The Behavioural Targeting Promise Land?
If you were to put together a list of irritating and annoying everyday occurrences, those dinnertime phone calls about getting your ducts cleaned or your windows and doors replaced would be high on the list, followed closely by email spam, and television commercials that seem to be twice as loud as the program and repeated ‘ad infinitum.’
Would You Like Some Behavioural Targeting With Your Duct Cleaning?
My own special hell includes all those newsletters, reports, and white papers touting statistical analysis aimed at directing advertisers to the behavioural targeting promise land. Behavioural targeting refers to the practice of collecting data (that’s data not information) about how people behave. That data is then used to display advertisements that are supposed to be of value to individuals who have shown an interest in that subject matter. From an advertiser’s point-of-view it seems like a very promising tactic for increasing the effectiveness of what otherwise would be a shotgun approach, and I would hazard a guess that at its most sophisticated (as in expensive) it may actually work. On the other hand, if it’s not done properly, it can lead to silly if not downright unfortunate marketing gaffes. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see how this approach in the wrong hands or set to autopilot by some backroom programmers could go terribly wrong.
