It’s a sticky subject and it’s not going away anytime soon.
Some have called personalization the Holy Grail of marketing. If you can connect with people in a highly relevant and personalized way, you’ll dramatically improve your response rates and marketing ROI. What’s more, most people prefer personalized ads–ads delivered to their name, at the right time, the right place and with the right message–to irrelevant, poorly targeted online ads and SPAM.
Sounds like the perfect marriage, right? Well, as you would expect on this blog, it’s not that easy.
A study conducted in 2007 at UC Berkeley of California adults found that 85 percent of all respondents do not want websites to track their web behavior in order to improve advertising targeting.
The New York Times had comScore conduct a detailed and broad estimate of the amount of consumer data that is transmitted to Internet companies like Yahoo!, Google, MSN and others and shared it in To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You. In short, it’s a mind-numbing amount of data.
As consumers, we want it to be relevant.
But we don’t want marketers to have the tools necessary to make it that way.
A bit of a catch 22, isn’t it?
What do you think?
