I had a Saturday job working at Boots when I was 17, and would occasionally work the perfume counter. This led to me building a decent “nose” for detecting perfumes. I refined this skill, thinking that it would be a useful technique for chatting up girls. If I knew their fragrance, maybe I could make guesses about their personality. It wasn’ t useful. It was creepy. Rather than thinking this a skill, it appeared that I’d raided their dressing table.
Effectively, all I was doing (honestly) was experimenting with targeted marketing…
The ultimate end point for marketing effectiveness is to target the individual, the “market of one”. As I penned thoughts on this during my degree in 2000, I had no concept of how close we would get in such a short time frame.
Although we’re not at the extremes of the Minority Report, with Tom Cruise being welcomed personally by a computer upon walking into GAP, tools such as Facebook advertising and retargeted display allow us to get pretty darned close.
Whilst I’m loathe to use this as a form of therapy … I must admit being in a moral dilemma as to where I position myself on the issue. As a professional, I want to target potential car buyers as well as I can, and with little wastage on those who are not in the market (aside from the “brand building” usefulness). As an individual though, I hear complaints from friends who deem targeted advertising a form of intrusion.
This may upset some, but my instinct is that more targeted advertising allows the user to have access to better content and services. We give little thought to the fact that adverts are paying for the TV programme we enjoy watching, and we often find ourselves enjoying the advertising itself – usually because it speaks to us as a demographic.
All advertising is targeted, it is a waste otherwise. But how targeted does it have to be before it becomes a violation of information we have shared in good faith with friends, or shopping we have been doing in private?
Amazon’s recommendation engine is now part and parcel of how we purchase media on the internet, and yet this is an ever growing monolith of data and rules designed to extract the maximum spend from you.
I suspect the answer lies, as ever, in common sense. Targeted advertising can work if it is subtle and helpful, or more significantly, not blatantly obvious and a pain in the backside. How many of us have been recommended books on Amazon that are wildly inappropriate for us, but linked to an embarrassing book we’ve bought for a friend? Only recently I had a play on the ScrewFix website for a new extractor fan for my bathroom. I soon got bored of being served targeted adverts on extractor fans!
Whilst I would like to think advertisers will regulate themselves, I think the reality is that the media platforms will have to take firm stances on this. At the moment, Facebook and Twitter have strict rules on some elements of advertising (eg not allowing dating ads to be served unless someone has stated “single” in their profile), but will they be tempted from this when public companies and quarterly targets are under pressure? These sites (Google included) are in a precarious position, whilst they are enormous machines, they are the creation of a public who has craved their services. As soon as this trust is breached, the sites could lose market share very quickly.
You could argue that Facebook is already at tipping point, particularly as the fastest growing segment is aged over 50. How long before credible independent republics of social network are created?
As a marketeer, I will always try to improve the effectiveness of our marketing spend, but it is short sighted to “spam” our potential customers. We owe it to deliver a consistently good user experience, and I believe advertising should play along these lines. In fact, I’m hoping that we can be cleverer with targeting and use it to build a relationship with consumers … it will take discipline to not make the same mistakes I did as a 17 year old – that definitely wasn’t effective.
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