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Personalised Online Ads
The New York Times Bits Blog recently published a story on personalised online advertisements that include your name. For example "Hi John, we think you'd like...". The NY Times asked AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo a simple question: can they show you an advertisement with your name in it?
They received a mixed response. Microsoft says it could use only a person's first name. AOL and Yahoo could use a full name but only on their sites, not the other sites on which they place ads. Google isn't sure; it probably could, but it doesn't know the names of most of its users. Whether or not these companies have ability to use personalised adveristing, no one is actually doing it and I'm not really sure why.
Online businesses are so far ahead of print, yet so far behind. While Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month, no ones actually using this information to deploy personalised messages online.
We've seen personalised messages and advertising appear in print for many years. Direct mail often incorporates the recipients name and customised messages, and in recent years, personalised images. I'm not sure why there would be a hesitation to expand this type of personalisation from offline to online. It seems a logical evolution to me. Past statistics indicate that incorporating a persons name in marketing communication captures attention and increases response rates.
These Web companies already have tonnes of information about their visitors, including the frequency of their visits, amount of time spent on the site, areas of interest, and even contact details if they've registered on the site. Today, it's hard to be anonymous and be online. You may have seen the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon showing two dogs at a computer, with one saying to the other, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
That's really no longer true. I just wonder how long it will be before we start seeing our names in online ads. Or our pets names...
Posted on Sunday, 11 May 2008 at 1:40 PM | TrackBack: http://www.veedeepee.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/129