asserts that this is out of or beyond control, except by the retailing, marketing, and media firms working both independently and collaboratively. Media is concerned (the book calls it “worried”) about the fragmentation of audiences by the splintering of media channels. Similarly, marketing is concerned about the best way to reach people through splintered channels. Media and marketing agonize over the increasing ability of customers to avoid advertising messages altogether, as well as whether production integration activities are persuasive alternatives for consumer capture. Retailers compound this psychology with concerns about Wal-Mart, other low-priced retailers, and Internet competition.

Trade press articles, conferences, the trying of new operations, and consulting firms, through information about what others are doing and the proselytizing of alleged best practices, have influenced marketing and media system executives to seek a solution: a marketing and media system dedicated to gathering information about consumers. The result is a database marketing system typified by screening for appropriateness (making judgments about whether individuals are desired as customers); targeted tracking (following actual or potential customers’ marketing and/or media activities to learn the consumers’ interests and to decide what materials to offer them); data mining (exploration of actual or potential customers’ data that have been collected by tracking customers, registering them, or purchasing information about them); interactivity (the drawing of individuals to products by encouraging actual or potential customers to interrogate the marketing and media firms’ virtual or actual representatives in the evaluation and purchasing process); mass customization (the drawing of individuals to products by using what has been learned from targeted tracking and interactivity in order to offer tailored choices to customers based on specific niches in which customers have been placed); and cultivation of relationships (the initiation of action, including mass customization and interactivity, after customers have been fit into niches to establish bonds that keep customers coming back).

It is asserted that an emerging awareness that such surreptitious activities are occurring has begun to drive a new culture of suspicion and envy. Most people believe that media and marketing systems that do not show the same products and deals to everyone are unfair. Also there is concern that personal information on individuals is used in ways that individuals would not want. There is concern that customers do not understand the implications of giving up information. There is concern that the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines on customer data security do not result in an open database. Consumers know little about data mining or how companies use the data they gather.

The phenomenon of setting up a framework and architecture for the next 20 or 30 years of commercial activity, including whether it is what we want, probably can’t be stopped, but ways are suggested to slow and weaken it. The Federal Trade Commission should require Web sites to replace the label “privacy policy” with “using your information.” School systems should develop curricula that tightly integrate consumer education and media literacy for students in all grades (I would include adult education). The federal government should require retailers to specifically disclose what data they have collected about individual customers and when and how they use the data. This book’s recommendations might be a starting point. I suggest the additional goal of deciding what controls on marketing and media should exist for privacy and database marketing, which the book discusses as an election issue in local, state, national, and international political bodies.