Best Practices: Online Marketing Voyeurs and the Consumer Exhibitionists Who Want to Be Watched
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 9, 2008 | Share This
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Cast your minds back to the primordial past – you know, ten years ago when the ‘net was poised to deliver the most personalized user experience imaginable with targeted, relevant advertising at every new page. What happened?
I’ll admit the teeth thing was close to home but my lips are actually quite large. Lip plumping is a very low priority for me. As for moving and storage, I’m not going anywhere or planning on storing anything.
Behavioral marketing was supposed to change all of this by building private detailed user profiles that marketers could use to better serve relevant advertising. Marketers would be blocked from knowing any personal data such as name, social security number etc, but they would be able to target against geographic location, websites visited, click-throughs, searches performed, time on particular sites, and types of downloads.
This week’s issue of The Economist features not one, but two (!) pieces on online behavioral targeting of advertisements. The main article delves into the controversial side of behavioral targeting in
So far, so swell but when you are dealing with people’s online behavior it pays to be upfront, transparent, and careful. Phorm tested their system with British Telecom for two years without the knowledge and consent of BT’s customers. This tends to send a red flag to consumers who are already concerned about internet privacy. The fact that most ISP’s seem to be envisioning an “opt-out” system rather than an “opt-in” also suggests some ham-handedness when dealing with their customers.
The reality is that behavioral targeting done right, respecting privacy and consent, ought to deliver the experience we were all expecting ten years ago — relevant advertising that actually delivers useful information to the consumer. The second Economist article is an editorial and it echoes this sentiment. To whit:
“Attempts to sneak in behavioural-targeting systems through the back door could give a promising idea a bad name. Done properly, behavioural targeting promises to make advertising more relevant for consumers, to increase conversion rates for advertisers and to make online publishers’ advertising slots more valuable (since even slots on obscure web pages can have relevant ads placed in them).”
Hear hear and jolly good show! Pardon me for lapsing into my mock British-ese but its hard not to when quoting a magazine in which letters to the editor are all addressed to “SIR”.
Back in the good ol’ U.S. of A, the FTC has issued a report titled Protecting Consumers in the Next Tech-Ade (yes, your tax dollars contributed to that god-awful title) which in typical fashion refuses to take a stance on behavioral marketing other than to note public concern. They do call on the industry to regulate itself, which we agree with. Don’t muddy up a good tool that can enhance both the users experience and the advertiser’s effectiveness by being deceptive.
When Google launched their GMail E-mail service they positioned targeted ads as one of the benefits of their service. People who were uncomfortable with the idea knew upfront that this was part and parcel of the experience and others who were intrigued signed up in droves. In the end it has proven to be enormously popular, proving a maxim that we here at SearchViews hold dear: “Don’t try to hoodwink your users.” Eventually as with British Telecom’s secret trial run with Phorm and Gene Simmon’s horrible webcam-captured mating act if it’s out there people will find it and blog about it and post it.
Hopefully as behavioral targeting becomes more standardized it will be in the spirit of the enlightened experience we were promised many moons ago. A happy internet experience where advertising is relevant to the user and knows the difference between looking for The Lohans, Lo-Pan and Willie Loman. I think a lot of consumers would gladly opt for that.
Topics: Advertising: Behavioral, Advertising: Contextual, Advertising: Online, Google, Technology, Web Analytics |
[…] sampling. We at SearchViews have advocated for the idea of integrating behavioral marketing at the ISP level. Now that would be a creative way to make more money. Perhaps they could take a lesson from Google […]