An argument for targeted advertising
Corrin Lakeland has an interesting
argument
for targeted advertising. A niche vendor might
not be able to justify the expense of a non-targeted
campaign, even if there happens to be a great fit
between that vendor's product and a subset of the
audience. Someone who goes with just the advertised
mainstream brand will end up with a suboptimal choice.
Won't somebody please think of the small businesses?
Unfortunately, even though this is a real problem, the
more targeted that advertising gets, the less it helps.
I like small businesses, but I'm still running
Disconnect to block most
targeting and tracking. Why?
Let's use Lakeland's example of carpet. I can go
carpet shopping at the store that's been paying
Little League teams to wear its name for 20 years,
or I can listen to the door-to-door guy who shows up
in my driveway and says he has a great roll of carpet
that's perfect for my house, and can cut me a deal.
A sufficiently well-targeted ad is just the
online version of the guy in the driveway.
And the customer is left just as skeptical.
Speaking of skeptical customers, Eaon Pritchard looks
back at the famous McGraw Hill Man in the Chair
ad (read the whole thing), and writes, What
this ad is about resonates with me when placed in
context of the great digital divide - ie on the one
hand the school of advertising, online in particular,
that favours the hyper-targeted, 'personal' and
data driven tactics that are manifest in the near
subterfuge of cookies, tracking and all manner
of 'behavioural' targeting. And on the other the
approach that favours strategies that contain content,
usefulness, values-based communication, involvement,
storytelling etc to name but a few.
People have learned to be
suspicious of door-to-door home improvement
sellers
and telemarketers. And people ignore email spam,
and choose email services based largely on spam
blocking. Now, we're finding targeted web ads
"creepy." And when your creepy marketing alarm goes
off, that's because your inner economist pulled it.
Are there direct mail and email spam campaigns with
good ROI? Yes, but direct marketing is a never-ending
parasite/host game. People discard mail printed
"bulk," you get USPS to change it to "Standard".
Spam filters block one variant of a message, you get
crazy with the Unicode and send different ones.
Meanwhile, when people don't take advertising
personally,
it works—and not just as a response rate to a
cold call/direct mail/junk fax/email spam/targeted web
ad, but as a real signal that will influence people years
later.
Non-creepy advertising isn't perfect, and doesn't
solve all the customer/vendor match-up problems in
the world. We have a lot of non-advertising tools
for that. But it's a fallacy to say that just because
non-creepy ads have a problem doing something, creepy
ads are any better.
Bonus link: The Amount of
Questionable Online Traffic Will Blow Your
Mind
by Mike Shields at Adweek. (via Bob Hoffman, Ad
Contrarian)
Syndicated 2013-10-21 04:25:28 from Don Marti