Ads Specific to You

Advertisements catered to you and your interests have not been around for a very long time. What is this trend? Lets look at this new trend and how it is affecting the world of advertising.

Have you noticed that alongside your Facebook page or news feed there are several ads? The ads that are placed there are not the same for everyone. Have you noticed that the ads you see there are usually for something that interests you or for something that can be found around your geographical location in the world?

This is a screen shot of my Facebook account with ads specific to my interests and recent activity while online.

The ability to specialize the ads, which people are seeing, is due to the new concept of behavioral targeting. Lauren Drell, associate editor of supported content of Mashable explains how behavioral targeting works:

Targeting companies establish an agreement with a publisher, who puts a piece of code on his website. (That publisher must have a clearly stated policy for the consumer to opt out from having data collected.) Then, when you’re browsing the web, the site will put a cookie on your browser, which populates as you surf.

Now that your browser has a cookie, the targeting begins. Data points amass as you click your way from site to site, taking note of what you buy, what you read and what you search for. The more time goes on, the more data is collected.

The advertising companies use that information to personalize the ads that will show up during your time online. This seems like a neat feature for both the advertising company and for us as the consumer. The ads we will be seeing will be for products that we actually enjoy or would like to have.

At first thought it seems to be a win, win situation. But do I really want my activity online to be recorded? It works for specializing my ads but is that all that that information is used for?

This act of behavioral targeting is now spreading to your mobile devices. There is still much room for improvement when it comes to the mobile devices but it is predicted that mobile ad market will generate $20.6 billion by 2015 and paired with behavioral targeting the number will only keep increasing.

http://www.samsung.com/us/topic/our-smart-tvs

This concept is now also being introduced to TV. To the left is the TV that Samsung recently came out with that is able to connect to the Internet. 

 I do not believe it is not too far into our near future when we will only see ads that are chosen for us based off the shows we watch and what we browse on the Internet through our TV.