Personalized Marketing aka CRM

Adage (free registration) has a revealing article online that’s tied to virtual spaces (even though it may not seem like it is). It’s called “In Search of Marketing’s Future“. You can guess some of what that future is if I’m talking about it. From the article:

The event {Outlook 2005}, which came one year after McDonald’s CMO Larry Light declared the death of mass marketing, made clear that there is life after that death — namely in the form of hyper-targeted one-to-one marketing strategies that use a variety of technologies.

That sounds sufficiently innocent; almost friendly even. As do a couple other quotables. But here’s the a piece of the article that caught my attention:

“We built this huge umbrella. We looked strongly and deeply at the internet,” Mr. Weedfald said. “The internet has very little value unless you understand the back end of something called CRM. It’s about tracking, converting and retaining customers 24 hours a day, utilizing the power of wireless and the internet.”

Is now a good time to talk about the “tracking” and spying tools that are already employed in virtual worlds? These comments sure make it sound like Big Brother has siblings. Should that be “restraining”?