Another
piece in The Guardian this week (some of the Brit papers are a very
good read) discusses how Tesco harvests — and then replants —
customer data.  This is of interest because Tesco, a British
company, is hankering after the U.S. grocery chain, Albertson´s. 



See “Tesco stocks up on inside knowledge of shoppers´ lives´´ below and “ Profile of an upmarket C10 deserter“ sidebar.

Heather Tomlinson and Rob Evans
Tuesday September 20, 2005

Tesco
is quietly building a profile of you, along with every individual in
the country – a map of personality, travel habits, shopping preferences
and even how charitable and eco-friendly you are. A subsidiary of the
supermarket chain has set up a database, called Crucible, that is
collating detailed information on every household in the UK, whether
they choose to shop at the retailer or not.

The
company refuses to reveal the information it holds, yet Tesco is
selling access to this database to other big consumer groups, such as
Sky, Orange and Gillette. “It contains details of every consumer in the
UK at their home address across a range of demographic, socio-economic
and lifestyle characteristics,” says the marketing blurb of dunnhumby,
the Tesco subsidiary in question. It has “added intelligent profiling
and targeting” to its data through a software system called Zodiac.
This profiling can rank your enthusiasm for promotions, your brand
loyalty, whether you are a “creature of habit” and when you prefer to
shop. As the blurb puts it: “The list is endless if you know what you
are looking for.”

This
publicity material was, until recently, available on the website of
dunnhumby, but now appears less forthcoming. Attempts by a number of
Guardian reporters to retrieve their own personal information under the
Data Protection Act led to a four month battle; the request was
ultimately denied so the Guardian has appealed to the Information
Commissioner. Tesco has provided some personal data held by Clubcard,
the loyalty scheme that monitors members' shopping and which has been
credited with fuelling the supermarket group's astronomical growth in
the past decade.

But
as far as Crucible is concerned, the company admits it has “put great
effort into designing our services” so information is classed in a way
that circumvents disclosure provisions in the Data Protection Act.
Clues about the content of dunnhumby's database have appeared in the
company's marketing literature. Crucible, it says, is a “massive pool”
of consumer data. “In the perfect world, we would know everything we
need to know about consumers. We would have a complete picture:
attitudes, behaviour, lifestyle. In reality, we never know as much as
we would like.” But Crucible, it suggests, has got much further than
rival systems by pooling data from several sources and then using the
vast Clubcard data pool to profile customers.

Together,
Crucible and Zodiac can generate a map of how an individual thinks,
works and, more importantly, shops. The map classifies consumers across
10 categories: wealth, promotions, travel, charities, green, time poor,
credit, living style, creature of habit and adventurous.

A
“Mrs Pumpkin” is cited: she makes pennies work when she shops, mostly
uses cash, has a steady repertoire of products but experiments with the
new, shops at various times, spends a little more on eco-friendly
items, is involved with charitable giving, is rarely away and likes
promotions for things she buys.

How
does Tesco get the information? Clubcard is used to target promotions
at particular cardholders. But Crucible is separate and Tesco insists
that while loyalty scheme data is used by Crucible it does so
anonymously rather than a house-by-house, name-by-name basis.

Dunnhumby's
chairman, Clive Humby, offers a few more clues. Companies such as
Experian, Claritas and Equifax have databases on individuals and
Crucible collects from them all. Any questionnaire you may have
completed, any reader offers you responded to, are bought to build up a
picture of attitudes and habits. Crucible also trawls the electoral
roll, collecting names, ages and housing information. It uses data from
the Land Registry, Office for National Statistics and other bodies to
generate a profile of the area you live in. Zodiac is employed to
provide a more detailed profile. The combination is valuable to many
consumer goods firms: dunnhumby generated profits of £4m on sales of
£28m in the last year for which accounts are available. Some £12m of
business was done directly with Tesco.

Mr
Humby and Edwina Dunn founded dunnhumby. The two have a reputation as
shrewd operators in the marketing industry and still own shares in the
firm alongside Tesco's majority stake. How the supermarket group and
other customers use the data is less clear. One former employee
involved in the company's marketing told the Guardian that it can be
used to decide how to target offers to individuals or where to open new
stores.

A
Tesco spokesman said last night: “All work carried out by dunnhumby is
regulated by the Data Protection Act and the Direct Marketing
Association Code of Practice.” But, as the supermarket unveils yet
another set of sparkling half-year figures today, one thing is clear:
while past success may have been built on the company knowing its
customers, Tesco plans to secure its future by knowing everyone else's
customers as well.

Profile of an upmarket C10 deserter

When
it comes to my personal information, I'm a natural paranoid. So when
signing up for a Tesco Clubcard to get those cashback vouchers and
offers, I made a point of providing as little information as the
application would allow.

No
matter. According to Tesco's disclosures under the Data Protection Act
(DPA), in the year my card was in use the supermarket managed to build
a substantial – if rather wayward – portrait of this reluctant
shopper's habits. A formal DPA request, followed by numerous letters to
and fro, a terse telephone conversation and finally, a fax explaining
that, yes, this information would be used in a journalistic exercise,
finally produced two sides of information.

Apparently,
I'm a gal who hankers after “finer foods”- indeed, a “natural chef”,
though friends tell me this probably has more to do with my tendency to
cook with natural ingredients than any signs of being a budding
Nigella. I am, Tesco determines, “upmarket” – a reference, I suspect,
to my habit of buying organic food (Green & Blacks mint chocolate
being a particular favourite).

The
database defines me through the past four years, placing me in the
mysterious “C10” category for 2003, having been an “H13” a year earlier
– whatever that means. My “family type” is “other,” though alternative
social options are not listed. Most importantly for the supermarket, I
just don't spend as much as I could there. Under “share of spend” with
Tesco I am deemed to have “potential”.

My
household carries a “reference number”, the date of my last visit, with
branches used in the past. It says whether I have used Clubcard
vouchers and correctly states I do not want my personal information to
be passed to other parts of the “Tesco Group”. There is no information
as to whether I am diabetic, teetotal or have a special diet.

Five
slots describe my “shopping habits”, each carries the words “Not
shopped in last eight weeks”. Clearly, I'm a Tesco deserter and a prime
candidate for those £10-off vouchers that have been dropping through
the letter box of late.

· To learn how to get your personal information under the Data Protection Act, see www.guardian.co.uk/foi

The UK paper The Guardian carries a couple interesting pieces this week
on the British company, The Press Association, or as it is know now,
the PA Group.  Essentially, it demonstrates that investment in
creative people who can leverage digital technology can make
money. 

See ´´The new heart of British journalism´´ and “Service used by every paper makes only 1% of the money
´´

The new heart of British journalism

Martin Wainwright
Tuesday September 20, 2005

Twice
now, extraordinary things have happened to the sleepy market town of
Howden – little more than a village on the rich, flat land where the
river Humber is joined by the Yorkshire Ouse. The first time, in the
1920s when the local airfield became the centre of Britain's airship
industry, ended abruptly with the loss of the R101 (and the then air
minister) in a storm over northern France. The second time is now, and
it shows no sign of collapsing at all.

Quietly
over a decade, Howden has become one of the biggest centres of
journalism in the country. More than 650 staff of the Press Association
– well over double the organisation's workforce in London – occupy
buildings scattered round the quaint streets, as if an Oxbridge college
had dropped in. Editorial trainees are in the Bishop's Manor, a
medieval roost with jumbo plasma TV screens in the fireplaces where the
Bishops of Durham used to warm up after trekking down from the
north-east. Guests from London stay in a redbrick Georgian manor house
which looks like something out of Jane Austen.

The
high command of PA Sport has the vast, curving top floor of a
purpose-built office block which replaced the town's redundant police
station and magistrates' court two years ago. From here, among scores
of other sports information services, Premier League goals and match
analysis are texted live to mobile phones all over the world.

Howden
is the main laboratory for PA's expansion from a comprehensive and
reliable news-wire into the structural support for newspapers,
websites, television, radio and magazines. The guts of the service is
produced elsewhere, by reporters at news events, parliament or sports
fixtures, but the processing and ever more imaginative marketing go on
in Yorkshire.

Tony
Watson, PA's editorial director, a multiple award-winner and former
editor of the Yorkshire Post, relishes the innovation. Outside his
office on the ground floor, reporters' material is slimmed into
Teletext bulletins (“An excellent subediting exercise,” he says. “The
contents have to have exactly the right wordage to fill a line across
the screen.”) On the next floor up, the same data is repackaged for
listings and, with extra content, for breaking-news sections on
websites, including the Guardian's. On the top floor it gets
reprocessed again for sport.

Another
section turns it into mini-bulletins for mobiles, text-only or with
pictures. There are initiatives to expand it into digital TV, with a
studio just opened and a specialist journalists' training course
starting next month. Although PA has always been, and remains, modestly
anonymous, its Howden super-office is starting to publish on a scale
most editors must envy.

Touring
the main building, Watson points out a wall pinned with national and
international news pages from British local newspapers. Copy has always
been provided for these by PA but now staff at Howden offer story
choice and complete page layout too. A couple of those magazines dished
out by rail companies are produced here with advertising and printing
subcontracted to regional newspaper customers of PA. A canny use of
partnerships has been part of the agency's growth. The editorial centre
grew out of joint working with now vanished Westminster Press. PA
Weather, which now sells its meteorology to road-gritting departments
as well as the media, has just taken over the other, Dutch half of the
joint operation.

Howden
is now full up, says Watson, whose colleague Chris Buckley, managing
director of PA Sport, takes over half the middle floor on Saturdays,
when football needs 70 extra staff and the listings terminals are
briefly unoccupied. There has been criticism about PA pay rates – this
month the National Union of Journalists published a survey showing
levels as low as £12,000 a year at Howden. But the size of the
operation is buoying the flagging local economy, and vacancies are
quickly filled.

And
now there is India. By November, 50 staff will be backing up the
Yorkshire operation in offices in Mangalore, on the south-west coast of
India, which are also designed to be a jumping off point for further
news and sport packaging overseas. “There's tremendous interest in
British sport in Asia,” says Watson, describing automated systems in
Howden which text or email results, as they happen, in Cantonese, Thai,
Mandarin and many other languages. “But there's also a growing number
of fixtures locally, which we can handle either for other markets or
for the countries involved.”

Two
recent deals see PA distributing German sports results in Germany and –
from this autumn – selling South African premier league reports and
results within South Africa. Mr Buckley says: “They're holding the
World Cup there in five years' time and Fifa has recommended the
data-processing system as a model for the rest of Africa.”

After
the R101 tragedy in 1930, there was gloom in Howden when glamorous
airship designers stopped coming from London. Today, the “Howden
Flyer”, a direct, two-hour train service from London which stops at the
town six times a day to drop off largely PA clients, is only going to
get busier.