The most effective way to advertise on the Internet, or not?

Posted by wcw1204 on
Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 5:17 pm

Google is developing behavioral ad targeting services. It collects customers’ interests judging by their Internet surfing habits. And then Google provides advertisements that are tailored specifically to individuals on websites that serve AdSense ads. Google will also provide customers to categorize

themselves. Customers can go to Google’s ad preferences manager to change their interests of information. For example, Google may automatically assume a customer is interested in cars because the customer surfs car forums a lot. Therefore, Google will provide car ads on AdSense ads to the customer. However, the customer can change its ad preferences and even requires Google to provide other categories of ads. In that way, the AdSense ads become customized, customers would not complain those ads are not smart enough to sense their needs and wants because they can customize it by themselves. Ads may not be annoying anymore, because the ads shown on the screen are just what the customers want.

This is a brilliant idea that benefits both advertisers and customers, which is a win-win strategy. Of course, Google is the biggest winner in this game. However, Google has to place cookies on customers’ browsers to collect the data, which may infringe customers’ privacy and arouse the concern of the marketing ethics. It seems like it is still a long way to go for marketers properly leverage the Internet.