Blake Perdue - Website & app reviews, and technology & startup commentary

Can Targeted Advertising Work?

August 5th, 2008 in Ads/Marketing

Many companies are interested in wringing more dollars out of online advertising through profiling and more accurately targeting users. Two weeks ago, an ISP in Kansas was caught spying on the web surfing habits of 26,000 customers in an effort to profile users. I and many others are very opposed to this due to the privacy implications and the fact that we don’t want our online activities being tracked.

However, I’ve begun to rethink whether targeted advertising is a good idea, thanks to the ads on Twitterrific. When I decided to try Twitterrific I had the intention of buying the ad-free version if I liked it enough. I love Twitterrific but I don’t plan to make this purchase because, can you believe it, I actually like the ads.

Twitterrific’s users tend to be tech-saavy web users. Marketers advertise on Twitterrific mainly to reach “creative, web and design professionals” and the ads I’ve see thus far are for stuff I’m actually interested in. Below is a screenshot of some ads I’ve seen lately.

In order for us to enjoy all the free online services, we must endure the advertising that pays for it. But, online advertising is so poorly done that I’ve been trained to ignore ads on the web at all costs. If the ads were more geared towards my interests, however, I’d be more likely to pay attention or even take action. Twitterrific’s ad-serving partner, the Deck, has achieved this. I pay attention to their ads because I usually find something interesting or discover a cool company I didn’t previously know about.

Now I’m not saying I want my surfing habits tracked in order to get better ads. But, if there was another way to achieve this without invading my privacy (opt-in surveys?), I think I might view advertising in a whole new light.

Comments

i hate web ads. they’re intrusive and annoying. i’ve been using adblock for a while and love it. it removes most all ads.

Dan McDole on August 5th, 2008

I’m not sure if I like it or not yet, but the ads on Facebook always seem to be fairly targeted. I do like the idea of tailoring ads to the user. Get rid of those stupid “think you can’t graduate” ads and put in stuff that I’m interested in and I think the hit rates will increase. Of course, just as sales people like to be sold, I think marketing people like to be marketed to…

Jessica on August 5th, 2008

I’m all for targeting advertising, but what I’ve seen so far is poorly implemented. The potential of the iPhone, for exp, is huge considering the built in GPS and data syncing with your main computer.

Ben L on August 5th, 2008

For some reason it has never terribly bothered me that companies might track my habits to give me targeted ads. OTOH I’m horrified by The Patriot Act. Maybe I’m okay with tracking as long as they don’t give the data to government. Oh, and as long as they don’t track sensitive things like medical-related habits and they flush the data in a reasonable amount of time (30 days)?

Here’s an idea; what if we could assign our own tracking agent and they could provide tracking info but only on a real-time basis and only for serving ads? We’d each select our respective agent based on the balance of services and privacy they offered. Care little about tracking; get lots of free schwag. Care a lot about tracking; pay the agent to safeguard your privacy for a trivial amount like maybe $10/year. It would have to be legislated to that people can’t track any information for advertising w/o explicit user approval, but it might be an interesting approach.

That said, I’m commenting primarily because of Dan McDole’s comment. It made me wonder if a website that uses advertising revenue to support content generation can tell when a user is blocking ads. I mean people who use ad block are using resources and access content that has economic value designed to be monetized by advertising but they won’t even allow simple ads to be displayed while they browse. In essence those users are annoying and intrusive to a company that is trying to operate profitably in a dog-eat-dog medium; why shouldn’t a site block those users from viewing their content?

I’ll have to ponder this one a bit more…

Mike Schinkel on August 5th, 2008

@mike — A few webmasters banded together to start a movement to block adblock users from getting their site content. I forgot what the site was that they created, but basically if you went to their sites you would get a message saying “you’re using adblock, you don’t get this content …”.

Blake Perdue on August 5th, 2008

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