I just attended OMMA Behavioral here in San Francisco, where we were treated to a number of presentations and panels revolving around the opportunities and possible pitfalls of using behavioral targeting to make advertising work better for advertisers, publishers, and end-users (it should be able to do all three).

A recurrent theme seems to be where the line is drawn at how well behavioral targeting works–there’s a point at which advertising that’s too closely matched to a user’s online behavior that might seem a bit…stalkerish. Media Post’s David Berkowitz writes a hilarious post on Facebook ads targeting him by presuming to know he’s Jewish. He points to another 22-year-old user who complains that she’s sick of seeing ads saying, Tired of being fat at 22?

This type of targeting probably isn’t behavioral at all – it’s probably a combination of geographic and demographic data that the advertiser hopes correlates with the product and message they’re offering. (I’ve used Facebook’s SocialAds and know that targeting is limited to age, geography, interests, etc., and not on how many times they looked at photo galleries, for example) In fact, as mentioned by David Kopp, Senior Director of Ad Product Strategy at Yahoo, the problem is that there isn’t enough behavioral targeting.

Users might resent being presented with advertising that presumes to know their interests and values based simply on where they live and how old they are. Not every suburban Dallas married man is a Republican, for instance, nor is every teenage girl enamored of Miley Cyrus. More effective analysis of user behavior might allow what Edmunds’s Stephen Berkov called “acupuncture marketing” – extremely precise targeting, even at the individual level. It would be marketing beyond segmentation and bucketing, with a minimum of error.

Social networking sites have become a goldmine of user information that would not normally be volunteered to sites without lengthy registration forms (which are rarely filled out accurately). Users freely volunteer information about their interests, purchase intents, travel plans, etc because it’s shared only within their own social network and a level of trust is maintained. Add to this the fact that people who have been online for a long time (or, in the case of Millennials, pretty much their entire life) understand they surrender a bit of their privacy, and the user option to opt-out, and you have a system that allows better targeting of ads.

David Kopp at Yahoo offered an example: he hears all the time that people see Botox ads on Yahoo, and wonder what they’ve done in the Yahoo network to encourage Botox ads. Kopp said they do no behavioral targeting whatsoever for Botox. In fact, if they had, there would likely be fewer mismatches and fewer people wondering what they did “wrong.”

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Online Advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.