july 2008

This post is from from my other blog here

Consumers are smart. People know when they are being marketed to. Ad agencies bombard consumers with ads everyday. Gas stations have ads above the pumps for credit cards. The aisles of the grocery store have coupon machines that plat sound clips and automatically dispense coupons as a shopper pushes their cart past. Magazines are filled with more ads than actual articles. The Internet is powered by ads. There are hardly any websites without ads all over. Even eCommerce giants such as Amazon.com have ads on nearly every page. If you searching for a topic on Google or Associated Content you are served ads somewhat related to your query. Consumers can’t escape advertisements.But when does a consumer welcome an advertisement? While the ad at the gas pump might be relative, or the coupon at the grocery store for an item similar to an item the shopper needs, it is still at times not relevant to the consumer at all. In the next year, this will change for online consumers. As more and more people use social networking sites such as FaceBook and other sites where an Internet user feels comfortable putting in information, an advertiser will be able to target each ad to more than one attribute. As Google offers more and more solutions to a user, and collects more data on them, the ability to target a number of different consumer attributes becomes simple.For example, FaceBook users input a number of things that they would never tell a marketing company. Look at a FaceBook profile. Users input age, sex, relationship status, career status, location, interests, school information, etc. All of these attributes allow marketers to serve ads that are relevant. If a company wants to target women age 20-24, who have a degree from Duke, are engaged and current live in Nebraska, they can. In the next year, Google will be able to do the same and use this to make each sponsored search ad they serve even more relevant. As they collect data from what you purchase via Google Checkout, what your search history is, what you have clicked on, what you talk about using Google Talk, the ads they serve to you will be more relative to what you are truly more likely to purchase. No longer will the searcher be shown any ad that is running for the search term “Nike Sneakers”, Google will know your online shopping habits, your location, and more. These attributes will allow a marketer to truly pinpoint their ads to a consumer that is interested in their products. We are seeing limited demographic targeting on a smaller scale right now through Google, but as advertising experts who run highly targeted campaigns on FaceBook know, they more highly targeted the focus, the better return on investment.Consumers are smart, but marketers are getting smarter.