Behavioral advertising: a grudging thumbs up
August 24th, 2007 by Hugh KennedyBehavioral banner advertising is all the rage. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and bloggers everywhere have cottoned on to it, and clearly the US Federal Trade Commission is interested. If the federal government takes notice, you know we’ve crossed the chasm.
I can’t help thinking, though, about a piece I ghost-wrote two years ago for a pharmaceutical chemist, who decried the trend toward putting all scientific exploration into a niche and discouraging forays into fields outside one’s specific therapeutic area. The memory of writing that article makes me wonder: Whatever happened to Renaissance Men and Women who branched out and weren’t defined purely on the basis of their clickpaths? Several years down the road, Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” function continues to elicit a shrug from me. Once in perhaps 1,000 times I see something of interest. Everything else is based on a generic picture of who I am. If you looked at my book or music collection you’d wonder whether I was hopelessly schizophrenic instead of interested in everything. Except NASCAR.
In the end, I suppose the net is that behavioral ads will win the day, thousands of coders in China will design hundreds of versions of the same message for 50 cents an hour, online vendors will sell more long-tail page placements (the equivalent of 4:15 AM Sunday air time), and companies will profit from the fragmentation. To look at what else in the world might inspire us beyond our click paths, we’ll just have to take it offline.