Data-driven tools enable marketers and financial firms to specifically target any group, from students and veterans to ethnic groups. This report examines digital targeting and marketing to Hispanics, especially younger Hispanics, due to their growing economic clout and early adoption of mobile smart phones, which enables precision targeting based on behavior, geo-location and language.

So-called “native advertising” ─where advertiser-produced or –directed content is designed to blend in with online editorial information ─ is quickly becoming a dominant way American consumers receive marketing. Marketers in the U.S. spent nearly $8 billion last year on native ads (up $3 billion from 2013), which is expected to rise to $21 billion by2018.¹ Native ads are where the “format and the tone match that of a publisher’s original editorial content.²

U.S. PIRG Education Fund and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) respectfully submit these additional comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). A set of regulatory and other safeguards is urgently required to ensure that contemporary “Big Data”-driven financial services are used in an equitable, transparent, and responsible manner. All Americans, especially those who confront daily challenges to their economic security, should be assured that their lives will be enhanced—not undermined—by the new digital-data financial services marketplace.

Below are some of the groups who online marketers have turned an eye on for some of their more sophisticated and problematic digital marketing practices.  

Dramatic changes are transforming the U.S. financial marketplace. Far-reaching capabilities of “Big-Data” processing that gather, analyze, predict, and make instantaneous decisions about an individual; technological innovation spurring new and competitive financial products; the rapid adoption of the mobile phone as the principal online device; and advances in e-commerce and marketing that change the way we shop and buy, are creating a new landscape that holds both potential promise and risks for economically vulnerable Americans.