GISMA Launches Late Night Webinar Series
GISMA has continually addressed the issue of business impact on the environment and sustainability through our GISMA Think series, and it is a common feature in our academic programmes.
GISMA Late Night continued this theme, addressing latest trends in digital marketing using the example of mega shopping events like Singles Day, the biggest event in the world, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday.
Retail events such as these require a highly sophisticated and technologically advanced infrastructure that relies on artificial intelligence and the analysis of big data. While more and more retailers do indeed emphasise environmental issues and their social responsibility in their campaigns, the perspective of their corporate digital responsibility is missing.
The GISMA professors took this as an argument and focused their workshop with the students on so-called recommender systems and the dark side of online shopping. Recommender systems are truly effective tools for guiding consumers towards consumption behaviour — allowing for mass personalisation in an unprecedented way, and prediction of consumer behaviour. They (and in fact many other digital tools) may well tempt companies to manipulate consumers, produce fake information, even fake influencers and entice consumers to buy products they don’t really want or need.
The late night webinar allowed the LATAM audience in a very interactive format to engage with GISMA at a time which was more convenient for them, bringing GISMA closer to home, and raising awareness of issues we believe the global community needs to resolve.