Joe Duck

Have Blog. Will Travel.

Advertising Targeting – or creepy harassment?

Here’s a thoughful observations from YieldBuild after attending the the OMMA conference.    The issue is whether you can do too much targeting of your advertising and scare folks away by being “creepy”.

Although we’ve only begun to scratch this surface I suspect that it’ll be dependent a lot more on the individual than on the targeting mechanism.   For example I don’t really mind Google “reading my titles” and offering relevant ads to me as I read my email, though for some this is clearly a major invasion of privacy.   (What?  You didn’t realize Google is reading all your titles and possible your content, though I’d guess they dont’t do that for liability reasons alone)

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August 7, 2008 - Posted by | advertising, Google, Web 2.0 | ,

4 Comments »

  1. Where advertisers really seem to miss the ball is one major point…

    It doesn’t matter what the media controllers think-the consumer is in charge.

    So any advertisement medium that doesn’t totally recognize that consumers are completely in charge, will in the long-term be a failed model.

    The key to the future of advertising is presenting creative and unique (and not intrusive) ways to allow the “hand-raisers” to stand up and be counted.

    Any of these unique (albeit interesting) algorithms trying to peel back our personal onion layers to predict and detect what we want will fail – who wants that kind of looking over my shoulder BS anyway! The eyeball game is over it is time to create advertising models where the consumer are 100% in control of the exposure and experience.

    Hey here is an idea…when I search on a topic have a separate tab that showcases advertisers that match my search and let me decided whether I want to even look at them. Just don’t get in the way of my searches.

    Sames goes to online articles…how many times a day do all of us get annoyed when a stupid pop-up ad gets in the way of our reading – seriously just how stupid is that? It completely takes away from the whole point of reading something of interest.

    Comment by glenn | August 7, 2008 | Reply

  2. Glenn that is a really interesting idea – let the consumer choose the advertisers. This would keep users happy *and* mean super targeting for the advertisers.

    Comment by JoeDuck | August 7, 2008 | Reply

  3. Ask anyone who understands sales…what are your chances of selling blindly to just anyone as compared to selling to consumers that are raising their hands?

    It is a no brainer your close ratio will be orders of magnitude better when you are pitching to hand raisers.

    The entire eyeball game came into place because of the old school media buys for TV, etc…no one ever wanted accountability there…just a big numbers game.

    Comment by glenn | August 7, 2008 | Reply

  4. LOL..Yahoo! must be reading your blog Joe!!!

    http://www.dailytech.com/Yahoo+Allows+Users+to+Opt+Out+of+Targeted+Ads/article12623.htm

    Comment by g | August 9, 2008 | Reply


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