Because there isn't enough of emergent conspiracy with our current medical system, lets try to get the loved ones in on it too. We can all lie and doctors can use this new found flexibility to finally bring down the cost of healthcare.
When a child comes, there are all kinds of new expenses: diapers, formula, clothes, pediatricians, strollers, cribs, baby monitors, toys. . . .
Personally though, I'm surprised the canonical example isn't buying a new home. I bought my first home two months ago, and it seems like every day in the mail I get two offers for life insurance, another for lawn care, and another for furniture/blinds. But I'm not seeing a deluge of online ads for those things. Maybe it's an opportunity?
It's much more than just the things you buy for the new baby. Having a child is a watershed moment in your life from a marketing perspective:
1. Your life is different. You used to self-herd [1] yourself to one set of brands and businesses before you had a child. That is now broken. Marketers have a small window of opportunity to get you hooked on new brands and businesses. Once they do, you'll self-herd to them for a very long time, if not for ever.
2. You are tired and you don't make the best decisions in that situation. This leaves you especially susceptible to marketing, which, because of #1, will have a long-lasting impact.
That being said, the article is mostly bullshit. My wife recently had a baby. We didn't keep it a secret in any way on Facebook, Google or by our purchase behavior. We didn't get hit by any kind of directed marketing (except for retargeting ads online) until after we had the child and the record of birth is part of the public county records.
But this only applies for the first child, when the parents are the most nervous about living up to expectations. By the second or third child, they're like: "I get onesies at Goodwill and garage sales since they're cheaper and they'll only be in it for a couple of months before the knees are worn-out, or they've outgrown it." and "Pack-n-play? Those are expensive - I just take a blanket along for them to play on. Takes less room in the car and easier to clean."
I don't understand. Do you think these companies are sending coupons out of a sense of charity? They spend so much money giving coupons in the hopes of winning brand loyalty and making back a whole lot more money.
Yes! ... at least in the new version (I haven't seen the older version but just noticed it's on Amazon Prime).
What's scary about that scene is that so much of our infrastructure is available on the Internet. There are projects scanning for "support systems" (including the baby monitor in yesterday's story), but most of these system rely on technology that's older and less well maintained than our computer systems.
The original version also - yes, in 1969 - involves hacking the traffic light control computer system to cause chaos in Turin. The elite computer hacker who pulls off this feat by sneaking into the traffic control center and replacing the reel to reel tape on one of the mainframes is played, rather depressingly and entirely to type, by Benny Hill. I guess they didn't have the go-to computer hacker stereotype quite worked out in 1969, but they knew that geeks had potential as comic relief...
From Benny Hill to Dennis Nedry (Jurassic Park) to The Warlock (Die Hard 4), the development of the unheroic hacker stereotype; the heroic ones are slimmer...
Yeah, it turns out Zion isn't a place in the middle east, but a hypothetical place brought on by nuclear war. So in this case, nuclear proliferation is part of some crazy apocalyptic prophecy.
