Tag Archives: advertising

How badly targeted “personalized” ads can be

Picture by geralt on Pixabay

One of the main reasons – and quite possibly thé main reason – why the big platform players, such as Facebook, Google and Amazon are collecting data by the bucket load on everyone (obviously including you, dear reader) using their platforms, product and services is the belief that this enables them to serve “better” a.k.a. “more personalized” ads, and thereby deliver you a better user experience.

An important element during this data collection effort is keeping track of all the websites you have visited, the underlying logic being “if you have visited that website, it is very likely that you Continue reading →

The “I-already-have-this” button

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The other day I was listening to episode 590 of the podcast Six Pixels of Separation, in which the host, marketer Mitch Joel (who is always outstanding in selecting guests for this excellent podcast – and even better in coming up with intelligent and insightful questions), was interviewing PR guru David Meerman Scott. And in their conversation they mentioned having experienced multiple times something that is causing a lot of frustration with both the podcast interviewer, the interviewee and myself, and which is linked to the online marketing technique called retargeting (whereby you seem to be followed around when surfing the internet by online ads from a company whose website you recently visited).

As such this marketing technique is quite successfull, but the aspect of it that Mitch Joel mentioned was referring to exactly the scenario that is causing most of the frustration for me: Continue reading →