This is just another good example of the increasing sophistication level advertisers are getting when doing targeted ad work.  Now that we have breached the gap of advertising to the masses to advertising to me specifically, how far might the capabilities go?  Will they know what I am needing at this very moment and send an ad to me for that?  Don’t laugh, a glimpse into the future might make that more or a reality.  In order to give you a really quick picture, let’s examine what they already know.

They work with information aggregation companies that start by getting your name, age, address.  They build upon this by purchasing lists from all kinds of organizations and soon they can add what magazines you read, details about your home and upgrades you might do.  Eventually, they bridge over to online activities and match you up to your online profiles and personas.  This allows them to add fields and fields of data that you have keyed into surveys, and profiles on sites like Facebook, and MySpace.  Of course, they also use cookies that are put on your computer to track the Websites you go to.  This is helpful because it triangulates topics you might be interested in. Understanding all of these information sources they already have will help you have a picture of how well they can already target you with specific marketing of things you might be interested in. But there is more…  there are now services on Facebook that can study the pictures of your friends that are posted and to analyze elements in those pictures that will give a clue as to what cloths or accessories you might want.  I saw this picture the other day that was demonstrating how the picture of the man with sunglasses triggered the advertisement for sunglasses.  When they see that you are carrying a Coach handbag, they will advertise Coach to you.  Amazing!

So, back to the question I raised about how far it might go…  Since we are going to carry phones that also act as GPS systems, and the cell towers can triangulate us anyway, advertisers will soon know where we are by proximity.  They will know that we are in Oklahoma, and that it is 110 degrees at the moment.  Knowing that, they might send me advertisements for bathing suits, cold drinks, and vacations to Canada.  If they follow my Twitter feed, they will know even more than that, they would know details about my life like what meals I like to eat, my work habits, and family connections.  They would know the vacations I take, and when I am back.  By building a rules based system that filters on specific words they see in my Twitter feed, they could send me coupons for services that are in context with what happened to me that day.  They literally could read my mind to the degree I micro blog my thoughts.There is more, in the next report we will look at alternative marketing methods disguised as entertainment or work tools.

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

In the beginning, there was the banner ad.  A company that I started was the main vendor for AOL as they grew up and we got paid tons of money over 4 years or so to develop the banner ads for AOL.  This meant that we learned by experimenting on the market: what colors to could and should use, how to build in animations to attract attention, and therefore what not to do as well.  It was a blast to be pioneering this first tool in Internet marketing business.  It was all about click through rates.  We lived and died by how many people clicked on the banners.  Man, have things ever changed.

From there, we quickly jumped to large systems that would track information on users by putting “cookies” on their computers.  Cookies are tiny little text files that look like gibberish to you and me, but the computer reads them and learns all about you on a particular site. So, we would know who the user was, or at least what they have clicked on in the past.  This allowed us to have an inventory of banner ads, and then we could drop something on the screen that would be interesting to a user – instead of the shotgun approach we had been using prior to this development.  Users at that time thought this type of targeted marketing was an invasion of privacy because we were storing information about them and using it to customize the advertising they would see.  Our argument was that we were doing them a favor because they only had to see banner ads that might be interesting – we saved them time in some way.

Wow, if they only knew how much their privacy was getting ready to be brokered.  Pretty soon companies that tracked user information and behavior were scouring the world for data on those users so that they could improve the ability of an advertiser to deliver targeted content.  This got so bad that a woman had a breast exam, was diagnosed with cancer, and started getting emails 2 days later from a support group.  Problem was, she had not told anyone about the diagnosis – no one.  So she researched how this information got out and found that the hospital was selling diagnoses to marketing companies.  This ushered in the era of HIPAA regulations.  All that aside, the era of targeted marketing was here.

Targeted marketing as a concept is brilliant, effective, and in many ways, actually does benefit the consumer.  Instead of running a TV commercial that is going to shotgun the general audience with products that might be specifically for a male or female, advertisers can now run ads that only I, as a male, might be interested in.  That is good for me.  Also the click through is higher.  The fine line here is that targeted marketing can be taken to an extreme.  How much information about me should an advertiser get to have?

For example, today I got a picture in my email from a friend that showed a streetview of my house from Google Streetview.  It showed my two cars in the driveway.  Google will certainly use this service to allow advertisers to place marketing geographically, and to let people “see” any place they choose directly from a computer anywhere in the world.  With just my name and an address (which any company can get) they now have the ability to see where I live in detail, what we drive, and even us walking around the yard if the timing is right.  The next step may be that Wal-mart starts selling the data on what products I buy.  They could do this today.  What if the utility company starts selling usage data, and information on when people move?  There is actually no end to data that is not restricted legally today that could be sold.

The bottom line is this: online marketing is quickly building a targeted model that is deep and robust.  They are doing this from the pieces of information they can gather on us.  This is a bigger list than  you think.  Next posting I will share with you some of the more interesting targeting marketing going on.

Scott Klososky
Scott@FPOV.org