Now, instead of investing time to understand customers’ unmet needs and unspoken desires as successful companies had been doing for generations, we began to monitor their online behaviour, looking for patterns and vulnerabilities, gathering data to leverage later—sometimes to serve or oftentimes to exploit the user. Virality became top of mind.

Features such as advanced segmentation make the job of a knowledgeable analysis ninja easier, but at the end of the day, our analytics tools lack even basic intelligence.