I just read an article on MSNBC where a woman Rachel Beckman, talked about offensive facebook ads, which pick up on your information and supply “relevent” ads, such as “Your a muffin top” (She informs us that a muffin top is “For those blissfully unacquainted with the slur, it’s when a woman wears too-tight jeans and a roll of flab hangs over her waistband.”).
She also says about ads which pick up on her engagement status, with things like loose weight before the big day etc, and then once her status changed to married she gots pregnancy ones…
Now i can understand that you dont want to be bombared with ads whcih offend you, but are you seriously telling me this is new?!
Google, THE biggest ad site with their Adsense/Adwords program, where Google uses its advanced search engine, which can extract meaning and key information from a webpage to show users “relevent” ads depending on the pages content, but this isnt really new?
Everyone expects to see ads for weightloss if they are looking at a site with “How to loose weight in ten easy steps”… I just dont see the suprise specific targeted ads are (in theory) better for everyone, the person who pays for the ads, gets them shown to people who are more likely to buy, the advertising agency (eg, Google Adwords, or Facebook or Yahoo publisher etc) makes more money because it increased a high click through rate… and the end users in theory get ads which they are more interested in…
And i think TV is going the same way, one day when we have fully interactive TV we will have ads suited to put viewing habbits, and prefrences etc.
Okay just a minirant, im gonna go cycle into town 🙂
Cya laters guys.
Dan