Journal·
Building a Walled Garden Out of Your Customer’s Saliva
A free DNA testing kiosk in the lobby of any high-footfall venue produces, on average, 1,200 unique data subjects per day. With the right consent flow, those subjects produce roughly $14 of attributable lifetime value each. The kiosks pay for themselves in eleven days.
Angela Fisher
Front-end Engineer
1. The Kiosk
The kiosk is roughly the size of an ATM. It says, in cheerful letters, DISCOVER YOUR HERITAGE — FREE, and in a much smaller font, on the back, AND CONTRIBUTE TO MARKETING SCIENCE. The user spits into a cup. The kiosk thanks them, prints a tasteful certificate (“60% Norwegian”), and silently appends a new genome to our marketing database.
We have deployed kiosks in shopping centres, music festivals, and one or two airports where security is, charitably, a vibe.
2. Lactose Tolerance as a Targeting Signal
The advertising industry has spent two decades trying to infer purchase intent from clickstreams. We have leapfrogged this by simply reading the underlying genome. Lactose tolerance is now one of our highest-performing targeting signals — significantly more predictive of dairy purchase than any inferred behavioural cohort. Our oat-milk client did not initially understand what we had done for them. They understood when the numbers came in.
3. The Paternity Conversion Event
Our highest-margin product, by some distance, is the paternity conversion event — a private notification, served via push, when our model detects, with high confidence, a discrepancy between a user’s self-reported family tree and their genome. We do not advertise this product. It is sold direct, at retainer, to a small number of clients in legal services, private investigation, and one daytime television production company.
4. Heritability of Conversion
Our most exciting open research project is the heritability of conversion behaviour. Early data suggests that brand affinity is meaningfully heritable — that the children of customers who purchase a given brand are 23% more likely to purchase the same brand, controlling for income. This will, we believe, redefine the concept of customer lifetime value across multiple generations.
We anticipate that, by 2031, the most valuable inventory in the industry will be impressions targeted at the unborn. Our infrastructure is already in place.