How I stalked 20 thousand middle-aged moms in Delhi

Facebook Audience Insights — This powerful marketing insights tool can help us take a peep into the lives of the people of an entire city.

Sometimes instead of stalking a person, we can stalk millions of them together

A bunch of us are creepy stalkers on Facebook or other social media sites. Whether it is to vet a new friend we made, or to keep tabs on our exes, many many of us have scrolled through long Facebook walls, and tried to search usernames across Twitter and Instagram and LinkedIn to make connections.

I wouldn’t say it is healthy habit, needless to add, beyond a certain threshold, even on the wrong side of legal line, in most countries. But it is an intrinsic human tendency — to desire to know more about others, while having a mask on our own faces.

Let us take a look today at Facebook Audience Insights (which is available on this URL if you want to try out yourself — https://www.facebook.com/ads/audience-insights/interests). While it is a tool to help marketing folks better target audiences to reach people of intended groups, it also is a powerful tool to profile a city or an entire country. It can give us insights of unprecedented levels like

What chocolate brand do 18–20 year olds like in Mumbai ?

Which brand of bags do 40–50 year old women buy more in Moscow ?

What TV Shows do people in the IT industry, residing in London prefer ?

These insights and analysis, of the order, magnitude, and accuracy that huge firms pay millions, even billions of dollars to big survey houses (like Nielson, IRI, IMRB etc) for.

Note: If you want a different case study using 18–25 year old Uttar Pradesh redidents instead of moms from Delhi, read this instead https://medium.com/@championswimmer/what-young-people-in-uttar-pradesh-think-and-do-fd632c3b30bc

Let get stalking

Start Creating an audience

We’ll start from “Everyone in the world” and narrow down from there.

Then we will select a city or county or even a country. Facebook will guide you along in your creepventure.

Select geographic region first, then narrow down other parameters. Facebook will show you tooltips to help you along the way.

Let us say we want to select all the nice moms in my city, Delhi. We can pick age group and gender.

Now not all 45–50 aged women are necessarily married, let along be mothers. But Facebook takes care of that as well.

You can select marital status for targeting. And then you can select “parenthood” properties. That is, using the Facebook family properties (someone marks you as their mother on Facebook, Facebook knows how old your child is), you can target mothers, and specifically mothers of kids of a particular age group. I will address this here, because this needs to be said, allowing big firms to target mothers of children of age groups 0–12 months (one of the options) is a very slippery slope. But anyway let’s proceed, I want moms of kids in high-school, just about to go into college.

There are extremely fine-grained selectors, including

What language a person speaks,

What is their level of education

What kind of occupation they are in

Specifically in US — their ethnicity

Specifically in US — their political affiliations

Now that we have our sights on our target audience, this is the point where most marketing firms would just blast an advertisement towards this group. But wait, we let’s find out more about the lives of mothers aged 45–50, with kids in high-school and college, living in Delhi.

Peeping into their lives

Facebook now, on the right hand side pane shows trends. What do these people do, what do they like ? Do they use a desktop or a mobile ? Which places they visit. This is a treasure trove.

Percentage of our audience in various jobs, compared to the same ratio for all Facebook users

So we see that lot of people in Education and Libraries (suggesting school teachers) and Management being the biggest draw. We also see that in Delhi, people in this segment are far less likely to be in healthcare/medical services/architecture/engineering than the average on Facebook.

What do they like ?

Let us find out what Delhi moms like then.

Pages liked by our audience, and affinity (chances of our audience to have liked that page, vs rest of Facebook)

Ok, this is really interesting. I know down here in India, we have a bunch of well educated people still falling of “babas” and “matas” of spiritual and numerological leaning (God save India from its weird superstitions) so we see high affinity towards Nirmal Guruji, and Neha Lalwani, and some Guru ji. About a thousand of our Delhi moms are into this mystic shit, which I am guessing all three pages have strong overlap (using the Facebook Insights tool, we can check cross-affinity and confirm our hunch).

Delhi moms are into clay kitchen ware and wedding gifts too, naturally. So Ekaani and Mora Taara have high affinity as well. For both these brands, Delhi moms make up close to 5–10% of their audience.

While that list was ranked by affinity (showing how much more likely Delhi moms are to like something compared to the rest of the people on Facebook), let us take a look at absolute numbers now. We figured how specifically Delhi moms are different from others, but not let us find out what they all really really like, in raw numbers.

How many of the 20 thousand Delhi moms like the given pages ?

Whoa there. A whole 17% of them are into further fake-spiritual shit — some BK Shivani (a female iteration of Asaram Bapu / other fraud babas). Next up on the list, is Fabiosa India. So Fabiosa is a digital magazine / Facebook page for moms. So I get it. They are good at being mom-magnets.

Ofcourse, moms that age need to start think about nutrition — whether it is for their kids, or they (and their husbands) want to lose weight. So Dr Shiksha has been making a killing with Delhi moms. Also home decor is important, you don’t want to invite people over at this age in life to a spartan home. You want people to compliment your sofas and ask you where did you get that nicely designed TV table from ? In comes Livspace and UrbanLadder.

How can you talk about Indian women, and not talk of sarees ? Jaypore is definitely selling a bunch of Pashminas to Delhi moms, or at least they definitely desire to get some.

I do not know how many husbands of these Delhi moms will appreciate but at least 10% of them are ardent followers of Ssumier S Pasricha, whether you like it or not.

What these women surely want a lot is to leave their husbands and kids off to themselves for a while, and gang up and take a trip down to Rajasthan or Shimla or somewhere. Because the affinity and the absolute numbers for Women on Wanderlust is through the roof. If you are her husband or her kid, and you’re reading this, you need to take your mom/wife to some vacations. Seriously. Data says so.

Really loved seeing all these happy women on trips, without and shackles (read husbands and kids). No wonder Delhi moms, across the board like this page a lot

Taking middle aged women on trips is lucrative business folks. Just see the happy faces in the photos. Come on, someone needs to start giving WoW some competition.

I am not sure what we learnt

Honestly I am not. There are quite a few takeaways.

One, definitely is, this is a great tool, and in the hands of an able marketing professional, can generate brilliant insights. Me, not a marketing professional, with no understanding of how 45–50 year old women in Delhi behave, can tell you right now, you have a better chance of getting Delhi moms are your customers if you are a travel agency organizing all-women tours, than anything else. Unless ofcourse you want to don some white clothes and start your own spiritual sham (no business model better than that, of course).

The other, increasingly as we are learning since the Cambridge Analytica fallout, is that Facebook has been creeping into our lives like anything, and then selling this mass-stalking analysis and insight to anyone who wants it. Mind you, to get the data that I got, I did not actually pay Facebook a single penny. All this data is available even before I actually pay for a single advert on Facebook. Facebook (and mind you, Twitter and LinkedIn too) have been playing fast and loose with access to this huge aggregate data that can allow people to profile a group of people. Often times, based on race, color, religion too (although such targeting isn’t explicitly available, but correlating with other factors, entirely possible.

Finally, it boils down to the very choice of lives we are living on these digital platforms. Opening up our lives, our relationships, our tastes and distastes up for the world to see. And machines — with access to unlimited data — is the most potent profiling tool; better than any profiler the FBI has ever trained.

When a mom of a 8 month baby keeps seeing the advertisement of a particlar brand of cereal over and over on her Twitter feed, Facebook feed, her Instagram feed. It starts to make home in her subconscious mind. She doesn’t have to look at the ad and think “Oh we will buy cereal XYZ” immediately. But when she is at a supermarket, looking for cereals, those advertisements she has constantly seen on her mobile and laptop screens day in and day out will trigger her (without her conscious and deliberate choice) to pick up cereal XYZ. Legal precedent prevents targetting based on race, religion and color. It prevents targeting ads on Facebook users below 18. But it doesn’t prevent anyone to target parents of a 8 month old baby, who, even before she can start walking or talking, is consuming products advertised to her parents via deeply invasive tools that had profiled her parents down to the bone.

That sucks

Jeffrey Hammerbacher, former Data Scientist at Facebook, who in large part contributed to building the systems that give us these invasive profile of an aggregate group of people, found his conscience tugging at the strings of his heart one day. One morning he woke up and decided he cannot do this anymore.

Jeffrey Hammerbacher, former Data Scientist at Facebook

He now runs Cloudera. But I am not sure the tools he is building is still, now, even in an indirect way, continue to affect our lives the very same way he didn’t want to.