Missed Targeted Advertising
Posted on Saturday, June 16th, 2007 at 21:16.
Targeted advertising is advertising chosen for you based on information a website knows about you. Typically, this advertising is limited to your geographic location. For example, if you live in Los Angeles, you might see a banner ad for locally owned LA business, but someone in Wisconsin will not.
MySpace knows more about its visitors than most websites. For example, MySpace knows that I’m gay because I set my “sexual orientation” in my profile to “gay”. I exclusively see banner advertisements for RealJock.com, True.com, Match.com, Dlist.com, and every gay social networking site ever created. ever.
I also put that I graduated from Emerson College into my profile. A second type of targeted advertising is “context sensitive” advertising — banner ads selected by analyzing the text content of a page. Context advertisements are only as smart as the surrounding text on a page. MySpace’s context sensitive ads see the text “Emerson College”, but do not know the “I graduated from there” part of my profile. The result of this incapacity is below:
This is an example of a company shooting the advertising arrow and hitting the wrong target. Instead of encouraging me to use its site to review graduate schools, CollegeProwler.com has insulted me by saying my undergraduate degree isn’t from a respectable institution.
Update: June 28
My complaint made it all the way to College Prowler’s CEO. Luke had “NO IDEA [they] were doing this” and assured me that this type of advertising “will stop very soon”.
I appreciate the irony of Google placing an ad for a dating site on this entry.
Myspace doesn’t know what to make of me, I’d wager. My targeted advertising tends to go back and forth between gay websites (all the ones you mentioned, plus Gay.com) and wedding dresses. My guess is they think I’m a drag queen.