Google finally gets it
Google announced today that as part of their growing push into display advertising, they’re finally going to target users instead of sites. Google calls this “interest-based” advertising, and they intend to run it as a beta test through AdSense.
Google has been a laggard in behavioral targeting, on one hand because of a simple lack of capability, and on the other because of the deserved scrutiny they’ve received for their dominant market share in both search and display advertising following their DoubleClick acquisition.
Yahoo and others have been doing BT for a while. The skyscraper ad you see embedded to the right (click on it to see the whole thing) is one that rendered for me today on Yahoo’s IM web client. How did they know I wanted to go to Kauai? Because I searched for a vacation to Kauai (from San Francisco) on Orbitz a couple days ago.
The secret sauce, Google claims, is that users will have control over the buckets in which they get placed, once they find the Ad Preferences tool. But how will users know the tool exists? A user can also opt out of targeting, but this requires them to find the Google Ad Privacy Center, or to install a browser plug-in if they clear their cookies frequently.
That said, ad privacy is something that primarily riles people up in theory. Sure, maybe you’re uncomfortable with ad networks tracking your sites, but when you see an ad that interests you, do you really feel violated? Making a user feel okay about being targeted – especially microtargeted – is all in the execution. Transparency looks good in press releases, but most users will never set their preferences, or even know the settings exist. So the targeting must be subtle, the messages must be relevant, without being over-personalized.
If you over-personalize, or if you make the targeting too obvious, you get the in-your-face iris-scan Hell of Minority Report. And nobody wants that.