False Promises

One of the great things marketers have been promising since the dawn of the commercial Internet is personalized advertising; ads targeted to what you really want. Really? Right now ads that could be targeted with trivial effort... aren't. Where's the great future of targeted advertising?

Highly targeted advertising is supposed to be the holy grail. It gives advertisers more bang for their buck by only putting their ads in front of receptive eyeballs and it is supposed to please audiences because it doesn't show them ads for stuff they don't care about.

Yet if we ignore all the privacy and tracking concerns over cookies, many of us are still broadcasting some valuable targeting information every time we hit a web page. That information is in our "user agent" identifier, which is a string of information about the browser we're using.

Mine says "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.5) Gecko/20070713 Firefox/2.0.0.5". So what can you tell about me? You can tell I'm using the latest version of Firefox on an Intel-based Macintosh, running OS/X. You don't know if I'm male or female, rich or poor, old or young. But you do know I'm using Firefox on a Mac.

Despite the fact I'm basically broadcasting that to every web server my browser contacts, I still get ads for Windows registry cleaners, Windows anti-virus software, Windows anti-spyware software.

And these Windows-centric ads aren't just served up to me by little fly-by-night ad servers. They're served up by the big boys, the companies that have told us "let us track your every move and we'll give you ads more suited to you". Yet, while I'm telling them I'm on a Mac before they serve me the ads, they still serve me ads directed at Windows users.

I'm not angry. This isn't some "how dare you defile my Mac with Windows-oriented ads" rant. It's just me asking why, with all the promises of better targeted ads, when I lay valuable targeting information at the feet of ad servers, do I get ads that show me this targeting information is being ignored?

Sure, personalized targeting isn't always perfect. Look at the people who have been outed by their TIVO. And it has been a bit of work to get my Amazon recommendations back up to a grown-up level after buying a bevy of "Thomas The Tank Engine" books for my kid. But when it's done right, it can make things more interesting. Still, the online advertising industry has had over 10 years to make good their promises and they can't even seem to use my user agent info.

The promise of personalized targeted advertising still seems to be pretty much a pipe dream so long as I'm having to view ads for Windows registry cleaners on my Mac.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 10:26 pm and is filed under Online Marketing And SEO, Techno Thoughts, Web Programming.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.