Today is saw this announcement in my Google Analytics account:
Google Analytics Data Sharing SettingsIn order to improve your experience with Google products, Google Analytics is updating its data sharing policy. Read the rest of this entry »
Just recently several blog-posts assumed that Google is about to start it’s own Behavioral Targeting Services soon (http://ask.enquiro.com/2007/google-inching-towards-a-more-targeted-world/; http://gigaom.com/2007/07/31/google-plays-with-behavioral-adwords/).
“The goal for Google is to ensure that all the results, organic and sponsored, are highly relevant to the user.”
Yes of course. And for sure a substantial part of Googles research power is being led to the area of Behavioral Targeting since it would be just the natural next step from a technological point of view.
Behavioral Targeting will be one of the next big trends in online marketing – it is already one of the fastest growing technology segments here but has not yet reached the momentum to make a real difference for GYM. But this might change. Undoubtedly the idea to show ads according the the users browsing history follows exactly the beliefs behind the gigantic success of Google AdWords. And the fact that Google startet to offer more and more personalized services (iGoogle, search-history etc.) clearly shows that they try to to revive Personalization and give users value for the data they allow google to store. That’s nice and i personally like iGoogle e.g.
But it is also obvious that Google is not making any money out of that. They simply want to position themselfes as the ones that store your data and make you feel fine, using intelligent services. Or free services – like gmail. With gmail you can already see what the deal will be in the end: you provide personal and privat data (e.g. your email, your browsing history, your searches), you are allowed to store everything nearly unlimited and for free. In exchange we provide you with relevant adverts, reflecting the data we have and what our statistical models will suggest.
To be clear – i don’t think data driven and even personalized advertisements are bad – my beliefes are going into the opposite direction. I only think that users will not feel fine with a situation where one single instance will store everything, even private things and in the same time starts to in fact sell this information to the market – personalized ads are nothing else than that.
I think Google will not try to really move into that business because they would hazard to loose everything that drives their company value: trust. The moment where Adwords or even AdSense will be converted to BT-Services Google would simply have to store and use everything you do online…Perhaps they hope that everybody will appreciate iGoogle and search-history as essential so that the privacy costs would be perceived as not too high in a scenario like that. I simply can’t believe this – even though i still love them for the power of their products and the value they generate (even with Adwords).
Dave Morgan from Tacoda (now an AOL company) pointed out that the next thing in behavioral advertising will be predictions http://blogs.mediapost.com/spin/?p=1056.
“What’s that? Predictive is one step closer to the Holy Grail of delivering the right ad to the right person at the right time in the right place. It is about truly understanding enough about the consumer’s state of mind at a moment within a particular media or marketing environment to be able to predict what he or she likely needs, wants or desires — and being able to satisfy or advance that need, want or desire with a commercial message.”
He also points out that delivering predictive ads will be one of the most challenging things in the future of our industry, taking years of time from now. Perhaps this statement is a little bit influenced from the takeover by AOL/TimeWarner that was announced some days later. Of course it will be challenging and take the best people both from the industry and the academic side to fulfill this promise. But i also think the industry should not accept such a delay in delivering next generation ads at all.
Our approach of combining survey information and pure measurement data (which used to be behavioral targeting in the past) by using advanced realtime machine learning methods and algorithms is presumably still not the holy grail of delivering the right ad to the right person. But it ads significant new possibilities to the planning process as additional dimensions are coming into play like psychographic, lifestyle and simple buying intentions for specific products. This is the first step into predictive behavioral targeting – and it works!
I hope that Tacoda that used to be one of the most innovative players in the US market does not slow down now. The industry needs solutions for state-of-the art targeting sooner as in a few years. This is especially challenging as some of the big players like Google, Yahoo etc. are not able to play along due to privacy reasons and their perception in the public. Although Google seems to do everything to get ahead in this field (http://gigaom.com/2007/07/31/google-plays-with-behavioral-adwords/) nobody really believes that they will start a real behavioral service ever – although they could be the most powerful BT company simply doing it…