In response to a post on the New York Times’ Bits blog about a well-targeted Facebook ad, commenter EJ tosses out an idea for behavioral targeting done right:
The approach to targeted advertising that would best serve consumers might be to have a central opt-in network where consumers enter information both about ads that they would be interested in and about ads that they don’t want to see…
The network could then disseminate that information to various advertising networks, who would identify your preferences via a single cookie.
Those who have privacy concerns or just don’t want to see targeted ads simply wouldn’t opt in, and would see the regular jumble of random ads (plus maybe an ad or two letting people know about the opt-in network.
I don’t know if advertisers would go for it, but it seems to me that it’s best for the consumers, who would control the information they are giving other companies, instead of those companies automatically trolling through their browsing history for whatever their bots can glean.
(And if anyone has any clue how to actually successfully implement this, Please Steal This Idea.)
I don’t like this idea. I love it. Yeah, there might be some workability issues — I suspect the biggest hurdles would be overcoming privacy fears about centralized data and getting enough people to sign up to make it worthwhile — but if something like this were ever implemented properly, it would provide a great deal of value to both consumers and (despite EJ’s misgivings) advertisers.
But what I like most about it is that it begins to move us past the paradigm that has permeated our culture since the rise of mass-market advertising in the ’50s and ’60s. According to this paradigm, which is so pervasive most of us hardly even give it a second thought, advertisers are mad geniuses who know us better than we know ourselves. They interrupt our media consumption to tell us about products and services we wouldn’t have otherwise considered, and through creativity, timing and sheer brute-force repetition manage to shape our tastes. Read the rest of this entry »
