You like music? You’ve probably seen a lot of music ads. Like sports? You’ve probably seen a lot of sports ads. Like reading? You may have seen ads for new book releases. Makes sense, no? On the most basic level, the targeted marketing world within social media is pretty self explanatory. Keywords within your profile info will trigger specific ads that you may be interested in. For the most part, this works very well. Most things that you would be interested in are mentioned in your profile and from that, advertising companies can tap into your interests.
But here’s one ironic example of this strategy backfiring. What if (like in my case) your musical interests include “everything except punk rock, metal or heavy rap”? As you might expect, it is the metal keyword that gets picked up. The word “except” gets overlooked. So you end up with ads like: “Want metal ringtones? Get ringtones from your favorite metal bands…” Yes, it does seem like a trivial flaw, but we’re in the 21st century. Basic things like this, I think, are soon to be improved.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:34 am
I congratulate, the excellent answer.