Personalisation
This is what’s going to make Internet advertising huge. This is the ‘killer app’. The technology is already developed and being used that enables sites to determine which of their many visitors have been cruising around car-shopping Web sites looking at new Fords or which of their visitors have just had new babies in the family. No kiddin’. So a savvy site owner can go to a car manufacturer and say something like: "I’ve got 20,000 young affluent males coming to our site next week that are getting ready to buy a new car. They’re thinking of buying a Ford. Would you like to have your product message placed in front of them? There will be a bit of a premium charge for this of course." Or the site can serve ads for Pampers to the new daddies when they surf through the pages of the site. As we all know males actually buy most of the diapers. S stores put diapers next to beer. There's some connection between diapers and beer and fathers anyway.
Some feel personalisation technology can be ideal for influencing on-site behavior of visitors interested in high-consideration category products like automobiles.
Sean Lee, Head of Advertising Sales for Real Media UK disagrees about the whole personalisation commotion: "The kind of environment the ad appears in is more important than what a personalisation network might perceive the kind of visitors are." Where the ads appear is certainly important. But try to imagine how sophisticated profiling databases will become as the data on individuals grows over time. After a year or two of observation, most people are going to be thoroughly profiled and the clever marketer is going to know the smallest personal preferences of the majority of site visitors.
If the Web just showed plain old banner ads to a bunch of people kind of like billboards print magazine/newspaper and other traditional ads do, banner ads would still be worth doing. But it wouldn’t be killer. The killer thing about Web advertising is the ability to figure out what kind of person is viewing the ad and what their interests are and show them an ad that is custom-tailored just for them. On the Internet, this can be automated, done with precision, and without spending too much money.
Personally, I’d rather not see an ad of any sort unless I happen to be in the mood to see one. This mood happens about as often as I spontaneously get in the mood to jump into a lake of ice-cold water. Almost never. But I’m realistic. I know I’m going to see a gazillion ads in life whether I want to or not. I’m resigned to it. I like to scuba dive but I do it in the tropics. How would I like it if instead of seeing all the ads I see about underarm deodorant and such as I go through life I saw ads about scuba diving holidays and other things that interested me instead?
As the economics of buying and selling these personalisation capabilities matures, Internet advertising is going to get huge.
Internet pundits and those in the know agree on one thing: advertising on the Web is going to continue the to growth at a phenomenal rate. Advertisers finally ‘get’ it and are starting to put real money into Internet advertising. As the true potential of the Web to actually ‘reach out and touch someone’ becomes apparent and advertisers and sites learn how to take advantage of this, the market will blast off to waaay beyond the $7 billion figure. Sites are already able to deliver highly targeted content. Sites and advertisers will wake up to the potential this year. They’ll go ape-shit with it next year.