Towards personalized advertising
Description
The next couple of years, we will see a development in the direction of more personalized /customized advertising. Nowadays advertising is in most cases not focused on the individual needs, wishes etc. of consumers. Therefore, traditional advertisements are in most cases very inefficient. The increasing possibility for advertisers to customize their ads will increase the effiency because more consumers will respond to the ads they receive. The Internet will be the best medium to make this happen. But interactive TV has also opportunities to enable more customized advertising.
Enablers
- (Broadband)Internet: the rise of (broadband) internet connections leads to more and more people who visit the Internet and spend an increasingly amount of time on it. Besides this broadband internet makes it possible to better trace (static IP etc) the people who are online and what they are doing on the web. Therefore, advertisers will be able to gather detailed customer data regarding e.g. their shopping patterns.
- People's willingness to provide personal data: an increasing number of consumers have no problems with providing their personal data when they get something in return (e.g. Gmail).
- Technology: The technology to gather and interprete personal data is becoming better and better.
- Individualism: people are becoming more and more individualistic and therefore they will appreciate customized ads.
Inhibitors
- Privacy violations: a lot of people worry about the decreasing level of privacy.
- People's increasing ability to ignore ads: people use popup-blockers to skip ads on the Internet and special devices to skip TV ads.
Paradigms
When personalized advertising will occur, the traditional advertising media do have a problem. Especially newspapers, magazines and radio are non-personalized media, they provide ads for broad target groups. Media like the Internet and maybe TV will benefit because they are able to provide personalized ads. Therefore, advertisers will change their focus from advertising in traditional media to personalized media. Traditional media will suffer losses.
Experts
- 24/7 Real Media
- MIT Advertising Lab
Timing
- Personalized advertising is already happening, e.g. look at Google's way of showing ads based on what a customer is searching for. The coming years personalized advertising will increase rapidly.