Vertical Advertising

A recent E-Marketer article (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007117) explores the growing presence and efficiency of vertical online advertising. Here, rather than exposing users to general advertising, marketers leverage users' site-visitation history and text-scans of user content to better target advertisements to users' interests. According to the article, “vertical ad networks are a growing phenomenon in the online advertising space...because of their ability to deliver engaged, targeted audiences.” Furthermore, March 2009 statistics suggest that user engagement with vertical ad networks has risen as well.

In our class discussion this past Monday about vertical advertising, one of my classmates made a compelling point: what if the users themselves could select the kinds of advertisements they would like to receive. This comment (and this article I later stumbled upon) have lead me to reflect on my own experience as the subject of vertical advertising.

The top line and sidebar on my Gmail account include advertisements for Free Credit Reports, First Class Flying, and ESPN. I have never checked my credit score, flown first class, and ESPN is not one of the four channels that come with my apartment's very basic cable subscription. Although Google may have scanned my email for some guiding terms, my recent flight purchase does not make me interested in high-end flying (come on, Google, have you not yet picked up that I am incredibly cheap?). My fanatic loyalty to my hometown Philadelphia sports teams does not mean I have any interest in in-depth post-game analysis and critical commentary.
Google, you don't know me as well as you think.

If Google proves slightly off-base in its "targeted" advertising, Facebook's conception of me as a user is downright insulting. My Facebook sidebar is strewn with ads for Diet Pills, "Between Jobs" services, and something called "Team Estrogen" -- ouch. I'd like to hope Facebook has it wrong.

As we've discussed in class, the internet's targeting technology is fast growing, but has only come so far. It still relies on user input to generate content, tag items, and input text. And clearly, mere scans of this user-generated information do not always result in an accurate pictures of users. Perhaps my classmate's comment makes sense - instead of online advertisers telling users what they THINK they know about them, maybe the users themselves could select the ad content they will encounter. Of course, such a dramatic shift would require users to move past their distaste for online advertising and acknowledge that online advertising is necessary for our free use of this boundless resource. Once they have accepted that advertisements must be a part of their online experiences, they can take more control of the content they experience.

Some potential outcomes for both advertisers and users:

FOR USERS:
Benefits: ability to control the ad content they view; engagement with products and services that might actually relate to their lives; power to filter out offensive or irrelevant advertisements

Costs: it is easier to ignore irrelevant ads, but if ad content is actually appealing to users, it might distract them from their other online activities

FOR ADVERTISERS:
Benefits: collection of personal, behavioral, and consumer information about users; ability to target more accurately

Costs: some ads will be hard-pressed to find an audience to directly select them (I would never ask to receive adds about "Team Estrogen," but who knows, it could be my calling...), so users might too narrowly define their advertising boundaries and miss potentially appealing products/services

It will be interesting to track how vertical advertising develops in the future and if user choice becomes an important component.