I caught the tail end of a Willie Nelson interview a few weeks ago. I am not sure if it was a planned plug or genuine, but during the interview Willie made reference to not smoking marijuana anymore. He claims he now uses a vaporizer to lessen the lung damage as he gets older.
Curious, I went Googling to find out what a vaporizer is. As usual, Google came through and, within minutes, I was well versed in modern weed vernacular and technique. I closed my tabs and moved on.
For the next few days, almost every website I visited presented me with a banner advertisement promoting marijuana paraphernalia. For a guy like me, who often demos website functionality on my computer, this was somewhat embarrassing. However, it is a great example of Behavioral Targeting on Display Networks.
While Behavioral Targeting is not really a new technology, it is still one of the biggest weapons Display Networks use to compete with the more precise demographic targeting available on social networks. BT, which displays ads to users based on their web browsing activity, generally competes for the same space on a website as ads that are displayed based on the context of the site. Over the last few years, we have seen BT maturing, but it’s still not without problems. There are technical challenges for accuracy, and it’s relatively expensive, as many publishers request a premium over contextual advertising. On the flip side, we have seen higher conversion rates coming from BT ads over contextual ads in some applications. Although the benefit is wide, most people believe BT primarily benefits in the product purchasing cycle, making it more relevant for certain brands than others.
With Facebook now serving nearly one third of all display advertisements in the U.S., expect traditional online ad networks like Yahoo, Microsoft and Google to continue ramping up and tweaking technologies such as BT.
Keep in mind that social networks have barely scraped the surface of the behavioral concept, but assume it’s coming. When it does, it could be a game changer as advertisers may be able to display messages based on a user’s real-world activities and conversations with friends.
For advertisers, targeting is only going to get more precise. Personally, I’m just glad Rogaine isn’t running a BT campaign – vaporizers was embarrassing enough.
