The Evolution of Online Advertising
The targeting of advertising to specific micro segments is a fundamental requirement for an effective ad campaign. The two methods of targeting of recent times have been behavioral targeting and contextual targeting. It is now generally accepted that these forms have pitfalls for both advertiser and consumer.
Behavioral targeting aggregates data based upon a user's viewing of pages from a website. Generally this is facilitated by the placing of a cookie upon the user's PC. The cookie then reports the user's viewing behavior allowing for the identification of patterns of viewing behavior. However, great concern is expressed about the treatment of the user's right to privacy amongst consumer groups and legislators.
Contextual advertising scans the content of webpages, seeking to identify keywords, against which advertisers have bid to have their ad linked. If a match is made the ad is placed alongside the content, through an automated process. However, such systems are unable to identify the context of the entire page and therefore, a placement could be made against content that is inappropriate, derogatory or insensitive to the subject. They are also unable to identify the sense or meaning of words, leading to a misplacement of ads. For example, the word "orange" can be a color, a fruit, a telecommunications company, a mountain bike, and countless other variants.
Read more about this topic: Semantic Targeting
Famous quotes containing the words evolution and/or advertising:
“The evolution of humans can not only be seen as the grand total of their wars, it is also defined by the evolution of the human mind and the development of the human consciousness.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“The same people who tell us that smoking doesn’t cause cancer are now telling us that advertising cigarettes doesn’t cause smoking.”
—Ellen Goodman (b. 1941)