When one of Google's very public faces, Matt Cutts tweeted about a Firefox plugin to opt out of not only Google's new "interest-based" advertising targeting scheme, but those of a number of other ad networks, I started to think about how well (or not well) such targeting has worked in other applications.
The first meme that popped into my mind was "My Tivo Thinks I'm Gay", the title of an article in the Wall Street Journal that garnered a lot of commentary in the blogosphere and elsewhere when it first ran. Basically, the conclusion of the article and my own experience was that trying to identify your interests from the shows you watch, the books you buy, or the sites you visit only works when you're boring, single, and predictable. If you've got more than one person using the tracked account or your viewing/surfing habits are rather whim-based, you'll only confuse the robots into recommending stuff you wouldn't watch/read/click in a zillion years.
I buy books for my whole family via my Amazon account. I used to buy books for my business. I buy gifts with it. And my recommendations are a mess. They don't reflect me or my interests and are generally pretty unhelpful unless I spend a lot of time telling it what recommendations are completely pointless and uninteresting so it can sort out all those purchases that don't actually represent my interests.
Now, I'm of two minds on this. Being someone who runs Google ads on his sites, I think that if Google gets this right, I might get a higher clickthrough rate and possibly get paid more for each click because the ads won't be limited to being relevant to my content, which is not always stocked with high-value keywords. I might get some of those lovely insurance-related ads that can pay $10 a click instead of ringtone and clipart ads that pay a nickel a click. So, as a publisher, I think it might actually make me more money.
As a consumer, I think it's going to create a nightmare. I actually like having Google display ads that are relevant to the page I'm on. In many cases, I'm there because I'm looking for content in that category/topic, and the ads are relevant to my immediate needs. It's why I was more likely to click them than generic run-of-site banner ads, and why a lot of other people were too.
But if I've been looking at a lot of baseball instruction sites to help me teach my son how to play, finished that task, and am moving on to search for information about leasing a web server, Google's going to be wasting its time displaying baseball-related ads. I'm done, moved along. The ads I'd be likely to click now are releated to leasing a web server.
Now, savvy moms and dads have their kids set up with separate accounts on the computer with separate logins and their own browser cookies, but many older systems boot up with an automatic logon so they go straight to the desktop, and everyone uses the same account. In cases where the family is sharing a computer and a logon, you're going to drive the poor preferences robot nuts. It's going to be looking for ads about medications for Bakugan that reduce cramping and promote erections.
Now, I'm sure Google wouldn't have opened this can of worms if they didn't feel they could bait the hook better than previous attempts at behavioral targeting have. But still, a lot of those previous attempts have left a lot of us who were targeted wondering how they could miss by such a wide margin. I've often felt like I'm a bird, they're Dick Cheney, and those ads just hit some poor old guy in the face, because they never came near me.
Either that or the ads are for something I already use/bought and cannot use/buy any more of. For example, it seems like 75% of the ads I see on Yahoo!, for weeks now, are for a medication that's already been prescribed for me. Now I'm pretty sure that this drug company is not just blitzing Yahoo! with these ads. I'm figuring I've been identified as someone with this condition or interested in this condition, but since I'm already taking the medication, I don't need to find out more about how it can help me. My doctor and I have already discussed that extensively.
But here's one more benefit I'm hoping might be part of this behavioral targeting: recording the ads I don't click. I've seen this product's ads on Yahoo! hundreds of times in the past weeks, it seems. At what point do Yahoo!'s algorithms say "looks like he's not interested" and stop showing me those ads? I'm not just letting Yahoo! set cookies. I'm actually coming in through a personalized MyYahoo! page, so that they're easily able to cookie me with a user ID every time. At some point some robot should say "he's seen it 75 times without clicking on it, therefore displaying ads for this product to him is a waste of time."
Nearly two years ago, I complained that the companies promising targeted advertising weren't even bothering to look at the User Agent info being broadcast by my browser, which told them in no uncertain terms that I was on a Mac, and they continued to serve me ads for software to improve or repair Windows. For years, these companies have tried to sell us on "let us strip away a little bit more of your privacy and we promise we'll give you fewer pointless ads and more ads you'll find useful." We did, and they failed to deliver... every single time.
In the end, I have to take the consumer's side. It's not just because I am a consumer, but because I've seen that when you take consumers for granted, eventually they'll find ways to punish you for it. Google better get this right or it could end up costing them not only a lot of money, but a lot of goodwill.
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