You might recall that
back in December we confirmed your worst fears. A report from 404 Media said that Cox Media Group (CMG) was pitching to advertisers an ad platform called Active Listening that would serve up ads based on conversations you were having within “earshot” of your phone’s microphone. For example, you might say to your spouse in the privacy of your bedroom (but near your phone) that your underwear is getting worn out and is threadbare. All of a sudden, you might see underwear ads pop up on your phone’s screen over the next few days.
Subscribing to such a service makes sense for advertisers because companies would prefer to spend their marketing dollars where they can get an instant return on the investment. CMG uses AI to pick up on conversations that could be used to find products that the phone owner would be very interested in buying right away. As an advertiser, you can’t find a pack of more qualified buyers than those who say that they need your product ASAP.
To further prove that Active Listening is a real service offered to advertisers,
a pitch deck made for investors from CMG has leaked. In the deck, the media outfit admits using AI to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.” But advertisers don’t live on spying alone. The deck adds that combining the voice data obtained through Active Listening with behavioral data can be used to “target in-market consumers.”
The leaked pitch deck shows that Google, Meta, Facebook are, or were once customers of Cox Media Group. | Image credit-404 Media
CMG’s pitch deck notes that consumers have a tendency to “leave a data trail based on their conversations and online behavior.” The AI-powered software collects and then analyzes the combined voice data and behavioral data from more than 470 sources. The slideshow that contains the pitch deck points out that
Google, Amazon, and Facebook are CMG clients although Google did remove it from its “Partners Program” website when 404 Media contacted Google seeking a comment.
“All advertisers must comply with all applicable laws and regulations as well as our Google Ads policies, and when we identify ads or advertisers that violate these policies, we will take appropriate action.” Google
Facebook parent Meta is reportedly reviewing CMG to see if the latter violated any of Meta’s terms of service. A Meta spokesman told the New York Post, “Meta does not use your phone’s microphone for ads and we’ve been public about this for years. We are reaching out to CMG to get them to clarify that their program is not based on Meta data.”
An Amazon spokesman said to 404 Media that it “has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so.” 404 Media also reported last December that a company in New Hampshire called MindSift admitted that it used voice data culled from conversations phone owners had while near their phones to place targeted ads.
