Custom advertising tailored especially to an online surfer (and potential customer) based on past viewing habits, web searches and sites visited is one of the break-through advertising channels promising a better passive shopping experience for the customer.
Farhad Manjoo at Slate has an interesting article for anyone using paid, targeted advertising online, The Uncanny Valley of Internet Advertising, discussing why “Targeted Web ads are too dumb to be useful and just smart enough to make you queasy”:
If you ask an Internet ad guy to defend himself—to explain why you, dear Web surfer, should feel comfortable letting him serve you ads based on everything you do online—you’ll likely hear two arguments. First, he’ll tell you that targeted ads are simply the cost of doing business on the Web. It takes billions to build and maintain sites like Google and Facebook, and you don’t pay a dime to use them. Parting with some of your private information—and agreeing to tolerate, if not always click on, some ads—is your end of the bargain.
It’s the latter argument you hope will make the sale. When ads work correctly they don’t annoy you with pitches for stuff you’d never buy but instead will delight you by introducing you to products and services you already use (brand allegiance shifting) or new products related to your lifestyle that you never knew you really wanted.
Before the Internet companies would waste billions to broadcast messages to people who weren’t interested in their wares, and consumers learned to ignore most of the ad campaigns with which they were inundated daily. The Internet promised to change all that, transforming the enormous advertising industry from something that was mostly wasteful into a hyperefficient, hypereffective commercial matchmaker.
It’s a great theory. And then you launch your browser, load up any site, and you’re bombarded with the ugly reality. Why are Internet ads so crappy? Why are they so often so creepy? Other than those tiny text ads that show up alongside your search results—which have truly revolutionized the ad business—most commercials you see online don’t seem to know anything at all about you or what you might buy.
One of the pitfalls of targeted advertising is that with a limited set of data points with which to target you, companies might flood your browser with redundant or inappropriate ads based on mis-readings of keywords or other errata.
Yesterday I spent a few minutes browsing through Indochino, a site that sells custom-fit men’s clothing. I have previously written glowingly about Indochino and its rivals, and I’ve purchased lots of things from the company, so it’s not crazy to serve me ads for the firm. Today, though, the Web won’t quit with Indochino ads—on Slate, the New York Times, and pretty much every other site I visit, I’ve seen two and even three Indochino spots per page. Does this make me want to visit Indochino to buy something right now? No. I just went there! I decided not to buy anything! Can’t you take a hint?
Taken together, the Jaguar and Indochino ads illustrate a terrible problem for the Web marketing business. I call it the uncanny valley of Internet advertising. Today’s Web ads don’t know enough about you to avoid pitching you stuff that you’d never, ever buy. They do know just enough about you, though, to clue you in on the fact that they’re watching everything you do.
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