I still get ads asking me to register for a nursing assistant degree on my Facebook. After 5 years. Facebook should know me by now. The ad server should be able to tell that I can not differentiate a femur from a fibula and as a matter of fact I have very little interest in that line of work.
I do not fret over online privacy issues, I was sold on putting more of of my likes and dislikes online, since somehow this was going to make the interwebs magically figure out what to I should see. I believe no ad is better than irrelevant ads, but unlike most consumers I want to see very relevant and well targeted ads. However. up till now the web has fallen short of this promise. Why is the web still so poor at showing me what I want to and should see. For users like me who do not fret over leaving online DNA at sites that I visit, it is shocking that I still get served ads peddling hip replacement surgery. I am not even 33 yet.
I am not adept at writing fancy code, but I do have a question for those that get paid to do this. It seems to me that the money is on the best recommendation engine, why don’t we have better recommendation engines than we currently have? It can not be that hard we put someone on the moon. (I borrowed that line from Dambisa Moyo)
Tags: internet
Great point Oz. This is where the web is heading and in most cases already is. From my perspective maybe its more a question of what the advertisers are paying for rather than what’s offered. The first company to figure this type of advertising out is Yahoo. And for the most part they haven’t lost their edge, however if one compares them to their search counterparts (like Google) to see which one is seeing greater demand-then one could conclude that the money until now is still chasing geographic targeting.
But in theory behavioral targeting is simple to offer and we at Pamoja Media offer it too, what has been more of a challenge though is being able to explain it to clients in a way that puts them at ease and justifies the higher cpm’s or cpc’s that it demands.