- How will privacy concerns come into play as advertising becomes more targeted?
The Internet is an excellent marketing and advertising tool as it provides much more information about consumers behaviour than any other media vehicle. As a result, advertisers invaded the web with targeting advertising in order to generate profits.
What exactly is “targeted advertising”?
Targeted advertising is a specific type of advertising where advertisements would be placed at strategic places in order to reach a targeted audience.
Most of the time, advertisers use interactive advertising which is most commonly performed through the Internet. Interactive advertising uses online interactive media to communicate with consumers in order to promote products, brands, services and so on.
More precisely, the most important type of interactive advertising is: behavioural targeting.
- Behavioural targeting is a technique used by advertiser online to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaign.
This is how it works:
This technique uses information collected directly on individual’s web-browsing behaviour, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisement to display on that individual. Therefore, they deliver the message to the users who are more likely to be interested.
As a result, online users gathered thousands of information data surfing on the web without even knowing it, we call it a “digital footprint”. Today, with the expansion of new technologies and media, consumers are even offering their entire personal information including new data about friends, linkages, influences, content created, games, attention, mobile and TV.
Behavioural targeting is not anymore only focus on what you want but determines what your friends want and how you influence them. Moreover, they determine who or what influence you and your behaviour.
Due to the collection of personal data such as profiling, many online users and advocacy groups became concern about the privacy issues caused by that type of advertising.
Lets take an example:
Facebook, with 250 million active users and increasing every day, became a huge source of concentrated information data. Being a social network used to display personal information, advertisements are fundamentally profiled-targeted. In order to target a specific audience advertisers are using several techniques through behavioural advertising such as location targeting, keyword targeting, connection targeting, relationship targeting, age targeting, birthday targeting, education targeting, sex targeting, workplace targeting and language targeting.
In my opinion, advertising agencies will always find a way to get people attention in order to make profit. Targeted marketing is an excellent way of promoting products as you are addressing your “message” to someone who is already interested in it. Therefore, with the expansion of new technologies, the manipulation over consumers and the power of the media will still increase.
Links:
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=targeted+advertising&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/07/27/10-powerful-ways-to-target-facebook-ads-that-every-performance-advertiser-should-know/
http://mashable.com/2008/08/22/do-privacy-and-advertising-mesh/
http://www.verio.com/resource-center/business-guides/internet-law/
