Why Your DNA is a Goldmine for Marketers

David Pike prefers hiking holidays over seaside lounging, and personalized ads over random promotions. “Show me the trails of Madeira,” says the St. John’s mathematics professor, describing the sort of marketing campaign he finds most appealing, “not the sandy beaches of Jamaica.”

One day in the not-too-distant future, marketers might turn to an unexpected source for clues to Prof. Pike’s vacation preferences: his chromosomes.

In the ever-growing field of personal-data mining, marketing firms already latch on to details far beyond the sphere of names and postal codes to gain insights into consumers’ personal tastes. And DNA may well be the next frontier: genetic information gleaned from burgeoning databases. Prof. Pike and thousands of others, for instance, have contributed their DNA for ancestry or health tests. And Canadian volunteers are now signing up for the newly launched Personal Genome Project, which is to house an online open storehouse of genetic codes and personal traits.

If that sounds far-fetched, consider this: Two years ago, just a decade after the first human genome was mapped, Visa Inc., one of the world’s largest credit-card...