The name trade is just a species of inductive reasoning. It's like the blind man feeling an elephant's tail and assuming he's found a rope, or the comic-strip aliens who land on Earth, encounter a coddled house cat, and conclude that they've reached a planet ruled by cats. Sometimes marketers' guesses may seem like a joke, but they're still informed guesses, meaning that someone who doesn't know you knows at least one specific fact about you. The alternative to this Keystone Kops stuff is, basically, a world in which junk mailers and their online counterparts do know all about us. Marketers envision a world in which they have so much information about us that they can anticipate our needs, providing exactly the offers we want and skipping the stuff we don't.
Interactive television holds out the same possibility.
I'm reminded of the late Ottoman sultans, living amid a retinue dedicated to their whims, their tastes continually reflected back in the fun-house mirror of a thousand obsequious retainers with their own agendas. Simple Though mainstream marketing gurus have latched onto the concept of simplicity as if it were a new-fangled notion, Malcolm Howard discovers living simply is neither simple nor easy. Storming the Gates Faced with the prospects of making less wages than men or making about the same amount of money with a college degree that men can make without one women are beating a path to college campuses in record numbers.