BC Business
Google's latest refinement in behaviour-based online advertising is a game-changer. Google has recently announced the launch of behaviour-based advertising. No matter how technologically advanced we are as individuals, we all should be paying a lot of attention to this, on two fronts: it gives us pause for thought as marketers, and it forces an entirely different set of considerations as human beings.
Google has recently announced the launch of behaviour-based advertising. No matter how technologically advanced we are as individuals, we all should be paying a lot of attention to this, on two fronts: it gives us pause for thought as marketers, and it forces an entirely different set of considerations as human beings.
As marketers this announcement should be the cause of much celebration. Google is undoubtedly the most ubiquitously embraced online function for even the most trepidatious user of the Internet. It’s unavoidable. If you have a pulse and your computer has a connection, you are using Google.
Interest-based or behavioural advertising technology will allow us to achieve incredible efficiency in terms of what we say to whom. We can, for example, customize the messages within an advertising campaign to sub-segments of the target audience. If newspapers could do this, they may not be in the situation they are in today.
To illustrate, imagine a real estate campaign for a waterfront resort in Kelowna. The people who might buy a resort home because they are attracted to the waterfront location for water-skiing purposes will get one advertising message, and the people who are attracted to the location in the Okanagan because of the proximity to vineyards will get another version of the ad showing up on their browser.
This will be possible, presumably, because some of these people will have been to wine/vineyard/oenophile websites, while others will have been cruising YouTube videos of water-skiing wipeouts prior to visiting this hypothetical recreational real estate development website. Further, if patterns develop amongst all click-through viewers of the website, and a huge number of visitors are coming from either the “water skiing” or “wine” camps, we could build two versions of the website, entirely devoted to one interest or the other, instead of one generic website meant to target all visitors. If Google plays this correctly, this announcement could mean a whole new evolutionary step forward in terms of how personalized the web experience will be to each user, and how precise the marketing community can be with its online ad spend.
As human beings and individuals, however, it seems like another line in the sand has been crossed. Personally I’m a little queasy about all this. Social media like Facebook and Twitter and MySpace already forces us to re-examine and check our sense of privacy at the door, or to choose to not participate in what is becoming a huge and mandatory new movement in online functionality.
Yes, we’ve always known that every online action is trackable. And yes companies have been using our online behaviour to make marketing decisions for a long time now. What’s different here is that we’ll actually be seeing the data culled from our online movements chewed up and spit back out at us in the form of advertising that reflects our personal actions.
That takes the traceability of our online activities from being a silent and invisible to something that we will be reminded of daily in a very in-your-face way. Best be careful who is looking over your shoulder if your Google search pages will display, based on your online movements, ads for adult diapers, embarrassing domestic cars, or (gasp) cigarettes. Opening your laptop in some circles could become a career-limiting move.
Will there be a backlash? Will we be branded as evil marketers if we take advantage of this? And where does this go next? If this level of personal information is being accessed now, let’s project forward ten or twenty years. Will we all be metaphorically stripped naked and lying in the middle of the road, with marketers standing around us in a circle poking our nakedness with a stick?
Or will this lead to a better online experience for everyone, where every banner and click-through ad is truly of interest and serves only to keep us informed of the things that we want to be informed about? After all, if you are that Okanagan wine enthusiast we discussed earlier in this article, you’d want to know about a half-price clear-out sale at Burrowing Owl of the ’87 Cabernet, wouldn’t you?