Extenuating Circumstances

“Without spoiling anything, you discover something at the end that’s incredibly important about one of the characters you’ve been playing, which creates an incredible disconnect between the audience and the character – and I think that is deeply, deeply flawed.

I'm no neophyte when it comes to targeting — not only do I work at Ad Age, but I cover direct marketing. Yet even I was taken aback when, as an experiment, we asked a database-marketing company to come up with a demographic and psychographic profile of me based on publicly available information. Was it ever spot-on.