Long Term Impact – Will consumers feel jaded towards targeted advertising campaigns?

One mistake that marketers can never afford to make is to underestimate the intelligence of their audience. Targeted advertising through DMP’s and building up user profiles to tailor advertising budgets to suitable potential clients is a massive leap forward in terms of intelligent advertising campaigns.

The first time a consumer sees the items they left behind in a cart, displayed to them in an online banner can be an interesting experience for an online shopper that makes them wonder about the technology behind it, a kind of Neo in the Matrix moment. Woah.

It can be fun in a way, to see these types of consumer-specific ads popping up more often and feel like your internet browsing experience is much more tailored for you personally. In fact, there is the potential for both advertising and web content to be crafted in a way to suit individuals based on their profiles.

However, when the novelty wears off and people become more used to this form of advertising, will it be tuned out just like many other forms of advertising are – or even looked at in a negative way by being seen as intrusive?

It is not uncommon for people to mentally block out banner display ads as they focus on the content that they are interested in viewing. For that reason, ads should be developed in a way that utilizes and incorporates the interest of the person in an interactive and engaging way. Some intelligent thought process needs to take place before rolling out an ad campaign. For branding purposes, interactivity is a good way to engage users and turn ads into fun.
A great example of this was Nike’s ‘Phenomenal Shot’ ads where fans could share goal celebrations from soccer matches, and interact with them, add taglines and images and send them to their friends just 10 seconds after the goals took place in real life. They could rotate them in 3d on their phone.
Simply using someone’s IP Address to find their suburb in an advert in a meaningless way won’t cut it in the long term. People will get fed up with ads about how ‘A single mother from [ENTER SUBURB HERE] cut down her belly fat with one weird trick’ and will become a source of annoyance. Nobody believes this stuff after they’ve seen it 100x.

It is for this reason that targeted campaigns need to be mindful to use their programmatic ad buying in the smartest and most interesting way possible. Personalising our use of the internet and the ads we see is the future of both online and offline marketing. We will see billboards on bus stops that display us ads based on the cookies on our mobile phones. Some campaigns have advertised based on gender through facial recognition which is 90% accurate at selecting male vs female faces, and was done several years ago at a bus stop. However, with profile and cookie data, things like this can be done without the guesswork, and can be achieved by any advertising campaign.

Shopping dockets from Woolworths and Coles that print out advertisements based on our profiles can’t be far off as well. The possibilities are wide-reaching. It is therefore worthwhile contemplating how ads can be smarter, funnier, and more interesting for users to engage them and improve their buying experience.

Personalisation of the internet and how we experience advertisements will be improved through programmatic ad buying campaigns, however with all forms of advertising the content needs to be interesting and appealing with thoughts into how to best use the opportunities available, so that people have a reason not to delete their cookies and continue gaining the benefits.

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